Conrad, Golding and
psychogeography
Chris McCully, March 2015
Civilisation and dysfunction in
Heart of Darkness (1)
…a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t
even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It
appears the French had one of their wars going on
thereabouts. Her ensign drooped limp like a rag; the
muzzles of the long eight-inch guns stuck out all over the
low hull; the greasy, shiny swell swung her up lazily and
let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty
immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was,
incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go
one of the eight-inch guns; a small flame would dart and
vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny
projectile would give a feeble screech – and nothing
happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of
insanity in the proceeding… (p.16)
Civilisation and dysfunction in
Heart of Darkness (2)
…came upon a boiler wallowing in the
grass, then found a path leading up the
hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and
also for an undersized railway-truck lying
there on its back with its wheels in the air.
One was off. The thing looked as dead as
the carcass of some animal. I came upon
more pieces of decaying machinery, a
stack of rusty nails…. (p.18)
Civilisation and dysfunction in
Heart of Darkness (3)
…a white man in an unbuttoned uniform,
camping on the path with an armed escort
of lank Zanzibaris, very hospitable and
festive – not to say drunk. Was looking
after the upkeep of the road, he declared.
Can’t say I saw any road or any upkeep,
unless the body of a middle-aged negro,
with a bullet-hole in his forehead….may be
considered as a permanent improvement
(pp.23-24)
Civilisation and dysfunction in
Heart of Darkness (4)
…decent young citizen in a toga…coming
out here in the train of some prefect, or
tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his
fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through
the woods, and in some inland post feel
the savagery, the utter savagery, had
closed around him….He has to live in the
midst of the incomprehensible, which is
also detestable. And it has a fascination,
too….’ (p.7)
Kurtz as representative (1)
Kurtz is first alluded to as a representative
of civilisation, of administration (note the
capitalisation in the quote that follows), of
Europe: ‘He will be a somebody in the
Administration before long. They, above –
the Council in Europe, you know – mean
him to be’ (p.23). Kurtz is here depicted as
a representative of rules, councils,
literacies.
Kurtz as representative (2)
His small sketch represented ‘a woman,
draped and blindfolded, carring a lighted
torch. The background was sombre –
almost black. The movement of the
woman was stately, and the effect of
torchlight on the face was sinister’ (p.30
and see also p.125, fn. 64: ‘Astraea,
Roman goddess of justice, is often
depicted as blindfolded…and Liberty as
holding a lighted torch’).
Kurtz as representative (3)
Kurtz is described as ‘a prodigy….[A]n
emissary of pity, and science, and
progress, and devil knows what else’
(p.30). Kurtz is described by the
company’s agent as a ‘universal genius’
(p.33).
Kurtz as representative (4)
‘His mother was half-English, his father
was half-French. All Europe contributed to
the making of Kurtz; and by and bye I
learned that, most appropriately, the
International Society for the Suppression
of Savage Customs had entrusted him
with the making of a report…. And he had
written it too…. Seventeen pages of close
writing he had found time for!’ (p.61)
Culture, custom and setting in
Heart of Darkness (1)
But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a
glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl
of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies
swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless
foliage…. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us,
welcoming us – who could tell? We were cut off from the
comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms,
wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an
enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand,
because we were too far and could not remember, because we were
travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone,
leaving hardly a sign – and no memories.
The earth seemed unearthly….’ (pp.43-44)
Culture, custom and setting in
Heart of Darkness (2)
Representatives of ‘civilisation’ are
‘appalled’, not because they encounter
something inhuman but because what
they see is ‘not…inhuman’: ‘what thrilled
you was just the thought of their humanity
– like yours – the thought of your remote
kinship with this wild and passionate
uproar’ (p.44; my emphasis, McC)
Culture, custom and setting in
Heart of Darkness (3)
Marlow states that the ‘savages’ he encounters manifest
a universal humanity (‘What was there after all? Joy,
fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage…. Let the fool gape
and shudder – the man knows, and can look on without
a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as
these on the shore…’ p.44; my emphasis, McC) is
strikingly reminiscent of Tylor’s postulation that ‘culture’
(laws, art, morals, beliefs and customs) was common to
‘savages’ even if that culture represented ‘an early
condition of mankind, out of which the higher culture has
gradually been developed or evolved, by processes still
in regular operation as of old….’ (Primitive Culture, Vol.
1, p.28).
Culture, custom and setting in Heart of
Darkness (4)
The structures of the novel allow Kurtz to occupy the heart of Heart of
Darkness. It seems aesthetically significant, too, that the ‘wild and gorgeous
apparition of a woman’ (p.75) – presumably Kurtz’s Congolese lover –
should be structurally located at exactly the point where Marlow first lays
eyes on Kurtz. Thematically juxtaposed with the aunt and the Intended, this
figure
…walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the
earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried
her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass
leggin[g]s to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her
tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things,
charms, gifts of witch-men…. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and
magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate
progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful
land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious
life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of
its own tenebrous and passionate soul (p.76)
Culture and civilisation in Heart of
Darkness: summary
Culture: poetry/music, art, sense of the
sacred (Congolese woman embodies all
these); well-adjusted to its surroundings
(‘he must at least be as much of a man as
these on the shore’); also venal
Civilisation: all the above, but also venal;
literate, maladjusted, incomprehending
and cyclical
William Golding, 1911-93
Lord of the Flies (1954)
The Inheritors (1955)
Pincher Martin (1956)
The Spire (1964)
Nobel Prize 1983
The Inheritors as a consequence of
and reply to Wells (1921)
• Wells and other early C20th writers had depicted
Neanderthals as ‘grisly’ (Wells’ story ‘The grisly
folk’, appeared in 1921), baboon-like and ‘the
natural enemy of Man’ (de Paolo 2000)
• Neanderthals co-existed with modern humans,
weren’t in the last baboon-like; there was crossbreeding: between 1-4% of human DNA is
‘neanderthal’
(http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/nea
nderthal-human-interbreed-dna.htm)
William Golding, The Inheritors
• Neanderthal group – main characters Lok, Ha,
Fa, Nil and Mal – encounter humans (H. sapiens
sapiens)
• Humans are ‘people who make
incomprehensible noises, travel on the water in
hollow logs, shoot at the Neanderthals with
barbed sticks, steal their children, hunt them
down…’
(Lively, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/11/fiction.williamgolding,
accessed February 28, 2015)
The Inheritors: setting and culture
• Water, log, stone, tree, cave
• Wet/dry
• Waterfall
•
•
•
•
•
•
Oa (a goddess/Earth mother)
Neanderthals have tools, burial rites and fire
They have dance (p.134)
Have a sense of history
Kinship grouping
Kinaesthesia (empathy with others’ bodily movements >
sharing of ‘memory pictures’)
The Inheritors: kinaesthesia and
other forms of apprehension
‘Lok looked away….He flared his nostrils
and immediately was rewarded with a
whole mixture of smells, for the mist from
the fall magnified any smell incredibly, as
rain will deepened and distinguish the
colours of a field of flowers’ (p.15; my
emphasis, McC)
The Inheritors: apprehension
Lok…would have laughed if it were not for the
echo of screaming in his head. The stick began
to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to
full length again.
The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice.
“Clop!”
His ears twitched and he turned to the tree.
By his face there had grown a twig…. (p.96)
The Inheritors: sense of the sacred
‘Now Mal spoke.
“There was the great Oa. She brought forth
the earth from her belly. She gave suck.
The earth brought forth woman and the
woman brought forth the first man out of
her belly.”’ (p.25)
The Inheritors: genealogy and history
They listened to him [Mal] in silence….
There was the picture of the time when
there had been many people…. There was
also a long list of names that began at Mal
and went back choosing always the oldest
man of the people at that time: but now he
said nothing more. (p.25)
The New People in The Inheritors
• Technological (they aren’t afraid of water
and use boats)
• Use weapons (bows and arrows, fire)
• Are ready meat-eaters, use skins etc. for
personal decoration
• Have containers
• Have language and do not use
kinaesthetic or other communication
• Murder and abduction
Caves, kinaesthesia and The Inheritors
An essay by Golding in his collection A Moving Target
opens with the description of a single footprint in what
was once the soft mud of a cave in the Auvergne, with a
mark alongside made by the stick on which the maker
leaned, saving himself from falling. Golding talks of
kinaesthesia, the capacity for sympathetic identification
with someone else's bodily movements; there is a sense
in which The Inheritors seems like an exercise in fictional
kinaesthesia, with its author trying to slip not just into a
Neanderthal skin, but also into one of those
unimaginable minds. (Lively, see above)
The Inheritors and racism
The people [Neanderthals: McC] are astonished and
awed by the newcomers [humans]. These, in turn, look
at the "devils" with a mixture of fascination and repulsion;
they abduct their young as playthings, but their objective
is extermination. Perhaps this is a suggestion of the
origins of racism, and indeed the whole novel is ripe for
allegorical deconstruction.
(Lively, see above; my italics, McC… Note that I do not
think the novel is an allegory: it is an imaginative
exploration of the durable terrors of human culture)
Golding, Conrad and
psychogeography
• Heart of Darkness and The Inheritors offer a
continual challenge to rethink human origins
• Both novels engage with relationships between
humans (or pre-humans) and the contexts in
which they must live, work and worship
• Both novels offer little hope as to the benefits of
‘civilisation’ unless human civilisation is to be
realigned with the cultures (including the
environments) from which it derives.
• Far from being ‘racist’, both novels interrogate
and offer a radical albeit implicational reply to
racism.
References A-G
Achebe, Chinua. ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"’.
Chancellor’s lecture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1975), subsequently
published (in revised form) in ed. Paul B. Armstrong, Heart of Darkness. Norton
Critical Edition (4th edition, 2006), pp.336-349.
Armstrong, Paul B. (ed.) Heart of Darkness. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W.
Norton and Co. (2006)
Arnold, Matthew. Literature and Dogma. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Second edition
(1873).
Chambers, R.W. The Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School.
Oxford: Oxford University Press (1932).
Cook, Jill. Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind. London: British Museum Press. (2013)
Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Penguin. (2012)
Golding, William The Inheritors. (Republished with an introduction by John Carey, 2011).
London: Faber (1955)
Hawkins, Hunt. ‘Heart of Darkness and Racism’. [An earlier version of this essay was
first published in Conradiana 14.3 (1982), pp.163-71.] In ed. Paul B. Armstrong
(2006), pp.365-375.
Hawthorn, Jeremy. ‘The Women of Heart of Darkness’. In ed. Paul B. Armstrong, Heart of
Darkness. Norton Critical Edition (4th edition, 2006), pp.405-415.
References J-W
Knowles, Owen (ed.) Heart of Darkness. Penguin Classics edition. London: Penguin.
(2007)
Lively, Penelope ‘O unlucky man’,
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/11/fiction.williamgolding (2003)
Meredith, Martin. Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life. London and
New York: Simon & Schuster (2011)
Meyers, Jeffrey. Joseph Conrad: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner (1991)
Najder, Zdzislaw. Joseph Conrad: A Life. Rochester, NY: Camden House. New edition.
(2007)
De Paolo, Charles ‘Wells, Golding and Auel: Representing the Neanderthal’. Science
Fiction Studies 27 no.3, pp. 418-38 (2000) [Accessed via Jstor, February 2015.]
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage (1994).
Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of
Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Two vols. London: John Murray
(1871)
Viegas, Jennifer ‘Neanderthals, Humans Interbred, DNA Proves’ (2010)
http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/neanderthal-human-interbreed-dna.htm,
[Accessed February 28th 2015.]
Watts, Cedric. ‘“A Bloody Racist”: About Achebe's View of Conrad’, Yearbook of English
Studies, 13 (1983): 196-209. [http://www.jstor.org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/stable/3508121,
accessed November 2012.]
Whitehead, Lee M. ‘The Moment out of Time: Golding’s Pincher Martin’. Contemporary
Literature 12 no. 1, pp. 18-41 (1971) [Accessed via Jstor, Febrary 2015.]