Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness and William Goldings Lord of the Flies - Assignment Example

Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies Based on Edward Said Introduction Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies are two fictional stories that both express the novelists’ view of ‘unusual’ places and the means colonised people employ to represent their identity and history. As argued by Edward Said (Gardiner et al. 2011, p. 55): Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonised people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history. The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future--- these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative. This paper compares and contrasts the Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies in relation to the aforementioned statemented of Said. “Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world” Several critics claim that Conrad had very insufficient knowledge of the Congo wherein he travelled. Nevertheless, if an unbiased interpretation of a foreign culture is practically unlikely, by what criteria of cultural relativism or cross-cultural analysis are the critics evaluating the Heart of Darkness? A prominent anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, commented that “it becomes profoundly unclear how individuals enclosed in one culture are able to penetrate the thought of individuals enclosed in another” (Griffith 1995, p. 15).This dilemma of cultural relativism becomes much more relevant to Said’s analysis in the sense that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is generally viewed to be at the core of this problem. As explained by Leo Gurko (Griffith 1995, p. 15): He [Conrad] was the outside man looking in, longing to participate in life but obscurely inhibited… He keenly understood the plight of the foreigner seeking roots in an adopted country and of the exile in the process of finding a new home. Virtually all his characters are foreigners and exiles… The fact of their being outsiders aggravates the difficulties under which they labor. In essence, Heart of Darkness represents Africa as the exact opposite of civilisation, a region where human beings’ praised rationality and sophistification are ultimately ridiculed by victorious savagery. Conrad’s novel tells the story of the frightening voyage of a white man into the interior of the Dark Continent—Africa. On the ship named Nellie, Marlow narrates his expedition into Africa to his three fellow travellers. The portrayal of the African people in the novel is unpleasant, at least to a knowledgeable and aware African reader. These ‘dark’ people are called and considered ‘savages’. As recounted by the narrator about Africa and its people (Bloom 2009, p. 75): “It [Africa] was unearthly and the men [Africans] were – no, they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar”. Such subject of displacement is quite a widespread theme in modernist literature. This is somewhat true in Conrad’s work. The feeling of displacement of Conrad is a manifestation of his own dilemma as a cultural outcast (Said 1994). The notion of madness as an outcome of cultural displacement reflects a widespread issue in Conrad’s work; Kurtz exists in disorientated condition which is a form of madness (Aschroft et al. 2006). In selecting Africa as the setting of the Heart of Darkness, Conrad studied several anthropologists and explorers who had previously travelled Africa. The paradox inherent at this point is that the ‘heart of darkness’ would not, indeed had been ‘dark’ in the least (Griffith 1995, p. 20). However, the darkness at this point is also a reliable representation for the anthropological uncertainties apparent in Conrad’s novel. Anthropologists and explorers had very little knowledge of Africa; and, possibly more truthfully than others of the same period, Marlow always discloses his poor knowledge of Africa. In truth, the connection to Africa is ironic— identified and still strange or mysterious; recognized and still misjudged; explored and still enigmatic. Almost three decades prior to the release of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, missionaries had talked about Africa in such primitive allusions as “distinguished from every country under heaven by its misery and degradation” (Griffith 1995, p. 21). Decades after numerous of these antecedents to Conrad’s depiction of Africa have been thrown into oblivion, Marlow’s voyage stays widely known, maybe even tautologically, in fictional narratives on ‘primitiveness’ (Conrad 1975, p. 96): We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness (…) We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet (…) The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us, who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled. The core of primitivism in the novel of Conrad is, virtually unavoidably it appears, lies in Heart of Darkness. The issue is the reason the Heart of Darkness becomes very significant in the cultural lore of European intrusion in Africa. Maybe, partly, the answer can be found in the talent of Conrad to understand the complicated principle of ‘cultural hermeneutics’, or the field that focuses on how one acquires understanding or awareness of other cultures (Stape 1996). As stated by several critics, Marlow, similar to current ethnologists and travellers, creates a bizarre or hallucinatory instead of a factual Africa (Griffith 1995, p. 24): All this is before Marlow and is the ‘objective substance’ of his graphically told story, but what he sees (…) belongs not to history but to fantasy, to the sensational world of promiscuity, idolatry, satanic rites and human sacrifices unveiled in nineteenth-century travellers’ tales as the essence of an Africa without law or social restraint, a representation that was embroidered into colonial romances and charted by an ethnography still innocent of a discipline’s necessary rules of evidence. Without a doubt, Marlow’s image of the Dark Continent, similar to Conrad, relied on the European misinterpretations of African cultures. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies resembles Conrad’s portrayal of the cultural mysteries of Africa in the Heart of Darkness. Even though indirect, Golding initiates a consolidation of the cultural setting and literature. Such reading re-analyses past critical frameworks that have, mostly, focused on the perpetual themes of this narrative about a group of English lads, abandoned on an island in the South Pacific after World War III, and their plunge into habitual primitiveness and barbarism. As majority of critics argue, Golding’s characters imitate those in Coral Island of R.M. Ballantyne. The youngsters of Ballantyne express cultural views of imperial domination and equally the ‘lowliness’ of the ‘savages’, the aboriginal people dreaded for its inhuman behaviour (Bloom 2010, p. 12). For Ballantyne’s youngsters, savage and malevolent behavior is external to them, and the indication is that colonialism and imperialism is beneficial, that the ‘inferior’ or ‘primitive’ cultures can be ‘enlightened’ and ‘civilised’ by the cultured West (Bloom 2010, p. 12). In view of the entire location of Lord of the Flies, Golding seems to hold the imperial exploration ideology in his mind. John MacKenzie warns the reader about the bigger implication of this ideology (Crawford 2002, p. 55): Africans swiftly became the human substitute for the usual animal prey. Baden-Powell constantly stressed that the scouting and stalking techniques of the Hunt could immediately be transferred to human quarry in times of war. Hunting was also… a preparation for the violence and brutalities of war. By brutalising themselves in the blood of the chase, the military prepared themselves for an easy adjustment to human warfare, particularly in an age so strongly conditioned by social Darwinian ideas on race. In the novel, Golding’s interpretation of British imperialism, the history of proto-fascism is compellingly represented by the English youngsters’ Nazification: “Shorts, shirts, and different garments they carried in their hands: but each boy wore a square black cap with a silver badge in it. Their bodies, from throat to ankle, were hidden by black cloaks which bore a long silver cross on the left breast and each neck was finished off with a hambone frill” (Golding 1983, p. 18). Such descriptions are the foundation of the novel’s description of the ‘strangeness’ of other cultures. Golding evaluated civilisation against the ‘primitiveness’ of some cultures, especially those that are unknown to the West. The ‘strange’ place where the English schoolboys were deserted serves an important part in the story. The youngsters are mainly marooned on a desolate tropical island, seemingly in the Pacific. It is a landscape which is totally unknown to the boys, and after preliminary boyish interest and curiosity the forbidding truth of a life without the control and guidance of grownups in a mysterious, intimidating world starts to dawn on them. The island is characterised by impenetrable vegetation and dense wilderness with abundant food available. Most of the narrative focuses on the white beach at the island’s lagoon: “… the white surf flinked on a coral reef, and beyond that the open sea was dark blue. Within the irregular arc of the lagoon was still as a mountain lake…” (Golding 1983, p. 8). In their preliminary survey of the island, the lads acquired an accurate knowledge of the geographical environment by hiking to the peak of a mountain. The boys are at first thrilled about being in an island which definitely is a mainstay in their adventure stories. Gradually, though, the place starts to divide them and without the guidance of adults plunge them into primitive conditions. The need to hunt, the scorching heat, the desolation, and the failure to understand what appear like supernatural events all began to adversely affect the previously ‘civilised’ and ‘cultured’ English schoolboys (Haldar 2006). Golding has selected an appropriate place for a story which highlights and exposes the savage nature of human beings. For Golding, the widespread and leading cultural ideas seen in the narratives of Ballantyne confirm the manifestation of wickedness in outside objects, or humans. However, Golding argues that the evil or wickedness that human beings dread, and therefore try to crush, is inside the ‘civilised’ British individual (Reiff 2009). Significantly, Golding seems to have a particular connection in mind regarding a wickedness that is not crushed or defeated by British civilisation, yet is, basically, a possibility that accompanies it. He links teenage English boys belonging to the upper class, fascism, and the imperial exploration principle. Hence, whilst in Germany fascism in fact developed, whereas in Britain it did not, there is still the likelihood that the British ideology could simply reverse to fascism, like what happened on the island, because elite education and exploration principle share much similarity with fascism (Aschroft et al. 2007). In Golding’s novel, the island’s realm is captured from the point of view of the English lads. At first, they seem to be versatile, exceptional civilised youths. Yet their fixation with survival and natural occurrences immediately shifts into an obsession with the bizarre and the mysterious. They confront supernatural phenomena in a series of paranormal occurrences. Suspicious and frightened, the boys are exposed to supernatural occurrences. Even though initially it is just the ‘littluns’ that seem troubled by this terror, the circle broadens until everyone on the island accepted the ‘Beast’ as true. The ‘littluns’ are troubled by bad dreams. And alongside the escalating sense of oddity and menace, the island itself becomes deceptive and dangerous (Golding 1983, p. 57): Strange things happened at midday. The glittering sea rose up, moving apart in planes of blatant impossibility; the coral reef and the few, stunted palms that clung to the more elevated parts would float up into the sky, would quiver, be plucked apart, run like raindrops on a wire or be repeated as in an odd succession of mirrors. Sometimes land loomed where there was no land and flicked out like a bubble as the children watched. But this bizarre evolution of the natural matter of the coral reef is logically interpreted by Piggy as a delusion. Yet, such is the widespread doubt at the moment of what is true and untrue that the arrival of darkness is feared. This differentiates Golding from Conrad: Golding believes that external forces, like primitiveness, are not the cause of human savagery; instead he believes that every human being has natural potential to become evil. “They [stories] become the method colonised people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history” It would be easy to conclude that Heart of Darkness is only a realist account of the various levels of Western identity and history hidden in imperialism. The true histories of the story of the imperialist mission are rampant in Conrad’s work. Conrad highlighted the value of creating anti-imperialist sentiments in a specific, personal, and culturally-based setting—a course of action which requires exposure to foreign lands so as to investigate, examine, negotiate, and reconstruct ideas about identity and history (Said 1994). Heart of Darkness shows the twofold issue, the problems of ‘otherness’ and ‘foreign’ in opposition to a sense of national or individual identity, duty, and history. Marlow’s dual allegiance to his principled ideology and to his country, expressed by geographical icons of boundaries, maps, and national identity related to an unnamed presence of fatal danger. Said argues that it is “no paradox that Conrad was both imperialist and anti-imperialist” (Collits 2006, p. 105). Said (1994) mentions in Culture and Imperialism the strong points of Conrad as an anti-imperialist author. A specific strong point is the manner Conrad’s work puts into perspective and demonstrates the futility, ferocity, and eventuality of colonialism. One more strong point that Said observes is how Conrad “permits his later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies, even if, for his own part, he had little notion of what that Africa might be” (O’Hara 2007, p. 30). However, in spite of the broadminded liberal tendencies of Conrad, he is finally constrained by his deep-seated inner Eurocentric views. Unfortunately, Conrad creates work, like the Heart of Darkness, as an individual whose Western beliefs of cultures outside the Western world is profoundly embedded as to remove or prevent him from understanding correctly other cultural identities and histories (Said 1994). Conrad is confined to the belief that the world is completely governed by the West, wherein every resistance to the West simply verifies the malevolent power of the West. Conrad is blind to the fact that there is a way out of this harsh tautology. Said observes the Eurocentric attitude of Conrad and, hence, his capacity and his predisposition to propagate colonialist debate or treatise. Said also argues that “as a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them” (Moore 2004, p. 261). The liberal anti-imperialism of Conrad, for that reason, does not counteract his Eurocentric beliefs or invalidate the colonial and imperial components embedded in the novel. Thus, as argued by Achebe, the form of liberalism Conrad embraces and represents “almost always managed to sidestep the ultimate question of equality between white people and black people” (Hamner 1990, p. 124). The avoidance of this issue in the domain of the narrative and, possibly, in the readers’ minds is a perpetuation of factual and metaphorical brutality. Moreover, Achebe observes that the image of Africa espoused by Conrad “as setting and backdrop… eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity” (Stape 1996, p. 53). In spite of its anti-imperialist strong points, therefore, Conrad’s novel has the capacity to keep on dehumanising “a section of mankind that has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and in many places today” (Moore 2004, p. 256). Taking into consideration these observations, the image of Africans and Africa in the Heart of Darkness should be interpreted with operational opposition. Conrad’s novel mainly represents Africa, specifically Congo, with respect to their physical and bodily aspects. A major depiction of Africans in the story is the portrayal of the Congolese as symbols of ‘primitiveness’. The initial acknowledgment of this representation is how the Congolese wilderness is provided with a human face all over the narrative (Ray 2006): “a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart” (Conrad 1975, p. 88) and “the face of the forest was gloomy” (Conrad 1975, p. 119). In such depictions, the wild is associated with concepts of gloom, misery, death, and enigma, situating it as not just the adversary, but the place of death as well for those who go into it. In contrast, those who represent it are regarded ‘dead in the centre’ (Orr & Billy 1999, p. 73) or existing without life and inhumanly. In essence, Conrad used the Heart of Darkness to express his beliefs, ideas, and attitudes toward ‘other’ cultures he perceives to be ‘strange’ and ‘mysterious’, like Africa. However, even though this is the case, his novel can be used by the African people to assert or fight for their colonial identity and history. They can use this novel to show the world how they were marginalised and belittled in human history, and that they should eventually take their rightful place as a ‘civilised’ race and nation of their own criteria. On the contrary, the whimsical or bizarre components in Lord of the Flies work alongside the carnival—they merge to unsettle the reader and undermine the prevailing cultural ideas of the dominance of civilised British humanity. These are the form of beliefs that sustained the self-satisfaction and self-righteousness of England, and in fact other Allied countries, specifically, that the cruelties inflicted by the Nazis were a wholly German occurrence (Carey 2010). Under the bizarre perspective, it is the split from possible paranormal interpretation to the eerie and frightening truth of natural reason that unsettles the readers—that the Beast is a human being, British, and Nazi. Golding here, unlike Conrad, is presenting the identity and history of not the ‘inferior’ cultures, but the ‘superior’ ones (Reiff 2009). Rather than blaming or pointing to external objects and mystical creatures, the readers are faced with the truth of human ferocity or savagery. In truth, the supernatural questions the post-war ‘truth’ of the English society. The transition from the bizarre to the eerie heightens carnivalesque components in the novel that metaphorically undermine, reverse, the image of cultured, civilised, structured, and controlled English identity (Carey 2010). All in all, these components are the systems by which Lord of the Flies disrupts. However, such is the internal permanence of the story—its reliance on thrill, suspense, or reluctance of interpretation—that readers cannot go through the novel and feel the strange surprise it provokes a second time (Bloom 2010). In fact, the absolute bizarre holds something ‘momentary’, not as a category, but as a component. Eventually, the shock effect of the wicked, sinful aspect of not only human behaviour but the actions of British lads is what is unsettling about Golding’s story. The confirmation of the children as English subjects is not unnecessary to the story’s essence. It is crucial to the story’s moral examination and questioning of the English identity and history (Crawford 2002). One of the most effective fantastic components in the novel is the pig, which the author employs allegorically to undermine prevailing racial ideals, particularly towards the Jewish nation, and, generally, towards those people regarded foreign or ‘outsiders’ to any population. This has disturbing importance to the inhumane acts perpetrated against the Jews in the Second World War, but has been missed by the detractors of Golding who have not read Golding’s fusion of the human and the pig, and the racial importance of devouring pig meat during celebrations (Bloom 2010). This connection between pig meat and the Jewish people is strengthened by Golding’s naming of the story Lord of the Flies. Allon White explained that the devouring of pig flesh during celebrations is an anti-Semitic tradition. It is an insult to the Jewish people. White argued that “meat, especially, pig meat, was of course the symbolic centre of carnival” (Bloom 2010, p. 77). The fact that the pig turns into a human being and a human transforming into a pig in the wild, hysterical depravity of Jack and his authoritarian system is crucial. The tailing of the human hunt and the pig hunt, culminating with the demise of Piggy and Simon, represents the connection between the pig metaphor and the annihilation of those regarded ‘outcasts’, ‘foreign’, or ‘others’. Virginia Tiger interprets that “Piggy is killed… because he is an alien, a pseudo-species” (Reiff 2009, p. 82). Piggy was created by Golding—a character that resembles Jews: “There had grown tacitly among the biguns the opinion that Piggy was an outsider, not only by accent, which did not matter, but by fat, and ass-mar, and specs, and a certain disinclination for manual labour” (Golding 1983, p. 64). The character of Piggy, basically, resembles Jewish scholars, with his physical weakness and unusual accent. Essentially, Golding uses the imperial practice of pig sticking to show a connection between English fascism and imperialism (Reiff 2009). Golding presents a dystopian image of carnival that resides in the racially prejudiced, brutal, and vicious ridge that has occupied its position in the historical development of crowd dynamics during celebrations or festivities. The dystopian symbolism of Golding “incorporates noncelebratory carnival decrowning, where a king figure is parodied and derided as the played-out subversion of hierarchical society” (Crawford 2002, p. 67). Golding, in essence, exposed the ‘true’ English identity through a caustic satire. Conclusion Edward Said’s assertion that “stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonised people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history” is clearly proven by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Both Conrad and Golding used their narratives to convey their ideas and views of ‘other’ cultures, cultures that they believe are ‘strange’ or ‘bizarre’. In the case of Conrad, he described Africa as a place inhabited by ‘dark’ and ‘primitive’ people. His images of Africa were somewhat unfounded, as Said attested. Conrad was Eurocentric, and he proved this in his novel. On the other hand, Golding described an island in the Southern Pacific as desolated and supernatural. In this island, many inexplicable events happen which make a human being ‘evil’. Like Conrad, Golding negatively portrayed a place outside of the West. However, Conrad and Golding diverged in the issue of colonial identity and history. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness represented not the identity and history of the so-called ‘inferior’ cultures, but those of the ‘superior’ ones. He used his story to promote the dominance of the Western culture, identity, and history. In contrast, Golding showed how such superiority can be crushed by external forces, like desolation and absence of adult supervision, just like what happened to the English schoolboys. For Golding, there is no such thing as ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ identity, history, and culture, only ‘evil’ that lies dormant in the heart of every human soul. References Aschroft, B. et al (eds) (2006) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Ashcroft, B. et al (2007) Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Bloom, H (2009) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. New York: Infobase Publishing. Bloom, H (2010) William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. New York: Infobase Publishing. Carey, J (2010) William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies. New York: Simon & Schuster. Collits, T (2006) Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire. London: Routledge. Conrad, J (1975) Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin Classics. Crawford, P (2002) Politics and History in William Golding: The World Turned Upside Down. Missouri: University of Missouri Press. Gardiner, M. et al (2011) Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Golding, W (1983) Lord of the Flies. London: Penguin. Griffith, J (1995) Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma: Bewildered Traveller. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Haldar, S (2006) William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. New York: Atlantic Publishers. Hamner, R (1990) Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives. Washington, DC: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Moore, G (2004) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Casebook. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. O’Hara, K (2007) Joseph Conrad Today. New York: Imprint Academic. Orr, T & Billy, T (1999) A Joseph Conrad Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Ray, M (2006) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. New York: Atlantic Publishers. Reiff, R (2009) William Golding: Lord of the Flies. New York: Marshall Cavendish. Said, E (1994) Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Stape, J (1996) Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Read More