Ian Watt. Heart of Darkness. [Conrad in the Nineteenth Century]. California UP[N3, 4, 5]. 1979[81].

[정리]

The Rise of the Novel로 유명한 이언 와트의 이 책은 작가의 간단한 전기와 함께, 작품 분석을 겸하고 있다. 그 중에서 먼저 HD와 관련된 부분을 읽었다.

먼저 와트가 주목하고 있는 시대적 배경에는 내가 중요하게 생각하고 있는 부분들이 많이 들어 있어서 논문에 적지 않은 도움이 될 듯하다. 빅토리아 시대가 강조하는 '일의 윤리,' 자연주의적이고 비관주의적인 우주관*세계관(열역학 제2법칙), 진화론과 사회적 진화론의 전개 양상, 제국주의 등등.

(콘래드의 이 시기를 전후한 편지를 보면 비관주의적 세계관이 많이 드러나는데 이 부분이 당대의 사고 방식과 어떻게 연결되는 것인지, 또 콘래드 자신의 유년기의 체험, 부모님의 죽음 등과의 상관관계 등에 대해서도 좀 더 고민해 보아야 할 것이다.)

와트는 이 작품에 두드러지는 특징으로 인상주의와 상징주의를 내세우는데, 그것은 그림에서의 인상파의 등장과 함께 공적으로 인정되는 세계상보다도 개개인이 자신의 지각을 통해 느끼는 것에 우선 순위를 두는 것과 연결이 된다(이 부분에서 와트는 그 유명한 delayed decoding이라는 용어를 사용하고 있다). 상징주의는 작품의 의미가 하나로 수렴되는 것이 아니라 미완결적이고 미결정적인 삶의 모습을 그대로 전달하려는 시도로 인해, 작품의 해석에서도 각자의 상상력의 작용에 따라 다양한 해석이 나올 수밖에 없는 상황으로 이어진다.

거기에다 헨리 제임스가 콘래드에게 미친 영향과 두 사람의 차이에 대해서 이야기 하는 부분도 주목할 필요가 있다.

말로와 커츠의 관계, 또 말로가 거짓말을 싫어한다고 하면서도 작품의 마지막 부분에서 커츠의 약혼녀에게 거짓말을 할 수밖에 없었던 상황에 대해서도 분석을 하고 있다.

적지 않은 분량의 이 글은 여러 가지 면에서 내 논문에 도움이 될 듯하다.  

[인용]

i. 1897-1898 : In the Doldrums

(133) gallant defeat and disillusioned romanticism - Conradian subjects, Youth

ii. Sources: The Congo and Kurtz

(136) 실제로 콘래드가 콩고에 머문 기간은 6개월

(137) 작품에서 제시하고 있는 것은 선택적

they emphasise the prevailingly sombre mood of the story, and omit the various pleasant incidents which Conrad mentions in his notebook, not to mention the hope he expressed on one occasion of having "a shot or two at buffalo or elephant."

(138) 아프리카 여성 - the embodiment of the confident natural energy of the African wilderness.

- HD is no more a direct representation of conditions in the Congo in 1890 than it is of Conrad's actual experiences there; but it is an expresstion of the essence of the social and historical reality of the Congo Free State as his imagination recreated it.

(140) 벨기에의 식민주의의 비효율성, 말로와 커츠의 고립감을 강조하기 위해 식민주의가 진척된 상황을 의도적으로 변형.

(141) 유럽 세력과 아랍 세력의 갈등.

(144) white man going native

- Lütken - I have met one or two 'Kurtzs' in my time in Africa

(145) Hannah Arendt - Carl Peters :커츠를 닮은 인물 (The Origins of Totalitarianism. 189)

iii. Ideological Perspectives: Kurtz and the Fate of Victorian Progress

- Marlow's Victorian Ethic

(149) 일을 강조하는 빅토리아 시대의 사고 방식이 이 작품에 녹아 있음. Walter Houghton - work라는 단어가 중요. [The Victorian Frame of Mind 고대]

(150) Carlyle's everlasting yea amounts to little more than a personal commitment to two percepts from Gothe's Wilhelm Meister

1. Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action

2. Do the Duty which lies nearest thee

- 칼라일의 일, 의무, 체념 등에 대한 설교는 궁극적으로는 빅토리아 시대의 삶을 특징짓는 가치관.

- George Eliot : God, Immortality, Duty(peremptory and absolute)

- The Material Universe

(151) [Conrad] saw only danger in "the modern blind trust in mere material and appliances"

(152) 열역학 제2법칙 - Lord Kelvin(1851) - the earth would end in cold and drought through the diffusion of heat-energy. This astrophysical pessimism became a standard feature of late Victorian thought.

- The previous century had inferred a divine watchmaker from the perfection of the celestial machine; it was now discovered not only that there was no watchmaker, but that the spring was running down.

(153) 자연주의적 비관적 우주관을 보여주는 편지 내용들. 편지 편 참조

(154) Conrad and his contemporaries belonged to the first generation that had not felt supported by the traditional view of man's flattering eminence in the history.  

- Evolution and Imperialism

(155) We were wanderers on prehistoric earth -- the first of men : 진화론적 사고. Alfred Wallace는 콘래드가 좋아하던 작가.

(156) Social Darwinism - Herbert Spenser: First Principles(1862) 적자 생존 - a law which validated the current competitive economic order and its attendant inequities, because they were a necessary stage in the process of social evolution.

- the exportation of their various economic, political and religious institutions was a necessary step towards a higher form of human organisation in the rest of the world.

- The Descent of Man: Darwin himself spoke of "high" and "low" races, and of "stronger" and "weaker" nations.

(157) Victor Kiernan: the mystique of race was Democracy's vulgarization of an older mystique of class.

(158) 보어전쟁에 대한 콘래드의 태도: 분열적.

(159) We must not forget that in the nineteenth century no real political alternative had been suggested to Western penetration of other continents; the only practical issue was what form it should take.

- Rescue의 Travers: 사회적 진화론과 제국주의의 결합된 모습.

- imperial or colonial experience is disastrous for the whites; it makes them lazy; it reveals their weaknesses; it puffs them up with empty vanity at being white; and it fortifies the intolerable hypocrisy with which Europeans in general conceal their selfish aims.

(160) 바발라치(An Outcast) 백인들에 대해 - Obey me and be happy, or die.

(161) the most powerful literary indictment of imperialism. [이 견해가 어느 정도 정당성을 띠는가?]

- The Nineties and the Savage God

(161) the Victorian world order was collapsing.

- 현존하는 문명이 조만간에 파괴될 것이라는 염려. 그 예들.

(162) Thomas Huxley - Evolution and Ethics

윤리적 과정은 인간으로 하여금 '인위적인 인간성'을 형성하도록 함. 다른 사람들의 견해에 대한 두려움 때문에.

the greatest restrainer of the anti-social tendencies of men.

This socially imposed restraint is directly opposed to the instincts of natural man.

(163) Spenser 자신도 낙관론을 버리고 인간이 Rebarbarisation의 과정에 있다고 말함(1898)

- Kurtz's return to barbarism exemplifies the dangers in the attempt to make technological and evolutionary optimism a functional substitute for more traditional views of the social and moral order.

(166) 커츠의 신으로의 상승 욕구가 어둠으로 하강.

- 인간이 무의식적으로 잡식성이고 달랠 수 없는 이드의 식욕에 지배되는 것.

(167) Conrad and Freud : what they see is often the opposite of what they want to see.

(168) Camus : in order to be a man, to refuse to be a God

iv. Critical Perspectives

(168) 콘래드가 직관적인 방식(intuitive way)으로 글을 씀.

- This mingling of the intuitive and the calculating in Conrad's mode of fictional creation was probably too complicated for him to describe, even perhaps to recall; and he leaves us with miscellaneuous critical explanations which are always incomplete, often unhelpful, sometimes wayward, and yet in their own way pyschologically convincing.

[콘래드의 글쓰기 방식에 대한 이 부분의 지적은 왜 그의 글이 모호하고 모순적으로 비치는 지를 이야기할 때 이용할 수 있을 듯.]

a) Impressionism

(170) Virginia Woolf - Modern Fiction(1919) 인상

- Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

- painters were now attempting to give their own personal visual perceptions a more complete expressive autonomy

(171) from public systems of belief - what all men know - to private views of reality - what the individual sees. (Realism - Modernism)

- 흄 - impression과 idea 중에서 impression을 더 강조.

- Hume: making the psychology of individual sensation supplant traditional philosophy as the main avenue to truth and value

(174) Marlow - reality is essentially private and individual.

(175) delayed decoding - to present a sense impression and to withhold naming it or explaining its meaning until later.

[원주민들이 화살을 쏘며 공격하는 장면. Youth에서 배가 폭발하는 장면 등]

(176) narrative technique : the verbal equivalent of the impressionist painter's attempt to render visual sensation directly.

(178) intense sensory contact with the events

[콘래드의 주 목적 중의 하나는 이 이상한 이야기를 어떻게 하면 독자들에게 실감나게 전달하느냐, 하는 것.]

(179) it is very unlikely that Conrad either thought of himself as an impressionist or was significantly influenced by the impressionist movement. Conrad wanted to pay as much attention to the inside as to the outside, to the meaning as to the appearance; and this is one of the reasons why, he is so different both from the French Impressionists and from Pater, Crane, or Ford.

- Ramon Fernandez : Conrad's art does not trace the reality befor the man, but the man before the reality; it evokes experiences in their subjective entirety because the impression is the equivalent of the entire perception, and because the whole man experiences it with all the powers of his being.

(b) Symbolism

(181) the impressionist and symbolist tendencies are alike in being antitraditional assertions of the private individual vision.

- (19세기 말의 지적인 위기) the death of God and the disappearance of the omniscient author.

[Romantic Period 이후로 개인적 vision이나 symbol이 중요해 짐]

- symbol. a creed or confession of faith.

(182) identify truth with individual impressions.

(183) The fundamental intellectual mode of the Symbolists was not science and observation but religion and imagination.

(188) Moby Dick과의 공통점

1. They do not subordinate everything to the hero's quest

2. the symbolic objects which the protagonists seek - the whale or Kurtz - are both dangerous and ambiguous.

(189) All the great creations of literature have been symbolic.

[문학 작품에서 상징성이 갖는 중요성. 콘래드가 편지에서 한 말]

(191) one obvious practical objection to this kind of symbolic interpretation is that it alters our attention too exclusively to a few aspects of the narrative - to those which seem to provide clues that fit the assumed unitary and quasi-allegorical frame of symbolic reference.

[이 작품의 의미를 버질의 에어네이드나 단테의 신곡 지옥편 등의 유비로 보는 것은, 즉 작품의 의미를 하나로 못 박으려는 시도는, 작품의 다른 면을 사상하는 것.]

(192) 와트는 브뤼셀의 모습에서 관료적이고 기계적이며 비인간적인 모습을 읽어내고 있다. 인간 소외, 물신화 등등.

(193) Marlow registers but rarely comments; and we are thus left free to draw our deductions about the symbolic meanings of the passage. They are multiple, and they are not expounded but suggested; consequently our interpretative priorities will depend on our literary imagination as readers, and on our own way of conceiving reality.

(195) breakdown of the shared categories of understanding and judgment.

(198) 노발리스 - 푸른 꽃.

c) Marlow and Henry James

(200) Kurtz - one-dimensioanal and theatrical

- Kurtz is not very fully characterized : 프랑스 상징주의자들의 소설은 주인공의 내적 삶에 집중하기 때문에 다른 등장인물들은 아주 명료하게 등장하지 않음.

(201) 초기 작품 - 비개성적 3인칭 서사(impersonal thrid -perosn narration)

(202) James as one of Conrad's masters. (F. W. Dupee, Conrad - James's greatest disciple)

(204) Marlow라는 인물의 창조 : James의 The Spoils of Poynton의 영향.

- Conrad may have developed Marlow from James's use of a central observer.

(205) E.K. Brown - 제임스와의 공통점 ; their novels focus the reader's attention on "what will happen, but rather with what the happening will mean to the principal character(s)

차이점 : whereas James as author selects and orders the "meaning" of wha thappens, in the Marow stories and especially in HD, Conrad lets his protagonist muddle out the meaning of his own experiences as best he can.

(207) Conrad goes much further than James both in the abandonment of authorial omniscience, and in the related transition from a closed to an open fictional form.

- The representation of life's incompleteness had also been an important part of Conrad's own aim in The Nigger. But in HD, Conrad took the incompleteness of the fictional action and the indetermininacy of its moral implications much further.

(208) a radical and continuing exposure to the incompleteness of experience and the impossibility of fully understanding it.

(209) 헨리 제임스는 HD를 탐탁치 않게 생각. 말로가 화자이자 등장인물이기도 하다는 점.

(210) the difficulty of tell the "full story".

(211) 말로의 3가지 역할 : the narrator as a remembering eyewitness

                                   the narrator as the voice of his author's opinions

                                   the narrator as a friendly personal presence

- The fact that Marlow is not the primary narrator has the effect of giving him an objective status that is in accord with more recent modes of storytelling.

(212) through Marlow Conrad discovered a new kind of relation to his audience, and one which enabled him to be more fully himself.

(213) Marlow - Conrad : the seaman and the writer

- the moral perspective which Marlow's commentary endorses is very largely the professional and social ethic that he shares with his immediate audience.

v. The Tale

(215) 흰 색과 검은 색의 symbol을 intermingle. [Feminism 비평에서 이 부분 상세하게 지적]

(216) Colonisation has been briefly presented by the primary narator as in the guise of light  overcoming darkness; but this moral positive is soon undermined when Marlow presents it as a brief and cyclical interruption of the normal predominance of darkness over the course of historical time.

- Efficiency에 대한 해명 - 중요

- The argument of efficiency was much used by the Social Darwinists to justify their economic and political views, and at the time Conrad was writing it had become a catchword of the Liberal Imeperialists.

- 로마 식민주의 비판. 원래 원고에서는 현대 식민주의의 위선성보다는 낫다고 씀.

(221) 깔끔한 복장을 한 회계사 - 비인간적(positive inhumanity)

b) Marlow and Kurtz

(230) Their kinship is of a much more complicated kind: it began in mistaken assumptions; it is in no sense reciprocal; and it has the curious characteristic that it never exists as current actuality, but only in prospect before Marlow meets Kurtz, or as a preempting obligation after his death.

(240) Kurtz has not been able to deal with isolation in the wilderness; his articulateness and his claims to virtue are shams; and his behaviour to others has not been better than that of the pilgrims, but much worse. 그럼에도 왜 말로는 커츠를 높이 평가하는가?

(241) There is great psychological truth in the way that Conrad shows how the autonomy of one individual's actions can be unexpectedly, involuntarily, and yet imperatively, preempted by th contingencies imposed by the large forces in which his personal relationships are set.

c) The Lie and the Darkness

(241) 말로가 약혼녀를 만나는 장면

- It is very widely agreed that the scene is treated in a rather strained, melodramatic, and repetitive way, with little of the convincing detail.

(242) It s a pointed thematic irony that Marlow's vulnerability to the pressures which impel him to lie should be a product of the very same moral sensitivities that make lying so repugnant to him.

(243) Stanley가 콩고로부터 유럽에 돌아왔을 때

- his entire system was utterly out of order, and he felt more and more unfit for what my neighbours called civilised society.

(244) 여성이 현실과 동떨어졌다는 이야기는 중상류층 여성에 해당된다는 이야기

- Jeremy Hawthorne이 The Women of HD에서 발전시켜 이야기.

- merely by allotting women a leisure role, society has excluded them from discovering reality.

(245) 러시안, 약혼녀, 커츠

These characters share one linguistic trait; they are addicted to the idealising abstractions of public discourse, to a language that has very little connection with the realities either of the external world or of their inner selves.

(247) the abandonment of the idea that the truth of philosophy could be applied to any of the practical problems of life.

- recognise untruth as a condition of life

(248) all ideological structures are really illusions, they may in practice be necessary restraints upon human egoism, laziness, or despair.

(249) Marlow's European conception of blackness as inferior or evil is undermined when he finds no moral darkness in the black inhabitants of Africa, but is forced to link many of the traditional negative connotations of darkness with the colour white.

(250) wilderness

- It is actively malign force and it is also impenetrable to human thought, because it has a primal inclusiveness which confounds the categories which man has constructed as the basis of his civilization.

- The Western religious tradition as a whole makes light not the rule but the exception; it is the result of a beneficient divine intervention, which may be temporary and is certainly not bestowed unconditionally.

(252) Hillis Miller - 콘래드를 nihilist로 보는 것에 대한 반박

- neither Conrad nor Marlow stands for the position that darkness is irresistible; their attitude is to enjoin us to defend ourselves in full knowledge of the difficulties to which we have been blinded by the illusions of civilization. (253) 

(253) HD is the act of a man who stumbled into the underworld many years ago, and lived to tell its secrets, although not until much later.

- 말로는 주 화자(겉 화자)에게 영향을 주어, 우리를 에워싸고 있는 어둠을 더욱 자각하게 만듬.

[Wallace, Huxley, Hume 철학. Henry James]

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