I’ve just gone through Conrad’s Heart of Darkness once more, this time to teach it almost simultaneously in my post-grad subject on “The Vietnam War” for our MA, and in my under-grad subject on Victorian Literature. In the first case, I’ve also focused, of course, on Coppola’s Apocalypse Now!, which seems to me a worse film every time I watch it because of its pretentiousness, although I’ll accept that there’s no better adaptation of Conrad’s masterpiece. Odd, very odd for a writer so interested in making us see.
Anyway, here I am this Sunday afternoon bracing myself for a few difficult sessions on Conrad’s novella, not only because the text is (brilliantly) difficult but also because there is no way one can escape the dilemma aesthetics vs. ideology when teaching it. I already had a very complicated taste of this while teaching The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when a couple of (very good) students showed their discomfort with my queer reading, only to beam at my strict aesthetic reading, which I gave in less than comfort. One can always speculate whether Jekyll was imagined as secretly gay or not but NOTHING can hide the fact that Marlow’s misadventure happens to a white man in colonial Africa. It is, thus, my duty –how Victorian this sounds! – to integrate Chinua Achebe’s bitter criticism of Conrad’s racism and the subsequent reactions, for not doing this to focus just on the sheer beauty of the prose would be simply morally wrong.
Harold Bloom says in The Western Canon (1995: 28) that “If we read the Western canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgement, to read at all.” If that is so, then I’m proudly illiterate, as I believe in teaching students to detect everyone’s ideology, including mine and Bloom’s, a true monster of selfishness if there is one. Can there be anything more narcissistic than claiming that “All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality”? We live as we dream… alone, yes, as Conrad wrote, but we are also social, historical and cultural creatures, that is, the children of a particular ideology, as Conrad knew very well, whether he liked it or not.
Mario Vargas Llosa, the last Nobel prize winner, has recreated in El sueño del celta (2010) –which I haven’t read yet but intend to read asap– the astonishing story of the man who inspired Conrad, pro-human rights activist Roger Casement, a hero turned villain as British public opinion about his deeds changed. Vargas Llosa, certainly no leftie, is a clear example of the successful mixture of aesthetics and ideology, for which, precisely, he has impressed the Swedes (and, yes, annoyed many others). Read his novel ignoring why Casement fought, what King Leopold’s Congo was about and why Conrad had to write his masterpiece and let’s discuss only literary aesthetics… at your own moral risk.