NEW SAVANNA: Working Paper on Heart of Darkness

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Working Paper on Heart of Darkness

A PDF of my all my posts on Heart of Darkness is now available on my SSRN page and at Academia.edu.

Introduction: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

That’s not what I set out to do when I undertook these notes. The idea was simply to do for Heart of Darkness what I’d just done with Apocalypse Now, or had done last year with Sita Sings the Blues: provide miscellaneous commentary on a rich text. Miscellaneous implies that I have no particular goal in mind. I start wherever and stop when I feel that, well, when I feel that I’ve said enough. The only thing that’s sure is that along the way I’ll do some fairly detailed descriptive work and that I’ll devote some attention to the form of the word.

And that’s what I did for the first six posts. Then, WHAM! Well, not WHAM, not right off the bat. More like, hmmm, I wonder… I got curious. I’d noticed that the nexus sentence, which I’d examined in posts five and six, seemed to be the longest in the text. I was considering remarking on this while writing the fifth post. But I decided, no, I better not. I better check it, not that anything much depends on getting that assertion right, but still, it’s safer to check. If rather tedious.

And so I counted the number of words in each paragraph, displayed the counts on a graph and all of a sudden found myself engaged in the quantitative analysis of a text. I knew, of course, that such analysis had been done, I just didn’t figure that I’d wander into such work by surprise, as it were. But I did, and now it’s done, and I’m left having to make sense of it.

But not immediately. The immediate task is to situate that analytic work among the more qualitative work and to look at, and appraise, it all. What’s up?

Scales of Description

In looking over these posts (and, I might add, those on Apocalypse Now) I see that my miscellaneous approach isn’t so miscellaneous. There is a method there; there is an objective. The objective is to examine the work on a variety of scales and to see how phenomena at those various scales interact with one another. The method, loosely conceived, is to choose analytic and descriptive techniques that allow me to do that.

Thus the Latour Litany (3 & 4)—My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my. . . —is itself a small-scale feature of the text, though its implicational scope is large. It first appears, however, in that nexus paragraph (5 & 6), which is structurally central (5). Structural centrality, of course, is a function of the entire text. It is about the mutual interaction of parts in the whole.

Similarly, what I’ve called Marlow’s calculation (11), that section at the end of the nexus (6) where Marlow weighs the life of his helmsman against that of Kurtz. The passage itself is a small-scale feature, but the ‘evidence’ on the two ‘sides’ of the scale is provided in mid-scale features: Kurtz’s story as given in the nexus and in the story of the battle that straddles the nexus. The method of balancing (10), if you will—Marlow’s bond with the helmsman vs. Kurtz’s deeds on behalf of European civilization—colors the whole story.

The two quantitative posts, on paragraph length (7) and on periodicity (9) are about the large scale organization of small scale features, paragraph length and the appearance of Kurtz’s name. While there’s much that I haven’t examined, just this much, given the multiple scales of analysis, suggests that Heart of Darkness is an organic whole, an ancient term of critical description if ever there was one.

Beyond Form, Beyond the Text

Finally, I’d like to say a word about the either post: Is Chinua Achebe to Joseph Conrad as Ike Turner is to Sam Phillips? One might think of it as an homage to deconstruction in that it hinges around the limitations of language, a theme that is central to the deconstructive art. In the large, texts do somehow point beyond themselves into the larger social and cultural world. In that context they are but devices we use someone to negotiate our relations with one another. A critical practice that would be rich and full must at least acknowledge that.

Handbook Discipline

I conclude with a long post in which I outline a handbook for Heart of Darkness that would contain consensus-level information about the text. I imagine that the activity of actually creating such a handbook would be a means of sorting through all the work that’s been done on the text and identifying what we know and can agree on. At the same time it would identify new avenues for investigation.

The Posts