The Victorian Fin de Siècle: A Gendered Space and Time of Colonial Modernity
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In Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s modernist technique of storytelling in a stream of consciousness makes the whole text of colonial reality into a dream in a Freudian sense, a dream-work as an object of analysis to interpret and cure its pathological symptoms. This project is a psychoanalytic endeavor to situate the novella’s truth-effect as conflated with the Victorian fin-de siècle, ultimately aiming to understand why Conrad tells a story of his lived experience of colonialism in the psychological frame of modernist writing in the first place. That is to say, what would be the socio-cultural cause of a truth-effect that the so-called “bourgeois novella” evokes, by means of which the author is rather concealing his narrative desire than exposing it in the “creatively destructive” space and time of colonial modernity? That being said, this paper considers Heart of Darkness symptomatic of what Andreas Huyssen calls the “great divide” of the literary in late Victorian culture between high modernism and mass culture, or of what Patrick Brantlinger calls the “split” between the modernist will-to-style of impressionism and the mass-culture tendencies of romance conventions. Futhermore, this paper explores such a drastic change of the literary in conjunction with the colonial politics of gender and race in Victorian Britain, thus bringing to light the truth-effect of Conrad’s psychological writing in terms of a so-called “modernist lie.” As a rhetorical tool of colonialism to transmit to Europe Kurtz’s “voice” of “progress, guidance, science,” Marlow’s lie is symptomatic of the rise of modernist literature, as long as it adheres to the modernist maxim, “make it new.” The lie in Marlow’s interior monologue bears upon Conrad’s doubt of the conventional basis of literary realism in telling the truth of bourgeois culture and ideas; for the lie itself is the author’s radical gesture to deny serving as their interpreter or representative in light of realism. Rather, his lie informs us of more than what is said because of producing the truth-effect as the uncanny realm of the unspoken which is neither repressed nor articulated completely. The eventual truth of such a lie, only if we care to learn, is that colonial discourse in the heart of darkness lies nowhere else but in the heart of civilization.
Abstract
In Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s modernist technique of storytelling in a stream of consciousness makes the whole text of colonial reality into a dream in a Freudian sense, a dream-work as an object of analysis to interpret and cure its pathological symptoms. This project is a psychoanalytic endeavor to situate the novella’s truth-effect as conflated with the Victorian fin-de siècle, ultimately aiming to understand why Conrad tells a story of his lived experience of colonialism in the psychological frame of modernist writing in the first place. That is to say, what would be the socio-cultural cause of a truth-effect that the so-called “bourgeois novella” evokes, by means of which the author is rather concealing his narrative desire than exposing it in the “creatively destructive” space and time of colonial modernity? That being said, this paper considers Heart of Darkness symptomatic of what Andreas Huyssen calls the “great divide” of the literary in late Victorian culture between high modernism and mass culture, or of what Patrick Brantlinger calls the “split” between the modernist will-to-style of impressionism and the mass-culture tendencies of romance conventions. Futhermore, this paper explores such a drastic change of the literary in conjunction with the colonial politics of gender and race in Victorian Britain, thus bringing to light the truth-effect of Conrad’s psychological writing in terms of a so-called “modernist lie.” As a rhetorical tool of colonialism to transmit to Europe Kurtz’s “voice” of “progress, guidance, science,” Marlow’s lie is symptomatic of the rise of modernist literature, as long as it adheres to the modernist maxim, “make it new.” The lie in Marlow’s interior monologue bears upon Conrad’s doubt of the conventional basis of literary realism in telling the truth of bourgeois culture and ideas; for the lie itself is the author’s radical gesture to deny serving as their interpreter or representative in light of realism. Rather, his lie informs us of more than what is said because of producing the truth-effect as the uncanny realm of the unspoken which is neither repressed nor articulated completely. The eventual truth of such a lie, only if we care to learn, is that colonial discourse in the heart of darkness lies nowhere else but in the heart of civilization.
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