HD3: Closure, Attachment, and Abstract Objects in Heart of Darkness

Or, Did Conrad’s Kurtz pioneer the Latour Litany?

I continue to think about the ending of Heart of Darkness, a conversation between the teller of the tale, Charlie Marlow, and Kurtz’s bereaved fiancée, known only as the Intended – a significant, depersonalizing, practice (one thinks of those characters in Dickens novels carousing about like self-contained armored vehicles). She wants assurances of his goodness and nobleness of spirit, which Marlow provides, despite the fact that, however remarkable he may have felt Kurtz to be, he also thought he was crazy at the end. She wants to know his Kurtz’s words and takes comfort when Marlow tells her that her name was the last thing that left his lips. But that is not so, at least not unless her name was Horror. And, in fact, I have no trouble imagining a bit of British sketch comedy in which The Husband refers to The Wife simply as The Horror.

But Heart of Darkness is not a comedy sketch. It is . . . well, what IS it?

The story’s ending reads like a grim parody of all those 19th Century British novels that happily end with He and She destined for wedded bliss. In Heart of Darkness He and She are like two continents, call ‘em East and West, and never the twain shall meet.

So that’s one thing. Here’s another. There’s that long paragraph in the second installment – it was originally published in three installments in Blackwood’s Magazine – in which Marlow, among other things, leaps ahead of his story and tells us about all the ivory they found at Kurtz’s station and piled onto the steamer. Let’s call that paragraph the nexus, for it seems to gather all the strands of the story into itself — I’ll say more about it in a later post. At 1531 words it’s the longest paragraph in the text, with 2nd, 3rd, and 4th longest being 1129, 1103, and 865 words respectively.

Anyhow, once the nexus gets good and rolling along, we have this: “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.” Somewhat later in the story, in the third installment, we have:

Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now--images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments.

It’s as though those things all occupied the same place in his mind. What is that place? There’s another connection to be made. In paragraph 160 (of 198 in total*) Marlow tells us that, when Kurtz’s mother died, she had been “watched over . . . by his Intended.” So, if I may invoke that myth logic I invoked so often in my remarks on Apocalypse Now, could it be that all those things – the Intended, the ivory, the station, the river, the career, the ideas – that they’re all stand-ins for The Mother?

To the infant, Freud has told us, The Mother is all – or is it merely The Breast? She is the World. For the adult Kurtz, a man given to abstract ideas of the highest purpose and grandest reach, a man now utterly detached from his familiar surroundings in the heart of a strange continent where he hopes to make his fortune, it turns out that he’s never left the scope of mother comfort. Except that she’s no longer there, and all the rest of it is inadequate to slake his infinite need for Mother’s Love Lost.

And so we get that bitter bitter lie of an ending. In those Happily Ever After books – kissing cousins to the Hot Romance books so beloved by Emma Bovary – one’s beloved provides the adult with the psychological closure Mother provided to the Infant. But there is no such closure for Kurtz – he dead – nor for the Intended. Marlow, however, out of his attachment to the man that might have been, and perhaps out of compassion, decides that there is no point in disabusing the Intended of her illusions. With her Beloved dead, there is no Happily Ever After for her. But at least he can allow her the illusion of the Happily Ever After that Might Have Been.

* * * * *

But let’s return to that list – my Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my career, my ideas, a Latour litany if ever there was one. What’s on my mind is the problem of extending human desire and concern beyond the range of phenomena bequeathed by biology. Biology gives us the need and desire for food and sustenance, for sex, and for what John Bowlby has called a secure base, The Mother, that is, the infant’s attachment figure (which isn’t necessarily the biological mother, though it usually is).

Bowlby (1969) reconstructed psychoanalytic object relations theory using primate ethology and some simple systems concepts. The result was the now familiar account of infant attachment. In 1982 Peter Marris published an essay, “Attachment and Society,” in which he discussed utopian religious communities and suggested (p. 199):

So those who try to live without exclusive ties of relationship, like the people of Oneida or the members of a monastic order, have to create a surrogate that will fulfill for them the same structural need for some ordering of priorities of concern. Characteristically, they find it in a symbolic relationship with the same emotional connotations as a personal pond; they are brides of Christ, children of a supernatural father.

That is to say, the attachment system is being “repurposed” by having attachment focus on symbolic beings rather than real ones. Much of ritual and story-telling, I submit, seems to serve such a purpose.

When Conrad invokes Kurtz’s litany (my Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my career, my ideas) and links it all to Kurtz’s mother via the Intended’s deathbed ministrations, he’s playing on that repurposing. He’s blowing its cover, so to speak, putting it out there for us to see. All of those things run together in Kurtz’s mind because they’re all attachment objects, or, if you will, facets of the primal object, the one that’s gone. That’s the psychic place they occupy in common.

Now, think of the whole story as being inscribed within that space, that space as it existed in Conrad’s psyche, as it exists in our psyche. Kurtz’s litany marks the center of that space while the listeners in the frame tale, which returns in the final paragraph, are at the periphery. The story itself covers or rather, given Conrad’s impressionist method, samples the rest of the space. And the nexus, in which the litany is introduced, samples the sample.

That’s a very clever bit of construction: litany within nexus within the story. And the story’s within the world.

* * * * *

* Yes, I’ve numbered the paragraphs, and counted the number of words in each of them. I’ve used the etext (#526) created by Project Gutenberg, which is available on the web.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1: Attachment. New York, Basic Books.

Marris, P. (1982). Attachment and Society. The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior. C. M. Parkes and J. Stevenson-Hinde. New York, Basic Books: 185-201.

CRAM

Light Cones

HD1: Heart of Darkness: Narration and Temporal Displacement

Well, I’ve read Heart of Darkness. And, yes, Apocalypse Now is quite different. But, no, I’m not going to subtract any points from Coppola for not being faithful to the text. Why? Because, even if he did carry around a copy of Conrad’s story and marked it up six ways from Sunday and copped the general river voyage situation and some lines from it, even then it wasn’t his text and fidelity isn’t relevant.

I suppose, as a stunt, I could subtract points from Heart of Darkness for not being faithful to AN, but what would that get me? Not even another day older and deeper in debt. That happens, but it's automatic and has nothing to do with this. So I won’t attempt that.

Herewith some notes.

Closure

 

At first blush the most interesting comparison between the two is in closure. AN closes upon the double sacrifice, one aspect of which has Willard, the Marlow character, killing Kurtz. That doesn’t happen in HD, where Marlow wasn’t sent to kill Kurtz, but simply to get to his station so Management could recover the ivory he’d gathered for the Company. There IS a moment where Marlow considers that he might have to kill Kurtz, but Kurtz backs off.

Instead, as Management has taken Kurtz’s ivory on board, so Kurtz brings the man himself, very ill, on board. He dies in transit: “Mistah Kurtz – he dead.”

Kurtz entrusted Marlow with his papers, as Kurtz had asked Willard to convey the truth to his son. He gives the last packet of papers to Kurtz’s Intended. Note that difference: Coppola’s Kurtz is married with children; Conrad’s Kurtz is only betrothed. Here’s the conclusion of Marlow’s conversation with the Intended:

“‘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.’

Whatever comfort that lie may have given the Intended – didja notice, BTW, that this creature has no proper name, just a functional specification; I don’t know Conrad’s work at all – through I read The Secret Agent in college – so I don’t know whether this is a feature of his style or merely a feature of this text – it bothered Marlow enough for him to wonder whether it caused a disturbance in the cosmos:

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.

So, Conrad’s tale achieves its closure with a lie told to a woman about the man she loved, no, it would seem, worshiped. Coppola’s tale achieves its closure with the completion of a military mission, albeit one that was off the books.

I’m not quite sure what to make of that difference. Not sure at all. It seems to me that The State is very much in play in AN, but not HD. European civilization, yes, The State, no. To be sure, The State is not front and center in AN, but it’s the matrix in which the whole tale is set. Is love between a man and a woman the matrix in which HD is set?

An interesting puzzle.

 

Form and Temporal Displacement

One of the obvious things about HD, one which has, I assume, received ample commentary is Conrad’s narrative technique. Marlow’s tale is set in a frame story. The frame story is simple. A handful of men are on a boat in the Thames, Marlow among them. He tells the story to them.

The frame tale takes up several pages at the beginning and makes several appearances throughout the tale. Including, of course, one at the end, a rather short paragraph.

This device affords Conrad the use of second person discourse here and there as Marlow addresses his companions and, thus, us readers as well, drawing us onto that boat on the Thames. One of these incursions happens nearer the end than the beginning in the second of the story’s three installments:

Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well, absurd. Good Lord! mustn't a man ever--Here, give me some tobacco." . . .

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.

"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. And you say, Absurd!

This occurs as Marlow has been narrating the only fight sequence in the story. They were perhaps a day’s journey from Kurtz’s compound and were attacked. Marlow lost his helmsman to a spear through the chest (like the Chief in AN) and Marlow’s feet and shoes were drenched in the man’s blood. So, Kurtz’s compound is near, but they’re not quite there.

Anyhow, Marlow continues on, presuming Kurtz to have been killed, and telling how

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 then . . . well, if I say everything about this passage that I find worthy of note, I’ll never get through this post. So, I’ll cut to the chase. Marlow rambles on about Kurtz and in the middle of the ramble we hear this:

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. ‘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. 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.

Note that last: ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—’ everything belonged to him. That’s not what I had in mind when I flagged this passage, but it’s worth thinking about.

But not now.

What interests me now is the temporal displacement. Marlow talks of filling the steamboat with ivory. But, at this point in the tale, they’d not yet gotten to Kurtz’s station and were not even sure of getting there. He’s jumping the temporal gun and telling us about something that would happen later on in the story, but certainly not now, not while they’re still repelling an attack from unseen attackers.

So, anyhow, Marlow goes on and on and on

He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land – I mean literally. You can't understand. How could you? – with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you...

The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells too, by Jove!--breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated....

The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and--as he was good enough to say himself--his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz...

and on and on into a report Kurtz had prepared for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs:

It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!' The curious part was that he had apparently forgotten all about that valuable postscriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to himself, he repeatedly entreated me to take good care of 'my pamphlet' (he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career.

And, after a bit more, starts making his way back to the present point in the tale:

No; I can't forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him. I missed my late helmsman awfully,--I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house.

Finally, he lands back in the present, that is, the present moment in the tale itself, where he pulls the spear from his helmsman’s body and tosses his body overboard. We’re now back in the flow of the story, heading for Kurtz’s station, but presuming that Kurtz himself is dead and not having any idea of what they’d find there.

That whole passage is worth detailed explication, not to discover any depths, but simply to inventory the materials on the surface and to link them to other parts of the tale. Perhaps some other time.

And one must note that this, I don’t know what you call it, ‘peroration’ is the word that comes to mind, but it’s certainly not that. Whatever it is, it was prompted by the one death in the story other than that of Kurtz himself. But that’s not why has my attention, not now.

What interests me is simply the temporal displacement. Other than allusions hither and yon it’s the only such displacement in the story. Everything else is told in order, one thing after another.

Why? And how does it work? Do we have a means of answering such questions?

The Contraditions of Capitalism

Take THAT Gordon Gekko!

Community News

Vinegar Love

Huh?

El Topo

Ever see two hot chicks on horseback, in the middle of the desert, fight with bull whips? The winner licks blood off the back of the looser. Then they kiss.

Hot, hot, hot!

Followed by, still in the desert, a black crow on the back of a white rabbit, dead.

Whoa! mystical symbolism? An omen?

No, just plot furniture in El Topo (the mole), Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 surreal spaghetti magical mystical western tour with blood and guts and deformed people and a gunslinger with slick black Jimi Morrison pants. Lots of sun and sand and sending the intellectual rubes up the flag pole. With meaning.

Did I mention the two hot chicks? The four masters? And the umbrella over a naked boy on horseback behind the guy with the slick leather pants, his father.

Well, the boy grows up to be a priest, after the gunslinger deserts him for one of the hot chicks. The one he took from the colonel manqué he’d castrated. Whose men had massacred the village we saw at the beginning.

But why did black pants cover the third master with dead rabbits? White ones.

More furniture. And we’ve not even gotten to the second half of the movie. The part about the village of corrupt bourgeois who play Russian roulette in church and brand slaves. Hot, hot, hot. Leaves ugly scars.

Now black pants has a shaved head, no guns, and wears a brown robe of rough cloth. And does it with a midget. Tenderly. The son returns, vengefully. First in brown priest’s robes. Then in slick black gunfighter gear. Get it?

Villagers kill deformed people, who were liberated through the work of midget and brown robe the father. Brown robe kills villagers. Immolates self. Midget gives birth.

Rides off with infant and with gunfighter the son.

The end.

That was exciting stuff when I saw it back in, I guess, 1971 or 1972. I’d never seen anything like it. It was disgusting, but thrilling! My god it was a roller coaster ride of mystical meaning. I probably saw it twice.

Wikipedia tells me the film has tons of artsy fans: David Lynch, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Manson, Peter Gabriel, and John Lennon. I can believe it. We’re all young once.

But it doesn’t hold up. John Emerson put it succinctly in a Facebook discussion: “Once your innocent vulgarity and stupidity is lost, it can never be restored, and one class of peak experience is inaccessible forever.” Yep.

Gimme Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, 1 & 2. She had a mystical sword forged just for her. She’s hot, hot, hot. And her daddy’s a Buddhist priest.

For realz.

Happy Empire 4th

Yesterday, in anticipation of the 4th, Michael Sporn posted a series of wonderful photographs of the Empire State Building. They were taken by his friend, Steve Fisher. I urge you to take a look. There's a wide range of views, and plenty of wit and wow!

I too have taken many photographs of the Empire State Building, all from New Jersey. In some shots the building is small, even almost invisible. In other shots it's front and center. Here I offer one of each.

Apocalyptic Confusion: Home, Away, and the King’s Two Bodies

When I’d made my last post I thought I was done with Apocalypse Now. I was wrong. I received a bit of listserve email about the convention of the king’s two bodies, and thinking about that – it happened quickly – allowed me to reconfigure my sense of the film’s ending. The king, of course, is Kurtz / Willard. As for the two bodies, one of them dies, ostensibly Kurtz, but the other does not. But that other body is not Willard, not exactly. That’s where we must deal in myth logic: The King is dead. Long Live the King!

That’s where I start, with Coppola’s reconfiguring that bit of myth machinery. Then it’s back to lance logic and on to home and hearth, then, once more, the sacrifice. I conclude by asking whether or not the film stands up to the objections I raised in my first post in this series.

Good King, Bad King

Let’s start with Dan Philpott’s account of the trope of the king’s two bodies in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philososphy:

In his classic, The King's Two Bodies (1957), medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz describes a profound transformation in the concept of political authority over the course of the Middle Ages. The change began when the concept of the body of Christ evolved into a notion of two bodies — one, the corpus naturale, the consecrated host on the altar, the other, the corpus mysticum, the social body of the church with its attendant administrative structure. . . . Whereas the king's natural, mortal body would pass away with his death, he was also thought to have an enduring, supernatural one that could not be destroyed, even by assassination, for it represented the mystical dignity and justice of the body politic. The modern polity that emerged dominant in early modern Europe manifested the qualities of the collectivity that Kantorowicz described — a single, unified one, confined within territorial borders, possessing a single set of interests, ruled by an authority that was bundled into a single entity and held supremacy in advancing the interests of the polity.

The trope of the king’s two bodies, then, is about the fiction of an artificial person, the state, that persists beyond the life of any one head of state. As such it is indifferent to the question of whether or not a king is good or bad. It’s not about the existing ruler at all, it’s about this artificial being that persists through and from one ruler to the next. It is a doctrine of continuity.

But Coppola very much IS concerned about the difference between a GOOD king and a BAD one. For in his reworking of the doctrine, Kurtz is a bad king, while Willard is a good one. But the state, of course, is continuous from one to the next. That state can only be the United States of America. Both men are commissioned officers in the American Army. They are employed by the state and they come to represent it in Apocalypse Now. Kurtz is a figure for the rogue state that got into the War in Vietnam and Willard is a figure for the pragmatic state that got out.

Something like that.

In this reading it is important that both men be disillusioned. But Kurtz descends from disillusion into madness and continues to fight on, creating a society about himself, his children. Willard keeps his disillusionment front and center, but does follow orders, even if those orders were issued by four-star clowns, as he called them.

Yellow Hello

T.DEE on Walls vs. Canvas

I had two reasons for picking up a copy of Roger Gastman & Caleb Neelon, The History of American Graffiti: 1) It presented itself as being the first comprehensive history of the modern graffiti movement in America. 2) I leafed through its table of contents and saw two entries for New Jersey; I looked at them and saw names I recognized from walls I’d photographed, ZAR, KEMOS, RIME, and T.DEE, among them. The second told me that the first claim might actually pan out.

And so far it has. So far I’m a 100+ pages into this 400-page book and love it. Whether or not I’ll actually read it page-for-page, that’s another question and doesn’t really reflect on the book. As I tend not to read such books from cover-to-cover. I read them for my purposes, which are what they are and they change from time to time.

One thing I wanted from this book was a context for the work I’ve been photographing for the past five years. Though Gastman & Caleb don’t say much about New Jersey graffiti – after all, they’ve got to cover Pittsburgh, Hawaii, San Diego, Puerto Rico, Baltimore, Nashville, Detroit, Chicago and on and on. So I wouldn’t have expected much on New Jersey, much less Jersey City. But I got enough to make some connections and I assume people in other cities have gotten the same, some connections to the larger narrative.

But enough of that. This is about T.DEE. As I said, I’ve photographed some of his work on local Jersey City walls:

Soft Iris

Living Graffiti: A Quick Note

There’s the imagery on the walls, it’s aesthetics, the name and all, is it new? where’s it going? and all that. And the ephemerality. That’s one thing.

But there’s also the social organization of the graffiti scene, that’s something else. And that’s important too, too important simply to hang it off the images themselves.

Legit art culture is organized around schools, museums, and galleries. It’s organized to produce timeless works.

Graffiti culture originated outside the world and has an uneasy relationship with it. Timelessness isn’t so easy to come by, as the works themselves often get gone over or simply buffed. Some writers produce works (on canvas or boards) that end up in a few museum collections and that show and sell in a few galleries. But that’s all a bit tetchy, and many of the best writers are between downright opposed and wary of the gallery / museum scene.

I suppose we should treat graffiti’s illegal nature as part of its institutional stance. Legit art may be occupationally marginal, with the stars having a peculiar place in the social structure, but it’s not criminal. Graffiti’s got a different posture before the law.

& graffiti’s got crews, most small and local, but some quite large and spread out, e.g. Seventh Letter. Piecing is often / generally done by two, three, or more writers working together. This is very different from legit art, which doesn’t do collaboration, though some work is certainly done by uncredited assistants, especially in the big shops (e.g. Koons, Hirst, Murakami).

And graffiti works through cyberspace. Work goes up, it’s snapped, and the flix go out on the web. To the extent that the originals themselves degrade over time and eventually are gone over, the photos are all that remain.

Put all this together, what do you get?

Living graffiti?

That’s what I’m pondering. We have art outdoors that’s in continual flux produced by a diffuse and ever shifting ‘between the cracks’ social organization. Art-as-cultural organism, changing & evolving, never static, never ‘standing the test of time’ but continually testing itself time and again.

Persisting but not eternal.