Jungles and Deserts: An Addendum to "Railing at Greatness"
Jungles and Deserts: An Addendum to "Railing at Greatness”
IMPORTANT NOTE: Reading the original thread or refreshing one's memory about the points outlined in that essay would help readers get a better sense of this "addendum."
Part One of Three
A 1909 epigram by Thomas Hardy reminisces about his days as a student:
A senseless school, where we must give
Our lives that we may learn to live!
A dolt is he who memorizes
Lessons that leave no time for prizes.
When Hardy later explained that the epigram was merely an “amusing instance of early cynicism,” he must not have known how uncannily his ironic little epigram predicted the state of a nation’s educational system one hundred years later. In the twenty-first century, works of distinguished artistry and excellence are being cast aside in favor of pragmatic “skills,” quantitative, collectible data, and efficiently “scannable” test “answers” instead of “essay questions” requiring thoughtful effort. The former definition of “literacy” as a quality of an educated person has faded into a much simpler one: merely the basic ability to read. In today’s schools “learning how to live” increasingly means how to make a living rather than providing models which enable us to begin understanding -- and ultimately cherishing- -life. No longer is there any time for these “prizes.”
Not long ago I read a newspaper editorial ( in print, believe it not) lamenting the fact that the quantity and quality of literature has been steadily deteriorating in the curricula of many U.S. school systems. One stark reason for this the fact that several government mandates require testing of student competency in reading and math in order to assure "accountability." Thus, classroom reading lessons have been directed to a possible positive outcome; every assignment is grist for the mill of the standardized exams, "teaching for the test" rather than for instilling in students an appreciation for and a love of literature.
Once again, educators are forcing literature to "earn its keep" by making it serve utilitarian ends. There is yet another bread-and-butter issue diverting literature from its essential excellence and artistry to a subservient role, using selected works as "examples"–not as "moral lessons" which educators mistakenly attempted in the past-- but as "teachable moments" by which students can be directed toward eventually acquiring earning skills. Thus, an English (or "language arts") curriculum which at once time might have featured several short stories now will only offer a limited number of selections, the time supposedly better spent on non-fiction passages about a work place or a job skill. A bonus comes attached to this prescription: a linear, non-ambiguous piece of non-fiction can be easily converted into exercises or questions that conceivably may appear on the "test." Certainly, no curriculum planner would think of bothering with any work that is just "too difficult" to comprehend upon a cursory reading; instead educator administrators would give the nod to works that are safe, comfortable, quickly digestible, non-controversial, and bland.
One doesn't have to be a futurist to realize that if this overly pragmatic attitude toward literature continues, too many American youths will grow up ignorant about the great works of civilization. Technological advances such as the Kindle aside, the world of literature as we know it might one day come to end. If it survives at all, it will be relegated to a kind of virtual museum, a curiosity rather than a significant aspect of human consciousness. That sounds dire, but it's difficult to ignore the trends, especially the models initiated and perpetuated in American schools.
In both his original Harper's article and his recent comment here, Vince Passaro cautions us against regarding "political correctness" as the root of the problem. Even so, in education's slightly neurotic "culture" --the post-Enron term for a work environment--any work of literature with the slightest tinge of controversy would never be considered as classroom fodder.
But just for the sake of argument, let's imagine a hypothetical teacher imbued with more bravado than a concern about career security who would--perhaps as a subversive sortie-- attempt to introduce his class to Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo." (Forget for a moment the question why a school district would hire for its faculty such a injudicious buffoon in the first place.) Yet imagine the repercussions arising from Lindsay’s's explosive opening line: "Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room": the school board would run the teacher out of town on a rail, frantically wrought notes of apology would be quickly photocopied and sent home to parents, politicians would denounce the troublemaker on the local evening news.
The poem itself is rife with racial stereotypes, lurid descriptions, and vulgar characterizations. Apart from a brief image depicting King Leopold being burned and tortured in hell for his oppression and crimes against the indigenous people of the Congo region, nearly everything about Lindsay's piece is on its surface thoroughly repugnant--shocking the sensibilities of not only readers of 2012 but even--perhaps especially-- to those of 1914, the year in which the poem was written.
Why then would Lindsay stoop to create such an offensive tract? The reading public at the time consisted of upper-class, fashionable Caucasians who had only begun to emerge into the twentieth century; however, the old ways of superiority, bigotry, and hypocrisy were slow to take their leave. Not only that, along with the Victorian fondness for lace-smothered fastidiousness and "gingerbread house filigrees, many people had become curious about things that seemed odd, exotic, dangerous, and strange. Incidentally, there is a bit of incongruity in the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the hugely popular literary detective whose methods originated in deductive reasoning, maintained an active fascination with the occult.
While it might be a fallacy to say that Lindsay was writing directly for such an audience, he was a product of his times. Added to that was his delight in the role of showman, or, as the editors of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry relate, Lindsay promoted a mind-set he dubbed the "Higher Vaudeville Imagination," arguing that "America needs the flamboyant to have her soul." As a result, "his poems often embrace questionable materials." The theme embedded in "The Congo" is not an argument for the prevailing colonialism of the status quo but rather an illustration of "raw superstition."
What I gather then, is that the depiction --arguably a celebration!-- of primitive people, or- as one of his subtitles rather rawly puts it --"their basic savagery." Still, the poem is not at all an accurate historical document nor an earnest sociological treatise; perhaps thinking it so provokes the initial outrage among contemporary readers. Yet, what "The Congo" confronts its readers with is not necessarily a region of the so-called "Dark Continent" as it actually exists, but as a talking picture of the place as it exists in the imagination. The poem and the ancillary parts of the work --such as stage directions along the margins of the text and the musical sound effects-- underscore the intended effect. Lindsay's fond wish was to restore poetry back to its early origins as "primitive singing." Thus "The Congo" is rich in rhythms and repetition, drumbeats, musical lines, such as the refrain "Boomlay,boomlay, boomlay, BOOM." Counterpointing the condescending depiction of the natives is repeated line (in all caps): “THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.” This homage to the mystical power of the Congo River is the strongest image in the poem. Because of his insistent attention toward music in his poems, the Norton editors tell us that Lindsay paved the way for jazz-inflected poetry to enter the American literary landscape, influencing such later poets as --are you ready for this?--Langston Hughes. How’s that for irony?
Jungles and Deserts Part two of three
Part Two of Three
In “A Flapping of Scolds,” the original Harper’s article to which “Railing at Greatness” thread refers, Vince Passaro reminds us that: “What we despise about literature, and what exhausts us about modern literature in particular, is its irony, its acknowledgment that in most cases the beautiful process of creation is tinged with something slightly immoral, something exploitative of intimacies and experience, rude, vain, self-justifying, disloyal, unrestrained.”
Some readers of modern works, such as American students inculcated with the value of authenticity, as well as critics who consider writers and their works as targets , often fail to recognize the subtleties of nuance and irony. Both of those qualities mark the works of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), the two modern writers who have been maligned by certain critics, whom Passaro rebuts in Harper’s.
Without studying the novella as closely as it demands, a casual reader of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness might find plenty of offensive fodder to justify his or her resentment. Upon closer analysis, the reader might come to realize that there are complex, often contradictory, tensions beneath the surface; this novel demands, as the cliché goes– a reading “between the lines.” For all the disagreeable epithets describing the natives, there are just as many ironic passages in Heart of Darkness to undermine the apparent racial condescension and promotion of the corrupt interests of the colonialists.
For instance, I found at least three separate instances of ironic subversion of the pro-colonial position all within three pages of Heart of Darkness (pp. 68-70 of the Signet Classic Edition, reprinted 2008.) Even before he begins his fateful river journey, Marlow describes his sight of a man o’ war off the coast, where he finds it “incomprehensible” that the warship would “fire at the continent,” essentially attacking nothing or no one at all:
Quote:
“–and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives–he called them enemies!–hidden out of sight somewhere.”
Just one short phrase packed with ironic paradox–“lugubrious drollery”– is a powerful hint of Marlow’s conflicted opinions about the ridiculous and ineffectual lengths to which the military will go to prop up and maintain the colonial system operated by white Europeans in search of wealth–no matter how laughably ineffectual the attempt. But perhaps more insightful is the judicial placement of a mere bit of punctuation: the exclamation point after the word “enemies.”
Just a few paragraphs later Marlow has a brief conversation with the young Swedish captain of a “little sea-going steamer.” The Swede “tossed his head contemptuously toward the shore” while tossing off a sarcastic remark: “ ‘fine lot these government chaps–are they not?’ he went on, speaking English with great precision and considerable bitterness. ‘It is funny what some people will do for a few francs a month.’ “ When Marlow asks him what happens to this kind of person when he goes “upcountry,” the captain tells him that just “the other day” he had discovered a man, a fellow Swede, who had hung himself on the road. Visibly shocked, Marlow asks why, to which the captain replies “Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country perhaps.” That Conrad thinks to include these seemingly off-hand but significant remarks at this point in Marlow’s own narrative reveals a more complex aspect to his character and a deeper spirit than that which merely scratches Marlow’s superficial experiences in his thirst for adventure.
Perhaps the most revealing contraindication of Marlow’s ostensibly superior attitude toward the native population is a passage that is often cited as evidence as a tiny inkling of compassion, if not an oblique recognition of sharing a common humanity. If nothing else the sight of the suffering makes him think twice about the legitimacy of the ukase imposed by white Europeans. Of course this is a reference to the famous passage in which Marlow sees a sestet of natives chained together as prisoners:
[
Quote:
I]“They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. Another report from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of war I had seen firing into a continent. It was the same kind of ominous voice but these men could by no means of the imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them an insoluble mystery from the sea.”[/I]
By witnessing the suffering of the prisoners, perhaps there is a sign of softening within Marlow’s hard exterior. He wants nothing more than to erase the horrid scene of the dying natives out of his mind: “My idea was to let that chain-gang get out of my sight before I climbed the hill. You know I am not particularly tender; I’ve had to strike and to fend off. I’ve had to resist and to attack sometimes–that’s the only way of resisting-without counting the exact cost, according to the demands of such sort of life as I had blundered into.” Marlow immediately follows this with a brief discourse on the nature of evil:
Quote:
“I’ve seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men–men I tell you. . . “ This is followed by a premonition foreshadowing Marlow’s dread upon eventually discovering kind of man Kurtz may be: “I would be acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther.”
One of the complexities of Heart of Darkness is its ironic and ambiguous relationship between Marlow and the mysterious Kurtz–does Marlow admire or deplore this “remarkable man”–or is there a little of both? Complicating matters even more strongly is the detached and elusive manner of conveying the narrative. Vince Passaro’s insightful afterword to the Signet edition explains the multi-layered set-up. While waiting for the tide to turn onboard a cruise vessel on the Thames in the “sepulchral city,” a small group passes the time by listening to one of their number tell of his experiences in a forbidding land. As Passaro reminds us,
Quote:
“[t]he reader is addressed by an unnamed narrator, who sets up the situation before Marlow starts to speak. Everything that Marlow will say will come to us through this narrator whose name we never learn.”
Viewing Kurtz --as depicted by Marlow–is catching a refracted glimpse through a prism. The result, as Passaro states, is
Quote:
“a three-layered narrative structure that goes from Marlow, to his companion, to us. But is this really Marlow’s story? . . .This is Marlow’s story of hearing a story.”
Even Conrad himself was aware of the intricate nature of his structure, and Marlow speaks for him. For all of his sardonic irony, the sea-going storyteller confesses how much he deplores deviating from the straightforward, unfiltered truth:
Quote:
“You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies–-which is exactly what I hate and detest about the world–what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.”
Yet when the world around him is “rotten” sometimes the only thing to do is sift it through a glass darkly, tell a kind of “lie”–fiction- in order to comprehend more fully the truth. (“Tell the truth,” writes Emily Dickinson, “but tell it slant.”)
Later in the same paragraph, Marlow admits that in an earlier conversation he had engaged in “pretence”:
Quote:
“This is simply because I had a notion it would somehow be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see–you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story?
Do you see anything?”
It is possible to interpret this as a direct admonition to the reader against a facile acceptance of the literal story; Marlow --and his creator-- seem to be urging us to take nothing in the novella on face value.
The presentation of a story that is three-times removed from its primary fictional focus through a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator is only one aspect of the novella’s intriguing complexity. There are other issues brought up by contemporary readers, whipped into a frenzy by reactive critics whom Passaro’s 1997 Harper’s article confronts and disarms. In the preface to the Signet edition of Heart of Darkness, Joyce Carol Oates –a scholar and prolific writer whose name appears in print so often that one wouldn’t be surprised one day to find a published collection of her grocery lists–recounts the aspects within Heart of Darkness which spark outrage among readers who perceive offensive elements. “In recent years Joseph Conrad’s . . .ideas of gender, race, class and hegemony have been severely criticized. The assumptions of Caucasian male privilege are no longer taken for granted.” Therefore, Oates explains, “the occasionally dogmatic and even derisive nature” of some of Conrad’s descriptions may strike” a discordant note” among readers outside the category of his earliest white male readers.
Another point which may have escaped the reader’s notice is Passaro’s observation that nearly every conversation which Marlow relates to his London companions had been spoken in French, which Marlow has translated into English for his friends. It is only very late in the narrative that English is the actual, original language. Marlow makes a point of expressing his relief that he has finally found a fellow English speaker, Kurtz. He tells us that every time he begins to remember Kurtz the first thing that comes to mind is “the Voice!’
Although Conrad is a moralist for whom writing fiction is a “vocation akin to the priesthood,” he “painfully reveals himself,” Oates says, as “an unquestioning heir of centuries of Caucasian bigotry.” Still, she argues that “Marlow, for all his condescension, represents a degree of humanity not found in the other Caucasian Europeans who are intent from wresting from black Africa all that they can get.” Oates reminds us that Marlow's “sharp cinematic eye” is effective in that it “brings alive for us those suffering black men, whose plight is meant to move the hearts of Conrad’s educated, well-to-do readers.”
Jungles and Deserts--Part 3 of 3
Jungles and Deserts- An Addendum to “Railing at Greatness”
Part Three of three
Startling connections unite Conrad and his contemporary T.S. Eliot. Both men were expatriates. Having been born in the Ukraine, Conrad witnessed cruelty first hand when his father spoke out against the Russian rulers of his country, resulting in the family’s exile and indirectly causing the deaths of both parents while Conrad was still a child. Conrad spent his early life at sea, eventually becoming a British subject in 1886. Born and educated in the United States, Eliot made his permanent move in 1914, after Ezra Pound had convinced him that England would provide an atmosphere more conducive to a literary vocation rather than America could.
Another thing both men hold in common is their literary genius, but their reputations have not always commanded the respect they deserve. Passaro’s Harper’s article links the two men because over the last couple of decades both have been unfairly vilified by critics who have been, to use Passaro ‘s succinct phrase, “skinned like a rabbit.” Both the novelist and poet have been accused of bigotry: Conrad for his alleged racial and gender condescension, Eliot charged with perceived anti-Semitism. On a superficial level, the charges against them seem not completely without basis, yet --since their work has often been misinterpreted and misunderstood-- both cases can be countered with evidence to the contrary.
There are several other similarities as well, in their choice of symbols to depict the basic corruption of humankind. In Conrad’s case images of an untamed jungle, rotting and decayed run all the way through Heart of Darkness. We find the flip side of this excess in the sparseness of deserts, nature drying up in numerous Eliot poems, notably “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men.” Indeed, the epigraph to the latter poem alludes to Heart of Darkness: “Mistah Kurtz–he dead.”
Yet there is an even deeper bond between the two writers in that their respective artistic visions regard mankind as basically flawed and human nature as so profoundly imperfect that it can not be redeemed in its earthly form. In this way, both Eliot and Conrad are “moralists.” Although Oates’s foreword states that Heart of Darkness suggests “a pessimism so deeply entrenched in Conrad’s work as to be identified with a self-serving political conservatism that conveniently renders any form of activism, even protest, ineffective. For if all men harbor darkness in their hearts, why try to save them? Why even pity them?”
But one can argue that the kind of “conservatism” shared by Conrad and Eliot is not of the political kind, but rather spiritual. It does not seem that either man would prefer that civilization return to an impoverished past rife with worse manifestations of blatant darkness and stark brutality. Nor does it appear that Conrad and Eliot would actively block the enlightenment opening the door for the inchoate social reforms originating in the early twentieth century. Even the Church, always known for its traditionalism and glacially-slow acceptance of social change, championed social progress with the papal encyclical Rerum Novae. In this decree and in his other teachings, Leo XIII condemned the avarice associated with the overweening quest for wealth, warned against the abuses of rampant capitalism, and strongly championed justice for workers. One can only assume that Eliot, a devout Christian to his very last breath, was onboard with the pope on these issues. For while spiritual conservatives believe that man himself may never achieve perfection, their philosophy is not necessarily antithetical to ameliorating the conditions surrounding man’s life.
As we learned back when schools still dared to allow Donne into the classroom, “No man is an island.” There is something akin to that idea in Heart of Darkness, with Marlow’s empathy for the suffering natives, albeit brief. But deeper than this is the undeniable “darkness” –the essential pessimism on the nature of man, essentially incapable of redemption, at least not by himself alone.
Inescapably, the darkness always looms. Marlow senses tension in his conversation with the bricklaying manager who pumps Marlow for information about Europe, evasively letting on virtually nothing useful about Kurtz attempting to change the subject by expounding about the relatively carefree of the hippos living in the ominous waters of the river. “ ‘That animal has a charmed life,’ he said; but you can only say that of brutes in this country. No man–you apprehend me?–no man here bears a charmed life.’ There are hints in this conversation, though, along with conversations with the station manager, as well as snippets of information which Marlow overhears, that enable Marlow to stitch together a picture of this Kurtz. Marlow picks up the sense that the other managers and agents, who describe Kurtz as “prodigious” and a genius,” are concealing a festering resentment toward the mysterious man up river, for he seems destined toward a coveted promotion in the company. The underlying reason for this, of course, is Kurtz’s ability to bring in large quantities of highly-profitable ivory–which is, after all, the raison d’etre for the Europeans occupying Africa to begin with. There are also hints that Kurtz’s methods of obtaining the valuable commodity are unorthodox, if not morally questionable. Later, when the boat passes an apparent independent poacher –an “intruder” on the river bank–possibly posing a threat, Marlow says, “I observed with assumed innocence that no man was safe from trouble in this world.”
When Marlow finally arrives at the Inner Station far up river and deep in the thick of the jungle, what he sees there visibly shocks him. Though Marlow tells his friends that he never has stopped admiring this “remarkable man” the reader has to wonder if this is completely true. Moreover, Marlow makes a diagnosis of Kurtz that parallels but is completely separate from the jungle disease from which he is dying, “his soul was mad. . .I saw the inconceivable mystery of soul that knew no restraint, no faith and no fear yet struggling blindly with itself.”
The unanswered question, of course, is what exactly causes of Kurtz’s madness. Was it the lack of civilization which the jungle with its perils, its insufferable climate, and overgrown
excess, symbolized by Marlow’s frequent references to the stench of rotting hippo meat? Hass greed – his own personal quest for weath as well as that of his capitalist employers-- and –paved the way for overreaching power and cruelty? Or is Conrad indirectly telling us that insanity is an inevitable symptom of the inevitable found not just in Kurtz but in every man who has ever walked the earth?
This, Conrad, is the ultimate human condition, man’s fate. “Destiny” Marlow reveals “My destiny. Droll thing life is–that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself–that comes too late–a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”
Despite the desolation, deprivation, and ever-present danger, there is a lifeline, no matter how slender, toward a saving grace: human nature may be flawed, but perhaps what keeps man from utter despair is the very fact that he is human, with which, in Terence’s famous axiom, “ nothing is alien.” Indeed, a seemingly intractable moralist such as Eliot recognizes this fact. In his essay on Baudelaire, Eliot states without apology: “So far as we do evil or good, we are human, and it is better in a paradoxical way to do evil than to do nothing; at least we exist.”
Amid the mysterious evil of the jungle and the desperate desolation of a waste land, Conrad and Eliot show man at his worst. It can be argued that both writers project the other side of the equation a balancing counterpart that is profoundly good rather than irredeemably evil. In Eliot’s poetry the implications are explicit in that man can find salvation from despair through the intervention of divine grace. In Conrad such a projection , if it exists , can only be inferred. Still, a glimmer of a slightly less pessimistic view of man can be gleaned from the concluding scene of Marlow’s narrative. This passage in which Marlow visits Kurtz’s mourning girlfriend is the scene which Oates cites as an example of Conrad’s misogyny, in that women are treated condescendingly, like children, in that they in every way the weaker
sex. Marlow, the man who thoroughly detests lying, assures her that Kurtz died with her name on her lips rather than his actual dying words–“The horror! The horror!” Rather than telling the woman the truth, he decides to spare her further grief. Readers can construe this scene as a revelation that Marlow is capable of performing an act of kindness; beneath his gruff exterior and rock-hard conviction of man’s essential corruption, he has a heart. In any event, only a man who has looked evil squarely in the face can know the meaning of redemption, eminently achievable through understanding and forgiveness.
That pair of concepts might well be invoked not only by readers whose blood rises at the prospect of attacking literary artists and their excellent works but also by those of us inclined to direct our disdain toward vituperative critics, reluctant students, and bureaucratic educators. Both factions might somehow come to the realization that understanding and forgiveness can travel a long way, a distance much farther up the river than mere righteous indignation could ever hope to go.
