Brian W. Shaffer - "Rebarbarizing Civilization"(3)

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Spencer's "Rebarbarized" Civilization in Heart of Darkness

50)  Civilization and Progress, John Beattie Crozi :

- whether Spencer's theory of evolution is "to be regarded as true or false, will depend not so much on how far it will explain the illusory phenomena of the past, as [on] how far it will explain the phenomena that lie amongst us in the present" (40)

[스펜서의 진화론이 현재의 현상을 얼마나 잘 설명해 줄 수 있는가가 관건]
 -  For Heart of Darkness suggests implicitly what Spencer states explicitly of the Europe, and more particularly the Britain, of his time: that it is undergoing a "process of re barbarization" (Facts 173).

- 한나 아렌트 : 스펜서 - "the first philosopher of evolution" (178).

-   the first philosopher of "devolution: he sees industrial Europe, at the end of the century, as sliding back into militancy.

[영국이 군국주의화. 야만화되고 있음을 주장.]

-  he envisions militancy, imperialism, and slavery as interrelated aspects of a general retrogression accompanying rebarbarization (Facts 159, 196).

- Spencer writes of his loathing for "that conception of social progress which presents as its aim, increase of population, growth of wealth, spread of commerce." "Increase in the swarms of people whose existence is subordinated to ma erial development," he continues, "is rather to be lamented than to be rejoiced over" (Facts 7).

- [콘래드의 직접 체험과는 별도로] his insight into European decadence is deepened and qualified by Spencer's theory of a rebarbarized civilization-a theory that anticipates Oswald Spengler.

51) Spencer:  Social Statics, originally published in 1850 and revised in 1892

while the mere propensity to thieve, commonly known under some grandiloquent alias, has been the real prompter of colonizing invasions, from those of Cortez and Pizarro downwards, the ostensible purpose of them has been either the spread of religion or the extension of commerce. (190)

(스펜서의 지적에는 제국주의를 비판하는 그런 면도 분명히 있다는 것을 보여주는 구체적인 증거. 콘래드의 사고에 스펜서가 어느 정도는 영향을 끼치고 있음이 드러난다.)

- Conrad's novella also uses the word trade as a euphemism for what is actually raiding and "grubbing" and emphasizes the connections among enslavement, imperialism, and militancy.

- Kurtz's possessiveness toward everything around him ("my ivory, my station, my river" [49]), for example, reflects the other Europeans' self-serving crimes in the name, as Spencer would say, of the "spread of religion or the extension of commerce" (Social Statics 190)

- Pilgrims : instead of representing only native Africans as militant, Heart of Darkness also depicts weapon-toting European "pilgrims" as warlike, "bloodthirsty" savages. Carrying the "absurd long staves" of the Africans (26), gratuitously "squirting lead into [the] bush" (46), and resembling "mean and greedy phantoms" (67) who mercilessly scapegoat and beat innocent victims in an "imbecile rapacity" for ivory (26), these Europeans represent imperialism and slavery as two sides of the same coin-as indicative of industrial Europe's regres sion toward militancy.

[제국주의와 노예제도가 (같은) 동전의 양면이라는 표현 잘 기억해 둘 것.]

- It is in the metaphorical linking of savagery and animal life, however, that Heart of Darkness most forcefully refigures Spencer's caveat(예고, 경고) about rebarbarization.

- Just as Spencer observes that "the forces at work exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in the way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants" (Social Statics 238), so Kurtz in Heart of Darkness-after native Af ricans have been likened to "creatures," "brutes," hyenas, "bees," dogs, and "ants"-concludes his peroration for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs with the post scriptum "Exterminate all the brutes!."

- 말로 : 흑인 개개인 -  of "no more account" to Europeans than is "a grain of sand in a black Sahara.

[13. Unsurprisingly, both Spencer and Conrad have been taken to task for depicting the "primitive" mind in stereotypical terms (see, e.g., Dewey; Street 159-60). Both Spencer, in Principles of Sociology, and Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, attempt to defuse such criticism. Spencer, for example, writes that "the words 'civilised' and 'savage' must have given to them meanings differing greatly from those which are current. That broad contrast usually drawn wholly to the advantage of the men who form large nations, and to the disadvantage of the men who form simple groups, a better knowledge obliges us profoundly to qualify" (2: 233). And Marlow suggests that we simply hate and fear what we do not understand, observing that in our "civilized" view of "the jungle," "the incompre hensible . . . is also detestable" (10).]

- [ A look at Lord Jim is instructive too, for we are witness there to the suggestion that the "lies of our civilisation" (172) render non-Westerners brutes (206), "hyaenas" (146), and "cattle" (10, 245). And what better emblem of this rebarbarization than the exploits of Gentleman Brown (who is every bit the "beetle" to Jim's "butterfly")? Like Kurtz (and Jim), Brown cannot succeed in Europe, and so he brings his "vulgar and greedy brutes" to Patusan (214). "Malicious," "lawless," "savage," and "revengeful," this "hollow sham" of a "buccaneer" and "ruffian," who ultimately proves to be Jim's nemesis, is little more than a "common robber" who brings "terror" to every situation in which he finds himself. one of the novel's most "civilized" characters, he is also, paradoxically, the most barbaric.]