Colonialism, Imperialism and Desire in Conrad´S “Heart of Darkness,”
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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Jakub Res Sex, Money, Disillusionment, Psychoanalysis: Aspects of Colonialism and Imperialism in Selected Texts by Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling Master‘s Diploma Thesis Dr. Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D. 2013 1 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author‘s signature 2 I would sincerely like to thank Dr. Stephen Hardy for all of his assistance, invaluable advice, and endless patience. 3 Table of Contents I. A General Introduction ….……………………...………………………………...…..5 II. Colonialism, Imperialism and Desire in Conrad‘s ―Heart of Darkness,‖ Nostromo and Lord Jim ……………………………………………………….……………………..24 III. Temptation and Conflict: Colonialism and Imperialism in Kipling‘s Kim and ―The Man Who Would Be King‖……………………………….………………………….64 IV. Conclusion……...…..………………………………………………………………...93 V. Works Cited………………………………….……………….………………………98 VI. English Resume…………………………………..……………………….…………101 VII. Czech Resume……………………………………………………………………….102 4 I. A General Introduction This thesis endeavours to analyze a number of novels, a novella and a short story by Conrad and Kipling, namely Conrad‘s ―Heart of Darkness,‖ Nostromo and Lord Jim, and Kipling‘s Kim and ―The Man Who Would Be King.‖ However, a number of references to other Kipling texts are also provided (e.g. the poems ―If,‖ ―The Ballad of East and West,‖ or ―Recessional‖). As the title suggests, the main objective of this thesis is, within the causal framework of colonialism and imperialism as these two concepts are represented in the texts in question, to investigate aspects of the interplay between sexuality and the sexual instinct and the emphasis on ownership central to the British imperialist and colonialist society of the late 19th and early 20th century. Put another way, in the context of the selected texts, this thesis intends primarily to explore the ways in which the colonialist and imperialist societies, that intrinsically incorporate, and are based on, possession and ownership, affect the libidinal lives of their members. The desire to accumulate wealth, an essential component of the modern industrialist capital-oriented society, and the sexual desire are treated as a continuum where a cause and an effect can only be identified in ambiguous terms. A typical instance of this continuum is Kurtz. Kurtz, one of the major characters in the novella ―Heart of Darkness,‖ is driven to the Congo by his desire to become wealthy enough so as to be allowed to marry his Intended. His colonialist mission could thus be seen as a result of an unsatisfied sexual desire, his undesirable social status being the primary cause of his voyage to the Congo. Yet when he reaches the Belgian colony and starts to work there as an ivory-post operator, Kurtz begins to exhibit signs of insanity (megalomania, paranoia etc.). He shortly becomes the most efficient ivory collector (i.e. robber) in the whole of the Congo. However, instead of finding satisfaction, Kurtz commences to be controlled by what Evelyn Cobley, in her Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency: Ideology and Fiction, terms ―criminal obsession 5 with efficiency for its own sake‖ (195). Kurtz‘s life undergoes a considerable degree of commodification and alienation in the sense that he becomes a victim of his insatiable quest for possession and ownership. Kurtz seems to forget the reasons why he has come to the Congo in the first place and is instead devoured by the irrational and eventually destructive inclination to hoard still more and more silver. So far the title of this thesis has only been clarified partially. Although some basic introduction to the analysis of aspects of sex, sexuality, money, possession, ownership and disillusionment has been provided, it still has to be elucidated what role psychoanalysis is supposed to play in a thesis dealing with colonialism and imperialism as represented by Conrad and Kipling. The major reason why psychoanalysis is mentioned in the title of this thesis is that the investigation of the two authors in question is based on perspectives presented in the book To Have or to Be written by Erich Fromm in 1976. Fromm, a prominent member of the Frankfurt School, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, social scientist, and humanist philosopher was born in 1900 to an orthodox Jewish family as an only child. He initially studied jurisprudence at the University of Frankfurt am Main but shortly moved to the sociological department of the University of Heidelberg where his instructors included a number of notable figures such as Alfred Weber, a brother of the famous sociologist Max Weber, Karl Jaspers or the Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert. In 1927, Fromm opened his own clinical practice and three years later, as a fully trained psychoanalyst, joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Shortly after the Nazi takeover in 1933 Fromm fled to Geneva and, a year later, to New York City where he started to lecture at Columbia University. In the United States, Fromm established, or helped establish, a number of scientific and scholarly institutions (e.g. the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry or the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology). In the late 1940s Fromm relocated 6 to Mexico City where he lived for over two decades. Finally, in 1974 he left America for Switzerland where he died six years after (this basic biographical information on Fromm comes primarily from the Erich Fromm entries on wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica). Aside from holding a number of scholarly and scientific positions at various universities and institutes throughout the world, Fromm had his own psychological and psychiatric clinical practice where he treated such conditions as depression, paranoia, insomnia and others. Frequently, maintains Fromm throughout his To Have or to Be, these illnesses were not exclusively caused by tangible neuropathological changes in the brains of the patients but rather by non-medical factors such as the socio-cultural conditions under which these individuals had to live. These conditions mostly refer to the frustration and the sense of inferiority that, Fromm argues, are inherent to the industrial age. In his To Have or to Be and elsewhere Fromm seeks to analyze the reasons why the industrial age, rather than happiness and satisfaction, eventually begets frustration and disappointment, phenomena that psychiatrists and psychologists like Fromm seem regularly to deal with: ―The Great Promise of Unlimited Progress,‖ argues Fromm at the very beginning of To Have or to Be, The promise of domination of nature, of material abundance, of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and of unimpeded personal freedom – has sustained the hopes and faith of the generations since the beginning of the industrial age. To be sure, our civilization began when the human race started taking active control of nature; but that control remained limited until the advent of the industrial age. With industrial progress…we could feel that we were on our way to unlimited production and, hence, unlimited consumption; that technique made us omnipotent; that science made us omniscient. We were on our way to becoming gods, supreme beings who could create a second 7 world, using the natural world only as building blocks for our new creation. (11) For details of how exactly this Great Promise, to use Fromm‘s term, fails the reader is referred to the following two chapters. The same applies to aspects of the difference between having and being, as illustrated by Fromm, and its relevance and applicability to the analysis of Conrad and Kipling. A relevant question that could be asked in relation to Fromm is how the 1970s book To Have or to Be, and more generally the ideas presented by the Frankfurt School, relate to the study of Conrad and Kipling. The aim of this thesis – and particularly the second chapter – is to demonstrate that Conrad can be viewed as one of the late 19th and early 20th century authors whose literature presents ideas that can be seen as similar to those advocated by the members of the Frankfurt School (scepticism and relativity of scientific progress, frustration about, and critique of, capitalism etc.). In addition, focusing on the selected texts by the two authors in question, the analysis provided in the following two chapters endeavours to delineate links between the late 19th and early 20th century colonialism and imperialism, and modern post-war capitalism that Fromm criticizes and subverts throughout his oeuvre. In Chapter II, a loose comparative analysis of Conrad‘s works (primarily ―Heart of Darkness‖) and Francis Scott Fitzgerald‘s novel The Great Gatsby is provided. This detour probably needs some clarification as well. In his famous novel, that apparently needs little introduction, Fitzgerald portrays the ruthlessness of capitalism in the 1920s Jazz Age, greed and the ultimate commodification of all aspects of existence. The novel abounds with depictions of class struggle (represented, for example, by Gatsby‘s mostly successful attempt to become rich and thus attractive to his beloved Daisy) and its effects (in the valley of ashes, an unhealthy polluted area created by industrial ashes – in fact a dump – live, one could argue, as a human garbage, those individuals who are unable to become affluent). 8 The major reason why Fitzgerald‘s masterpiece is included in a thesis that investigates Conrad and Kipling is to suggest both the explicit and implicit connections between the British colonialism and imperialism (mostly associated with the late 19th and early 20th century), and Conrad‘s depiction of the two, on the one hand and global (i.e. including American) capitalism of the last about 130 years. Focusing on the three texts by Conrad, the analysis provides references to The Great Gatsby in order to illustrate that colonialism/imperialism and capitalism may in fact be perceived as mutually interconnected and, to some extent, reciprocal.