Repression

Week 5:

Repression

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899)

Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1930)

This week’s pairing of Heart of Darkness with a book by the founder of psychoanalysis gave me a whole new outlook on Conrad’s nebulous novel. Last week our professor intimated that Freud’s work illuminated the darker areas of the human heart, and this got me in the mindset of reading Heart of Darkness as a novel set both in the Congo and deep within the protagonist, Marlow. I could be way off, but it did make the reading more enjoyable than the first time I read the book over a decade ago. At that time I didn’t appreciate the language that described the Congo in an obscure haze, where nothing is as it appears and where not even the characters themselves know what they are doing, why they are doing it or where they are going. (Very much a metaphor for the human race, no?)

The mystery of Kurtz, his plans, his history and his legend are never fully explained, and I viewed this as the ego within that never dies and never accepts the inevitable truth that it will one day no longer be. This pit within all of us makes us believe that we’re somehow different from others, that we are special and immortal. As we age and grow from experience, this element within grows stronger, as does the denial of our impending death. (Remember Rousseau’s statement that one clings to life all the more emphatically when one is in old age?)

(p.100) “‘At this moment I heard Kurtz’s deep voice behind the curtain, “Save me! - save the ivory, you mean. Don’t tell me. Save me! Why, I’ve had to save you. You are interrupting my plans now. Sick! Sick! Not so sick as you would like to believe. Never mind. I’ll carry my ideas out yet - I will return. I’ll show you what can be done. You with your little peddling notions - you are interfering with me. I will return. I…”

This reads like the inner voice of a dying man who has yet to submit to his fate. Is this the wishful thinking of an “Ivan Illych”?

The racism in the book is quite strong. Conrad had less than admirable things to say of Africans, and I will only cite a few examples here:

p.62-64 “No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being human. …the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.” “…he was an improved specimen.”

“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were .... No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it -- this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity -- like yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you -- you so remote from the night of first ages -- could comprehend.”

Moreover, Marlow always refers to black people as “fellows” or “chaps” not “men”. p.35 “Two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up.”

Despite all of this, he does seem to recognize the suffering inflicted on the African “fellows” by Europeans:

p.20 “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

(From Achebe’s essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”: “Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate.”)

The words suggest the atmosphere of murkiness and confusion of Marlowe’s enterprise; they are quite image and mood provoking:

p.44 “And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”

p.59 “…the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver.” “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.”

The story juxtaposes the old world – England, and civilization – with the “new, barbaric world” of Africa. In a sense, this new world discovery corresponds to the same journey that Freud took started for humanity. Ironically, this world is not so “new,” but taps into our most primitive drives.

p.60 “When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, reality - reality, I tell you - fades. The inner truth is hidden - luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks…”

At a fundamental level, each of us is composed of multiple forces, facets of ourselves that, looked at closely enough, make us appear as different people to ourselves. p.82 “These little things [police, European civilization…] make all the difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness.”

The language in this book is as dense as the jungle it so often describes. The story itself is not complex although the ideas within it are, and for this reason it is open to interpretation - as open to interpretation as one’s dark heart desires. I just might find out how malleable this book is if it becomes one that I use in writing the essay this term. It seems to be one of those books that one can use to support any possible argument! I’m sure a feminist, a Communist or a Capitalist could shape the ideas of this book into supporting his (or her) cause. However, perhaps to Conrad’s displeasure, it would be hard for a racist to justify racism given how brutally Africans are both described and treated in Heart of Darkness.

Civilization and Its Discontents -

Notes and thoughts:

The theory that Freud was replete with his own neurotic issues and was intelligent enough to rationalize and explain his neuroses is supported in his footnote: “It is remarkable too how regularly analytic findings testify to the link between ambition, fire and urinal eroticism.” (p.35)

I “Ego is originally all-inclusive, but later separates from the external world” - a means of protecting the self against unpleasurable experiences… in the words of Andre Breton, someone who greatly admired Freud, childhood is a time when the imagination is given free reign and is not restricted and minimized by the forces of civilization. When imagination dominates and enchants reality.

p.10 “The origin of the religious temperament can be traced in clear outline to the child’s feeling of helplessness.” And, ironically, depends upon the childish ability to believe in the unbelievable.

II “What we call happiness … arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs.”

p.15 …another way of stating that *balance* is the key to happiness. Both pleasure and pain need to be experienced to have this appreciation. Talk of excess and the punishment it can bring…

p.17 “One can therefore hope to free oneself of part of one’s suffering by influencing these instinctual impulses.” Aurelius would have agreed! “peace and quiet”

p.22 “Religion interferes with this play of selection and adaptation by forcing everyone indiscriminately its own path to the attainment of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in reducing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world by means of delusion; and this presupposes the intimidation of the intelligence.”

p.23 “No other technique for the conduct of life binds the individual so firmly to reality as an emphasis on work, which at least gives him a secure place in one area of reality, the human community. … The great majority work only because they have to, and this aversion to work is the source of the most difficult social problems.” (which must include that of “relations between people” causing stress, grief, frustration…).

III

p.26 Thoughts on technology and how it has not, really, brought pleasure to humanity… “If there were no railway to overcome distances, my child would never have left his home town, and I should not need a telephone in order to hear his voice.” Science: We’ve been given fire and now we’ve run away with it, forgetting where the “tool” came from…

p.32 “The replacement of the power of the individual by that of the community is the decisive step towards civilization.” …but recall Doris Lessing’s critique/warning of “mob mentality.”

“Individual liberty is not an asset of civ.” And Kurtz was trying to start his very own civilization in Africa.

V

Civilization is continually threatened with disintegration because of an inclination to aggression. It invests great energy in restraining these instincts. The law has tried to refine itself to the point of regulating most forms of aggression, but it still fails to prevent it.