V.V.(9) Vheissu

[jbor]

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>From: "David Morris" <fqmorris at hotmail.com>
>

> I don't think this equation fits the text.  What Hugh specifically notes as
> the source of his dread and horror was a lack, an absence.  The Vheissuvians
> do SEEM "ahead of us" in the classic model of Shang Gri La.  What we expect
> Hugh to discover is an unsullied purity in them to match their outward
> radiance.  He doesn't find that, nor does he find superiority.  He finds
> them as venal as anyone, and maybe even more so because of the ABSENCE he
> finds.

Hugh never really enunciates the "source of his dread" (172-3). Early on he
reveals to Victoria how the Vheissuvians had "music, poetry, laws and
ceremonies" (170.27) but that these were simply "skin too". Recall that Hugh
had been right inside their culture -- lived it, like Kurtz, rather than
simply observing it as an outsider, like Marlow -- only to find an absence
of "soul" there and that this was why his romantic "dream" of an exotic
paradise and a harem (170-1) proved to be nothing more than an illusion.

The "soul" *he* expected to find is the crux I think. I think he held a
stereotyped notion of tribal innocence: beautiful, open, uninhibited,
"noble" savages and all that. He supposed that it would be a place where the
innate *human* soul would be evident and uncorrupted and easy to locate.
After the horrors of the Mahdi revolt he wanted reassurance that there was
such a thing as the or a human "soul". What he hadn't counted on finding in
Vheissu was a sophisticated and intelligent race of people -- "venal",
perhaps, though you'd be hard pressed finding textual corroboration for this
assertion I think -- the equal of, or at any rate comparable to, any one of
the supposedly "superior" cultures and civilisations of the West.

But imo the crucial passages have to do with why he tried to escape
civilisation after Khartoum in the first place, when, in his eyes, the
supposedly civilised "world of neat hollow squares and snappy marching had
deteriorated into rout and mindlessness" (171.27). He explicitly states that
the pip pip jolly good ho of the British imperialists ("crying St George ...
about the Orient") is *precisely* the same sort of imperial propaganda which
"the Mahdist army had been gibbering ..., really, in Arabic" (172.2) at
Khartoum. So, he had seen through *this* charade, through all the
sloganeering and patriotic bunkum and realised just how empty and soulless
the imperialist mentality and agenda is -- and *that's* why he was
"weaseling in" on the R.G.S. surveying expedition to Vheissu. But what he
found there was ... a lesson about the *human* condition (cf. 201.30), one
which is reflected in those tourists Hugh sees in Florence (184.5-23):

    Did he owe it to them, the lovers of skins, not to tell about Vheissu
    not even to let them suspect the suicidal fact that below the glittering
    integument of every foreign land there is a hard dead-point of truth and
    that in all cases -- even England's, it is the same kind of truth, can
    be phrased in identical words? (184.18)

I suspect that those words might be: Die Welt ist Alles was der Fall ist.

best