Brian W. Shaffer - "Rebarbarizing Civilization"(1): Conrad's African Fiction and Spencerian Sociology (1993)

 출처 :    PMLA. Vol.108, No. 1 (Jan. 1993): 45-58

[인용]

45) Evidently, therejore, the conquest of one people over another has been, in the main, the conquest of the social man over the anti-social  man; or, strictly speaking, of the more adapted over the less adapted.

 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics
 

- The text lives only by coming into contact with another text (with context). only at the point of this contact between texts does a light flash, illuminating both the posterior and anterior, joining a given text to a dialogue.

Mikhail Bakhtin, "Speech Genres" and Other Late Essays
 

Conrad and Spencer at the Fin de Siecle
- Herbert Spencer(1820-1903) 당대에는 중요한 사상가였지만 지금은 통용되지 않음(out of currency)

[다윈의 경우에는 가장 중요한 사상가   the revolutionary scientist of late Victorian thought

- While Charles Darwin is typically viewed as the revolutionary scientist of late Victorian thought, it is nevertheless Spencer who first posits a process of cosmic evolution involving the survival of the fittest; and it is Spencer who provides, in Leo J. Henkin's words, "the ablest and most influential development of the argument from evolution to progress" (198)

( Henkin, Leo J. Darwinism in the English Novel, 1860-1910. The Impact of Evolution on Victorian Fiction. New York: Corporate, 1940. )

국내에 없음.

46) Alfred R. Wallace's as sessment of Spencer as "the greatest all-round thinker and most illuminating reasoner of the Nineteenth Century" to Darwin's own view, that Spencer is "about a dozen times my superior" and "by far the greatest living philosopher in England; perhaps equal to any that have lived" (qtd. in Carneiro ix)

[1 'Privately, however, Darwin was less enthusiastic about Spencer's achievement. Darwin's notebooks, for example, re cord that Spencer's "deductive manner of treating every subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind" and that his "con clusions never convince me . . ." (qtd. in Howard 94)]

- Immensely popular, available in inexpensive editions, and concerned with subjects ranging from social and cultural evolution to the function of art and trade, Spencer's works were at the height of their influence during the years in which Conrad's early fiction was taking shape.

[콘래드의 작품이 나올 무렵 스펜서의 인기와 영향력]

[Will Durant - The Story of Philosophy] Spencer편 참조

-  The hy pothesis that this fiction represents and challenges Spencerian ideas is therefore unlikely to be con tested. Nevertheless, while it is a critical com monplace to acknowledge Conrad's debt to Darwinian and Huxleyan perspectives, the rele vance of the Spencerian canon to the Conradian one has been virtually overlooked.

[3. Among those who have commented on Conrad's indebt edness to Darwin and Huxley are Hunter; Levine, "Novel"; Renner; Saveson; Watt; and Watts. The exceptional few who briefly mention a connection between Spencer and Conrad are Green; Hawkins, "Conrad"; Levine, Realistic Imagination; O'Hanlon; and Watt. And in his notes to Conrad's "Congo Diary" and Other Uncollected Pieces, Zdzislaw Najder con tends that Conrad's "agnosticism seems to have owed some thing to Spencer" (73)]

- John E. Saveson, who notes the novelist's "use of Spencerian terms and concepts" and maintains that "Conrad's earliest assumptions are 'scientific' in the sense that they are Spencerian" (22, 18); and Allan Hunter, who argues that "Spencer ex plains his own approach to sociology in . . . terms that are similar to Conrad's" and that the novelist demonstrates "a certain familiarity with particular works" by Spencer (104, 86; see Saveson 17-36; Hunter 86-91).

-  I seek to illuminate the ways in which the fiction appropriates and tests Spencer's influential "typology of civilization.

[type; 유형학]

- Positively, these fictions invoke Spencer's crucial distinction between "militant" and "industrial" societies and echo his perception that late-nine teenth-century British civilization is on a "course of re-barbarization." Negatively, they ultimately undermine Spencerian resolutions: Heart of Darkness expunges the difference between mili tant and industrial societies, showing that, in Eu rope's expansion into the Congo, the two proclivities are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive; and "An Outpost of Prog ress" parodies the Spencerian faith in the "be neficent necessity" of progress. Lord Jim (1900) also merits brief discussion here, not only because Conrad repeatedly pleaded that this novel be considered together with Heart of Darkness but because it provides many interesting alternatives to and modified examples of Conrad's intersec tion with Spencerian idea.

[5 He originally intended, pace Flaubert's Trois contes, to publish the short story "Jim: A Sketch" in a volume with "Heart of Darkness" and "Youth," maintaining that "the three tales, each being inspired by a similar moral idea," will make "a homogeneous book." Later, he writes that even the full-length Jim was "not. . . planned to stand alone. H of D was meant in my mind as a foil, and Youth was supposed to give the note" (2: 167, 231, 271).

-Eloise Knapp Hay:  "Heart of Darkness was a 'foil' for Lord Jim in the contrast it offered between the illusion of a man concerned with personal conduct and the illusion of a man obsessed by race superiority.

- Hay also notes that the Marlows of the two works are "dissimilar." While both will "lie" for their respective secret sharers (Kurtz and Jim), "the Marlow of Lord Jim be- lieves that even dangerous knowledge is worthy of public ex- amination, whereas the Marlow of Heart of Darkness believes the contrary: that dangerous knowledge must be suppressed.

- Ian Watt maintains that if Youth was Conrad's "Song of Innocence" and Heart of Darkness his "Song of Experience," then perhaps Lord Jim can be seen as "a dialogue between the two Marlows, with Jim as the voice of his earlier innocence, and Marlow confronting him with the disenchanted voice of later experience" (269). For alter- native positions on this issue, see Fleishman 107 and Winner 31.]

- I seek to portray the complex "di alogic" posture-at once receptive and critical, reinforcing and subversive-that Conrad's Congo fictions assume toward the story of civilization embodied in Spencerian sociology.

-  Gerald Graff, in a Bakhtinian moment, asserts "that no text is an island, that every work of literature is a re joinder in a conversation or dialogue that it pre supposes but may or may not mention explicitly" (10).

- we may view these fictions, which resolutely explore the relation between "civilization" and "jungle," as "rejoinders" to Spencer's typology of civilization.

[콘래드가 스펜서를 읽었다는 구체적인 증거는 없음]