V.V.(9) Vheissu

[Otto Sell]

I wrote:
>
> The way it is reached (168) and what Godolphin tells Victoria about it
> fits very much to 19th-century romantic and idealized ideas about
> "The East" (170), Rice-Burroughs or Rider Haggard, where you can
> escape from the establishment (156), looking for the "Black Venus"
> and let down your pants (170-71). Of course, as Michael wrote,
> Joseph Conrad is someone we think of too because he was one
> of those who was *not* romanticizing the way  Europeans lived
> out their "Heart of Darkness" but saw (and told) what
> colonialism really was about.
>

jbor wrote:

> Of course, Conrad's narrator, Marlow ( ... and thus Conrad?) holds on to
> that same imperialist presumption that European = "civilised" while
African
> = "primitive". The jungle and its natives are a darkness for Charlie --
> "monstrous and unearthly, inscrutable" -- their civilisation is a
phenomenon
> which he cannot understand and which he does not even attempt to recognise
> or describe in terms of a legitimate society or culture.
>

Marlow = Conrad: no
The frame makes clear that there is another narrator who introduces Marlow.
Even this narrator isn't Conrad, it's a narrator *in* the book and not the
author *of* it.

Therefore I'm not sure if Conrad totally "shared" the opinions of the
character he had invented (and more, we will never be able to answer the
question) or if he was giving an impression of what the people believed and
how they saw Africa in his time, a picture that was necessarily false
because it had been build up by explorers and imperialists to certain
purposes.
To bring enlightenment to those "poor savages," save their souls
through Christianity and all that hocus-pocus was just the fairytale told to
all the others back home.
The Prince Albert speech at the Guildhall 1849, the officially altruistic
goals of the Belgian Congo-Society set up by Leopold II. in 1879, the 1884
Conference in general, all pretty lies to fool the people like more than 200
million Americans fooled today with an election called democratic.

But you are right, Conrad still was a child of his time with a very
Christian background. He takes a differentiated view on British ("one knows
that some real work is done in there" - one thinks of the railway in India
here) and Belgian colonialism. He makes a difference between colonists and
conquerors right at the beginning by bringing in the Romans from 50 BC. That
the "victims" of that Roman "conquer" are now the "colonists" seems to
indicate that in his opinion colonialism can be include good sides too, at
least we are all using Roman letters, effect of that empire long ago.
British imperialism was an example even used by the nazis, printing Henry
Newbolt's "A Hero without a Name" (The Island Race, 1898) in their
schoolbooks to use its "message" for their purposes.

Conrad still carried the virus that colonialism in general could be a good
thing if done properly, whatever he had in mind how this should be done. But
at least Marlow learns to see the Africans as humans, not from the
beginning, but later in the novel when he reflects about the motives of
those 30 hungry cannibals who accompany Marlow's group for *not* simply
eating the Europeans.

Today we know more. Conrad who had seen it and reveals the mean and cheap
colonial reality claims in my opinion that many others must have spoken out
too, not spreading the false message again and again by giving in to those
adventure tales for egoistic reasons. It's a very much selected audience
Marlow is speaking to, so you can imagine what readers Conrad was thinking
of. But other literary critics have called his criticism an "old-fashioned"
one too, an inevitably old-fashioned one I'd like to call it.

> The (arrogant) falsity of the binary opposition (i.e. civilised v.
> primitive) is what is revealed in Vheissu to Pynchon's narrator, Godolphin
> (and thus to us by Pynchon? ... and perhaps it is something which poor mad
> old Kurtz saw as well, that undisclosed "horror" -- though Charlie never
> makes the connection ... does Conrad?), and this is precisely what he is
so
> distressed by. The Vheissuvians are in fact always *one step ahead* of
> Godolphin (and "Western civilisation"), culturally, intellectually, in
their
> relationship to the environment et. al., and this is what is so terrifying
> to old Hugh.
>

Yes, because his feeling of superiority is badly hurt by realizing that the
upside-down turned binary opposition might bear maybe more truth
than his former assumptions.

> Just as Pynchon's aesthetic is postmodern his ethics are distinctly
> postcolonial -- there is a marked difference to Conrad on both counts imo.
>
>
> best
>

Definitely, but Conrad says imho that you always risk loosing your humanity
when you begin to feel superior over other people, so his ethics is more of
a general human importance, let be the limitations of the "bottom of the
fold" (V., p. 155) of history he was living in, where postcolonialism wasn't
in the dictionaries and Conrad himself as a writer still struggling with
realism, most of his contemporaries still clinging to mimetic art.

He himself had met life as a struggle in all phases of his life, in his
Russian years, as a sailor and later to get attention as a writer. How could
he have not shared this darwinistic view.
And what speaks for him is that he refused the knighthood offered to him by
Prime Minister Ramsey McDonald in 1924.

Otto