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Heart of Darkness & the Headhunter

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Heart of Darkness & the Headhunter Myths of Authority in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Timothy Findley’s Headhunter Victor Kennedy Pedagoska Fakulteta Univerza v Mariboru 2000 Maribor, Slovenia Abstract Conrad’s Kurtz is often seen as the personification of the “darkness” Marlow discovers, a twentieth century icon of evil that has been used again and again, as in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Kurtz’s evil is his extreme authoritarianism in the name of civilization and “progress,” an evil particularly apt to the century that produced Hitler and Stalin. This view of Kurtz is rather simplistic, however, since Conrad uses him in a complex and ironic way: Marlow, and the reader, are both attracted and repelled by Kurtz. The danger resides in what Frank Kermode defined as the difference between myth and fiction: “Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change.” It is tempting to read Kurtz and his later incarnations as mythical figures of internal evil, as Dracula is a mythical figure of external evil. Heart of Darkness is not, however, a “total and adequate explanation of things as they are,” but a “fiction. for finding out,” and the best modern versions of Kurtz follow this model. Timothy Findley is a Canadian novelist whose Headhunter (1993) is a postmodern parody of Heart of Darkness; the title is a pun on psychiatrists, a twist on the idiom “head shrinker,” and an allusion to the heads mounted on poles surrounding Kurtz’s compound in Heart of Darkness. His novel questions the authority we have granted the medical profession in the late twentieth century by examining Kurtz, a psychiatrist who abuses his power over his patients as Conrad’s Kurtz abused his power over the “savages” of Africa. On a winter's day, while a blizzard raged through the streets of Toronto, Lilah Kemp inadvertently set Kurtz free from page 92 of Heart of Darkness. Horror-stricken, she tried to force him back between the covers. The escape took place at the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, where Lilah Kemp sat reading beside the rock pool. She had not even said come forth, but there Kurtz stood before her, framed by the woven jungle of cotton trees and vines that passed for botanic atmosphere. "Get in," Lilah pleaded—whispering and holding out the book. But Kurtz ignored her and stepped away. (Headhunter 3) The opening paragraphs of Timothy Findley’s 1993 novel Headhunter combine a journey across time, space, and texts with the enduring power of the myth of Conrad’s corrupt authority figure. It’s a sobering thought that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has become one of the normative texts of the late twentieth century; a glance at the August 18, 1997 issue of the New Yorker magazine, for example, reveals no fewer than three references to Heart of Darkness in three separate articles. Adaptations of the novella are almost too numerous to count. Such rewriting of seminal texts has become a staple of postmodern fiction, and studying the process and results of rewriting a staple of postmodern criticism. I will briefly examine some of the forms rewriting can take, and show how Findley has taken Conrad’s critique of colonialism in Africa and applied it to postcolonial Canada. Finally, I will compare two passages that demonstrate how descriptions of paintings, Kurtz’s painting of his intended in Heart of Darkness and an elaborate revision in Headhunter, capture the symbolic and thematic hearts of darkness in each work. Revisions can take several forms, including parodies, tributes, and sequels. Parodies, or “subversive sequels,” tend to be shorter than the original, while “contemporary revisitations” like Headhunter, in deconstructing character and situation, can be many times the length of the original. Revisions transform the original on several levels, including plot, character, theme, scope, attitude, typology, and language. Plot and theme can be transformed, even inverted, to reflect different ideologies and values, narrative situations, and focalizations; characters can be the same in different situations, or transformed into doppelgängers, as in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor. The attitude of the narrative can be supportive or subversive, and the language of the narrative can be modified by style, irony, and voice. A.S. Byatt’s Possession shows how modern texts may “possess” works of an earlier era: as in Mary Shelley’s short story “Transformation,” “transformation” is literally “possession.” Traditional parodies use the same characters, actions, setting, and plot as their originals, but with an ironic tone; sequels and prequels use the same characters and settings, but in a different time and with different actions (a good example of a parodic sequel is Thackeray's Rebecca and Rowena, a comic continuation of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe); revisions may use elements of the same story, characters, and actions, but described from a different point of view; metafictions and postmodern pastiches, such as Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Chatterton, use intertextuality and allusion to create a seamless web stretching endlessly into the past and future; critical analysis is in many aspects an analytical form of rewriting, an abstract recreation of a fictional world; plagiarism is just another form of rewriting; some critics even argue that each reading of a text is a rewriting, just as each performance of a drama is a rewriting, as anyone who has seen Laurence Olivier, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves as Hamlet can attest.1 Even Heart of Darkness revises earlier texts. In 1890, inspired in part by Stanley's account of "darkest Africa," General William Booth of the Salvation Army wrote In Darkest England: [W]hile brooding over the awful presentation of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa, is there not a darkest England? Civilization, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley found existing in the great Equatorial forest? (11-12) Booth’s earlier comment on Stanley’s book, “Upon the pygmies and all the dwellers of the forest has descended a devastating visitation in the shape of the ivory raiders of civilization,” (11), and his repetition throughout In Darkest England of the word “horror”, foreshadow the plot, theme, and language of Marlow's tale.2 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 The obvious question arises, what are the limitations of rewriting? Rewriting as a term loses its effect if it is expanded too far to include too many terms, such as “reading.” How far is too far? Is a performance of a play, or a reading of a novel, a valid use of the term “rewriting”? Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Parody, for example, provides many valuable insights into postmodern writing, but subsumes nearly all forms of rewriting under the term “parody.” ! 2 See Tim Youngs’ paper, in this volume, for an account of Stanley’s famous and disastrous expedition. ! ! 2! Ninety-one years later, Timothy Findley’s Headhunter revises the theme and images of Heart of Darkness, moving the setting from the Congo to Toronto. In her study of Findley’s novels, Moral Metafiction, Donna Pennee notes, “In a reading at McGill University, Montreal (26 November 1987), Findley stated that he ‘never got over [his] first reading of Heart of Darkness’. [T]he ‘true lie’ that Marlow tells becomes of as much interest in Findley’s work as the content of Conrad’s novel” (109). Instead of the Congo River, Findley’s journey traverses an inner landscape, the boundary between sanity and madness, as he moves Conrad’s story from Africa to a Toronto psychiatric hospital. Findley’s Kurtz is not a European ivory trader with guns, but a psychiatrist armed with modern mind-altering drugs. While setting and time are changed, however, the main theme, the examination of the effects of the unrestrained exercise of power, is the same. While Moral Metafiction predates Headhunter, Pennee’s title still applies to Findley’s techniques and objectives: Headhunter’s fictional Irish literary critic Nicholas Fagan says “All books are a conjuring. a conjuring of humankind and the world that we inhabit. Conrad was not the first to conjure Kurtz—and not the last. He was merely the first to give him that name. Kurtz is with us always. I don’t think you can blame yourself for that. The human race cannot take a single step, but it produces another Kurtz. He is the darkness in us all” (261). In The Literature of Guilt, Patrick Reilly studies thematic and moral differences between Victorian and modern literature, arguing that Heart of Darkness is one of the pivotal texts in the development of the modern world view, which is based on two contrasting kinds of epiphany. At the climax of Heart of Darkness, Marlow experiences the second kind, the “dark epiphany,” or the realization of guilt. Of the difference between the modern and the Victorian epiphany, Reilly writes: “All shall be well. We are right to be shaken when we quit the protective pinfold of this fiction for the shocking and pitiless disclosures of modern literature” (6). In “Heart of Darkness: a choice of nightmares,” he writes “[T]he voyage of discovery is used to carry complacent European man into the heart of his own filthy civilization and to expose the sham of its masquerading philanthropy” (46).
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