A Study on the Politics of Romancing in Heart of Darkness
1
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
It is a challenging work for the critics to assess and classify Heart of Darkness. This novella has bewildered scholars by critiquing inhuman imperial practices, yet simultaneously undercutting its own anti-imperial statement with racist discourse. It deviates from the tradition of Western imperial narrative by starting with a realistic exposure of the ugly realities of Western imperialism in Africa. However, this anti-imperialist critique, as the adventure story unfolds, is drowned by its racist assumptions and final ethnocentric assertion. Conrad creates a psychological and allegorical dimension to this narrative in order more effectively to cancel the political implications of Marlow’s initial critique of Western imperialism. For this purpose, Conrad deploys the narrative paradigm of romance. As Northrop Frye suggests in Anatomy of Criticism, romance often takes the form of a moral allegory, the narrative paradigm, as seen in Milton’s Comus, Bunyan’s Holy War, and many morality plays. The organizing principles of the world of romance are the melodramatic markers of good versus evil and angelic versus demonic. These conventions re-code the political material in purely individualistic terms of ethics and psychology, and ultimately contain the realistic or mimetic impulse of the fiction. This generic shift, asserts this paper, accompanies and is made to accommodate the strategically calculated movement of the focus of the narrative from the external facts about the imperialized Congo to the internal reality of the human soul. The conclusion of this study is that although Heart of Darkness starts with a disconsolate recognition of the unsightly colonial realities, Conrad’s ultimate project is to provide an apologia for Western imperialism and to re-assert the racial divide between Europeans and Africans.
Abstract
It is a challenging work for the critics to assess and classify Heart of Darkness. This novella has bewildered scholars by critiquing inhuman imperial practices, yet simultaneously undercutting its own anti-imperial statement with racist discourse. It deviates from the tradition of Western imperial narrative by starting with a realistic exposure of the ugly realities of Western imperialism in Africa. However, this anti-imperialist critique, as the adventure story unfolds, is drowned by its racist assumptions and final ethnocentric assertion. Conrad creates a psychological and allegorical dimension to this narrative in order more effectively to cancel the political implications of Marlow’s initial critique of Western imperialism. For this purpose, Conrad deploys the narrative paradigm of romance. As Northrop Frye suggests in Anatomy of Criticism, romance often takes the form of a moral allegory, the narrative paradigm, as seen in Milton’s Comus, Bunyan’s Holy War, and many morality plays. The organizing principles of the world of romance are the melodramatic markers of good versus evil and angelic versus demonic. These conventions re-code the political material in purely individualistic terms of ethics and psychology, and ultimately contain the realistic or mimetic impulse of the fiction. This generic shift, asserts this paper, accompanies and is made to accommodate the strategically calculated movement of the focus of the narrative from the external facts about the imperialized Congo to the internal reality of the human soul. The conclusion of this study is that although Heart of Darkness starts with a disconsolate recognition of the unsightly colonial realities, Conrad’s ultimate project is to provide an apologia for Western imperialism and to re-assert the racial divide between Europeans and Africans.
참고문헌 (27)
- Achebe, Chinua, "An Image of Africa", Research in African Literature, 9(1), pp.1~15 (1978)
- Batchelor, John, "The Life of Joseph Conrad:A Critical Biography" (1994), Blackwell
- Brantlinger, Patrick, "Rule of Darkness:British Literature and Imperialism,1830-1914" (1988), Cornell UP
- Conrad, Joseph, "Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Sources, Criticism, 3rd ed" (1988), Norton
- Conrad, Joseph, "Lord Jim. 1900" (2000), Penguin
- Conrad, Joseph, "An Outpost of Progress, In Tales of Unrest", pp.143~198 (1916), Doubleday
- Daniel, Just, "Between Narrative Paradigms: Joseph Conrad and the Shift from Realism to Modernism from a Genre Perspective", English Studies, 89(3), pp.273~286 (2008)
- Darwin, Charles, "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" (1989), William Pickering
- Frye, Northrop, "Anatomy of Criticism:Four Essays" (1971), Princeton UP
- Hammond, Dorothy, "The Africa That Never Was" (1970), Twayne
- Hawkins, Hunt, "The Issue of Racism in Heart of Darkness", Conradiana, 14(3), pp.63~71 (1982)
- Hawkins, Hunt., "Conrad’s Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness", PMLA, 94, pp.286~299 (1979)
- Jameson, Fredric, "The Political Unconscious" (1981), Cornell UP
- JanMohamed, Abdul R, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature", Critical Inquiry, 12(1), pp.59~87 (1985)
- JanMohamed, Abdul R, "The Manichean Aesthetics" (1983), U of Massachusetts P
- Karl, Frederick, "The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Vol. 1" (1983), Cambridge UP
- Kim, Soonsik, "Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as a Counter-Conradian Discourse on Africa", Comparative Literature, 25, pp.333~355 (2000)
- Kingsley, Mary H, "Travels in West Africa. Intro" (1965), Barnes & Noble
- 박상기, "콘래드의 독특한 아프리카 재현", 영어영문학, 51(2), pp.403~421 (2005), 한국영어영문학회
- Parry, Benita, "Conrad and Imperialism" (1983), Macmillan
- Romero, Jorge Sacido, "Failed Exorcism: Kurtz’s Spectral Status and Its Ideological Function in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness", Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, 33(2), pp.43~60 (2011)
- Said, Edward, "Culture and Imperialism" (1993), Knopf
- Said, Edward, "Orientalism" (1979), Vintage Books
- Sherry, Norman, "Conrad's Western World" (1971), Cambridge UP
- Watts, Cedric, "'A Bloody Racist’: About Achebe’s View of Conrad", Yearbook of English Studies, 13, pp.196~209 (1983)
- White, Andrea, "Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject" (1993), Cambridge UP
- Zins, Henryk, "Joseph Conrad’s Africa" (1982), Kenya Literature Bureau