ACL 3016 |
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Lecture 1 by Ian Syson |
Case
in point It has been established in most institutions where eng lit is taught as one of the central texts Francis Ford Coppola thought enough of the novel to base his movie Apocalypse Now on the novel. Set at the turn of the 19c It deals with some of the big themes of the modern period:
In it the character Marlow guides a boat up the Congo river to an outpost where ivory is collected and in so doing observes the corruption and decay of humanity embodied in the figure of Kurtz. Strictly speaking this is not the story of the book. The basic plot is: some men in a boat miss the tide and one of them tells a story to fill in time. The action of the novel takes place on the Thames. The African story in Heart of Darkness is framed within this action. I'll get back to why this is so important in a while. During Marlow's trip up the river he finds out the steamer on which he was to have travelled to meet Kurtz has been sunk.
The events of these 'some months' are compressed into the following ten or so pages. Significantly, almost no discussion is made of the actual mechanics of how the steamer might have been raised—apart from the obsessive fuss made about the rivets. While Marlow's listeners are told, conspiratorially, that he is really more in sympathy with the workers, Marlow is actually quite ignorant of work. He admits this much to his audience twice. OK, one might argue that the character Marlow wasn't all that interested in representing human labour. His interests were elsewhere. Perhaps in the more lofty metaphysical aspects of being human. Indeed, this is true; but it also happens to be an indictment of Marlow,
Perhaps Conrad was not interested in representing labour because he was not able to. Perhaps he was not able to because he was not interested in learning about labour as an activity worthy of poetic representation. If this seems to be making a fuss about nothing then maybe we should think about the context in which Marlow is telling his story. Who are the listeners? What is their occupation? It seems to me very strange that a sailor telling a story to a bunch of sailors cannot be bothered elaborating the story of the refloating of the steamer. It betrays a particular assumption about audience. Marlow makes assumptions about his audience, what they are interested in hearing about, and what are the proper events to be narrated. Work, clearly, is not a proper event. And while it is often dangerous to draw too close a relation between an author and his or her characters, I think that Marlow's assumptions about his audience are also Conrad's. This analysis is one that can be applied to many of the Great Works of English literature. When we look towards the Great Works we can discern something of a paradox: the Great Works have very little to say about work. Sons and Lovers, set in an English mining village, contains little about the mechanics of mining, unlike say Emile Zola's Germinal or the more recent Australian example, Betty Collins' The Copper Crucible.
Similarly, Jean Devanny's Sugar Heaven represents work closely at a number of points:
Yet the nitty-gritty of work is almost universally absent in the valued works of English Literature. Certainly we get occasional representations —as in the gravedigger in Hamlet or Wordsworth's solitary reaper —but even this labour is invariably portrayed badly, fleetingly or as an incidental or marginal activity—all this despite the fact that productive labour is the most central activity in human survival and advancement. To be fair, while many of the great works ignore work, there are some whose ignorance is a complex factor. I am thinking here of works like James Joyce's Ulysses. While work is not directly represented in Ulysses its traces, sounds and effects often are. The book is suffused with the white noise of work. But we are more interested in this unit in seeing and hearing the working class with more clarity than this hiss of off-stage noise.
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