AtDTDA: 19 Heart of Darkness, pt. 1 [540/542]

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

I'm splitting up this section into multiple posts, as so much of what the 
p-list has been posting—especially yesterday—revolves around 
questions concerning the moral spine of Pynchon's fictions.  Having 
thought  on it for a while, issues concerning slavery—what Starhawk 
would call "Power Over" —and the creation of the military-industrial 
war machine are constants in Our Beloved Author's writing. In the 
dead center of Against the Day we find a Brute bossman straight 
out of 'Heart of Darkness'. Judging from Pléiade's bruises, this is
another in a continuing series of portraits of sexual depravity in the 
lowlands with Piet as top in a creepy s/m relation.

Kit figures that Pléiade Lafrisée is off to do some of that  'consulting', as 
Root gets the waiter to make sure that the check goes to the Twisted Sister.

Pléiade, in turn, has a rendevous with:

          . . . .one Piet Woevre, formerly of the Force Publique, whose 
          taste for brutality, refined in the Congo, had been found by 
          security bureaux here at home useful beyond price.

The point of reference for Piet Woevre is "Heart Of Darkness", a work I've
encountered in such "second order simularca" as "Apocalypse Now" and 
in Orson Welles' original plan for his first movie, a version of Heart of 
Darkness told entirely from the P.O.V. of Marlow [we would only see 
Marlow once, in a mirror]. Until this morning, I had not read Joseph 
Conrad's novella. Here's an online link:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/526/526.txt

     . . . ."One day he remarked, without lifting his head, 'In the interior you
     will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.' On my asking who Mr. Kurtz was, he
     said he was a first-class agent; and seeing my disappointment at
     this information, he added slowly, laying down his pen, 'He is a very
     remarkable person.' Further questions elicited from him that Mr. Kurtz
     was at present in charge of a trading post, a very important one, in the
     true ivory-country, at 'the very bottom of there. Sends in as much ivory
     as all the others put together. . . .' He began to write again. The sick
     man was too ill to groan. The flies buzzed in a great peace. . . .°

                At first glance, there might seem little to choose between 
                the French Foreign Leigion and the Belgian Force Publique. 
                In both cases one ran away from one's troubles in Africa. 
                But where the one outfit envisaged desert penance in a surfit 
                of light, in radiant absolution, the other sought, in the gloom 
                of the fetid forest, to embrace the opposite of atonment—to 
                proclaim that the sum of one's European sins, however 
                disruptive, has been but facile apprenticeship to a 
                brotherhood of the willfully lost. Whose faces, afterward, 
                would prove as unrecallable as those of the natives.
                AtD 540

Issues of light and dark, issues purely of illumination, pervade both books.
Note how concepts of light are dark are used in the final sentences of 
Heart of Darkness:

     "'His last word--to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I
     loved him--I loved him--I loved him!'

     "I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

     "'The last word he pronounced was--your name.'

     "I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short
     by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and
     of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it--I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was
     sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It
     seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that
     the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens
     do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I
     had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he
     wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have
     been too dark--too dark altogether. . . ."

     Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a
     meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of
     the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was
     barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading
     to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast
     sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.°

As we all know, Kurtz's last words were 'the horror, the horror."

     . . . ."I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that
     station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the
     redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then
     I saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine
     of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered
     here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot
     of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word 'ivory'
     rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were
     praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a
     whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in
     my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared
     speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like
     evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic
     invasion. . . .°

>From Adam Hochschild's 'King Leopold's Ghost':

          Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has 
          nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: 
          the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams 
          of grandure, his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom 
          carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, 
          we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through 
          binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the 
          fenceposts in front of Kurtz's house. . . . [143]   

Heart of Darkness:  

       . . . .You remember I told you I had been struck at the
     distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the
     ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its
     first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then
     I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake.
     These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive
     and puzzling, striking and disturbing--food for thought and also for
     the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all
     events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole.
     They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if
     their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had
     made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The
     start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise.
     I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned
     deliberately to the first I had seen--and there it was, black, dried,
     sunken, with closed eyelids,--a head that seemed to sleep at the top of
     that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line
     of the teeth, was smiling too, smiling continuously at some endless and
     jocose dream of that eternal slumber. . . .°   

'King Leopold's Ghost':

          High school teachers and college professors who have 
          discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the 
          years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung and Nietzsche; 
          of classical myth, Victorian innocence and original sin; 
          of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. . . .

          . . . .But Conrad himself wrote, "Heart of Darkness is 
          experience . . . pushed a little (and only very little) beyond 
          the actual facts of the case." Whatever the rich levels of 
          meaning the book has as literature, for our purposes what 
          is notable is how precise and detailed a description it is of 
          "the actual facts of the case": King Leopold's Congo in 
          1890, just as the exploitation of the territory was getting 
          under way in earnest. [143]

Like in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's displays 'lowlifes of the lowlands',
a distinctly Northern European vision of decadent evil, of the evil borne 
from  the excess wealth carved from human flesh:

          But Woevre was indifferent most of the presumptions and 
          passwords of everyday sexuality. He had left that sort of thing 
          far behind. Back in the mapless forests. Let anyone think what 
          they like—should it come to a need for corporal expression, 
          he could maim or kill, had lost count of how often he had done 
          this, without hesitation or fear of consequence.
          [AtD 540]

Heart of Darkness:

     . . . .I don't pretend to say that steamboat floated all the time. More 
     than once she had to wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing 
     around and pushing. We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way 
     for a crew. Fine fellows--cannibals--in their place. They were men one 
     could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not 
     eat each other before my face: they had brought along a provision of 
     hippo-meat which went rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness 
     stink in my nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the manager on board 
     and three or four pilgrims with their staves--all complete. Sometimes we 
     came upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the 
     unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with 
     great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange,
     --had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word 
     ivory would ring in the air for a while--and on we went again into the 
     silence, along empty reaches, round the still bends, between the high 
     walls of our winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous 
     beat of the stern-wheel. . . .°

>From Joyce Carol Oates' introduction to 'Heart of Darkness'‡

          Based, like most of Conrad's fiction, upon personal 
          experience, "Heart of Darkness" is a rare Symbolist 
          work with roots in modern historic authenenticity; its 
          theme is nothing less than the acknowledgment of a 
          tragic darkness—the ethic of the "brute"—in the heart 
          of late-nineteenth-century Christian-capitalist Europe. [pg. 1]

More to come. . . .

° : From an un-pagenated on-line text version at:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/526/526.txt

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

‡ ISBN 0-451-52657-0, 
'Signet Classic Mass Market Paperback