[정리]
콘래드의 전문가 중 한 명인 세드릭 와츠는 이 논문에서 논란의 중점에 있는 아체베의 강연과 이후의 논문을 조목조목 비판한다. 와츠는 먼저 아체베의 소설 [모든 것이 산산히 부서지다](Things Fall Apart)가 다른 측면에서 본 [어둠의 심연]일 수 있으며, 그가 뛰어난 흑인 소설가이기 때문에 그의 콘래드에 대한 비판이 당혹스럽다고 이야기한다(196).
와츠는 아체베의 주장을 요약한 다음(196) 아체베가 '적이 아니라 친구를 비난하고 있는 점이 안타깝다'(197)라고 덧붙인다. 콘래드가 당시 만연하고 있던 인종주의로부터 자유롭지는 않지만, 그를 "지독한 인종주의자"라고 부르며 레오폴드 2세와 똑같은 인물로 취급하는 것은 명백한 잘못이라고 밀한다.
아체베는 한편으로는 콘래드가 뛰어난 스타일리스트라고 말하면서, 다른 한편으로는 아프리카와 아프리카 인을 묘사할 때 침묵과 광기(frenzy)라는 두 요소만을 반복적으로 보여준다고 이야기하는 자가당착적인 발언을 하고 있다는 것이다. 거기다 아프리카 인에게 언어를 주지 않았다고 말하는데 커츠의 정부인 여자가 커츠에게 1시간 동안이나 이야기하는 장면을 제시하면서 맞지 않는 말이라고 한다(다른 한편으로 말로가 아프리카 인들의 말을 몰랐기 때문에 의사소통의 통로가 원천적으로 봉쇄되어 있다고 봐야 할 것이다).
와츠는 콘래드가 다른 여러 곳에서 밝혔듯이 제국주의적 침탈에 대해서 강하게 비판을 하고 있고, 인종주의에서 자유로울 수는 없지만 당시의 상황과 비교해 볼 때는 오히려 진보적이었다는 것, 그리고 소설에서의 도덕과 윤리의 문제가 일반 사회 상식의 도덕이나 윤리와 같은 측면에서 이야기 될 수는 없는 것 아니냐는 식으로 콘래드를 강하게 옹호하고 있다.
(나중에 한 번 더 읽어볼 것.)
[인용]
(196) 'an offensive and totally deplorable book' in which Conrad has adopted 'the role of purveyor of comforting myths' Achebe
- part of its greatness lies in the power of its criticisms of racial prejudice.
- Particularly disconcerting, then, was this attack, coming from an important and influential black novelist whose work Things Fall Apart can be regarded as 'a Heart of Darkness from the other side.'
- Achebe's main claims are these. Conrad, in the 'offensive and totally deplorable' Heart of Darkness, has won the acclaim of white readers by pandering to their prejudices: Conrad dramatizes Africa as 'a place of negations ... in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest'. The blacks are dehumanized and degraded, seen as grotesques or as a howling mob. They are denied speech, or are granted speech only to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Furthermore, Marlow (who is Conrad's mouthpiece) is guilty of liberalism, which entails a paternalist form of racialism. As the tale unfolds, the author displays 'a preposterous and perverse kind of arrogance in ... reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind'. However talented Conrad may be, his tale preaches racial intolerance; it is on the side of enslavement rather than deliverance; and it is therefore to be condemned.
(197) 'Fraternity means nothing unless the Cain-Abel business.' Conrad - Cunnigham
- 'The blacks have enough enemies; it is saddening to see Achebe attack one of their friends.
- If Achebe had but recalled that Heart of Darkness appeared in 1899, when Victoria was on the throne, when imperialistic fervour was extreme and the Boer War was soon to begin, he might have been more prepared to recognize various unconventional qualities of Conrad's tale.
- Achebe makes a few concessions, but these tend to be withdrawn as the attack gathers momentum, resulting in apparent self-contradiction. Thus, early in the argument, we are assured that Conrad 'is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain'; yet later we are told that 'Conrad's famed evocation of the African atmosphere ... amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy' (the repetition is not illustrated), while the story concerns merely that 'breakup of one petty European mind' (Achebe ignores Kurtz's representative significance).
- Far from being a 'purveyor of comforting myths', Conrad most deliberately and incisively debunks such myths. The myth of inevitable progress, for example; the myth that white civilization is necessarily morally superior to 'savagery'; the myth that imperialism is the altruistic matter of 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways' : all these are mocked by the tale.
(198) Achebe asserts that the tale celebrates the 'dehumanization' of the blacks; yet it is precisely against such dehumanization that the tale amply protests. Of all the people described, by far the happiest, healthiest, and most vital are the group of blacks seen paddling their canoe through the surf of the coast: 'They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks - these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there.
- a dramatized ontological argument; a point of reference against which we may judge the depredations of the white man, when we see by contrast the mortal lassitude of the natives in the grove of death, the hopeless weariness of the blacks in the chain gang, and the absurd hybrids who are the 'reclaimed'.
- (Achebe - The Black Writer's Burden) Without subscribing to the view that Africa gained nothing at all in her long encounter with Europe, one could still say, in all fairness, that she suffered many terrible and lasting misfortunes. In terms of human dignity and human relations the encounter was almost a complete disaster for the black races. It has warped the mental attitudes of both black and white.
(199) Achebe suggests no distinction between Leopold and Conrad: both are bloody racists. Black is to white, he claims, as Dorian Gray's portrait is to Gray himself: the picture bears the ugliness which is really the man's.
- (They howled and leaped 부분에 대한 해명) To the reader who is familiar with Things Fall Apart, and who therefore is familiar with the historical and sacramental import of such howling and leaping, Marlow's attitude may well seem myopic and patronizing: Marlow assumes that what he sees is ancient, primitive, chaotic, mindless; something that civilized man hopes to have outgrown, and may be troubled to think he has not outgrown. Marlow, however, cannot be blamed for lacking the benefit of Things Fall Apart, which appeared nearly sixty years after he told his tale; and Conrad is offering an entirely plausible rendering of the responses of a British traveller of c. I89o to the strange and bewildering experiences offered by the Congo.
(200) The narrative obliges the reader to ask whether civilization is a valuable, fragile improvement on savagery, or a hypocritical elaboration of it. Part of the time the tale suggests the familiar notion, that Africa offers the primitive basis from which European culture has fortunately evolved; but against this plays the notion that Africa offers the raw and vigorous truth which has been adulterated and concealed by European culture; and sometimes the tale offers a third possibility, the suggestion of cultural equivalence between the two regions.
- may recall that Conrad, who spoke of the Boer War as 'idiotic', later referred to the colonial powers in Africa as 'competitors for the privilege of improving the nigger (as a buying machine)'.[Autocracy and War 143 - 찾아볼 것. 내 책 107)
- Conrad's prejudice, Achebe continues, is illustrated by the contrast of the black mistress with the white Intended: the latter speaks but the former does not, so 'it is clearly not part of Conrad's purpose to confer language on the "rudimentary souls" of Africa'.6 The criticism seems maladroit. The black woman is certainly capable of speech ('She got in one day and kicked up a row. .... She talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour' (p. 62)); and no explanation is needed for Marlow's ability to converse directly with a fellow-European but not with a black woman who, moreover, is seen by him only from a distance.
- (커츠의 두 여인) Both are loyal to the same man; both have charms (whether magical or metaphorical, metallic or bodily) which have proved impotent. both suffer loss and are described as 'tragic'. Conrad's art prevents us from seeing the contrasts without also seeing the similarities.
-(주7) (Almayer에 대한 언급) The linkage may remind us that the crucial moment in Conrad's first novel, Almayer's Folly, when a 'happy ending' briefly seems a possibility, comes when Almayer is tempted to abandon his jealousy and his racial prejudice and to join Nina in her flight with her Balinese lover: 'What if he should suddenly take her to his heart, forget his shame, and pain, and anger, and - follow her! What if he changed his heart if not his skin and made her life easier between the two loves ... !' (London, 1947, p. 192). As much as anything, it is racial prejudice that destroys Almayer.
(202) Achebe appears somewhat hard to please. When the tale offers views which he regards as illiberal, he condemns them; and when the tale is humane and liberal, he redefines such liberalism as racialist illiberalism.
- To sneer at liberalism is to sneer at democratic principles and to support racialism. [리버럴리즘에 내재한 문제점도 생각해볼 필요가 있지 않은가?]
- If Europeans could descend to such barbarism as the amputation and collection of black hands by the basketful as a punitive measure for slow rubber-tapping, how could they regard themselves as morally superior to the natives? Inevitably that was one of the questions raised by Casement's report for the Government and by E. D. Morel's Red Rubber.
(203) Conrad's tale asks whether civilization may be merely a hypocritical sophistication of savagery and whether the organization entailed, with its technology, its commercial empires, and its vast conurbations, may actually sap the vitality of its people.
- Todorov, the meaning of the text is that there is no meaning: it imparts the knowledge that nothing can be known.
(불어 번역
That knowledge is impossible, that the heart of darkness itself is obscure, the whole text tells us ... The last meaning, the ultimate truth are nowhere because there is no interior and the heart is empty.
(204) As we have seen, when Marlow remarks, 'All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz', he makes sure that we include England in that Europe. Heart of Darkness has many paradoxes, but in this respect its main ethical direction is clear and is not self-contradictory; certainly it is not the vacuous conundrum that Todorov described.
(205) Things Fall Apart 'opened to English readers one of the complex and ordered rural societies that lay behind Marlow's momentary glimpses "of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying.
- 'The horror!' is a cry which may be an indictment of his own corruption and therefore an endorsement of decent morality, or an indictment of the horrible nature of the universe and thus an endorsement of his kind of Satanic existentialism.
(206) Conrad shows the subversion of white norms by African energies; Achebe shows the subversion of black norms by European energies. Both writers protest against man's inhumanity to man, and their definitions of that inhumanity are strikingly congruent.
(207) Achebe makes it clear that he could praise Heart of Darkness only if he felt that its values tallied with his own, which include hostility to imperialism. An obvious paradox arises. A critic who in his travels through the world of letters seeks to commend those areas which he can annex as supports for his own values is practising ideological imperialism: his readings may constitute a support-system for himself as critical emperor.
- I have suggested previously that the moral value of literary works may lie in their dialectical rather than their exemplary force.
- generally. Part of the time in Heart of Darkness, Conrad (like Swift and Kafka in their works) is writing under satirist's licence: he exaggerates the absurdity and incommunication in the world, but what is exaggerated is closely observed and intelligently amplified, and such exaggerations offer truth-seeking challenges.
(208) That Conrad should, in 1899, have treated the blacks with considerable humanity strikes me as admirable, but I suspect that the tale's high status does not (or should not) depend on that humanity; the belief that it does confuses fiction with other forms of discourse (for example, the sermon or the political tract); and this is not to imply that literature is 'above' morality or politics, but merely to indicate that literature is morally and politically more complex than are such forms. And the complexity includes the element of retreat from life as well as scrutiny of it.
- Both Conrad and Graham were influenced by the climate of prejudice of their times: times when racial and particularly anti-Semitic prejudice was common to most people of all classes. What is interesting is that the best work of both men seems to transcend such prejudice.
(209) the merit of a critic depends not on his doctrinal assumptions (though they may well influence all that he writes) but on the intelligence of his responsiveness to the works he discusses. Principles, prejudices, and procedures can readily be imparted.