Conrad, Golding and psychogeography

1. Conrad, Golding and psychogeography Chris McCully, March 2015

2. Civilisation and dysfunction in Heart of Darkness (1) …a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign drooped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long eight-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, shiny swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the eight-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech – and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding… (p.16)

3. Civilisation and dysfunction in Heart of Darkness (2) …came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and also for an undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty nails…. (p.18)

4. Civilisation and dysfunction in Heart of Darkness (3) …a white man in an unbuttoned uniform, camping on the path with an armed escort of lank Zanzibaris, very hospitable and festive – not to say drunk. Was looking after the upkeep of the road, he declared. Can’t say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in his forehead….may be considered as a permanent improvement (pp.23-24)

5. Civilisation and dysfunction in Heart of Darkness (4) …decent young citizen in a toga…coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed around him….He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too….’ (p.7)

6. Kurtz as representative (1) Kurtz is first alluded to as a representative of civilisation, of administration (note the capitalisation in the quote that follows), of Europe: ‘He will be a somebody in the Administration before long. They, above – the Council in Europe, you know – mean him to be’ (p.23). Kurtz is here depicted as a representative of rules, councils, literacies.

7. Kurtz as representative (2) His small sketch represented ‘a woman, draped and blindfolded, carring a lighted torch. The background was sombre – almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of torchlight on the face was sinister’ (p.30 and see also p.125, fn. 64: ‘Astraea, Roman goddess of justice, is often depicted as blindfolded…and Liberty as holding a lighted torch’).

8. Kurtz as representative (3) Kurtz is described as ‘a prodigy….[A]n emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else’ (p.30). Kurtz is described by the company’s agent as a ‘universal genius’ (p.33).

9. Kurtz as representative (4) ‘His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and bye I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report…. And he had written it too…. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for!’ (p.61)

10. Culture, custom and setting in Heart of Darkness (1) But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage…. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories. The earth seemed unearthly….’ (pp.43-44)

11. Culture, custom and setting in Heart of Darkness (2) Representatives of ‘civilisation’ are ‘appalled’, not because they encounter something inhuman but because what they see is ‘not…inhuman’: ‘what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar’ (p.44; my emphasis, McC)

12. Culture, custom and setting in Heart of Darkness (3) Marlow states that the ‘savages’ he encounters manifest a universal humanity (‘What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage…. Let the fool gape and shudder – the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore…’ p.44; my emphasis, McC) is strikingly reminiscent of Tylor’s postulation that ‘culture’ (laws, art, morals, beliefs and customs) was common to ‘savages’ even if that culture represented ‘an early condition of mankind, out of which the higher culture has gradually been developed or evolved, by processes still in regular operation as of old….’ (Primitive Culture, Vol. 1, p.28).

13. Culture, custom and setting in Heart of Darkness (4) The structures of the novel allow Kurtz to occupy the heart of Heart of Darkness. It seems aesthetically significant, too, that the ‘wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman’ (p.75) – presumably Kurtz’s Congolese lover – should be structurally located at exactly the point where Marlow first lays eyes on Kurtz. Thematically juxtaposed with the aunt and the Intended, this figure …walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggin[g]s to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men…. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul (p.76)

14. Culture and civilisation in Heart of Darkness: summary Culture: poetry/music, art, sense of the sacred (Congolese woman embodies all these); well-adjusted to its surroundings (‘he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore’); also venal Civilisation: all the above, but also venal; literate, maladjusted, incomprehending and cyclical

15. William Golding, 1911-93 Lord of the Flies (1954) The Inheritors (1955) Pincher Martin (1956) The Spire (1964) Nobel Prize 1983

16. The Inheritors as a consequence of and reply to Wells (1921) • Wells and other early C20th writers had depicted Neanderthals as ‘grisly’ (Wells’ story ‘The grisly folk’, appeared in 1921), baboon-like and ‘the natural enemy of Man’ (de Paolo 2000) • Neanderthals co-existed with modern humans, weren’t in the last baboon-like; there was cross-breeding: between 1-4% of human DNA is ‘neanderthal’ (http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/neanderthal-human-interbreed-dna.htm)

17. William Golding, The Inheritors • Neanderthal group – main characters Lok, Ha, Fa, Nil and Mal – encounter humans (H. sapiens sapiens) • Humans are ‘people who make incomprehensible noises, travel on the water in hollow logs, shoot at the Neanderthals with barbed sticks, steal their children, hunt them down…’ (Lively, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/11/fiction.williamgolding, accessed February 28, 2015)

18. The Inheritors: setting and culture • Water, log, stone, tree, cave • Wet/dry • Waterfall • Oa (a goddess/Earth mother) • Neanderthals have tools, burial rites and fire • They have dance (p.134) • Have a sense of history • Kinship grouping • Kinaesthesia (empathy with others’ bodily movements > sharing of ‘memory pictures’)

19. The Inheritors: kinaesthesia and other forms of apprehension ‘Lok looked away….He flared his nostrils and immediately was rewarded with a whole mixture of smells, for the mist from the fall magnified any smell incredibly, as rain will deepened and distinguish the colours of a field of flowers’ (p.15; my emphasis, McC)

20. The Inheritors: apprehension Lok…would have laughed if it were not for the echo of screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. “Clop!” His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig…. (p.96)

21. The Inheritors: sense of the sacred ‘Now Mal spoke. “There was the great Oa. She brought forth the earth from her belly. She gave suck. The earth brought forth woman and the woman brought forth the first man out of her belly.”’ (p.25)

22. The Inheritors: genealogy and history They listened to him [Mal] in silence…. There was the picture of the time when there had been many people…. There was also a long list of names that began at Mal and went back choosing always the oldest man of the people at that time: but now he said nothing more. (p.25)

23. The New People in The Inheritors • Technological (they aren’t afraid of water and use boats) • Use weapons (bows and arrows, fire) • Are ready meat-eaters, use skins etc. for personal decoration • Have containers • Have language and do not use kinaesthetic or other communication • Murder and abduction

24. Caves, kinaesthesia and The Inheritors An essay by Golding in his collection A Moving Target opens with the description of a single footprint in what was once the soft mud of a cave in the Auvergne, with a mark alongside made by the stick on which the maker leaned, saving himself from falling. Golding talks of kinaesthesia, the capacity for sympathetic identification with someone else's bodily movements; there is a sense in which The Inheritors seems like an exercise in fictional kinaesthesia, with its author trying to slip not just into a Neanderthal skin, but also into one of those unimaginable minds. (Lively, see above)

25. The Inheritors and racism The people [Neanderthals: McC] are astonished and awed by the newcomers [humans]. These, in turn, look at the "devils" with a mixture of fascination and repulsion; they abduct their young as playthings, but their objective is extermination. Perhaps this is a suggestion of the origins of racism, and indeed the whole novel is ripe for allegorical deconstruction. (Lively, see above; my italics, McC… Note that I do not think the novel is an allegory: it is an imaginative exploration of the durable terrors of human culture)

26. Golding, Conrad and psychogeography • Heart of Darkness and The Inheritors offer a continual challenge to rethink human origins • Both novels engage with relationships between humans (or pre-humans) and the contexts in which they must live, work and worship • Both novels offer little hope as to the benefits of ‘civilisation’ unless human civilisation is to be realigned with the cultures (including the environments) from which it derives. • Far from being ‘racist’, both novels interrogate and offer a radical albeit implicational reply to racism.

27. References A-G Achebe, Chinua. ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"’. Chancellor’s lecture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1975), subsequently published (in revised form) in ed. Paul B. Armstrong, Heart of Darkness. Norton Critical Edition (4th edition, 2006), pp.336-349. Armstrong, Paul B. (ed.) Heart of Darkness. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. (2006) Arnold, Matthew. Literature and Dogma. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Second edition (1873). Chambers, R.W. The Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1932). Cook, Jill. Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind. London: British Museum Press. (2013) Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Penguin. (2012) Golding, William The Inheritors. (Republished with an introduction by John Carey, 2011). London: Faber (1955) Hawkins, Hunt. ‘Heart of Darkness and Racism’. [An earlier version of this essay was first published in Conradiana 14.3 (1982), pp.163-71.] In ed. Paul B. Armstrong (2006), pp.365-375. Hawthorn, Jeremy. ‘The Women of Heart of Darkness’. In ed. Paul B. Armstrong, Heart of Darkness. Norton Critical Edition (4th edition, 2006), pp.405-415.

28. References J-W Knowles, Owen (ed.) Heart of Darkness. Penguin Classics edition. London: Penguin. (2007) Lively, Penelope ‘O unlucky man’, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/11/fiction.williamgolding (2003) Meredith, Martin. Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life. London and New York: Simon & Schuster (2011) Meyers, Jeffrey. Joseph Conrad: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner (1991) Najder, Zdzislaw. Joseph Conrad: A Life. Rochester, NY: Camden House. New edition. (2007) De Paolo, Charles ‘Wells, Golding and Auel: Representing the Neanderthal’. Science Fiction Studies 27 no.3, pp. 418-38 (2000) [Accessed via Jstor, February 2015.] Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage (1994). Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Two vols. London: John Murray (1871) Viegas, Jennifer ‘Neanderthals, Humans Interbred, DNA Proves’ (2010) http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/neanderthal-human-interbreed-dna.htm, [Accessed February 28th 2015.] Watts, Cedric. ‘“A Bloody Racist”: About Achebe's View of Conrad’, Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983): 196-209. [http://www.jstor.org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/stable/3508121, accessed November 2012.] Whitehead, Lee M. ‘The Moment out of Time: Golding’s Pincher Martin’. Contemporary Literature 12 no. 1, pp. 18-41 (1971) [Accessed via Jstor, Febrary 2015.]