>Hi Tom, I like your idea of Conrad as fatalistic.
As I read Conrad: History can't be helped because we possess a dark (yin: feminine) center, an Inner Station within our hearts of darkness, that is beyond rational (yang: masculine) control -- Freud's view of the unconscious.
>Your comment on the Play of History is interesting, in that the self image of European Civilization was of controlling and subduing nature, and fate is infuriating to the rationalist project. Conrad drew attention to the absurdity of this impiety towards fate, which has roots in the Bible and Plato. The listless shelling of the wilderness is one example of Conrad's ironic treatment of the western mind, but that is just an introduction to Kurtz where the insanity of Genesis is revealed in full gory glory. In Genesis 1:28 God said to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it." To my interpretation, this toxic idea of dominion as the image of God was the start of the fall towards modern alienation as depicted in Heart of Darkness.
I would say, Robert, that indeed Genesis has been used as an invitation to the destruction of nature, yet the ideal implicit in Genesis is the opposite: Genesis begins with creation, an invocation of the dark center, which man as an image of God is to follow (In the beginning God created. . .). Conrad's creative power arises from the darkness within himself.
God sees what He has made (wild nature) and says that it is good. Implicitly, it shouldn't be destroyed or 'harvested', and it is not the locus of evil (the home of the dark man in Hawthorne, the serpent-man in Genesis). Then, too, Adam and Eve (or Tarzan and Jane in modern adaptation) initially live at one with the animals, the emblems of human passion. The fall is a fall from 'jungle as friend' to 'jungle as enemy' and a loss of self awareness.
'Going native', the power of wilderness to strip off the veneer of civilization, is a common theme (Typee, Lord of the Flies). Crusoe sustained European ideals perhaps because, until he had hardened himself, he was totally alone.
>King Leopold of Belgium thought he wrote the script, and Kurtz was his strange puppet dancing to a perverse set of strings. Conrad seems to present old Tao Congo as more powerful than the colonialists. The 'Dark Romantic' reminds me of Nietzsche's line that God is Dead, and the various strands of nihilism.
Leopold seems especially evil only because he was caught late in the game by the corrective force of reports like The Heart of Darkness and The Casement Report. He wasn't much different from colonizers throughout history. He only reduced the population of the Congo by half. Frequently colonists exterminate and replace.
>I don't think Conrad is at war with the feminine, but rather is somehow representing the feminine in a mockery of masculine conquest.
Look at _Amy Foster_, available at Gutenberg. There is also a defense of Conrad's women at
[PDF] 1 Conrad, Women, and the Critics - Apr 27File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
Conrad, Women, and the Critics. Nothing is more familiar to readers of Joseph Conrad than the. image of the author as a lonely seafarer, drawing on the mem- ...
www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-818448-4.pdf
About _The True Eye of the Tiger_, Sakis is a member here but doesn't believe in tooting his own horn, and his book has been unjustly neglected. I have his permission to publicize it.
Tom