Lost worlds at 3QD, Rider Haggard to Anthony Bourdain

I’ve published another article at 3 Quarks Daily:

Up-River! The adventure of reality from Haggard to Conrad to Coppola to Bourdain

Think of what’s happened in the world since the publication of Rider Haggard’s She in 1886 to the 2013 airing of the Congo episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, a span of one and a quarter centuries. The European Scramble for Africa was heating up in consequence of the Berlin Conference of 1884 so that by 1914 90% of Africa was under some European heel. By that time World War I, aka the Great War, exploded and Europe was in flames and choking with poisonous gas. Then Europe took a break as Japan armed itself, invaded Manchuria and then China and before we knew it, World War II. Then Korea, then Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and at the moment Iran’s looking iffy.

But that’s not what the article’s about. Between She and Congo we have Heart of Darkness (Conrad) and Apocalypse Now (Coppola). But it’s it link between She and Heart of Darkness that most interests me at the moment. For one thing, I’ve already thought and written about Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness:

• Apocalypse Now: Working papers
• Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales, Version 4
• Myth: From Lévi-Strauss and Douglas to Conrad and Coppola

Anthony Bourdain is a different [kind of] story. Perhaps one day I’ll attempt to do him justice.

Back to She and Heart of Darkness, it’s only in the last week that I’ve been thinking about that (prompted by an article I found on my hard drive). There’s a connection there, a deep one that I’ve just barely limned over there at 3QD.

The basic idea is that you take She, strip the romance (that is, the romantic mystification of imperial conquest?) away, and you get Heart of Darkness. In She we have a trio: Ayesha herself, pining away for her beloved Kallikrates, who reappears in the form of his descendant Leo Vincey. They’re replaced by Kurtz and the Intended in Heart of Darkness and the romantic mystification disappears in the process. How does that work? The only thing that seems clear to me is Kurtz’s motive for going to Africa in the first place, to acquire wealth so that he’ll be worthy of his Intended (or rather, her family). Conrad doesn’t make a big deal of this, but it’s there. As for the romantic mystification, it’s been shoveled into Kurtz’s report for International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, the one he glossed with “Exterminate all the brutes!”.

(There, I like that, foisting the burden of romantic mystification on Kurtz so that he’s rather like Horace Holly, Leo Vincey and, well, H. Rider Haggard.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She:_A_History_of_Adventure#cite_ref-92

I’ll leave you with a section from the Wikipedia entry on She:

Feminist literary historians have tended to define the figure of She as a literary manifestation of male alarm over the "learned and crusading new woman". In this view, Ayesha is a terrifying and dominant figure, a prominent and influential rendering of the misogynistic "fictive explorations of female authority" undertaken by male writers that ushered in literary modernism. Ann Ardis, for instance, views the fears Holly harbours over Ayesha's plan to return to England as being "exactly those voiced about the New Woman's entrance in the public arena". According to the feminist interpretation of the narrative, the death of She acts as a kind of teleological "judgement" of her transgression of Victorian gender boundaries, with Ardis likening it to a "witch-burning". However, to Rider Haggard, She was an investigation into love and immortality and the demise of Ayesha the moral end of this exploration:

When Ayesha in the course of ages grows hard, cynical, and regardless of that which stands between her and her ends, her love yet endures ... when at last the reward was in her sight ... she once more became (or at the moment imagined that she would become) what she had been before disillusion, disappointment, and two thousand wretched years of loneliness had turned her heart to stone ... and in her lover's very presence she is made to learn the thing she really is, and what is the end of earthly wisdom and of the loveliness she prised so highly.

Indeed, far from being a radical or threatening manifestation of womanhood, recent academics have noted the extent to which the character of She conforms to traditional conceptions of Victorian femininity; in particular her deferring devotion to Kallikrates/Leo, whom she swears wifely obedience to at the story's climax: "'Behold!' and she took his [Leo's] hand and placed it upon her shapely head, and then bent herself slowly down till one knee for an instant touched the ground – 'Behold! in token of submission do I bow me to my lord! Behold!' and she kissed him on the lips, 'in token of my wifely love do I kiss my lord'." Ayesha declares this to be the "first most holy hour of completed womanhood".