{"id":87,"date":"2010-12-12T21:00:33","date_gmt":"2010-12-12T19:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=87"},"modified":"2010-12-12T21:00:33","modified_gmt":"2010-12-12T19:00:33","slug":"ideology-and-aesthetics-heart-of-darkness-once-more-conrads-and-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2010\/12\/12\/ideology-and-aesthetics-heart-of-darkness-once-more-conrads-and-others\/","title":{"rendered":"IDEOLOGY AND AESTHETICS (HEART OF DARKNESS<\/em> ONCE MORE, CONRAD\u2019S AND OTHERS)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\tI\u2019ve just gone through Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness<\/em> once more, this time to teach it almost simultaneously in my post-grad subject on \u201cThe Vietnam War\u201d for our MA, and in my under-grad subject on Victorian Literature. In the first case, I\u2019ve also focused, of course, on Coppola\u2019s Apocalypse Now!<\/em>, which seems to me a worse film every time I watch it because of its pretentiousness, although I\u2019ll accept that there\u2019s no better adaptation of Conrad\u2019s masterpiece. Odd, very odd for a writer so interested in making us see.<\/p>\n

\tAnyway, here I am this Sunday afternoon bracing myself for a few difficult sessions on Conrad\u2019s 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<\/em> 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\u2019s misadventure happens to a white man in colonial Africa. It is, thus, my duty \u2013how Victorian this sounds! \u2013 to integrate Chinua Achebe\u2019s bitter criticism of Conrad\u2019s racism and the subsequent reactions, for not doing this to focus just on the sheer beauty of the prose would be simply morally<\/em> wrong. <\/p>\n

Harold Bloom says in The Western Canon<\/em> (1995: 28) that \u201cIf 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.\u201d If that is so, then I\u2019m proudly<\/em> illiterate, as I believe in teaching students to detect everyone\u2019s ideology, including mine and Bloom\u2019s, a true monster of selfishness if there is one. Can there be anything more narcissistic than claiming that \u201cAll that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one\u2019s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one\u2019s confrontation with one\u2019s own mortality\u201d? 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.<\/p>\n

Mario Vargas Llosa, the last Nobel prize winner, has recreated in El sue\u00f1o del celta<\/em> (2010) \u2013which I haven\u2019t read yet but intend to read asap\u2013 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<\/em> to write his masterpiece and let\u2019s discuss only literary aesthetics… at your own moral risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve just gone through Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness once more, this time to teach it almost simultaneously in my post-grad subject on \u201cThe Vietnam War\u201d for our MA, and in my under-grad subject on Victorian Literature. In the first case, I\u2019ve also focused, of course, on Coppola\u2019s Apocalypse Now!, which seems to me a worse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,34,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heart-of-darkness","category-teaching-tools-and-rules","category-victorian-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}