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Heart of Darkness (and Freud)

5/31/2020

I understand that Heart of Darkness can be a very difficult text, especially if it is your first encounter with literary modernism (which is often dense, fragmented, heavily symbolic and indeed ambiguous), and also difficult simply due to the nature and representation of its subject matter. One of the most important things to keep in mind when reading Heart of Darkness, is that for Conrad, distinctions between "savage" and "civilized" are not simply a result of judgments made about external appearances. Yes, racism and sexism (and most other -isms that rely on discrimination of others) function in this way; but the root causes and various effects are far more complicated. In order to deconstruct and disrupt such binaries we need to, if you'll forgive the pun, examine the ways in which oppression is not merely "skin deep" but reaches far deeper into the bloody, messy, ugly, violently beating "heart of darkness" that makes possible such systems as imperialism and patriarchy.

One of the difficulties of Conrad's text is that in spite of its own internalized racism and subsequently problematic endorsement of the very thing it professes to critique, it nevertheless attempts to show us how “civilization” functions as nothing but a facade to protect us from facing ourselves. Although first published in 1902, at the end of the Victorian period, Conrad’s novella can be read as an early modernist text (even though the “start” of modernism is usually dated to 1914 at the start of the first world war). Similar to Conrad’s stylistic choices, literary modernism often moves beyond the usually straightforward representations of external or social reality as found in Victorian texts and instead often attempted to represent a far more internalized, unstable, fragmented, and fluid perspective or view of the world (as we’ve already examined in last week’s readings). After all, the world itself seemed to be chaotic and disruptive of previous "truths" during the devastating progress and aftermath of the Great War. Many authors at this time were trying to grapple with the way "things fall apart" when the "center does not hold" (as observed by Yeats in "The Second Coming”).

So, what are some strategies or tactics for getting at the core or heart (or, subtext) of such texts? I suggest, first, understanding how influential Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis was for society and writers during this time period. Too often we discount the significance of Freud to 20th century literature in general, and modernism in particular, and usually because in our often ironic (and, I might add, feminist) postmodern stance we find Freud to be quite laughable in his theory of the Oedipal complex. However, to dismiss the influence of Freud’ theory of the unconscious might lead us to overlook important details within the contemporaneous literature, especially when we are examining texts under the theme of gender, desire and sexuality; after all, Freud’s theory of the castration complex was quite damaging for women in its reinforcement of masculinity (and men’s spectacular anatomy) as superior to femininity (and women’s deficient anatomy). A lot of people at this time, including many brilliant writers (many of whom we are reading) took Freud on in their work, adapting some of his theories, or, at least, feeling more liberated to explore alternative representations of reality (for instance, Woolf’s and Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness) or to explore more explicitly sexuality and sexual relations between men and women as well as same-sex partners (as seen in those texts that we read by Loy, Eliot, Forster, Woolf, and Joyce).

Understanding not only the basic theories Freud constructed but also the social, cultural, and historical contexts of his influence helps in approaching these texts. Modernist authors, who in many ways were reacting to “repressive” Victorian culture and society, were if anything genuinely inspired by Freud to explore more openly sexuality and desire. Even though today we often laugh at Freud for his seeming obsession with sex, and perhaps because in our current oversexualized culture nothing apparently is too shocking, early twentieth-century British society was in many ways shocked and titillated by Freud’s frank and open discussion of sex and sexuality, and writers felt that they too were being quite daring in talking or writing about sex. So, it’s important to keep that in mind, and also, if we approach these texts with the understanding that many of them function much like the unconscious (as Freud theorized it) then we have a lot of deep excavating to do. Freud thought of his own work as an archaeological dig, uncovering the multiple layers of the human psyche in order to get at what lay repressed or hidden. If we understand that many modernists constructed their own texts with multiple layers in order to fully explore internal realities, then we as readers are compelled to uncover the unconscious of these texts, which might be found through their densely symbolic and allusive references, as well as their sometimes glaring holes, missing pieces, inconsistencies or gaps in logic. This is similar to how dreams function, which Freud argued was one way of reading the unconscious; by reading our dreams, or nightmares, these are capable of revealing to us the things we cannot or do not want to face.

This brings us back to Heart of Darkness, which is in many ways is a nightmare that we are compelled to experience along with Marlow (if we agree to take that journey with him), and a nightmare that we struggle to interpret or understand because it presents us with realities we would rather not confront. The unconscious of the text reveals the savagery of imperialism and patriarchy, which is if a form of cannibalism, as these systems are driven by the desire and hunger to “eat the Other” because the “Other” is the very thing that those in power don’t want to see or recognize; thus, the overwhelming systemic dehumanization of “natives” and women. Also, by making connections between patriarchy and imperialism, the text exposes how these systems are founded on a paternalism that silences or suppresses the “Other’s” reality. I think perhaps the text unintentionally exposes this, since even if Marlow/Conrad is aware of the ugly side of colonialism, the unnamed, silent, or silenced women are set up as those “bodily markers” that further expose the underlying “heart of darkness” in the text: a violent repression and/or fear of difference. Just as Africa was referred to as the “dark continent,” so were women’s bodies and desires situated in one of Freud’s lectures on female sexuality and psychological development. Although Conrad indeed redefines savagery to show how the white man or white imperialist is no more civilized than his “dark others,” he, or rather Marlow, nevertheless upholds the paternalism of male privilege in his interactions with and descriptions of the women in the text. Just as he tries to romanticize the “noble savage” at several instances in his recollection (for example, his exoticization of Kurtz’ Mistress, the text itself never considering that she may have been most likely raped or an unwilling “bedmate” for Kurtz), he also insists upon keeping women trapped in their role as “moral gatekeepers.” By insisting on their naiveté and ignorance, men are able to keep them ignorant, powerless, and as “blank slates” of purity that allow men to return to the safety of “home” (or the private sphere) and forget or bury in their unconscious their own savagery (there’s also a relevant connection here to Jekyll and Hyde).

This is not to say that Kurtz’ Intended and Marlow’s Aunt are any less complicit in the imperialist project; they also seem to support the patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist missionary endeavor in Africa, since they too are products and recipients of white privilege. However, for myself at least, I find the female characters to be the “unconscious” of the text, and thus the key or code that makes possible a deeper understanding of its complexities. My own reading is of course also informed by the French philosopher and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, who in much of her work examines the ways in which women function as patriarchy’s unconscious, and so it is upon us as readers to do the difficult excavating work that gives voice to the repressed realities and desires of society’s and history’s “others.” One day, if I don’t get to write it myself, I would like to read a novella that presents Marlow’s story through the perspectives of its female characters; it would be interesting to discover what that narrative might reveal or say.

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Sexuality and Desire: Joyce, Woolf, and Forster

5/26/2020

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Virginia Woolf, 1927

Similar to the speaker in Mina Loy’s “Songs to Joannes,” Mrs. Dalloway and Molly Bloom both find male dominance and sexual submission to be oppressive. In this sense, they both subvert typical representations of female desire and sexuality. Although both women’s marriages seem to be defined by a lack of sexual intimacy and unfulfilled, repressed desires, they share in common a rich inner life and sensuality. An interesting connection between the two women is their love of flowers, which symbolize for both of them that (lost) connection to their sexuality, or, a kind of sublimated form of their sexual desires which finds expression in a love of nature. For example, although Dalloway is fully immersed in her urban surroundings—the “throb” and “hum” and “teeming, pulsing life” of the city thrills her—yet she repeatedly returns to memories of her childhood country home and her intimate friendships with Sally and Peter. Likewise, Molly keeps returning to memories of her youth in Gibraltar: the sea and meadows and flowers in the final passages of her soliloquy. Both women feel cut off from their maternal sides as they are also cut off from nature, which of course leads some to interpret at least Molly (not so much Clarissa) to be an earth mother figure, though I think this oversimplifies or essentializes the representation of femininity in the text, and undermines the complexity of Joyce’s characterization of Molly Bloom.

Nora Barnacle, Joyce's muse and inspiration

Molly may be “earthy” and “maternal” but she is also “vulgar” and sexually passionate and refreshingly expressive about her desires, far more so than most women of her day, or even our own, are allowed to be. Joyce does a fascinating job of slipping into a “feminine” language, thought-process, and perspective on the nature and expression of female desire (or at least Molly’s desires). She is in many ways more accurately an anti-Penelope (Ulysses’ loyal wife in The Odyssey). Molly’s soliloquy is marked by her sexual explorations rather than rigid virtue—though in some ways she’s very much like the mythical Penelope in her romantic fidelity to Leopold—and perhaps her infidelity is due to the possibility that Molly feels Leopold has in some way failed a “test” in their marriage (thus making him a kind of anti-Ulysses). And though yes, Molly has had sex with Blazes earlier that day, we don’t get the sense that she is going to continue the affair. The lack of affection and intimacy during their sexual encounter has actually left Molly cold and longing to reignite and reaffirm her sexual connection with her husband, who is shown throughout the text, in spite of his own vulgarities and infidelities, to be nurturing, sensitive and still deeply in love with his wife. Significantly, by the end they have both “come home” to each other (a term that also has sexual connotations), and although they don’t have sex, the orgasmic conclusion to Molly’s soliloquy is an orgasmic “Yes” to life, desire, and their marriage. Ironically, then, Joyce stays true to the original narrative of Ulysses while also modernizing it.

Image Credit: University College Dublin

There’s more I could say here about Ulysses but that would also require getting into the larger scope and action of the novel, which is not entirely necessary to our purposes, since we of course have not read the entire novel but only a very small selection, though one of the most important sections. I’ve said more here about Molly Bloom than Clarissa Dalloway mainly because I think Woolf’s character and writing style is a bit more accessible, at least more so than Joyce’s often challenging stream-of-consciousness. A good approach to reading Molly’s soliloquy is to relax and let our own minds go, or, our desire for immediate sense and logic to the structure of her thoughts; in this way we might gain a greater understanding or “feel” for the rhythms of internal thought and desire as these play out in Molly’s and our own conscious. Like the seemingly disjointed associative patterns in Molly’s soliloquy, we too are not always aware of the leaps and connections we make from one thought to the next.

On some level, we find a similar exploration of the subconscious in Forster’s short story, "The Other Boat," though it is not at all written in the more experimental stream-of-consciousness used by Woolf and Joyce. Forster allows for us to “read” the inner thoughts, desires, and perspectives of both Lionel and Cocoanut, hence allowing for a more enriched and complex understanding of the interplay between sexuality, race, gender, and class—and how these create connections and tensions between the two characters. This text’s construction of “otherness” demonstrates how men are often more stigmatized for homosexuality, and a primary reason for this, as theorized by various feminist thinkers, is because gay men in their same-sex desires are stepping outside or rejecting a system that relies on dominance over and exchange of female bodies (as I mentioned in my discussion of Swinburne). However, according to my own reading of the text, Forster also disrupts this theory, particularly in Lionel’s violent rage toward Cocoanut, the “feminized” other, and perhaps also because Lionel fears the ways in which he has become feminized. This homophobic fear, or internalized homophobia, is revealed explicitly in Lionel’s reaction to Cocoanut’s joke about “tipping” him as if he were a prostitute, which seems to be the instigating moment that begins the unraveling of their intimacy, leading Lionel to get up from the bed and notice the unbolted door (a wonderful symbol for his fear of exposure and becoming “uncloseted”). To recover his own sense of control and power, Lionel is then reduced to savagery and destruction of the other, itself shown quite explicitly by Forster to be connected to self-destruction – this also connects to Forster’s critique of imperialism.

In closing, a note about some of the outdated and offensive terms that appear in Forster’s story, such as “mulatto,” “half-caste,” “wog,” and “dago." These are all examples of how specific words contain a history of racism and oppression, and I think Forster uses them quite sarcastically and bitterly in his rejection of the “Ruling Race” (the British) and its own sense of racial superiority. Forster’s use of language here highlights the constructed differences between the “West” and its fantasized or projected “others” (see Edward Said's seminal study, Orientalism). Keep some of this in mind for next week’s reading, Heart of Darkness, and think about how Conrad’s text explores the various ways in which language is used as a colonizing force.

E. M. Forster, by Dora Carrington, c. 1924–1925

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Apocalyptic Visions: Yeats, Eliot, and Loy

5/25/2020

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This week’s readings were selected and grouped together in order to explore combatant and civilian perspectives during the First World War. By examining the tensions in these perspectives, we might complicate our notions of how war is both physically and psychologically experienced by all involved—those on the front lines and those on the home front. The massive scale of loss during the “Great War” catastrophically altered nations, and the corresponding sense of social fragmentation and alienation had a transformative effect on individual perspectives and artistic practices during and after the war, a cultural shift or era that we now call modernism.

Mina Loy, Hourglass, N.D.

Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937

Luigi Russolo, Solidity of Fog, 1928

Readers often struggle to assemble a coherent understanding of the meanings found in modernist texts like The Waste Land. The process of breaking down the fragments of Eliot's text in relationship to the whole (such as, the “whole text”)—the style, language, and structure, the seemingly disjointed barrage of images and allusions, and the difficulty of locating a coherent speaker or voice—impresses upon the reader the mental anguish and confusion experienced by so many during this time period. We are disorientated when encountering the landscape of The Waste Land just as the poem's various speakers are disorientated by the world that they are attempting to understand; just as the speakers are in some way attempting to (re)construct new meanings, new understandings, and new ways of representing a world now altered, we too as readers are asked to construct or engage in new ways of approaching poetry (or fiction, as we’ll explore later with Joyce, Woolf, and Conrad). To help understand why high modernist texts like those by Eliot and Loy seem so obscure, we should accept that these writers were not so much trying to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. Rather, writing in this way created something new out of something that felt so empty and hollow. This directly links to the influential American poet Ezra Pound’s imperative to his fellow modernist artists: “Make it new.” (NB: Eliot and Loy are also often categorized as American poets, and are often included in both American and British literature surveys. Eliot was an American expat living in England for much of his career and Loy was originally from England, lived as an expat in Europe, and eventually became an American citizen.)

T. S. Eliot in 1923,
by Lady Ottoline Morrell

Mina Loy (center) with Jane Heap and Ezra Pound in 1923

Image Credits: Wikipedia

William Butler Yeats photographed in 1903 by Alice Boughton

It should be said, however, that modernists did not necessarily refer to themselves as modernists. We should keep in mind that categories used to define a specific time period and style are almost always retrogressive, or applied by later readers/scholars, because of course when you’re living and creating art in the midst of such cultural revolution you are typically not aware of the whole, or how your work connects to the whole production of culture during that time. Such things can only be seen in hindsight, though I do think Pound and others were quite conscious of a dramatic shift in literary representation and style due to the dramatic social and technological changes occurring during this time of rapid modernization, and many were interested in questioning and defining what it meant to be “modern.” For our immediate purposes this week, we should consider in our readings of the assigned texts how modernist literature was directly linked to the devastations of the war, or, a wartime climate that had not been experienced on such a vast, global stage with such vast, global consequences prior to the twentieth century.

Thus, Yeats, who in some ways views himself as a visionary prophet, seems to see only further destruction to come, or at least further darkness; all the old consolatory myths (such as those found in religion) cannot be relied upon to make sense of the new world order, since religion itself, as Yeats seems to imply, has been responsible for such cataclysmic events. At the same time, in “The Second Coming,” Yeats relies on the same biblical myth of apocalypse that he is critiquing in order to construct the terrain of his poem. For Eliot, the broken land and broken, hollow people who appear to be no more than walking corpses, trapped in the Underworld (of a devastated London), indicates a broken culture; rather, all the old fragments of culture—religion, myth, and literary tradition—are no longer sufficient or capable of providing sense and unity. Yet, much like Yeats and to a far greater extent, Eliot’s poem is constructed entirely of that broken culture, and as the primary speaker of the text claims, to “shore up these fragments against my ruin” might be the only way to salvage something and create something new. Because, in Eliot’s view, it is culture and all the art and “higher” thinking/forms of creation that humans are capable of which remain key to the survival of civilization in the face of such wide-scale destruction. Art and culture is what “civilizes” us, or so this seems to be the prayer that Eliot is offering, just as the poem ends in a prayer, “Shantih Shantih Shantih,” a plea for “the peace that passeth understanding.”

Granted, Eliot has been accused of elitism and cultural snobbery (not to mention racism and sexism), and nearly a hundred years after the publication of The Waste Land, we have yet to see if literature and art are capable of saving us from ourselves. I would like to believe there is some truth and value to Eliot’s fervent faith in culture as salvation/redemption (from our own brutal potential for violence, hatred, xenophobia, and destruction), though I’m probably far too influenced by a postmodernist or even posthumanist point of view to buy into the investment in such grand narratives or “truths” that Eliot would like to recover. I will give him credit, though, for being hopeful—and in my opinion, out of all the poems we’ve read this week, Eliot’s is the most optimistic (even if blindly so, like Tiresias the blind prophet). For without such hope in the possibility of renewal and rebirth—as found in Eliot’s references to the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King and the biblical narrative of the risen Christ, both rooted in ancient fertility myths and rituals—what would be the point of continuing in such a bleak world if we did not cling to such myths that presupposed our own worth or even right to survive as a species? The Waste Land, like any myth or existential tragedy—such as Hamlet, which Eliot also heavily references—seeks to find meaning in a world that promises no meaning but only an inevitable march toward death and our common mortality. Depressing, indeed, yet Eliot at least manages to look ahead while also looking toward the past as a possible hope for regeneration and new life, as promised by the myths he is building from and using as the foundation for his text. For Eliot, whose burgeoning commitment to religious faith was growing at this time, all of these things are cyclical: with death comes rebirth, but only at the cost of sacrificing some representative member(s) of the community (a scapegoat, as René Girard argues in his work, namely, Violence and the Sacred).

Thus, Eliot finds some reassurance in religion and preserving the cultural past as an antidote (or palliative) for the present wreckage and perhaps as a cure for the future. Conversely, for Yeats, in his fear of what may come—represented by the beast “slouching toward Bethlehem” and all the other cyclical, spiraling imagery in his poem—it seems that we are spiraling toward our ultimate end, and I mean in apocalyptic terms, the End. This is kind of an odd thing, and perhaps does not qualify Yeats’ work as apocalyptic but rather purely dystopian. Let me explain. The tradition of apocalyptic literature or the apocalyptic imagination presupposes a cataclysmic break in time, which signifies a break with the past; however, this breaking of the old world is often represented as a good (albeit painful) occurrence so that a new world might come to be, free from all the death and decay and decadence inherent in millennial fears. And so, inherent in the End is the hope for a new beginning, or at least a fresh start, a clearing away of all the detritus and rubbish and waste of culture and history. The Apocalypse or End is of course a myth in itself, and an incredibly violent and problematic one that has continued to plague the 20th and 21st centuries in its imaginative fervor for a radical obliteration of what any one group, often fundamentalist, hopes to be rid of so that they may come to rule the new world order. After all, Revelations can be read as a revenge fantasy concocted by John of Patmos when he was imprisoned and improvising his grand, celestial plan of retribution against the Romans and those in power who were responsible for persecuting the new Christians. Nevertheless, Revelations is a very powerful revenge fantasy, as it continues to play out in our literature and cultural myths, as well as quite a few fundamentalist cults. We'll explore more fully this aspect of fundamentalist apocalyptic beliefs in Week 5.

Dorothea Tanning, Notes for an Apocalypse, 1978, oil on canvas (https://www.dorotheatanning.org/)

Apocalyptic literature is one of my primary areas of scholarship, so I apologize for digressing into a lesson on the ideology and myths specific to the genre, but I think it’s useful to understand the contexts of apocalypse as a literary tradition in relation to this week’s readings. So, where am I going with this? Well, I would say, The Waste Land is in many ways a beautiful, maddening, at-war-with-itself, prime specimen of this genre that I think longs for that new beginning but fails to achieve it. “The Second Coming” is in many ways dismissive of the genre, and rightly so, expressing the fear that our clinging to such cyclical myths of violence and destruction and rebirth really only brings us more violence and death rather than new life. Yeats seems to suggest that we must create a new mythology, a new narrative that escapes Revelations and its threat of the Anti-Christ, a beast of terror and apathy that leads us nowhere. Yeats of course only leaves us with apprehension of the old myths and their continuing influence rather than any genuinely new redemptive myth, which brings me, finally, to Mina Loy. (NB: I also wrote a fictional biography of Loy so, admittedly, she is my favorite writer here in this grouping of texts.)

One of the things that I find fascinating about Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” is that it does not seem to make any overt, concrete cultural references. It’s as if the poem exists in a kind of cultural vacuum where references and allusions to any reality outside of the speaker’s own claustrophobic interior experiences seem to have no place of privilege or room for expression. Even while the speaker and the poem is intent on deconstructing all the old romantic myths and myths of romance with the aim of “sweeping the brood clear out,” I would actually say, as I have elsewhere (see my explication of “Songs to Joannes” provided in the Prezi) that her text is the most apocalyptic out of all those we’ve read this week. Loy has no sense of nostalgia for the old remnants of a world that has been shattered but embraces chaos and a truly new world, because perhaps in her view this is the only revolutionary path toward true liberation for women, and for a “purer,” more honest relationship between the sexes (see the additional Power Point intro to 20th Century Britain for further discussion of the perceived “war between the sexes” during and after WWI).

The patriarchal system is predicated on and sustains itself through a masculinist culture of war and aggression, as Virginia Woolf later argued in Three Guineas, published in 1938 right before the start of the Second World War. According to Woolf, patriarchy is perpetual war against all those it deems “Other” and Loy would happily eradicate such a system in search of a new one—and there are indeed beautiful moments in her poem when she tries to envision what that new world might look like, where “evolution falls foul of sexual difference.” Similar to Yeats, however, Loy fears that in spite of her own visionary longing for new myths/narratives or an “elsewhere” and an “other” reality that might be born/borne out of “the blood printed on a butterfly’s wings,” her poem still ends in despair, or cynicism. For it is “Love—the preeminent litterateur” that literally has the last word in the poem. In other words, regardless of Loy’s radical vision, the poem’s ending implies that the same myths (of love, romance, sexual discord and oppression) will continue to win out as long as we have “Pig Cupid snuffling his nose” and butting in to the affairs of anyone who attempts to discover “something new … something nascent … something that cannot be articulated.” Loy’s apocalyptic vision is for something quite radical: a new language and form of poetry that might reconcile rather than divide the sexes into separate, hostile spheres.

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Heart of Darkness (and Freud)

Sexuality and Desire: Joyce, Woolf, and Forster

Apocalyptic Visions: Yeats, Eliot, and Loy

Hope Jennings

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