The Concepts of Modernism and Imperialism - Literature review Example

Despite any claims to the contrary, Marlowe indicates throughout his adventurous story Heart of Darkness that the claims of imperialism are just an excuse to plunder and steal. The company tries to blind outsiders with the light they’re supposedly bringing to the interior so that no one notices the exploitation occurring on the edges as the savages are brutally killed and the civilized men profit from their suffering. As Marlowe makes his way deeper and deeper into the Congo, these ideas are illustrated in the very first chapter. He sees the ‘savages’ misused and abused based upon the flimsy assertion of power the white men get because of their strangeness to the savages and through the use of their superior weaponry. This is blatantly done in the first camp and becomes more obvious as he moves deeper into the darkness. As Marlowe chugs up the river, he begins to find evidence of civilization driven out by the darkness of the jungle and begins to understand that the darkness of the jungle is really the light in the human soul. When he comes across the abandoned Russian trader’s cabin, the apparent hasty retreat in which the owner left behind a book, a rarity in the jungle, illustrates this attempt by the darkness to drive out the light offered them by the exterior men. This idea is further emphasized as Marlowe discovers that he cannot read the notes left in the margins by the then unknown owner of the book. By the time he finally reaches Kurtz, Marlowe finds he has reached the deepest part of the jungle as well as the deepest element of the human psyche that he ever thought to reach. Kurtz has become a savage in his own right, fully embracing the darkness of colonialism and turning the natives to his own advantage. The human skulls ringing Kurtz’s cabin suggest the level of his brutality brought about not by the practices of the natives themselves, but by the brutality of the invading force, the white men from the ‘civilized’ countries who have come to take control. In his book “The Wretched of the Earth,” author Franz Fanon describes Imperialism as it was seen from within the colonized nation. Within his narrative, he illustrates the intolerable conditions of life for the native peoples as they fall under the abject domination of the imperialist nation. He points out that it is necessary for Africa to decolonize if her people are ever to gain their equality among nations and their right to live as they see fit. In order to decolonize, the same means by which the territory was colonized must be adopted. In other words, since it required violence to colonize, it will take violence to de-colonize. “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon” (Fanon 35). This violence is justified because of the many crimes the colonizers have made against the people who were already in Africa when they came. “We should flatly refuse the situation to which the Western countries wish to condemn us. Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from our territories. For centuries the capitalists have behaved in the underdeveloped world like nothing more than war criminals. Deportations, massacres, forced labor, and slavery have been the main methods used by capitalism to increase its wealth, its gold or diamond reserves, and to establish its power” (Fanon 101). This statement makes it clear that to Fanon and his entire society, imperialism wasn’t simply a matter of official distinction, but something that reached deeper into the fiber of his nation, infecting all that it touched and would require a great deal of cleansing before things could return to almost normal. “To fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for the liberation of the nation, that material keystone which makes the building of a culture possible, There is no other fight for culture which can develop apart from the popular struggle” (Fanon 233). This sense that imperialism was a threat to the cultural system more than anything else is reinforced by the ideas of Samuel Huntington. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural” (Huntington 22). In exploring the evolution of society and culture, Huntington illustrates how the world is becoming increasingly homogenized within a fluid structure of civilization. “A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is define both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people” (Huntington 24). From a number of countries and regions, the world is now divided into broader yet fewer categories that will continue to clash along the boundaries. Huntington defines these boundaries as history, language, culture, tradition and religion” (Huntington 25). This clash has caused many individuals to return to their roots so to speak. Concepts of nationalism or culturalism have become stronger as a means of resisting the blending of cultures and losing identity. This helps to explain how writers such as Fanon and Conrad came to express themselves the way they did. Conrad harshly denounced imperialism and its effects, reacting against the brutality but also against the concept that these savages might one day be able to walk among his own people. Fanon adopts the language of the dominant culture in order to communicate his own rejection of it to a wider audience, asserting and rejecting the effects of imperialism at the same time. Individual soldier’s identities were profoundly changed by their experiences in World War I. In Act III, Eksteins says, “The four days we were in the trenches has turned me upside down. No man can experience such things and come out the same … I feel crushed, diminished. Diminished in what sense? As a social and moral being” (Eksteins III). In every possible way, soldiers were disillusioned with life. The purpose of the war on all fronts collapsed in the face of real and immediate human drama. Those who had not seen these realities in life remained attached to the frivolous elements of an emerging material culture, but the soldiers felt alienated and divorced from this society. They became anti-social, didn’t bother to join veteran’s organizations, stopped participating in social activities, became mentally unstable in some cases and often considered themselves as living within solitary prisons of the soul. They understood that they had been in the crucial center of the activity of the war and thus right where life was happening, yet they felt empty and devoid of meaning. They ended up rejected all that they were told was real, the political and perceptual world, and instead embraced fantasy and dream. Kovaly indicates much of the same sentiment regarding the end of the war as a sense of disillusionment and emptiness overtook her. “The war ended the way a passage through a tunnel ends. From far away you could see the light ahead, a gleam that kept growing, and its brilliance seemed ever more dazzling to you huddled there in the dark the longer it took to reach it. But when at last the train burst out into the glorious sunshine, all you saw was a wasteland full of weeds and stones, and a heap of garbage” (Kovaly 39). This imagery captures the sense that everyone had a hope and a knowledge that the war was about to end and that the Germans were running, but the discovery of freedom at the other side of war was insufficient to make up for all the heartache and loss they had experienced. Whether soldier or civilian or concentration camp escapee, the pervading emotion following the end of the war was a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness, something lost. “Something very important and precious had been killed by it or, perhaps, it had just died of horror, of starvation or simply of disgust – who knows? We tried to bury it quickly, the earth settled over it, and we turned our back on it impatiently” (Kovaly 45). While they attempted to move on to the new life that awaited them post-war, Kovaly indicates that the world had changed in a profound new way. Friends were no longer friends, identities were lost with heirlooms and other belongings and yet the survivors were willing to take pleasure in the simple fact of being alive. All of these seemingly conflicting emotions and attitudes fed into the concepts of the modern movement that was then overtaking the world. The concepts of Modernism are broadly defined as the group of studies investigating the social processes that organize the society we live in while recognizing that this world is in a constant state of flux. Modernist ideas tend to insist that everything can be classified into sharply defined categories and definitions. The main question of modernism was the search for the universal truths of the universe, which was believed to be achievable by breaking down elements into smaller elements. Through this process, the world was fragmented into several parts. Clean lines and distinct boundaries were sought as a means of discovering these universal truths. The driving force behind this search was to canonize the discovered universal truths as a means of distilling messages into communications that would be applicable to all cultures, individuals and time periods. The foundation upon which the theory rested was economic, political and scientific rationalization. Economic rationalization refers to the process of harnessing the forces of nature within the control of intellectual processes through greater understanding. Political rationalization refers to a similar control of the governing bodies and value systems to bring about a ‘correct’ society. Scientific rationalization held that there was an objective truth that could be discovered through the application of the scientific method. I’m sorry, this is as far as I’m going to get. I can no longer focus on the screen to read the last article. You will need to add this connection yourself. Read More