Heart of Darkness as a critique of Homo economicus

From a conversation with ChatGPT 5.2:

Benzon: What’s Heart of Darkness about? Its mode is more suggestive than literal. And, sure, it’s about the West vs. Africa. But isn’t it also about Homo economics vs human beings? Why was Kurtz in Africa? To collect ivory. Why was Marlow sent after him? Sure, to recover Kurtz. But really, it was about the ivory. The fact that Kurtz died is of little consequence to the company that sent him there. But it’s of great consequence to the fiancé he left behind. And why did Kurtz go to Africa in the first place? Because he was poor and her family was well-to-do. He went to Africa to make the money that would make him marriage worthy. What we have is an allegory about how Homo economicus wreaks marriage and reduces people to property.

ChatGPT: You’re right to insist that Heart of Darkness is not primarily about “the West vs. Africa” in any simple sense. Its power comes from the way it stages economic rationality as a corrosive moral force without ever theorizing it explicitly. Conrad doesn’t give us an argument; he gives us an allegory whose logic only becomes visible when you ask the question you just asked: why is everyone really there?

Once you ask that, the answers line up cleanly:

• Kurtz is in Africa to extract value (ivory).
• Marlow is sent to retrieve Kurtz, but the real object is the flow of value.
• Kurtz’s death is incidental to the company.
• Kurtz’s fiancée is incidental to the company.
• Marriage itself becomes contingent on capital accumulation.

That is Homo economicus avant la lettre—not as a theory, but as a way of organizing human life such that relationships, vocation, even moral aspiration are subordinated to extraction.

* * * * *

Now back to me, no longer in conversation with ChatGPT. Consider the treatment of economic issues in Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, of Madam Bovary. The nineteenth century novel was about marriage (at least in Europe). Heart of Darkness occurs at the very end of the century and, in effect, turns that novel inside-out and up-side down.

On the significance of Jane Austen

Henry Oliver, Why we love Jane Austen more than ever after 250 years, The Common Reader, Dec. 13, 2025.

From the article:

Why is Jane Austen quite so popular?

The reason is simple.

She invented the modern novel in order to answer fundamental questions about how to be good, happy, and flourishing in a commercial society. Her novels are about questions that are still central to our lives. How to live a good life in a commercial society? What is a moral education in the modern world? Who should we marry?

Jane reigns supreme because no other novelist else invented such important narrative techniques or had so much to say to readers about their lives and what it means to live in modernity.

Austen and the modern world:

Austen invented the modern novel at the moment when the modern world began. She was born as the world was entering a new epoch: Enlightenment, prosperity, liberty.

The year after Austen’s birth, The Wealth of Nations was published, and The Declaration of Independence was issued. Thirteen years later, the French Revolution started. In Germany, new ideas about subjectivity and personal development were being developed by Kant, Schiller, and Goethe.

It was a time of great evil: colonialism was rising to a peak, slavery and the slave trade had expanded, and penal laws were vicious and unjust. But it was also a time of a moral reformation. Christianity created the abolition movement. Enlightenment thinkers insisted on the obligations of human rights. Early feminist ideas were circulating. Theories of sympathy were becoming central to ethics.

Whatever we want to call this period—the decades that hinge around the year 1800—whether we say Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernity, the Great Enrichment, the Industrial Revolution, the birth of liberty—these ideas became the assumptions and conditions of our era.

There's much more at the link. 

Note: I discuss Pride and Prejudice in my article, The Evolution of Narrative and the Self (1993). In the terms I lay out there the novel is a Rank 3 form of narrative. Oliver is, in effect, arguing that Austen is a (the?) prototypical Rank 3 novelist, perhaps the first to get it all together in one text.

The demise of white male writer of literary fiction?

Over at Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen has posted the opening paragraphs of Jacob Savage, The Vanishing White Male Writer, Compact (Mar. 21, 2025):

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

I've blitzed my way through Savage's article finding this:

The antiseptic legacy of Obama-era MFA programs hangs over this generation (all three of the above authors graduated from Iowa). Workshopped to death, shorn of swagger and toxicity —and above all, humor—these books serve more as authorial performances than as novels, a long-winded way of saying, “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good ones, my heart is in the right place.”

Having your heart in the wrong place, unfortunately, isn’t quite the answer either. The best stories by the flamboyantly transgressive and politically incorrect writer Delicious Tacos capture a wonderful samizdat feeling, but anti-woke literature exists in a sort of mirror opposition to a more dominant sensibility. The gonzo provocations of Peter Vack (Sillyboi) or Matthew Davis (Let Me Try Again) tell us less about the world than about how the author wants to be seen. These too are performances. As Sam Kriss pointed out, the anti-woke heel turn is just more identity-driven content—except in these cases, the marginalized identity is that of white men.

And later:

A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV, before deciding that actually, it’s not so bad that men have disappeared. “I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction,” he concluded. “They don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured.”

Someone presenting themselves as GGT over at Marginal Revolution notes:

This has got it backwards. The purchasers of books, especially those of fiction, are overwhelmingly women (at least 60% but probably higher). (I wanted to publish a book in Hungary 15 years ago and the agent told me "only women" read fiction these days. That was 15 years ago. ) White males don't buy books anymore and especially don't read literature. So, simply there is no demand for the white male writer because the white males are playing with computer games, and just don't care about books. And whoeever still cares, are simply not interested in what white guys have to offer. Sorry. No big secret here.

I have no strong or informed opinion on the matter. I don't read much fiction these days, haven't for years. The last novel I read all the way through is Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, which is science fiction, not literary fiction, which is what Savage's article is about. Are white guys being zeitgeisted out, as he argues? Possibly. Or have they simply lost interest, as GGT suggests?

And then there's this lament by Mark Gould, former principle trumpet with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra:

Inter-Racial Sex: A Passage to India and Light in August

Over at 3QD Morgan Meis tells us that this is the 100th anniversary of A Passage to India. Accordingly I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. It's one of the oldest posts here, having originally been posted on May 6, 2010. It is the third in a series of five posts dealing with the symbolic deployment of racial difference. The first was about Shakespeare's Caliban while the second was about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. All five have been collected into a working paper,  Five Easy Pieces: Race in the Symbolic Universe (June 2014).

* * * * *

Now I want do deal with projected sexuality as depicted in two more recent novels: William Faulkner's Light in August (1932) and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924). Faulkner, like Twain, is central to the recognized canon of American literature and Light in August is one of his most important works. Forster of course, is British, not American, and, as such, is a more direct heir to the psycho-cultural dynamic of Prospero's magic island. But Forster's novel is worth discussing because it displays much the same psychological dynamics as Faulkner's even though the racial Other is an Asian Indian rather than an African American. The psycho-cultural dynamic I'm concerned about didn't originate in America. The European settlers brought it with them. It is a Western problem, not an exclusively American one – nor, for that matter, is it exclusively Western (whatever that means), but that’s well beyond the scope of this post.

A Passage to India centers on Adela Quested and Dr. Aziz. Ms. Quested came to India to be with her fiancé, Ronny Moore, who was stationed there. Dr. Aziz is a local physician who befriended her in her desire to see the "real" India. In particular, he took her and some companions to see the Marabar caves, a local natural wonder that was sacred to the Hindus. While walking in one of these caves Ms. Quested become confused, lost all sense of herself, and after coming out concluded that she must have been raped by Dr. Aziz. From that suspicion came a trial and during the trial Ms. Quested admitted that Dr. Aziz had not followed her into the cave at all. Hence he could not have raped her.

Why would Forster make such an incident the center of his novel? Because he wanted to underline a hidden sexuality in the British attitude toward the Indians. Just as Tom Sawyer used Jim as a screen on which to project his fantasies of escape and capture, so Forster's British used the Indians as a screen on which to project their own sexuality. Ms. Quested came to India to be with her fiancé, a man she found to be stilted, boring, and less interesting than the enthusiastic Dr. Aziz. The warmth and sexuality she saw in Aziz was the warmth and sexuality she wanted in her fiance, but was unable to find. And the outrage which the British community felt over this alleged rape had more to do with their collective fears and hidden desires than it had to do with justice.

Much of the book is conversation. And much of that conversation is that of one social group trying to make some sense out of the actions of another social group. For the most part we have Indians trying to make sense out of the British, and British trying to make sense out of the Indians. Much of the mutual puzzlement can justifiably be attributed to cultural difference. But these conversations aren't matters of mere curiosity about the others; they are part of a social process. And that social process is one of oppression. The British, in their conversations, talk of the inferiority of the Indians and, hence, the justice of British rule. The Indians are concerned both with insulating themselves from the British and with maintaining their dignity in the face of the ruling raj.

Forster's British men think of the Indians as women (or children). And, just as man is destined to rule over woman, so the British are destined to rule over Indians. Indian women have almost no role in the book; the key Indian characters are all male. And they are depicted in ways that give them many of the stereotypical attributes of women—they are emotional, dependent, changeable, they take poetry seriously. Forster is quite clearly sympathetic to these men; but his British males are not. Let us grant that Forster's sympathetic portrayal of Aziz and friends is accurate—I certainly don't have any grounds on which to question it. As such, it does reflect real cultural difference. But that cultural difference functions in this novel as sexual difference, the politics are sexual politics. The cold, rational British male must rule over warm, emotional creatures - such as women and Indians.

We see a typical example of this attitude in the testimony of the Superintendent of Police, Mr. McBryde, who opened the trial for the prosecution. At one point McBryde remarked, under the general heading of Oriental Pathology, that "the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer, but not vice versa . . ." At this point someone in the court most ungraciously commented "Even when the lady is so uglier than the gentleman?" McBryde's comment is standard racist fare. The "darker races" are sexually rapacious and inevitably drawn to white women. The anonymous reply, while certainly not meeting current tests of political correctness, restores a measure of volition and even dignity to the sexual preferences of the "darker races." The statement doesn't deny sexuality, but it clearly indicates that Aziz and others exercise discrimination in their choice of objects. They are not the slaves of mere whiteness.

Humans and Dogs in Wuthering Heights

An old post that I've decided to promote to the top of the list on general principle.

* * * * *

I first published this note on The Valve for December 30, 2009. It speaks to my recent posts on animals, especially in cartoons (e.g. Where'd the Animals Go?). Humankind's history of domestication and mutual adaptation with dogs is perhaps deeper than that with any other animal.

About a month ago I posted a bleg in which I asked whether or not anyone knew of any critical work which looked at Wuthering Heights in relation to contemporary lore and literature on feral children. In that bleg I quoted this important description of Heathcliff from chapter 10 in which Heathcliff is likened to a wolf:

Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s day, as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He’s not a rough diamond--a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.

The wolf, of course, is biological cousin to the many forms of domestic dogs, and various forms of dogs do appear throughout Wuthering Heights. In particular, violence between dogs and humans takes place at important transition points in the novel. I’ve collected five such passages in this post and italicized the dog references within each passage.

 

* * * * *

Chapter I: Lockwood has rented Thrushcross Grange and goes to Wuthering Heights to pay his respects to his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff. In a sense this is the the most important transition of all because it gets us and Lockwood into the Wuthering Heights world.

I took a seat at the end of the hearthstone opposite that towards which my landlord advanced, and filled up an interval of silence by attempting to caress the canine mother, who had left her nursery, and was sneaking wolfishly to the back of my legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch. My caress provoked a long, guttural gnarl.

'You'd better let the dog alone,' growled Mr. Heathcliff in unison, checking fiercer demonstrations with a punch of his foot. 'She's not accustomed to be spoiled--not kept for a pet.' Then, striding to a side door, he shouted again, 'Joseph!'

Joseph mumbled indistinctly in the depths of the cellar, but gave no intimation of ascending; so his master dived down to him, leaving me vis-a-vis the ruffianly bitch and a pair of grim shaggy sheep-dogs, who shared with her a jealous guardianship over all my movements. Not anxious to come in contact with their fangs, I sat still; but, imagining they would scarcely understand tacit insults, I unfortunately indulged in winking and making faces at the trio, and some turn of my physiognomy so irritated madam, that she suddenly broke into a fury and leapt on my knees. I flung her back, and hastened to interpose the table between us. This proceeding aroused the whole hive: half-a-dozen four-footed fiends, of various sizes and ages, issued from hidden dens to the common centre. I felt my heels and coat-laps peculiar subjects of assault; and parrying off the larger combatants as effectually as I could with the poker, I was constrained to demand, aloud, assistance from some of the household in reestablishing peace.

Chapter 6: Catherine and Heathcliff travel to Thrushcross Grange and look in through a window where they see Isabella and Edgar Linton fighting over a lap dog. Catherine is so badly bitten by a bull dog that she has to stay at the Grange for a month to recover. When she returns to the Heights she’s somewhat estranged from Heathcliff.

Old Mr. and Mrs. Linton were not there; Edgar and his sisters had it entirely to themselves. Shouldn't they have been happy? We should have thought ourselves in heaven! And now, guess what your good children were doing? Isabella--I believe she is eleven, a year younger than Cathy--lay screaming at the farther end of the room, shrieking as if witches were running red-hot needles into her. Edgar stood on the hearth weeping silently, and in the middle of the table sat a little dog, shaking its paw and yelping; which, from their mutual accusations, we understood they had nearly pulled in two between them. The idiots! That was their pleasure! to quarrel who should hold a heap of warm hair, and each begin to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it. We laughed outright at the petted things; we did despise them!

Heathcliff is telling the story to Nelly Dean, who’s telling it to Lockwood, who in turn is telling it to us. The story continues:

'Hush, hush!' I interrupted. 'Still you have not told me, Heathcliff, how Catherine is left behind?'

'I told you we laughed,' he answered. 'The Lintons heard us, and with one accord they shot like arrows to the door; there was silence, and then a cry, "Oh, mamma, mamma! Oh, papa! Oh, mamma, come here. Oh, papa, oh!" They really did howl out something in that way. We made frightful noises to terrify them still more, and then we dropped off the ledge, because somebody was drawing the bars, and we felt we had better flee. I had Cathy by the hand, and was urging her on, when all at once she fell down. "Run, Heathcliff, run!" she whispered. "They have let the bull-dog loose, and he holds me!" The devil had seized her ankle, Nelly: I heard his abominable snorting. She did not yell out--no! she would have scorned to do it, if she had been spitted on the horns of a mad cow. I did, though: I vociferated curses enough to annihilate any fiend in Christendom; and I got a stone and thrust it between his jaws, and tried with all my might to cram it down his throat. A beast of a servant came up with a lantern, at last, shouting--"Keep fast, Skulker, keep fast!" He changed his note, however, when he saw Skulker's game. The dog was throttled off; his huge, purple tongue hanging half a foot out of his mouth, and his pendent lips streaming with bloody slaver.

Chapter 12: Heathcliff elopes with Isabella Linton. Suave charmer that he is, he hangs Isabella’s dog.

'She abandoned them under a delusion,' he answered; 'picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impressions she cherished. But, at last, I think she begins to know me: I don't perceive the silly smiles and grimaces that provoked me at first; and the senseless incapability of discerning that I was in earnest when I gave her my opinion of her infatuation and herself. It was a marvellous effort of perspicacity to discover that I did not love her. I believed, at one time, no lessons could teach her that! And yet it is poorly learnt; for this morning she announced, as a piece of appalling intelligence, that I had actually succeeded in making her hate me! A positive labour of Hercules, I assure you! If it be achieved, I have cause to return thanks. Can I trust your assertion, Isabella? Are you sure you hate me? If I let you alone for half a day, won't you come sighing and wheedling to me again? I daresay she would rather I had seemed all tenderness before you: it wounds her vanity to have the truth exposed. But I don't care who knows that the passion was wholly on one side: and I never told her a lie about it. She cannot accuse me of showing one bit of deceitful softness. The first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog; and when she pleaded for it, the first words I uttered were a wish that I had the hanging of every being belonging to her, except one: possibly she took that exception for herself. But no brutality disgusted her: I suppose she has an innate admiration of it, if only her precious person were secure from injury! Now, was it not the depth of absurdity--of genuine idiotcy, for that pitiful, slavish, mean-minded brach to dream that I could love her?

Chapter 17: Catherine Linton has died in the previous chapter. We’re at Wuthering Heights, miserable home of Isabella and Heathcliff; Hindley and Hareton live there as well. Isabella is pregnant. Hindley takes a shot at Heathcliff; Heathcliff beats him half to death. The next day Isabella flees:

'The back of the settle and Earnshaw's person interposed between me and him; so instead of endeavouring to reach me, he snatched a dinner-knife from the table and flung it at my head. It struck beneath my ear, and stopped the sentence I was uttering; but, pulling it out, I sprang to the door and delivered another; which I hope went a little deeper than his missile. The last glimpse I caught of him was a furious rush on his part, checked by the embrace of his host; and both fell locked together on the hearth. In my flight through the kitchen I bid Joseph speed to his master; I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway; and, blessed as a soul escaped from purgatory, I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road; then, quitting its windings, shot direct across the moor, rolling over banks, and wading through marshes: precipitating myself, in fact, towards the beacon-light of the Grange. And far rather would I be condemned to a perpetual dwelling in the infernal regions than, even for one night, abide beneath the roof of Wuthering Heights again.'

I find this incident particulary telling, set as it as, amongst some much violence between humans and however briefly the puppy hanging is mentioned. Just another day at the Heights.

Isabella gives birth to Linton Heathcliff a bit later in the chapter.

Chapter 18: Catherine Linton (the younger) goes from Thrushcross Grange to Wuthering Heights and her dogs get into a fight with Hareton’s.

The summer shone in full prime; and she took such a taste for this solitary rambling that she often contrived to remain out from breakfast till tea; and then the evenings were spent in recounting her fanciful tales. I did not fear her breaking bounds; because the gates were generally locked, and I thought she would scarcely venture forth alone, if they had stood wide open. Unluckily, my confidence proved misplaced. Catherine came to me, one morning, at eight o'clock, and said she was that day an Arabian merchant, going to cross the Desert with his caravan; and I must give her plenty of provision for herself and beasts: a horse, and three camels, personated by a large hound and a couple of pointers. I got together good store of dainties, and slung them in a basket on one side of the saddle; and she sprang up as gay as a fairy, sheltered by her wide-brimmed hat and gauze veil from the July sun, and trotted off with a merry laugh, mocking my cautious counsel to avoid galloping, and come back early. The naughty thing never made her appearance at tea. One traveller, the hound, being an old dog and fond of its ease, returned; but neither Cathy, nor the pony, nor the two pointers were visible in any direction: I despatched emissaries down this path, and that path, and at last went wandering in search of her myself. There was a labourer working at a fence round a plantation, on the borders of the grounds. I inquired of him if he had seen our young lady.

'I saw her at morn,' he replied: 'she would have me to cut her a hazel switch, and then she leapt her Galloway over the hedge yonder, where it is lowest, and galloped out of sight.'

You may guess how I felt at hearing this news. It struck me directly she must have started for Penistone Crags. 'What will become of her?' I ejaculated, pushing through a gap which the man was repairing, and making straight to the high-road. I walked as if for a wager, mile after mile, till a turn brought me in view of the Heights; but no Catherine could I detect, far or near. The Crags lie about a mile and a half beyond Mr. Heathcliff's place, and that is four from the Grange, so I began to fear night would fall ere I could reach them. 'And what if she should have slipped in clambering among them,' I reflected, 'and been killed, or broken some of her bones?' My suspense was truly painful; and, at first, it gave me delightful relief to observe, in hurrying by the farmhouse, Charlie, the fiercest of the pointers, lying under a window, with swelled head and bleeding ear. I opened the wicket and ran to the door, knocking vehemently for admittance. A woman whom I knew, and who formerly lived at Gimmerton, answered: she had been servant there since the death of Mr. Earnshaw.

. . . . . .

This, however, is not making progress with my story. Miss Cathy rejected the peace-offering of the terrier, and demanded her own dogs, Charlie and Phoenix. They came limping and hanging their heads; and we set out for home, sadly out of sorts, every one of us. I could not wring from my little lady how she had spent the day; except that, as I supposed, the goal of her pilgrimage was Penistone Crags; and she arrived without adventure to the gate of the farm-house, when Hareton happened to issue forth, attended by some canine followers, who attacked her train. They had a smart battle, before their owners could separate them: that formed an introduction. Catherine told Hareton who she was, and where she was going; and asked him to show her the way: finally, beguiling him to accompany her. He opened the mysteries of the Fairy Cave, and twenty other queer places.

That’s 18 out of 34 chapters. I’ve not had time to scout out the rest of the book for such incidents. Truth be told, I didn’t have time to scout out these five cases either. I just took them from old notes. Apparently that’s as far as I got with this project back in the day. Still, it’s enough to give you a sense of how dog imagery is used in the book.

Three critics on the eclipse of the novel and the rise of film [rank shift | singularity]

My friend, Adam Roberts, just yesterday (June 3, 2021) begins a review-essay:

I don’t propose, here, to write a proper review of Joseph Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel (St Augustine’s Press 2019); which is to say, I won’t write a review of the kind I might undertake for a scholarly journal or newspaper. [...] Bottum argues that the novel has lost its cultural force. Lots of them are still being written of course, and some of them sell many copies; but he thinks the form is no longer as central to our collective identity as it was in its heyday, when Scott and Dickens and their like not only reflected society’s nature back to society, but shaped people’s sense of what it meant to belong to such a society, to be as a human being. “For almost three hundred years,” he writes “the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world — the device by which, more than any other, we tried to explain ourselves.” The book ranges widely, though often shallowly: with only 150 pages in which to stage its argument many of its points and references are mere gestures, brevities, sketches for larger analysis. There are whole chapters dedicated to Scott, Dickens, Thomas Mann and (oddly, perhaps) Tom Wolfe but in these Bottum concentrates mostly on just one title by each. Bottum has a thesis as to why the novel has declined: Protestantism, Weberian disenchantment, Taylor’s A Secular Age, this great shift in the social-cultural life of ‘the West’, which the novel attempts, says Bottum, to re-enchant.

A bit later he offers some remarks about science fiction (SF):

I also argue that the primacy of the ‘SF Novel’ was short lived: SF novels were a small (though I think significant) part of the first great boom in novels in the 18th- and 19th-centuries. Short stories were the backbone of the Pulps in the first half of the 20th-century. Then as the Pulps began to lose ground a swarm of ‘fix-ups’ led to a great period of SF novels through the 1950s, 60s and 70s. But the novel is no longer the primary mode of SF (though SF novels are still being produced in great number — by me, amongst many others) The primary mode is, and has been since the prodigious success of the first Star Wars movie, visual texts: films, TV, video games. In this latter form SF/Fantasy has come to dominate recent and contemporary culture: of the top 20 highest grossing movies of all time, 18 are SF or Fantasy. The various iterations of Star Wars, all the Harries Potter, endlessly proliferating Marvel superheroes, hobbits and thrones, hungry games and vampires are everywhere at the moment. What used to be a fairly niche fandom is now ‘the’ mainstream.

Both aspects of the main thesis of my History of Science Fiction anticipate Bottum’s argument in The Decline of the Novel. Or to be more precise, as for the second, Bottum deplores what he sees as the banalization of culture represented by the shift from novels to TV shows, pop songs and so on, where I tend to celebrate it.

That's two critics, Bottum via Roberts and Roberts himself, on the eclipse of the novel and the rise of film and TV. During my undergraduate and graduate years film studies was a relatively minor pursuit in the academy, though I happened to attend schools that took film and other media seriously (Johns Hopkins and SUNY Buffalo). Now let's consult a third, the late J. Hillis Miller (who was at Hopkins when I was there).

This is from Miller's "My Fifty Years in the Profession" published in the ADE Bulletin (No. 133, Winter 2003, p. 65):

In the fifty years since I joined the Johns Hopkins English department, we have gradually, and now with increasing rapidity, moved out of the print age into the age of electronic media. Radio, cinema, television, DVDs, MP3 music, and the Internet now play more and more the role literature once played as the chief interpellator of citizens’ ethos and values. During’s literary subjectivity is becoming rarer and rarer among our citizens. They go to movies or watch television. That is what makes them what they are, not reading Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Dickens or Henry James, much less Donne or Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery. I am sure hundreds or thousands of people have seen TV versions of novels by Austen, Dickens, or James for every person who has read the books. One reason that university administrators have stood by and allowed English departments to dismantle themselves is that they, no doubt unconsciously, feel that it does not matter so much any longer what these departments do.

And this is from a recent interview from the Australian Humanities Review (2014):

A spectacular example of this sort of thing is the State University at Albany where an administrator closed Jewish studies, French, German, and Russian studies. He just closed them arbitrarily because he had the power to do that and wanted to use the money otherwise. My advice to Albany—not to any of you, it’s your own business what you do—would have been to tell the English Department at Albany to take this as an opportunity to sit around together and concoct a new programme which would not be called the English Department but something like ‘Teaching How to Read Media’ or ‘Understanding Media’. This new department would include Film Studies and also include all those other language programs, so students could read literature and theory in the original. You’ve got to know German to read Heidegger or Adorno properly, French to read Derrida or Baudrillard. So rescue the languages as part of this programme! I don’t know whether it would work. You could at least try. You could say, ‘We’re teaching students essential skills in how to live in this world of new media. We’re teaching them how to read television ads and political ads and not to be so bamboozled so easily by the lies they tell’. Television ads have a complex rhetoric, which I have begun to study.

This smells like RANK SHIFT to me. We're witness to a major change in human cultural expression and organization, a singularity in the sense that John von Neumann used the term:

“The interests of humanity may change, the present curiosities in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind in the future.” One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Stanislaw Ulam, from a tribute to John von Neumann.

Nationalism and the novel

An elegant argument about literary nationalism in Journal of Cultural Analytics today. Contra Pascale Casanova's thesis about the nationalism of minor literatures, the US is most navel-gazing. Followed by France! https://t.co/McZ16BR2Fv pic.twitter.com/tSOX4xm9HX

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) February 17, 2021

Abstrct of, Cultural Capitals: Modeling 'Minor' European Literature:

Conceived against the backdrop of ongoing debates regarding the status of national literary traditions in world literature, this essay offers a computational analysis of how national attention is distributed in contemporary fiction across multiple national contexts. Building on the work of Pascale Casanova, we ask how different national literatures engage with national themes and whether this engagement can be linked to one’s position within a global cultural hierarchy. Our data consists of digital editions of 200 works of prize-winning fiction, divided into four subcorpora of equal size: U.S.-American, French, German, and a collection of novels drawn from 19 different “minor” European languages. We ultimately find no evidence to support Casanova’s theory that minor literatures are more nationalistic than literature produced within major cultural capitals. Indeed, the evidence points to the exact opposite effect: all three of the models we employ suggest that novels written in more minor languages tend to be significantly less nationalistically focused than those written in European centres like France or Germany. Nevertheless our data do confirm Casanova’s larger hypothesis of the existence of visible stylistic effects associated with a book’s location within a global cultural hierarchy of languages.

Heart of Darkness 6: Some Informal Notes about the Nexus

Another surprise. This post has just over 3800 views, and it's mostly descriptive. No theory at all. It's relatively old, having been originally published on 7.17.17.

 My previous post in this series (see links at the end of this post) was about the longest paragraph in Heart of Darkness, one that is structurally central to the text. For that reason I’ve called it the nexus.

In this post I offer comments on the entire paragraph, along with comments on several preceding paragraphs and one following paragraph. My object is to demonstrate, in some detail, the range of material Conrad covers in this structurally central paragraph. What’s lacking in these comments is an overview. To invoke an old metaphor, I’m commenting on trees by ones, twos, threes and stands, but the shape of the overall forest is obscure.

Perhaps there’s no overview to be had. But I doubt that. I just don’t know the terms in which an overview can be constructed. I'd appreciate suggestions.

* * * * *

At this point in the story Marlow and the others are close to the Inner Station, where they expect to find Kurtz and, of course, his ivory. The boat is attacked from the shore. The helmsman is transfixed with a spear and dies, bleeding all over the floor. Marlow notices that his shoes are drenched in blood. He transfers the wheel to one of the pilgrims who’d been sent by the manager, and tosses one shoe overboard, thinking about how Kurtz must be dead and how he’d lost the opportunity to talk to him.

I have interpolated comments in italics, thus. The comments do not strive for depth. They note or ask about the obvious. Where I break a paragraph into segments to comment on the segments individually, I number the segments A, B, C, etc. I also give the total word count for the entire paragraph, but only list that total in the first segment of a multi-segment paragraph.

Before the Nexus

[99. 117 words]"The other shoe went flying unto the devil-god of that river. I thought, 'By Jove! it's all over. We are too late; he has vanished—the gift has vanished, by means of some spear, arrow, or club. I will never hear that chap speak after all,'—and my sorrow had a startling extravagance of emotion, even such as I had noticed in the howling sorrow of these savages in the bush. I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life. . . . Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well, absurd. Good Lord! mustn't a man ever—Here, give me some tobacco." . . .

(1) Notice the sorrow and desolation he experiences while thinking of the meeting he’ll never have. (2) And then he turns his attention to his present listeners, one of whom apparently has sighed. Where does the “absurd?” come from? What’s Marlow thinking the other has judged to be absurd? (3) And then the concrete need of tobacco for his pipe, which gets lit in the next paragraph, which focuses our attention on the here and present of the frame tale.

[100. 61 words] There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow's lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame. The match went out.

[101A. 210 words] "Absurd!" he cried. "This is the worst of trying to tell. . . . Here you all are, each moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors, a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another, excellent appetites, and temperature normal—you hear—normal from year's end to year's end.

Notice this figure — “each moored with two good addresses”. It will return again at 103G. Marlow then returns to commenting on his actions back then, the loss of his shoes, of Kurtz’s discourse. But, to the present Marlow’s shame, he did not shed a tear back then.

[101B.] And you say, Absurd! Absurd be—exploded! Absurd! My dear boys, what can you expect from a man who out of sheer nervousness had just flung overboard a pair of new shoes. Now I think of it, it is amazing I did not shed tears. I am, upon the whole, proud of my fortitude. I was cut to the quick at the idea of having lost the inestimable privilege of listening to the gifted Kurtz. Of course I was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me. Oh yes, I heard more than enough. And I was right, too. A voice. He was very little more than a voice. And I heard—him—it—this voice—other voices—all of them were so little more than voices—and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense. Voices, voices—even the girl herself—now—"

(1) Marlow now assures us that, yes, he did get to hear “the gifted Kurtz.” (2) What girl? The Intended, which he’ll mention shortly, or perhaps that native woman who’ll be mentioned somewhat later and who appears to have been Kurtz’s mistress? (3) And why does Marlow go silent? To compose himself before going on?

[102. 7 words] He was silent for a long time.

The Nexus Proper

[103A. 1502 words] "I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began suddenly. "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the women, I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, 'My Intended.' You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it.

(1) Marlow starts with a reference to the Intended, and to his conversation with her in which he lied about Kurtz’s last words, which were “the horror, the horror.” He told the Intended that Kurtz died with her name on his lips.

(2) The women are to kept out of this world. Whatever THIS world is – Africa? the sea? – it’s men only.

(3) The Intended is first mentioned in paragraph 58, though not by the phrase. Marlow is conversing with a young agent, an aristocrat who collected artifacts and was supposed to be making bricks. Marlow had been talking with him and noticed “a small sketch in oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was somber—almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister.” It had been painted by Kurtz and was, we subsequently infer, the Intended, whom we meet at the very end of the story.

(4) This is the first use of that phrase, “the Intended”.

[103B.] And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes, but this—ah specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favorite.

The frontal bone, perhaps alluding to the brain behind it. That it keeps on growing, presumably alluding to hair growth after death. He’s thinking of Kurtz being dead, which, of course, happens later in the story. From bald head Marlow associates to ball, and from there to ivory, the object of this whole business.

Follow the ontology in that sequence: from (part of) a living being, to an inanimate object, to a substance sans form. We’re heading toward “ivory” as a mass noun, as a substance. We’ve gone from high in the Great Chain of Being to low.

[103C.] Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country.

And elephants had to be killed to obtain those tusks. This is the economic core of the venture, the Company’s, and Marlow’s boat trip.

[103D.] 'Mostly fossil,' the manager had remarked disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes—but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate.

(1) Not sure what’s going on here. Still, the term “fossil” tends to have a paleontological reference and that lines up with various references to prehistory. But how would burying the ivory deep have saved Kurtz? It’s as though the ivory tempted him, but couldn’t do so if he couldn’t find it. (2) Note the word “niggers.”

[103D.] We filled the steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he could see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the appreciation of this favor had remained with him to the last. You should have heard him say, 'My ivory.' Oh yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—' everything belonged to him.

Here we get the critical phrase, the one where Kurtz shows his boundless greed and boundless need, the phrase I’ve called the Litany: 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—' As I’ve indicated in an earlier post — Ontology at the Heart of Darkness — it limns an ontology.

[103E.] It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over.

Kurtz had become a man possessed. He’s no longer an autonomous agent. He was in thrall to powers of. . . the place? Cf. the voiceover line in Apocalypse Now where Willard remarks that Kurtz had been receiving orders from the jungle.

Abstract words in prose fiction [#DH]

Just posted the talk I gave last week to King's College, with the text synced to the slides: https://t.co/zLNOaqhu7W

It's a summary of my dissertation work on abstract language in the novel, and explains how that work addresses “immateriality,” the official topic of my postdoc. pic.twitter.com/NVQamhPIPh

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) February 24, 2020

Kurtz as MacGuffin, or: Why trash him before we meet him?

In an earlier post about Heart of Darkness I said:

But, and this is crucial, he wanted us have a précis of Kurtz’s story before we finally meet him in the last installment. [Why? Good question, but let’s leave it alone for now.]

That’s where I’m going, to answer the question I posted in brackets. But before we get there I want to take up a matter that Samuel Delany has been emphasizing in discussions at Facebook: It’s not about Kurtz; he’s only a subplot, if you will.

Kurtz as MacGuffin

You might object, But he’s the central character in the story. He’s why Marlow went up the Congo. He’s what the story’s all about. No?

No. Yes, he is the central character and, yes, he is why Marlow went up the Congo. But is he really what the story is all about? Is it about his thoughts and desires and how he’s changed in the course of the story? Think about it.

First, over half of the narrative goes by before we learn anything about him other than his name. We get a précis of his life story in one long paragraph – the good, the bad, and the very bad (“Exterminate all the brutes!”), then he’s carried onto the steamer, sees his African mistress gunned down, and then he dies, well before the story concludes with a conversation between Marlow and his Kurtz’s fiancée. He doesn’t do much of anything. Whatever doing he’s done is in the past. In this story he just gets carried to a watery grave.

I submit that Kurtz is what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin, the object in a spy story or a detective story that motivates the action. The black ceramic bird at the center of The Maltese Falcon is a good example. It turned out to be of little or no value (the statue was a fake), but people thought it was valuable and so they made all this fuss over it.

Hitchcock explained the MacGuffin in an interview he had with François Truffaut:

The main thing I've learned over the years is that the MacGuffin is nothing. I'm convinced of this, but I find it very difficult to prove it to others. My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in North by Northwest. The picture is about espionage, and the only question that's raised in the story is to find out what the spies are after. Well, during the scene at the Chicago airport, the Central Intelligence man explains the whole situation to Cary Grant, and Grant, referring to the James Mason character, asks, "What does he do?" The counterintelligence man replies, "Let's just say that he's an importer and exporter." "But what does he sell?" "Oh, just government secrets!" is the answer. Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!

To be sure, Heart of Darkness is not a spy story or a detective story. It’s a stripped down African adventure story. But the concept is still apt.

Consider Steven Spielberg’s enormously successful Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of the highest grossing films of all times. In this case the MacGuffin is the Ark of the Covenant, a religious object of great value to Christians and Jews, but otherwise just an old relic with unspecified powers. But what does the Ark actually do in the film? What purpose is accomplished through the agency afforded by the Ark? Nothing, really. Yes, at the end, the Nazis look at it when it is opened and are thereby incinerated, but the plot was never about defeating Nazis. It was about finding this object, this MacGuffin. And what happens to it? It ends up in a government warehouse in the middle of nowhere.

The Ark and its surrounding aura is the focus of an exotic adventure set in the Middle East, but that’s all it is. And so it is with Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. He’s the focus of a story about a voyage up the Congo in which an African helmsman is killed by other Africans and an African woman is killed by European “pilgrims”, but he does nothing in the story and facilitates no larger purpose. He’s a pretext.

A pretext for what? Delany argues that the real story is in all the delays in the journey, delays caused mostly by colonialist incompetence. That is surely part of it; these imperialist lords are shown to be incompetent as well as greedy. But that doesn’t quite account for Marlow’s final conversation with Kurtz’s Intended. It is in the course of the conversation that we learn why Kurtz went into the Congo (paragraph 171):

"I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.

That revelation points at the heart of European social order, the bourgeois family, and reveals it to be a sham. That revelation in turn cascades up to a meta-level and becomes a comment on the European novel, which had been obsessed with marriage and family throughout the 19th century.

Why that long paragraph, that précis?

Now we’re in a position to answer that question: Why give us a précis of Kurtz’s story before we finally meet him in the last installment? Because we need the précis in order to understand the very end of the paragraph. What happens at the end? As I have pointed out before (e.g. in The Heart of Heart of Darkness) at the very end of that paragraph Kurtz compares Kurtz to his helmsman, who had just been killed, and finds him wanting. Conrad had to give us the précis in order to make the comparison meaningful. Marlow had already told us quite a bit about the incompetence of his African crew; now we also know that Kurtz himself was morally bankrupt.

Now that we know enough about both Kurtz and the helmsman to make the comparison meaningful, and Kurtz comes up short, what then? Imagine a somewhat different version of Raiders of the Lost Ark where, at some point a bit after the middle, and well before we’re sure the Ark has been discovered, Spielberg engineers a flash-forward in which we see the Ark being trundled into the warehouse, perhaps with some workers talking about all the time and expense wasted in finding that old piece of junk. That would pretty much empty the rest of the story of its life. All this work – for that’s what this grand adventure has become, mere work – is for pretty damn little.

That long paragraph does two things. In the first place it removes all the mystery that has surrounded Kurtz. We have nothing to look forward to when Marlow finally finds him. Secondly, it robs the journey of any moral value. Up to this point in may have seemed as through this journey up the Congo was but a long tedious slog through the charnel house of European imperialism. Now we know that’s all it has been.

And this in turn sets us up for the story’s penultimate horror, the slaughter of Kurtz’s mistress. The ultimate horror, of course, is the story’s final lie (paragraphs 188-197):

"'Ah, but I believed in him more than anyone on earth—more than his own mother, more than—himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.'

"I felt like a chill grip on my chest. 'Don't,' I said, in a muffled voice.

"'Forgive me. I—I—have mourned so long in silence—in silence. . . . You were with him—to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear. . . .'

"'To the very end,' I said, shakily. 'I heard his very last words. . . .' I stopped in a fright.

"'Repeat them,' she said in a heart-broken tone. 'I want—I want—something—something—to—to live with.'

"I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! The horror!'

"'His last word—to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!'

"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

"'The last word he pronounced was—your name.'

"I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it—I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether. . . ."

Notice how Marlow was thinking of Kurtz’s last words – 'The horror! The horror!' – words Kurtz most likely (surely?) uttered in reference having seen his mistress slaughtered, as he, Marlow, prepared to deliver his lie. Think of the social structures, and the history, bound together by those words and rendered into dust though that lie.

Haunted by Love and Marriage: She and Heart of Darkness

Rider Haggard’s She and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are very different books. She is an adventure romance of well over 100,000 words while Heart of Darkness has somewhat less than 40,000 words and is grim and impressionistic. And yet in 1983 Allan Hunter [1] suggested that Heart of Darkness is a parody of She. A few years after that Murray Pittock [2] published a list of correspondence between the two. More recently Johan Warodell [3] has given us a detailed comparison of Conrad’s Kurtz and Haggard’s Ayesha. This paragraph from Stephen Tabachnick [4], citing Pittock, will give you an idea of the similarity between these two superficially very different texts (p. 190):

Pittock specifically notes several parallels of plot and character, as follows. First, both stories “concern journeys undertaken to meet a mysterious character in the heart of Africa, in both cases white, recalling the legends of Prester John” or of Mujaji, the white-skinned queen of the Lovedu tribes in the Transvaal. Second, “Both journeys into the interior are by river, and, like Marlow’s, the helmsman of Holly and Leo is killed as a result of the action of the natives before either of the protagonists can reach his destination.” Third, in both works, the great age of Africa is part of the mystery. Fourth, the “technological superiority” of the contemporary explorers is “a feature of both books.” Fifth, “Marlow’s first sight of Kurtz echoes Holly’s last sight of Ayesha in She, as one terribly aged: ‘I could see the cage of his ribs [and] the bones of his arms moving.’” Sixth, both Holly and Marlow witness secret rites: Marlow “encounters Kurtz in the wood during the rites of the African sorcerer..., which echoes Holly’s solitary witnessing of Ayesha cursing her dead rival, Amenartas.” And last, neither Kurtz’s soul nor Ayesha’s knows any restraint and both “yearn for power.”

Beyond that I would note that both books are haunted by marriage.

Before we ever see Kurtz we see a painting he made of his Intended; moreover, we learn that he journeyed into Africa’s interior so that he could make his fortune and thus be worthy of his Intended, at least be worthy in the eyes of her family. This is from Marlow’s conversation with that woman:

And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.

Kurtz sought to enrich himself through empire so he could return home and get married. That’s what interests me, the relationship between marriage and empire that marks the outer boundary of Heart of Darkness.

It’s there in She as well. In Chapter 22, “Job Has a Presentment”, Ayesha is talking with Leo and Holly:

“Almost dost thou begin to love me, Kallikrates [that is, Leo],” she answered, smiling. “And now tell me of thy country–‘tis a great people, is it not? with an empire like that of Rome! Surely thou wouldst return thither, and it is well, for I mean not that thou shouldst dwell in these caves of Kôr. Nay, when once thou art even as I am, we will go hence–fear not but that I shall find a path–and then shall we journey to this England of thine, and live as it becometh us to live. Two thousand years have I waited for the day when I should see the last of these hateful caves and this gloomy-visaged folk, and now it is at hand, and my heart bounds up to meet it like a child's towards its holiday. For thou shalt rule this England––“

“But we have a queen already,” broke in Leo, hastily.

“It is naught, it is naught,” said Ayesha; “she can be overthrown.”

Of course, things didn’t work out that way at all. Ayesha died in the Pillar of Life and Leo went off to Tibet in search of wisdom. But the whole preposterous story is inscribed in the relationship between empire and marriage.

What could that relationship be, in either text? It’s not causal in either direction. And to say it’s (merely) symbolic is not quite right. Both stories tell of men adventuring into the unknown. But the territory where they conduct their adventure, Africa, is available through empire and the goal of the adventuring is linked to marriage. Marlow is in search of Kurtz, who wanted to get rich so he could get married; Leo and Holly are in search of Leo’s ancestry, where they find a woman who wants to marry Leo.

I think Leslie Fiedler’s classic book, Love and Death in the American Novel (1966), can give us some idea of what’s at stake. Fiedler argues that, while the 18th- and 19th-century European novel is focused on courtship and marriage, the American novel — which is necessarily based on European prototypes — is about “a man on the run, harried into the forest [e.g., Cooper’s Natty Bumpo] and out to sea [e.g., Melville’s Ahab], down the river [e.g., Twain’s Huck Finn] or into combat [e.g., Crane’s Henry Fleming] — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say, the confrontation of a man and a woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility” (p. 26). Of the European novel Fiedler remarks (p. 25):

The novel, however, was precisely the product of the sentimentalizing taste of the eighteenth century; and a continuing tradition of prose fiction did not begin until the love affair of Lovelace and Clarissa (a demythologized Don Juan and a secularized goddess of Christian love) had been imagined. The subject par excellence of the novel is love, or more precisely–in its beginnings at least–seduction and marriage; and in France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, even in England, spiritually so close to America, love in one form or another has remained the novel’s central theme, as necessary and as expected as battle in Homer or revenge in the Renaissance drama. But our great Romantic Unroman, our typical anti-novel, is the womanless Moby Dick.

Haggard and Conrad are writing at the end of that version of the European novel. Both are stories of men lighting out for the territory like American novels, but both are as well haunted by love and marriage.

The analytic trick, it seems to me, is to figure out the imaginative objects and forces that got reconfigured as we move from She to Heart of Darkness. Ayesha becomes the Intended, Leo becomes Kurtz, Holly becomes Marlow, and the unnamed editor of She becomes the unnamed auditor on the deck of the deck of the Nellie who then conveys Marlow’s story to us. And that’s just the beginning of the analytic job. Ayesha is a much more active character than the Intended; the relationship between Holly and Leo is different from that between Marlow and Kurtz; motives are different; one story traffics in the supernatural, the other not; and so forth. Completing that analysis is a job for another day, and a somewhat longer and more tortured post.

And that analysis is, in turn, preliminary to a consideration of the order of publication. Obviously, She, published in 1886, came before Heart of Darkness, 1899-1900. Why? Is that a matter of mere historical contingency or does it reflect the formal and thematic economy, if you will, of the Anglophone literary system. There is, of course, one respect in which Heart of Darkness could not have been written before She. It is set in the Belgian Congo. Since King Leopold had only created the Free Congo State in 1885; it would take a few years to administer the atrocities Conrad depicts (he sailed the Congo in 1890). But, by that time, European colonialism had centuries worth of depredations to its credit. A narrative like Heart could have been centered elsewhere.

What I’m after, and what I believe to be the case, is an argument that narrative is subject to a psycho-cultural economy such that She has to have been written before Heart of Darkness. Both texts arose in the same cultural system and reflect that system. She reflects an earlier state of that system than Heart of Darkness and this is so, not because of the often contingent events of history, but because of the internal dynamics of that system.

What I’m thinking is that, in this case, that dynamics is one of parody, perhaps even of anxious influence in one of the senses Harold Bloom has theorized. We know that Conrad detested Haggard’s fiction. Did he create the expressive technique of Heart as a way of writing an Africa novel that was utterly different from Haggard’s?

References

[1] Hunter, Allan. Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinsm: The Challenges of Science. London: Croom Helm, 1983.


[2] Pittock, Murray. “Rider Haggard and Heart of Darkness”. Conradiana 1987, Vol. 3 (19).


[3] Warodell, Johan. “Twinning Haggard’s Ayesha and Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz”. Yearbook of Conrad Studies (Poland), Vol. 18, pp. 57-68 Kraków 2011.

[4] Tabachnick, Stephen E. “Two Tales of Gothic Adventure: She and Heart of Darkness” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 56, Number 2, 2013, pp. 189-200.

[5] Fiedler, Leslie, Love and Death in the American Novel. New York, Stein and Day, 1966.

Why do people die in novels?

Olivier Morin, Alberto Acerbi, Oleg Sobchuk, Why people die in novels: testing the ordeal simulation hypothesis, Palgrave Communications 5, Article number: 2 (2019)

Abstract

What is fiction about, and what is it good for? An influential family of theories sees fiction as rooted in adaptive simulation mechanisms. In this view, our propensity to create and enjoy narrative fictions was selected and maintained due to the training that we get from mentally simulating situations relevant to our survival and reproduction. We put forward and test a precise version of this claim, the “ordeal simulation hypothesis”. It states that fictional narrative primarily simulates “ordeals”: situations where a person’s reaction might dramatically improve or decrease her fitness, such as deadly aggressions, or decisions on long-term matrimonial commitments. Experience does not prepare us well for these rare, high-stakes occasions, in contrast with situations that are just as fitness-relevant but more frequent (e.g., exposure to pathogens). We study mortality in fictional and non-fictional texts as a partial test for this view. Based on an analysis of 744 extensive summaries of twentieth century American novels of various genres, we show that the odds of dying (in a given year) are vastly exaggerated in fiction compared to reality, but specifically more exaggerated for homicides as compared to suicides, accidents, war-related, or natural deaths. This evidence supports the ordeal simulation hypothesis but is also compatible with other accounts. For a more specific test, we look for indications that this focus on death, and in particular on death caused by an agent, is specific to narrative fiction as distinct from other verbal productions. In a comparison of 10,810 private letters and personal diary entries written by American women, with a set of 811 novels (also written by American women), we measure the occurrence of words related to natural death or agentive death. Private letters and diaries are as likely, or more likely, to use words relating to natural or agentive death. Novels written for an adult audience contain more words relating to natural deaths than do letters (though not diary entries), but this is not true for agentive death. Violent death, in spite of its clear appeal for fiction, does not necessarily provide a clear demarcation point between fictional and non-fictional content.

Comment: FWIW, or various reasons, color me skeptical. For one thing, the adaptive hypothesis implies that death shows up in fiction because it is something we all must confront, but that we can't prepare for by rehearsal. But is homicide more prevalent in 20th C. American novels because Americans want to prepare themselves for the threat of murder? Seems unlikely to me. I rather suspect that murder shows up because of the moral and psychological issues it raises about the murderer. Fans of The Sopranos, for example, weren't preparing for the possibility of being murdered by a mob boss. They're interested in how a mob boss thinks and feels about the murders he orders and the ones he commits.

Addendum: 9.20.19: Moreover I don't see how simply reading about this or that violent death at the hands of someone else can provide any simulation that would be of value in an actual physical confrontation. Fighters don't prepare for a match by reading about matches, or even watching film – though they may do some of that. Their primary preparation takes the form of sparing, actual physical practice. Reading about fights does nothing to train your physical actions and reactions.

Heart of Darkness: Why were pilgrims on board the boat?

A couple of weeks ago I posted a fragment from an interview with Samuel Delany about the passage in Heart of Darkness when the boat pulled away from the shore at the Central Station with Kurtz on board. Delany remarked that the pilgrims had murdered his African mistress. They started shooting people indiscriminately and she was foremost among them. The text didn’t explicitly say that she was killed, but the implication is there.

I posted that passage because I somehow didn’t see that implication when I was working on the text a few years ago.

I forgot to note that that settled a question that had been bugging me for some time: Why were the pilgrims on board in the first place? Oh, I don’t mean what justification was given in the text. I forget what it was, but it doesn’t really matter with respect to my current point, which is about story-telling craft. Why did Conrad need them on the boat? He didn’t really need yet another example of monstrous European behavior in Africa. He had plenty of that. He must have had some other reason.

That other reason, obviously, was to murder that mistress. In the overall symbolic substructure of the tale, in the myth-logic, it was important that she be murdered by explicitly religious people. Roughly: Kurtz’s Intended is a tropological descendant of Dante’s Beatrice, the archetypal target of courtly love. Courtly love took fundamentally religious sentiments and imagery and applied them to secular targets. Courtly love became transformed into romantic love and, by the early 19th century, romantic love had become the ideal presupposition of and reason for marriage (think of Jane Austen). Kurtz had gone to Africa to make his fortune and thus become worthy of his beloved.

What did he do when he got to African. He “went native” and, in particular, took an African mistress, presumably a woman whom he had come to love. The pilgrims were on board the boat to exorcise him of his lover.

About a decade after Conrad published Heart of Darkness Freud would publish a classic paper, “Contributions to the Pyschology of Love. A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men”, in which he outlines the virgin/whore dichotomy in the male mind. Kurtz’s Intended is on the virgin side of the dichotomy while the African mistress is on the whore side. About a decade before Heart of Darkness Thomas Hardy worked through this dichotomy in a different way in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891).

There’s more to say, an actual argument to make, but this at least shows the direction that argument is to take. As I remarked to Delany in a conversation on his Facebook page, Heart of Darkness is inscribed in the rotting carcass of the 19th century European ‘love and marriage’ novel.

* * * * *

Freud, S. (1910) “Contributions to the Pyschology of Love. A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men.” Trans. Joan Riviere. Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers. New York: Basic Books, 1959, 192 - 202.

The problematics of identity in America

Gabrielle Bellot reviews Danzy Senna's New People in The Los Angeles Review of Books. From the review:

The problem of the 21st century in the United States is still the color-line, a line that extends back into prior centuries. This is the age of identity — as all ages have been, really, but the very notions of what it means to have an identity or to be something are now, more than ever, at the fore. But even as we have blurred racial lines in ways scarcely imaginable when The Souls of Black Folk appeared in 1903, we still have our clear-cut demarcations. And in many ways, lines of color, alongside the complexities of what it means to pass as one thing or another, may be what best defines Danzy Senna’s epochal — in its most literal sense — new novel, New People. Du Bois is not an explicit presence in the novel, yet his thematic and political concerns — updated, as it were, for this new era — haunt New People. These themes of passing and racial demarcations informed Senna’s first novel, Caucasia, as well. New People also explores an idea common in Percival Everett’s fiction — the two, incidentally, are married — of reclaiming and repackaging racial stereotypes as a person of color. I was particularly reminded of Everett’s hilarious, brilliant novel, Erasure, in which an experimental black author — often read as “white” due to how and what he writes — decides to write an offensively stereotypical narrative of American blackness, which then, ironically, launches him into national success. Despite thematic similarities, Senna’s voice and narrative are distinct and compelling. And her conflicted, white-passing, multiracial protagonist Maria is both a believable — if exasperating — figure and a partial but disquietingly accurate embodiment of the United States in 2017. How do we live in our own skin, the novel seems to ask, when it is living in our own skin that causes so much grief? How do we live when our own body becomes our perpetual enemy, our familiar yet alien desert planet, our inconsistently locked home? 

New People is a paean to the psychosocial complexities of being racially mixed, and, as a result, color-lines, passing, and double-consciousness are everywhere.

Fictionality as an intelligible and stable category of discourse

Andrew Piper, in Journal of cultural Analytics:

This article makes a very different claim, one that is based on observing a great deal of instances in which individuals have engaged in fictional or non-fictional writing over the past two centuries. Seen from this perspective, fictionality emerges as a highly legible category at the level of linguistic content ("lexis" in Aristotelian terminology). Such legibility is what allows us to build predictive models that can identify works of fiction with greater than 95% accuracy, and it should be added, that allow human readers to do the same (as in my initial experiment above). Contrary to the beliefs of the philosophers of language or different schools of literary critics from poststructuralists to postclassical narratologists, truth claims in language (or their opposite fictionality) are a highly recognizable linguistic aspect of texts. What appeared to be the case at the level of the sentence or "utterance" (what Searle rather vaguely called a "stretch of discourse"), no longer holds when we observe writing at a different level of scale. Placing all of the emphasis on the reader's activity, whether as cognitive predisposition or interpretive freedom, overlooks the powerful and extensive ways that texts mark themselves for their readers according to their fictional nature.

Not only does the research here suggest that fictionality is a highly legible category, but it also appears to have been surprisingly stable for at least two hundred years. While there have undoubtedly been significant changes to the way we tell stories, when we use learning algorithms trained on nineteenth-century texts we can still recognize contemporary novels with an impressive degree of accuracy (about 91%), even if that performance does decrease (history still matters). Indeed, the very features that seem to indicate the uniqueness of novels in the nineteenth-century, for example, appear either to be increasing over time or largely holding steady, even among a diverse range of genres into the twentieth and twenty-first century. While it remains an open question as to the extent to which different genres exhibit these features of fictionality to a similar degree, my initial research suggests that there is a surprising degree of commonality across very diverse types of fictional writing. Such continuity has important and still largely unaddressed implications for how we think about both genre and literary periodization.

YES!

Note, I've not yet read the article. I'm just skimming it. And I spotted this:

Indeed, imagining people as people may be fiction's most important role. If we remove dialogue from the sets above, including the pronominal expressions that accompany them (she said, he cried, etc),27 we see how third-person pronouns emerge as one of the strongest indicators of fictionality along with references to family members and bodies (Table 5). There is over a three-fold increase in the average number of she/he pronouns in fiction versus non-fiction outside of dialogue, with just these two words alone accounting for more than five-percent of all words in the text (or roughly 5,000 instances for a medium-length novel).

This speaks to my hobby horse about how we as critics have to learn to think and talk about characters as characters, not as people (who just happen not to be real).