Beyond Spencer: The Military-Industrial Complex in Heart of Darkness
51) Watt - "the greatest authors are rarely representative of the ideology of their period; they tend rather to expose its internal contradictions or the very partial nature of its capacity for dealing with the facts of experience" (147).
52) Conrad is both "Spencerian and anti-Spencerian," invoking Spencer's categories and absorbing his rubrics even if finally opposing his perceptions and undermining his conclusions.
- while Spencer decries the West's loss of ground in its realization of the industrial ideal, he never doubts that the militant-industrial distinction is a legitimate means of characterizing the development of civilization.
- Heart of Darkness, in contrast, ultimately subverts this distinction altogether, for the novella represents not the mutual exclusivity of militant and industrial tendencies but their mutual reinforcement in what might be called a "military-industrial complex."
[14. The Decline of the West Spen gler goes so far as to claim that "Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated" (36). ]
- By suggesting that commercial and trading mastery depends on brute military force and that "foreign trade and modern war have always been one and the same thing" (John Seely, qtd. in Coit 123), Heart of Darkness disarms the rhetoric of "imperialist civilization."
[스펜서가 두 사회를 이분법적으로 나누는데 반해, 콘래드는 경제적 * 정치적 동기에 유발된 사회의 유사성을 지적하면서 그런 이분법을 약화시킴.]
- Meaning accrues in the novella through the invocation and then the subversion of the militant-industrial distinction and other dualities. Conrad accomplishes this feat, as Hay points out, "through repeated reversals or inversions of normal patterns of imagery" (137)
[15. The case can be made that Heart of Darkness defuses the West's claim to superiority over the non-West by subverting the oppositions on which the West bases its hegemony: godly/ godforsaken, complex/simple, mind/body, language/gesture, logic/illogic, rational/irrational, good/evil, efficient/inefficient, order/chaos, sane/insane, day/night, light/dark, historic/prehistoric, culture/nature, and so forth.
- 구별을 없애는 예: the "merry dance of death and trade" in the image of a military-industrial complex (17)
- "Autocracy and War," an essay in which Mark Conroy correctly observes a "wedding of arms and trade" (81), Conrad charges that "industrialism and commercialism . . . stand ready, almost eager, to appeal to the sword as soon as the globe of the earth has shrunk beneath our growing numbers by another ell[길이의 단위] or so" and that "Il n'y a plus d'Europe-there is only an armed and trad ing continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for life and death, and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions" (107, 112).
- Not only do European trading and military posts dot the land, but expeditions devoted to "exploring" the terrain in fact "tear treasure out of" its bowels "with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe" (32-33).
- Even the Thames and Congo rivers, the one a waterway of "civilized commerce" and the other of "savage mystery" ("resembling an immense snake uncoiled" [ 12]), are conflated at the end of the novella, when the Thames itself seems to lead "to the uttermost ends of the earth . . . into the heart of an immense darkness"
[구별을 전복시키거나 지우려하고 있음] a military-industrial complex
- Watt : "the romantic, anarchic, and psychopathic energies of Kurtz find their ultimate sanction in Western industrial supremacy, for Kurtz really asserts his claims to 'the rightness of God' through his monopoly of firearms'.
- Kurtz's wealth and power, both cut from the whole cloth of his "method" and "immense plans," are linked symbiotically; but his technique for bettering commercial interests, which consists less of trading and barter than of raiding and murder, tends to go beyond the militant (an "unsound method") to the genocidal ("Exterminate all the brutes!").
[16 Avrom Fleishman rightly points out that "Conrad's African tales, even more than his Asian ones, demonstrate that the contact of Europeans and natives encourages the submerged barbarism of the superficially civilized whites to express itself by genocide. Not only are the natives stirred up by the rapacious policies of the imperialists, but the whites become more savage than the 'savages' " (90). ]
[이 주장은 바꿔 말하자면 문명인이 야만의 환경 속에서 야만인보다 더 야만인이 된다는 말이 될 수 있다. 아체베가 지적하는 것 중에는 이런 문제도 분명 있다.][새퍼의 글을 좀 더 정확하게 들여다보아야 하겠지만 "유럽 중심주의" 혹은 "백인 중심주의" 적인 것이 없지 않다는 느낌이다.]
- Heart of Darkness stands as a riposte to the Spencerian claim that nineteenth-century Britain is a "compromise between militancy and industrialism," suggesting instead that the two "antagonistic" tendencies collectively constitute an unmistakably civilized form of activity-one that becomes "an instrument of pure brute force" (Tessitore 3)