Occupying Anarchism

[David Morris]

The butterfly symbolism is so juvenile, I'd think no author would do it as
a first level metaphor, unless h /she made the music higher.

On Saturday, July 28, 2012, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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.
>
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