Monday
As I reread Heart of Darkness for a Post-Colonial Literature class I’m currently teaching, I am reminded why Francis Ford Coppola used it as the basis for Apocalypse Now. The novella captures what happens when a superpower claiming lofty ideals loses its way.
Will some future filmmaker use it to make a film about DJT’s assaults on Iran and Venezuela?
I’m using the Conrad masterpiece as background for the course. To establish the colonialist mindset, I’ve also assigned:
–an excerpt from Edward Said’s Orientalism, which contends that racist depictions of “the Orient” helped pave the way for Western colonialism.
“To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule,” Said writes, “is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact.” If one looks at the works of various “novelists, poets, translators, and gifted travelers,” one sees that “the Oriental” is often described as “irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal.’” Said’s framing applies also to the other areas colonized by the European powers.
–an excerpt from Rider Haggard’s She (1887), about a mysterious woman living in the heart of Africa, immortal and stunningly beautiful, who draws men to their doom. Such a woman can also be found in Heart of Darkness.
–Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” in which the colonized people are described at various points as “fluttered folk and wild,” “new-caught sullen peoples,” “half devil and half child,” slothful and foolish, and ungrateful. The white men, by contrast, are (or should be) mature, patient, self-sacrificing, and tireless in their efforts to improve others.
The poem opens with this heroic vision:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
One line particularly struck me since it is a version of what DJT has been promising us with the Iran invasion. Indeed, it has been presented to Americans as justifications for all its imperial wars:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of famine
And bid the sickness cease…
In other words, less developed nations, we are using force to give you peace. It’s for your own good since such wars will bring an end to famine and sickness.
Kipling follows up this promise with anger that the colonized don’t appreciate these gifts:
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Kipling is not always this patronizing, and recent scholarship has determined that he was one of the more enlightened Brits when it came to colonial matters. Whatever his blind spots, he at least believes in sacrificing oneself for the good of others: he tells colonists to choose the “toil of serf and sweeper” rather than the “tawdry rule of kings.”
DJT, by contrast, wants to be a king, and his view of the world is one described by Conrad’s Marlow when he imagines the ancient Romans conquering Britain:
But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the 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.
Or as DJT put it when defending his invasion of Venezuela to the United Nations, “To the victor go the spoils.”
When Trump’s supporters praise him for his honesty, even though every word that comes out of his mouth is a lie, it’s because his base motivations and his base hatreds are so clear. He feels no more need to be diplomatic than an entitled toddler. Whereas Kipling sorrowfully defends “savage wars of peace,” Trump relishes smash and grab fighting. He is the perfect embodiment of the ivory-obsessed “pilgrims” in Conrad’s novel, and his Iran invasion echoes Marlow’s account of a French ship lobbing shells into the African continent:
For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we came upon 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 dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy 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 six-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, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.
Unlike Trump but like Kipling, Marlow believes that a noble ideal drives the colonial enterprise. “What redeems it,” he says speaking of invasion,
is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to….
The “idea at the back” of the European colonizers is that they will lift up benighted souls with western Christian civilization. Marlow hears a version of this from the aunt who helps him obtain his captain’s post. Although he expresses skepticism, part of him (as we learn in the final pages) clings to the vision:
She talked about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,’ till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit.
‘You forget, dear Charlie, that the laborer is worthy of his hire,’ she said, brightly. It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
The crisis is that Kurtz, who represents the best of civilization—at various times we learn that he’s a gifted writer, a great musician, a superb painter, a natural leader of men, a compelling orator, and a “universal genius” and that all Europe has contributed to his making–casts off all restraint and descends into barbarism. We see the reversal in an essay Kurtz has written for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, one in which lofty sentiments are contradicted by a later addition:
It was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. 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 addendum is an expression of utter cynicism, of one who has believed and become thoroughly disillusioned. What follows is the abandonment of all self-restraint.
We are never told exactly what Kurtz does that’s so bad although we see heads on poles and an African mistress. Meanwhile Marlow mentions “certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites,” “abominable satisfactions,” and “the colossal scale of his vile desires.” For specifics, we are invited to imagine the worst.
Never before in its history has America had a president who felt so free to override Constitutional restraint or a political party so unwilling to check him. Indeed many, both close to him and in the public at large, have been eager to join him in those midnight dances.
Marlow, however, is eventually won over to Kurtz by his honest self-appraisal. Kurtz sees, in his dying moment, both the heights to which humans can soar and the depths to which they can plunge. If Coppola turned to the novella in his film, it’s because he saw both the promise of America’s democratic vision and its descent into an abyss. “He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’”
America at the moment is once again teetering between its better angels and its worst. That’s a drama worthy of epic treatment. Trump, however, is no Kurtz but rather a “papier-mache Mephistopheles,” as Marlow describes another character. Speaking of this man Marlow says, “It seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.”
Trump is, in short, “a hollow man,” to borrow from T.S. Eliot. Eliot alludes to Heart of Darkness in his poem, and we can apply his concluding prediction to the president. Trump’s world will end, not with a bang, but a whimper.
In other words, not a Hollywood ending.
