Occupying Anarchism

[alice wellintown]

The story, as Conrad tells it, deals with corporate advetisments, for
meat products, a penal colony for cattle and men. Our narrator is a
hunter of the rare and beautiful butterfly not named or desribed. The
butterfly. Reminds me that not a few authors have used the butterfly
as symbol. Conrad uses it again and again. Here, in the anarchist, the
story he calls, not an ironic tale, the subtitle he saves for The
Informer, but a desperate tale, the insect, like the critique of
adertisment, is quickly abandoned as frame narrative distraction that
permits authorial commentary on the narrator and his
self-consciousness, his rejection of gulability and his independence
from the corporate scheme, though all rather ironic as he is an
unreliable narrator who quickly establishes the apparent truth of his
tale, as Conrad often does, by telling it as it was heard by a
desperate man whose tale telling has no motive other than to expose a
desperate man who must remain desperate.

Papillion, a true story novel, like Shantaran, is much the same; how
the worm takes flight with a tale.

Conrad sez, of anarchists, they are soft of heart and not so smart.
Sounds about right. Anarchism can never rid itself of the obvious,
what gave it a rebel, as Camus might call him.