Читать книгу Dealing with Evils. - Annie Gagiano - Страница 6

When the other speaks, he or she becomes another subject,which must be consciously registered as a problem by the imperial or metropolitan subject.

– Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism”

If I may add one more generalisation to those that have been broadly accepted concerning the European Enlightenment, it would be this: that the pronouncements on colonised peoples and phenotypes made by the most authoritative thinkers of the Aufklärung are characterised by an almost uniformly complacent, confident solemnity. Perhaps such authoritative racial arrogance is the inevitable expression of European internal consolidation and external expansionism. To illustrate the point, here are some examples:

The superabundance of the iron particles, which are present in all human blood, and which are precipitated in the reticular substance through evaporation of the acids of phosphorus (which makes all Negroes stink) cause the blackness that shines through the superficial skin; and the high iron content of the blood seems also necessary in order to forestall a slackening of all parts. The oil of the skin which weakens the nutrient mucus that is requisite for hair growth, has permitted hardly even the production of a woolly covering for the head. Besides all this, damp heat promotes strong growth in animals in general; in short, the Negro is produced, well suited to his climate; that is, strong, fleshy, supple, but in the midst of the bountiful provision of this motherland lazy, soft and dawdling. (Kant 22)

Africa is in general a closed land, and it maintains this fundamental character. It is characteristic of the blacks that their consciousness has not yet even arrived at the intuition of any objectivity, as for example, of God or the law, in which humanity relates to the world and intuits its essence [. . .] He [the black person] is a human being in the rough. [. . .]

Africa [. . .] does not properly have a history. (Hegel; qtd. in Dussel, Invention 22)

By a dialectic which is appropriate for surpassing itself, in the first place, [European] society is driven to look beyond itself to new consumers. Therefore it seeks its means of subsistence among other people which are inferior to it with respect to the resources which it has in excess, such as those of industry. This expansion of relations also makes possible that colonization to which, under systematic or sporadic form, a fully established civil society is impelled. Colonization permits it that one part of its population, located on the new territory, returns to the principle of family property and, at the same time, procures for itself a new possibility and field of labor. (Hegel; qtd. in Dussel, Invention 25)

Against the absolute right of that people who actually are the carriers of the world Spirit, the spirit of other peoples has no other right (rechtlos). (Hegel; qtd. in Dussel, Invention 24)

I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no science, On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TARTARS have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are NEGROE slaves dispersed all over EUROPE of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education, will startup amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In JAMAICA indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly. (Hume 252 n.)

The link between this powerful, totalising discourse (illustrated in the above examples) and the need to validate the great surges of colonisation that emanated from Europe has often been pointed out – indeed, a persuasive reading of Enlightenment thought as perhaps primarily if unconsciously a mode of validation of European expansionism has gained considerable currency, as may be illustrated in more contemporary pronouncements such as the following:

Truth is, in other words, a social relation (like power, ownership or freedom): an aspect of a hierarchy built of superiority-inferiority units; more precisely, an aspect of the hegemonic form of domination or of a bid for domination-through-hegemony. Modernity was, from its inception, such a form and such a bid. The part of the world that adopted modern civilization as its structural principle and constitutional value was bent on dominating the rest of the world by dissolving its alterity and assimilating the product of dissolution. The persevering alterity could not but be treated as a temporary nuisance; as an error, sooner or later bound to be supplanted by the war of truth against error on the plane of consciousness. The order bound to be installed and made universal was a rational order; the truth bound to be made triumphant was the universal (hence apodictic and obligatory) truth. Together, political order and true knowledge blended into a design for certainty. The rational-universal world of order and truth would know of no contingency and no ambivalence. The target of certainty and absolute truth was indistinguishable from the crusading spirit and the project of domination. (Bauman 232-33)

The categorization of the three worlds is, of course, a consequence of Enlightenment philosophy, implicitly grading civilization progress through the standards of northern Europe and America. Modernity in the Third World is necessarily the economic, cultural and political imposition on non-European societies of the European Enlightenment that in this century has been exposed to radical critique. (Lee 40)

That modernism is itself an ideological expression of capitalism, and in particular, of the latter’s reification of daily life, may be granted a local validity [. . .] Viewed in this way, then, modernism can be seen as a late stage in the bourgeois cultural revolution, as a final and extremely specialized phase of the immense process of superstructural transformation whereby the inhabitants of older social formations are culturally and psychologically retrained for life in the market system.

(Jameson, Political Unconsciousness 236)

The following quotation in my main text nevertheless illustrates the persistence with which the upsurge of Euro/Western prosperity (which we label “modernity”) has continued to mask the extent to which it rested on, took advantage of or simply ignored the “Third World” or colonised countries’ misery.[22] The pronouncements following here are by the influential philosopher/anthropologist Ernest Gellner:

I mean, there are two things to be said in favour of modernity. One, it’s inevitable and second, it’s good. And it’s not good because it’s inevitable, but it’s good on top of being inevitable. But it is very important that it is inevitable. I mean, mankind first of all has now got hooked on a style of living to which he would like to get accustomed and simply will not, freely, without the most appalling political disasters, accept some kind of reverse policy and a serious romantic rejection of the modern world. You know, that particular programme is just unthinkable, incidentally would involve the elimination of vast numbers of people who simply wouldn’t then be able to survive. So it’s simply not a remotely realistic alternative. But on top of that, I mean it seems to me positively good that we should have overcome scarcity, that economic and political conflicts in society should have ceased to be a zero sum game, that it would be possible to avoid unnecessary physical suffering. I think on all that we can agree. (“Tough” 36)

In the last section of the Gellner quote, the use of the plural pronoun “we” is particularly striking. To this reader, at least, it seems to signal simultaneously an unconscious exclusiveness and a complacent arrogance or triumphalism that stands in the direct line of inheritance of the Enlightenment philosophers.[23] Given Gellner’s considerable standing in Western academia it can be taken as an index of the enduring power of the self-legitimising narrative of modernity as the heir to, or extension of the Enlightenment. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979), Adorno and Horkheimer detect a sort of protesting too much element in the apparently celebratory discourse of Enlightenment. They describe it as “mythic fear turned radical” because of its claim to inclusivity: “Nothing at all may remain outside because the mere idea of outsidedness is the very source of fear” (16). They are in tune with the liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel when they declare that what modern men “want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness” (40).

Dussel criticises philosophers like Habermas for describing modernity as a purely European event by arguing that “while modernity is undoubtedly a European occurrence [originating “this history of world domination”], it also originates in a dialectical relation with non-Europe” (Invention 9).[24] The nature of that relation is, however, of a peculiar kind. According to Dussel, “[t]he ego cogito (of Descartes from 1636) was not the original philosophical expression of modernity. Before, the ego conquiro (‘I conquer,’ in first place with Hernán Cortés in 1519 in Mexico) had to undergo the practical experience of Europe’s ‘centrality,’ of its superiority [. . .]” (Underside 217).[25]

In conquering the territories and cultures which it invaded, argues Dussel, “Europe never discovered (des-cubierto) this Other as Other but covered over (encubierto) the Other as part of the Same, i.e. Europe” (Invention 12). This point accords with Adorno and Horkheimer’s, above. Dussel uses two expressions, “the myth of modernity” (the pattern of thought that declares “the suffering of the conquered and colonised people [. . .] as a necessary sacrifice and the inevitable price of modernisation” [64]), and the “fallacy of development” (the idea of a route or evolution towards modernisation[26] along which the colonised region will have to follow the colonising economy [53, 64]) in order to indicate how Europe/the West justifies and explains the brutalities of conquest to itself.

C. E. Pletch has with subtle sarcasm described the profound, resultant split into the three “worlds” of the “globalised” twentieth century:

The third world is the world of tradition, culture, religion, irrationality, underdevelopment, overpopulation, political chaos, and so on. The second world is modern, technologically sophisticated, rational to a degree, but authoritarian (or totalitarian) and repressive, and ultimately inefficient and impoverished by contamination with ideological preoccupations and burdened with an ideologically motivated socialist elite. The first world is purely modern, a haven of science and utilitarian decision making, technological, efficient, democratic, free – in short, a natural society unfettered by religion or ideology. (574; my italics)

A central distinction necessary to this discussion (“modernity” vs “modernism”) is usefully delineated in the quotation below. It helps to move the present discussion into the realm of cultural responses to the modernisation process. In a lengthy footnote from his Modernity and Ambivalence, Zygmunt Bauman writes:

The definitional discord is made particularly difficult to disentangle by the fact of historical coexistence of what Matei Calinescu called “two distinct and bitterly conflicting modernities.” More sharply than most other authors, Calinescu portrays the “irreversible” split between “modernity as a stage in the history of Western Civilization – a product of scientific and technological progress, of the industrial revolution, of the sweeping economic and social changes brought about by capitalism – and modernity as an aesthetic concept.” The latter (better to be called modernism to avoid the all too frequent confusion) militated against everything the first stood for: “what defines cultural modernity is its outright rejection of bourgeois modernity, its consuming negative passion” (Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977), pp. 4, 42); this is in blatant opposition to the previous, mostly laudatory and enthusiastic portrayal of the attitude and achievement of modernity [. . .]

I call “modernity” a historical period that began in Western Europe with a series of profound social-structural and intellectual transformations of the seventeenth century and achieved its maturity: (1) as a cultural project – with the growth of Enlightenment; (2) as a socially accomplished form of life – with the growth of industrial (capitalist, and later also communist) society. Hence modernity, as I use the term, is in no way identical with modernism. The latter is an intellectual (philosophical, literary, artistic) trend that – though traceable back to many individual intellectual events of the previous era – reached its full swing by the beginning of the current century, and which in retrospect can be seen (by analogy with the Enlightenment) as a “project” of postmodernity or a prodromal stage of the postmodern condition. In modernism, modernity turned its gaze upon itself and attempted to attain the clear-sightedness and self-awareness which would eventually disclose its impossibility, thus paving the way to the postmodern reassessment. (3-4)

I want to look briefly now at Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness as an archetypal European modernist text – using it as a hinge towards a discussion of the writings of the Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera. In agreement with Bauman (above), I see Conrad’s European modernist novel as manifesting the beginnings of an expression of doubt concerning the adequacy or completeness of knowledge of the European expansionist undertaking, along with the dawning but insistent recognition of its doubtful legitimacy.[27] Conrad does, unmistakably, in this text expose and subject to a profoundly felt moral indignation both the “fallacy of development” and the “myth of modernity” that Dussel mentions (see above, and compare: “If modernity is about the production of order then ambivalence is the waste of modernity” [Bauman 15]). Yet Achebe’s well-known critique of the Conradian text as simultaneously anti-imperialist and racist is hard to fault (see his essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”). If one prefers to avoid the tendentious term “racist” – and there is a strong tradition of readings of the Conradian text that include the frame-narrator Marlow in its author’s ironic gaze, rather than conceiving of Conrad’s purpose simply as using this figure to ventriloquise authorial convictions – a central problem in accounting for the nature and effect of this text remains its depiction of the African area and its inhabitants. A description such as the following in Conrad’s short novel –

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of the monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men 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 [Marlow’s description is presumably of an African dance, or ritual]; 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. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you – you so remote from the night of first ages – could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. (96; my italics)

– or Marlow’s reference to “the sunlit face of the land” as masking “the lurking death, [. . .] the hidden evil, [. . .] the profound darkness of its heart” (92; my italics) ascribes to both the region and its people simultaneously a quality of unknowability[28] to or by the European subject, and a conviction or certainty of its/their evil. [29]

The currently prevalent reading of Heart of Darkness that takes the text as a cunning expression of Conrad’s insight (revealed through the figure of Kurtz) that “enlightenment is a form of barbarism, that the West’s Other is the West itself” (During 452) is not invalid. It does, however, overlook the extent to which Conrad employs and (I would contend) endorses the ancient and persistent European stereotype of “Africa” as representing, in the present, the past of the “developed” West. The expressions “the night of [the] first ages” and “all the past” confirm this: even as Marlow is rebuking a European sense of ethnic difference and superiority, he is thus re-endorsing the notion of “primitive,” unrestrained evil passions as an inherently African condition.

One can link this to the following questions: do the very expressions “modernity” and “modernism,” as applied to “Western” conditions (whether sociopolitical and economic, or cultural and aesthetic) not claim for a part of the world, the command of an entire time-frame? Is there not in the “logic” of the very discourse of modernism, a strong trace of the “developmental fallacy” and the “myth of modernity” – to use Dussel’s terminology? Are the different parts of the world at different “stages of development” – or should we simply recognise that we are trapped in a power hierarchy of monumental proportions that has (predictably) not budged an inch since the conquests of other territories by Westerners? As I read Marechera (more fully discussed further on) these challenging questions are among those to which his text implicitly subjects European ideas of modernity as well as notions of modernism.

Heart of Darkness is indeed a massively scornful critique of (particularly) the Belgian colonial enterprise, subtly yet recognisably played off by Conrad against the (implicitly validated) “superior” British “civilising mission.” It is also a text in the tradition of the effacement of Africa (regions and peoples), of the reduction of these “dark” presences to a mere backdrop to the activities (both admirable and culpable) of Europeans (cf. my essay “Blixen, Ngugi” contrasting renditions of Kenya by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Karen Blixen). Perhaps, despite its author’s undoubted concern for the plight of colonised people, Conrad’s text is thus another expression of the “mythic fear” (quoted above) to which Adorno and Horkheimer refer. The very title Heart of Darkness, even though most intelligent readings apply the expression to Kurtz’s own “horror” (first inflicted; later felt), has remained as an expression in the “Western” vocabulary; a dismissive catchphrase[30] for referring to social collapse, power abuse and other disasters manifested in African societies – with little or no recognition of the extent to which these failures are interlinked to continuing (neocolonial) exploitation by European and other Western power centres, both political and economic.

As a critique of modernity and the modernisation process, the modernist novel – as exemplified by Heart of Darkness – can thus be described as implicated in or compromised by the system which it criticises (and which produced it). In his extensive comments on Conrad’s novella, Andrew Gibson refers to the “totalising discourse” employed by all its European characters, reading this tendency as indicating the “triumph of Western metaphysics as it is ensured by and properly indistinguishable from the triumph of Western power” (60). Although he reads the Marlow figure as “project[ing his] own drive to totalisation” onto Kurtz, Gibson also sees “Marlovian discourse” as “pervade[d by] [. . .] a sense of epistemological dead-end [. . .] [in] the amazed encounter with alterity – an alterity that will subsequently be brusquely subdued.” This “baffl[ing]” encounter, writes Gibson, “lies at the very roots of the European experience” (of this period, presumably) (62).

The ideas in the above citations fit in with the distinction drawn by Bauman between modernism and postmodernism (and, for the purposes of this essay, between a modernist text such as Conrad’s and the writing of an African (post-) modernist such as Marechera). “Pretences of knowledge,” writes Bauman, can be doubted in two ways: either one points out that there are events for which the “available knowledge” does not have a convincing or universally accepted narrative (and this, he says, is modernism), or one notes that the narrative offered by this knowledge system is not the only, or the best, or the most reliable account possible (and this, according to Bauman, is postmodernism). There is not actually a chronological succession, since both kinds of doubt have manifested themselves “as long as science itself” and between them, as a “co-presence,” Bauman suggests, produced “that modern culture which prodded modernity on its road to postmodernity” (238).

Now an African postmodernist[31] would of course notice the partiality (to make that term a pun) of European modernism in ways significantly different from the way a “Western” writer would – and would need to articulate such a “doubt” (to use Bauman’s term), or recognition of irony, in a manner sensitive to the realities of power distribution (“cultural” as much as political) of his or her time. In his novel, Saints and Scholars, the British Marxist Terry Eagleton writes: “A colonial territory was a land where nothing happened, where you reacted to the narrative of your rulers rather than created one of your own” (104). In a recent essay Rasheed Araeen refers to “art which is produced within the historical space of modernism,” making the following points:

As this space is controlled institutionally, some works are legitimated and are placed within a historical genealogy while others are ignored or suppressed. This historicisation, however, is not based on the nature of the work but on the racial, ethnic or cultural background of the artist; which thus excludes the modernist or avantgardist work of artists from cultures other than of European origin on the basis that modernism is ontologically a European phenomenon. In other words, the eurocentricity of modernism is constructed and maintained largely on racial grounds by which the supremacy of the white subject is maintained. (77)

There is probably a broad truth in this accusation of “Western” myopia, given how ghettoised studies of African writing, even of novels in the Europhone languages, remain. In his introduction to the essay collection Modernism/Postmodernism, the editor Peter Brooker observes that

[a] map which shows the South of England, the Eastern seaboard of North America, and which marks in Paris, Trieste, perhaps Berlin and Vienna but not Moscow, Petrograd or Milan is not an acceptable map of “the” world, but might be the map of a certain cultural mentality, and is, as it turns out, the “map” of an Anglo-American construction of modernism. The same general point applies to postmodernism. However internally different its main versions, their common geography stretches to the American West, Canada and Australia, and until recently would show little else, even of Europe, beyond Paris and Frankfurt. (4)

A brilliant avantgardist such as Marechera, after (co-)winning the fiction prize of The Guardian in Britain in 1979 for his first substantial publication, was allowed subsequently more or less to disappear from public view (see Veit-Wild, Dambudzo Marechera 185-378). His problem was certainly in part that of the category-jumper, the “unclassifiable” writer: highly sophisticated in employing postmodernist techniques, yet writing of African experiences and settings and (tout court) exemplifying the supposed paradox: an African intellectual utterly proficient in the whole gamut of “Western” cultural and academic discourse.

Marechera during the ten years of his major writing was, one might say, considered both too African for Europe and too European for Africa. His own, oft-quoted comment (in this regard) remains the most eloquent expression of dilemma: “I have been an outsider in my own biography, in my country’s history, in the world’s terrifying possibilities. It is, therefore, quite natural for me to respond with the pleasure of familiar horror to that section of European literature which reflects this” (Marechera; qtd. in Veit-Wild, Dambudzo Marechera 364).

Marechera thought of identity as “an act of faith, impossible to verify” and regretted the “paradox that modernism has been from the start identified with difficulties and, on a continent still barely literate, modernism has, therefore, been condemned as being irrelevant on African soil” (qtd. in Veit-Wild, Dambudzo Marechera 370).

Marechera noted approvingly Achebe’s use of a Yeats quotation in titling Things Fall Apart