Conrad, Casement, and the "Horror"

OK. It is time to get ourselves back to work on the blogsite. We will soon be viewing the American retelling of the Heart of Darkness narrative as presented by Francis Ford Coppola in his dramatic meditation on the misadventure that was the Vietnam War. This will give us another way of exploring the problem of the other as that other is found to lie within ourselves. But, before we get too far into this exploration, I wish to share a few comments about Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916) and his report on the savagery of the rubber trade in the Putumayo. While the record of these facts were published in 1913, it offers a window on the mistreatment of indigneous peoples vey much like what we have read about already in Heart of Darkness. In the early 1890s, Casement and Conrad were together in the Congo (The Congo Diary, 13th June, 1890--"Made the acquaintance of Mr. Roger Casement, which I should consider as a great pleasure under any circumstances and now it becomes a positive piece of luck.") and what they observed there would be explicit again in the Putumayo. Intriguing for us in this respect is Conrad's reflection on this time and the manner in which his description of Casement suggests the portrait of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. Here is Conrad in a letter :

"Before the Congo I was just a mere animal."

Then, inflating prose on Casement, he reports,

"He was a good companion, but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo report, Putumayo--etc) he made his way, and sheer emotionalism has undone him. A creature of sheer temperament--a truly tragic personality: all but the greatness of which he had not a trace. Only vanity. But in the Congo it was not visible yet."

Writing about his experience in the Putumayo, where he was dispatched as a British Consul to report on the treatment of "British Colonial Subjects, and Native Indians" by the government Casement reveals nothing of this tragic quality. Indeed, quite the opposite. Here, in a letter to a close friend he casts light on the circumstances of his task to represent the outrage in the region:

"I knew the Foreign Office would not understand the thing[meaning his report], for I realized that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race of people once hnted themselves, whose hearts were based on affection as the root principle of contact with their fellow men, and whose estimate of life was not something to be appraised at its market price."

Another reason why the British might have had difficulty grasping Casement's account was that its facts were appalling to the Victorian conscience, the very conscience against whcih Conrad strains in telling his narrative of Kurz at the far inner reaches of the Congo:

"The number of Indians killed by either starvation--often purposely brought about by the detsructio of crops over whole distircts or inflicted as a form of death penalty on individuals who failed to bring in their quota of rubber--or by deliberate murder by bullet, fire, beheading, of flogging to death, and accompanied by a variety of atrocious tortures, during the course of these 12 years, in order to extort these 4,000 tons of rubber, cannot have been less than 30,000, and possibly came to many more."

And yet, with the scope of this meditated slaughter, as with the irrational violence of the rubber extraction in the Congo, Conrad's portrait of this pitiable terror in the Heart of Darkness "attempted to penetrate the veil [of the deceptions of the civilizing project] and was anxious to retain its hallucinatory quality." The real and the imagined, then, were perpetually intertwined.

This week as we move deeper into the jungle of the Congo and the "epistemic murk" of the colonial rationalization of economic exploitation, let us consider how the history lived and told by Conrad differs from the terror wrought by the Conquistadores. Consider these questions from Michael Taussig's Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing: "Is there not a distinct desire in Heart of Darkness for Kurtz's greatness, horrible as it is? Is not horror made beautiful and primitivism exoticized throughout this book, which Ian Watt calls the enduring and most powerful literary indictment of imperialism."

OK, let's get to work!!

Walkabout Free Association: What is the film about?

In this assignment I would like each of you to share with the class your feelings and thoughts about Walkabout. You need not be generous or kind if you did not like it or could not relate to it, but you must try to explain why you feel or think about the film the way that you do. Consider, if you will, what the film is about. Is it simply what it seems--a parable about the elegiac possibilities of the Aboriginal life and the "crushed spirits of city dwellers," as the film critic Roger Ebert once wrote? (By the way, Ebert, and others, believe that Walkabout is "one of the best-photographed films ever.") Is it the complex tale of cultural encounter wherein both "native" and "foreign" suffer and learn from the encounter? What does the film say about communication and the necessity for meaning in human interchange? Of course, any film of value must operate on many levels of significance and this is certainly true for Walkabout, the story of which gets more difficult to pin down definitively the more you think about it. Indeed, one must wonder if even the sequence of the story, which we may be inclined to understand as linear, is not timeless, occurring perhaps in the "dreaming" wherein imagined and real, mythic and historical are seamlessly intertwined.

Roger Ebert does offer one very intriguing take on the film that may provoke some reflection. It is worthy of quotation here:

"The movie is not the heartwarming story of how the girl and her brother are lost in the outback and survive because of the knowledge of the resourceful Aborigine [sic]. It is about how all three are still lost at the end of the film--more lost than before because now they are lost inside themselves instead of merely adrift in the world...The film suggests that all of us are the captives of environment and programming: there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we simply cannot see."

So, let's see what you think and feel about this work that was characterized in the voiceover for the trailer as "just about the most different film you'll ever see." In your comments if you are led down the path of identifying resonances of the film with other works we have read, please elaborate so that we might see how many others were similarly struck.

The "Other" of Marco Polo

For this week I ask that we take up a more complicated angle on the self/other, native/foreign dialectics as a way of situating ourselves in relation to Marco Polo and in situating Marco Polo himself. The topic is theoretical curiosity, something familiar to us all. This work is clearly a geography, to be precise a "description of the world" as it was known for some time. Thus, it is not an itinerary. Instead it is more like a map of a journey within the imagination drawn on the surface of the world and so it is that the internal self/other and external native/foreign dialectics converge. The Travels (il milione) tell the tale of the exotic (much like Baudet describes in his historical account of the European imagination of the other) region of the desired, of paradise and it is this projection, fed by an aggressive desire to transcend the constraints of the theologically confined everyday, that is a critical contribution of Polo to the European narration of mythic geography. Moreover, this extension of the imaginary beyond the realm of the immediately known, was the first adventitious movement of the European mind toward anthropolgy and away from theology, a movement that would be more dramatically choreographed in the astronomical work of Kepler, Brahe, and Galileo.