Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

Novel
Fourth year

Ivory
Heart of Darkness shows us a link between the moral and ecological
limits of imperialism
...
Marlow's economic setting is
focused on ivory, and just as the land has become "a vast artificial hole"
under this European regime (16), the Congo basin's ecology has been
disrupted by the comp tided exploitation
...

Indeed, though Conrad mentions elephants in a letter home from the
Congo, in the novel the word appears to have been hunted to extinction
...
When Marlow reaches the Inner Station, there is so much ivory that
he wonders if the whole country has been emptied: “Ivory”
...

1

It seems one of English literature's grandest characters, Mr
...
2
Moreover, ivory demonstrates the epistemology of separation that interprets
human beings (and especially white ones) as separate from the world around
them
By the time Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, the Congo's economy had
exhausted ivory and turned to a very profitable resource that modern
industry needed and that literally grew on trees-rubber
...

The character of this prospecting was-yet more inhumane than the
ivory trade, and Conrad would have known all about the Belgian system of
quotas and hostage taking where men and women were forced to collect
rubber at the threat of their children's limbs

2

Ivory begins as a symbol of Europeans exploiting the African
environment but is ultimately reconstellated as a symbol of connection to
that environment
...
Kurtz clearly incarnates that mindset
...

Kurtz is possessed by the familiar European greed for ivory, yes, but in
his case the process breaks down the separation between the European and
the wild land when he is reborn as ivory
...

Even though his motive for a deeper knowledge of the land was
exploitation, Kurtz's transformation into ivory can be read as an image of the
human being becoming part of the natural world
...
" Against the
novel's ground of exploitation and commoditization there are images of an
alternative existence that embraces nature
...

These two modes present Marlow with what he calls "a choice of
nightmares" (62)
...

Behind these alternatives is a Cartesian dualism that separates humans from
nature and shapes the interactions between people and the environment
from the Thames to the Congo
...

Heart of Darkness illustrates a catalogue of detrimental relations
between people and nature
...
There is an English tradition of natural description
that expects nature to please, a tradition that lives in the word "landscape"
and its associations with painting and the picturesque
...

Kurtz is the central wanderer, and Marlow imagines him journeying
into nature with all the decisiveness of Wordsworth
...

Kurtz follows the-pattern of the Romantic voyager, but Marlow concludes
that those days in nature have not delivered humanity
...

Conrad gives his readers the Grove of Death, where Marlow heads for
respite only to find a horrific anti-pastoral of despair
...

Marlow walks on, mystified by his first steps in the impenalized land,
and presents another scene to reinforce the first: "I avoided a vast, artificial
hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose of which I found
it impossible to divine
...
Heart of Darkness measures two bright
threads in the modern loom-one a consideration of exploited nature, and the
other an examination of imperialism in practice
...
Popular scientific views of
humanity's place in nature influenced Conrad's work
...
This philosophical worldview presents an alternative
...
Kurtz's wandering deep in the forest and his propensity to "forget
himself" (56) are terrible for his peers precisely because of nature's strong,
pull toward what the deep ecologists call "identification
...

Imperialism prospers within a positivist tradition that makes each the
ruler of all natural objects-arid in Heart of Darkness we see this enacted on
landscape and people
...
Therefore, Kurtz's experience,
which insists on interdependence between person and place and
foregrounds the inseparable connection of subject and object, and
emphasizes context, is a revolution both for epistemology and ontology
...
The novel's reorganization of perception through context is
enacted

through

the

formal

dynamics

of

literary

impressionism
...
The key is that both identification and
impress4onism work by blurring the boundaries between setting and
perceiver
...
The blurred boundary
between subject and object is fundamental to impressionist knowing, and
that blurred boundary is at the heart also of the challenge Kurtz presents to
the modern conception of the human position in nature
...
Impressionists focus on the interaction between
human consciousness and the objects of that consciousness
...

For Ian Watt, these are examples of "delayed decoding" (176): and "thus
examples of the contingency of all knowing where: each conclusion is

8

subject to a revision that depends on a revaluation of context
...

It’s not that a cane is superior to a spear rather that each meaning
emerges from its context Likewise, humanity's natural setting and humanity
itself are tied together in one interpretive gestalt where a change to one
element necessitates the reinterpretation of other elements
...

Deep ecology's "identification" and congruent notion of a "relational
self" offer the tools to reinterpret striking moments in Heart of Darkness
...
Following this "moral shock" (64), Marlow tracks his crawling form
through long grass and halts Kurtz just short of the jungle
...
Deep ecology guides as to recognize this episode first as evidence of
the power of relational fields, and second as the rush to repress any
acknowledgment of identification with nature
Kurtz is the image of humanity recognizing its home in the natural
world and crawling away from the artificial separation of the steamboat and
the established roles it has come to uphold
...
Second, the contest between
Marlow and Kurtz emphasizes nature's power as a shaping context
...

Kurtz lives deep ecology's premise that there is no firm ontological
divide in the field of existence," and that instead of the old "man-inenvironment" paradigm, identity-is constructed by a relational field
...
I thought I would never get back to the steamer and
imagined myself living alone and unarmed in the woods to an advanced age"
(64)
...


10

In Marlow's care, Kurtz's crawl to nature becomes a story of nature
demonized and then repressed altogether, and this dual dismissal indicates
the power of modernity's fear of identification with nature and its
commitment to identification's opposite, exploitation
...


‫وما توفيقي إال باهلل‬

11



---