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Oct. 14th, 2015 01:31 pmhttps://books.google.ca/books?id=irPGHDFssegC&pg=PA89&lpg=PA89&dq=heart+of+darkness+chelsea+house+harold+bloom&source=bl&ots=dUIcV6r6DH&sig=7vvHmm0CoxQtyRvLTb7O_X2m-5o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAmoVChMIv6bKq_bByAIVSfJjCh39gAeB#v=onepage&q&f=false
Re. Bloom Thurberizing Conrad: score.
But:
The passage is coherent, in context. Kurtz is at once saying 1) "of course I understand, as this is exactly what changed me," 2) that listening to this exhortation is the death of the hope of understanding anything, since it reveals that the only basis for sustained action is a blood-based agitation, and 3) that to understand THAT is to understand everything that will ever be understood.
Bloom's insistence that the story collapses into obscurity is kind of fascinating. On the one hand I want to chalk it up with his bafflement at Engine Summer or his curious (maybe just apparent) inability to ever hint in writing at what Little, Big is getting at - he speaks of the latter like a piece of found art from fairyland or dream, as though assimilating it to one of its surface themes similarly to how he does Conrad's piece.
(Of still more personal relevance, he's published like three pages total about Bishop's work, ever, despite her importance to him - compare to the 50+ pages each he's devoted across his career to Warren, Ammons, Ashbery, and Carson, figures he'd probably consider finally less important, and of course the many more pages he's written about the handful of modernist poets he'd place with or above her. This omission has not not affected some of my life decisions.)
But maybe the most interesting aspect of that point of comparison is that he's entirely positive about Crowley's supposed mist, but gives Conrad's darkness (in the one text, anyway) the honor only of inspiring better art, mad-libbed out of its blanks by various Americans. I think another of Bloom's extraordinarily rare semi-failures also connects here - he thinks of Holden in Blood Meridian, a character and book he pretty much considers the peak of literary art post-1955, as being the god of war but not of this world. Whereas McCarthy, and never more than there, is born straight out of Heart of Darkness. He's not really even 2.0ing it, except to throw out sexism (of sorts he'll restore elsewhere) and generally make everything even bleaker. It's a stronger work, I'll enthusiastically admit, and primarily because of Holden, who's a much better dramatic presence; Kurtz isn't weak, or rather to the extent he is weak that's part of a strong point, but Conrad neglects the opportunity to inject positive energy into negation via character - the Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville route - and McCarthy doesn't. On the other side, though, Marlow's much preferable to the kid as a reacting human point of view. The kid's a Marlow who's literally unable to even narrate his encounter and struggles with the true god, which is a fascinating reversal of a narrator who can't stop narrating his encounter with a devil-god too weak and mumbling to be worth the bother. Neither approach is a mistake, each lets form allegorize content in a way crucial to meaning, but McCarthy's is more memorable and energizing - and most crucially is to the *author*, waking him the fuck up to his job of constantly re-waking us - and that just forever wins.
But ultimately whatever's objectionable in Conrad is in McCarthy too, and it's only obscurantism if (well, since) conservatism is - conservatism of the honorable kind, maybe redefinable as an infinitely attenuated liberalism, but still. Conrad's version doesn't even have McCarthy's wandering vein of Goddity in it - which may relate to his backing away from dramatization of the darkness itself - and is basically wholly rational if we accept what's induced. The possibility carefully ridden to its death in the dust in McCarthy, the notion that whatever in us is mindless or puppet-mastered by mindless powers outside us might be countered with discussion, with mind or prophetic accessings of a mind yet to be, isn't even extinguished in Conrad. It's just massively handicapped, perhaps ultimately for propaganda purposes: the nearly impossible task is the one we already pretty much knew we were supposed to take up. Whereas in McCarthy that's revised to impossible. The kid simply doesn't know where to begin, and not just because he doesn't have the words (although he sure doesn't). He can't find it. Whereas Marlow is beginning. The telling of the story is the beginning.
Conrad also gives McCarthy his non-saving "out" of world-created work, that Stonemason/Mexican peasant/herd animal path of avoiding all paths, in the passage where Marlow fights the river. It connects to who he's telling the story to: high-placed fellow river fighters. What disquiets us most about the possibility of positive change in the story, the inability of those who know the truth to tell it to women (however literally we're to take that - our animal "fates," our connections to membership in the Everyman that "is a woman"), is circumvented here. There is a place outside of the "public" sphere that is still public enough that change can be effected there; Conrad's implying that his periodical readers are a sort of gentlemen's club, the people who make the real decisions because they desl with the genuine obstacles. It's a flattery he's fairly consistent with, e.g. in the manager admitting Marlow's authority when Marlow refuses to move the ship in the fog. The dark heart of man stuff doesn't win the day, it's just won every day till now, the communication of which enables a candle to be lit in the mind of the frame narrator - who now sees the dark, though it remains to be seen if it's sufficient.
So yeah, sexist as fuck, or being entirely comfortable using sexist as fuck metaphors as ways of reaching out to a sexist segment of the public (men educated to think of manliness as a certain sort of stoic challenge as well as an entitlement), but not obscure. Marlow's dangerous nearness to directly advocating Kurtz' position of nihilism (both self-worshipping and genocidal flavors) is in part a call for us all to clap at the right moment to bring the threatened hero back to life. The story may be finally objectionable but it's not obscure.
So I wonder what the aversion is on Bloom's part that stops him from seeing this, or did the day he wrote that brief intro. That too much is given to fate/necessity? But that's exactly what he seems to admire in its influence, that it perfects for mass production the black hole-based novella engine identified, praised and slightly bit crucially misunderstood by Blanchot. It's the Ring video again ("there is a continent where if you so much as set foot on it in one week's time you will die or go mad"), really - stakes raised to the uttermost, not a life but life itself shown as hinging on an answer that isn't quite findable. Inside the text, though, would be Conrad's correction. One step outside is where you're supposed to find it (same with Benito Cereno - and probably Bartleby - probably often, in Melville - and presumably "Young Goodman Brown"? Which I now see all over in HoD, it may even be through that proxy that McCarthy's haunted by it). Maybe the trouble is that Bloom finds the rhetoric too convincing and the use to which it's put much less so - that it's de facto obscure because the lighting broke, too easily reads like an unintended Miss Lonelyhearts (surely another of its American descendants, though late-Twain in tone). Maybe there wasn't quite space to explain that, given the venue?
And yet he also evades the Crowley. And the Judge. Voice, imagination, mind - the storyteller at least should be free. Shrike and the Judge exemplify that freedom, even if they seek to take it from others, hence feed Bloom's faith even if intended as attacks? Whereas the exuberance in Heart of Darkness seems fully committed to the pretense that it isn't one, that none could ever be? Maybe that's the self-contradiction, the ruining inclarity.
(And yet the Crowley. Though we don't know what he wrote for that ten-years-late 25th edition.)
Re. Bloom Thurberizing Conrad: score.
But:
The passage is coherent, in context. Kurtz is at once saying 1) "of course I understand, as this is exactly what changed me," 2) that listening to this exhortation is the death of the hope of understanding anything, since it reveals that the only basis for sustained action is a blood-based agitation, and 3) that to understand THAT is to understand everything that will ever be understood.
Bloom's insistence that the story collapses into obscurity is kind of fascinating. On the one hand I want to chalk it up with his bafflement at Engine Summer or his curious (maybe just apparent) inability to ever hint in writing at what Little, Big is getting at - he speaks of the latter like a piece of found art from fairyland or dream, as though assimilating it to one of its surface themes similarly to how he does Conrad's piece.
(Of still more personal relevance, he's published like three pages total about Bishop's work, ever, despite her importance to him - compare to the 50+ pages each he's devoted across his career to Warren, Ammons, Ashbery, and Carson, figures he'd probably consider finally less important, and of course the many more pages he's written about the handful of modernist poets he'd place with or above her. This omission has not not affected some of my life decisions.)
But maybe the most interesting aspect of that point of comparison is that he's entirely positive about Crowley's supposed mist, but gives Conrad's darkness (in the one text, anyway) the honor only of inspiring better art, mad-libbed out of its blanks by various Americans. I think another of Bloom's extraordinarily rare semi-failures also connects here - he thinks of Holden in Blood Meridian, a character and book he pretty much considers the peak of literary art post-1955, as being the god of war but not of this world. Whereas McCarthy, and never more than there, is born straight out of Heart of Darkness. He's not really even 2.0ing it, except to throw out sexism (of sorts he'll restore elsewhere) and generally make everything even bleaker. It's a stronger work, I'll enthusiastically admit, and primarily because of Holden, who's a much better dramatic presence; Kurtz isn't weak, or rather to the extent he is weak that's part of a strong point, but Conrad neglects the opportunity to inject positive energy into negation via character - the Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville route - and McCarthy doesn't. On the other side, though, Marlow's much preferable to the kid as a reacting human point of view. The kid's a Marlow who's literally unable to even narrate his encounter and struggles with the true god, which is a fascinating reversal of a narrator who can't stop narrating his encounter with a devil-god too weak and mumbling to be worth the bother. Neither approach is a mistake, each lets form allegorize content in a way crucial to meaning, but McCarthy's is more memorable and energizing - and most crucially is to the *author*, waking him the fuck up to his job of constantly re-waking us - and that just forever wins.
But ultimately whatever's objectionable in Conrad is in McCarthy too, and it's only obscurantism if (well, since) conservatism is - conservatism of the honorable kind, maybe redefinable as an infinitely attenuated liberalism, but still. Conrad's version doesn't even have McCarthy's wandering vein of Goddity in it - which may relate to his backing away from dramatization of the darkness itself - and is basically wholly rational if we accept what's induced. The possibility carefully ridden to its death in the dust in McCarthy, the notion that whatever in us is mindless or puppet-mastered by mindless powers outside us might be countered with discussion, with mind or prophetic accessings of a mind yet to be, isn't even extinguished in Conrad. It's just massively handicapped, perhaps ultimately for propaganda purposes: the nearly impossible task is the one we already pretty much knew we were supposed to take up. Whereas in McCarthy that's revised to impossible. The kid simply doesn't know where to begin, and not just because he doesn't have the words (although he sure doesn't). He can't find it. Whereas Marlow is beginning. The telling of the story is the beginning.
Conrad also gives McCarthy his non-saving "out" of world-created work, that Stonemason/Mexican peasant/herd animal path of avoiding all paths, in the passage where Marlow fights the river. It connects to who he's telling the story to: high-placed fellow river fighters. What disquiets us most about the possibility of positive change in the story, the inability of those who know the truth to tell it to women (however literally we're to take that - our animal "fates," our connections to membership in the Everyman that "is a woman"), is circumvented here. There is a place outside of the "public" sphere that is still public enough that change can be effected there; Conrad's implying that his periodical readers are a sort of gentlemen's club, the people who make the real decisions because they desl with the genuine obstacles. It's a flattery he's fairly consistent with, e.g. in the manager admitting Marlow's authority when Marlow refuses to move the ship in the fog. The dark heart of man stuff doesn't win the day, it's just won every day till now, the communication of which enables a candle to be lit in the mind of the frame narrator - who now sees the dark, though it remains to be seen if it's sufficient.
So yeah, sexist as fuck, or being entirely comfortable using sexist as fuck metaphors as ways of reaching out to a sexist segment of the public (men educated to think of manliness as a certain sort of stoic challenge as well as an entitlement), but not obscure. Marlow's dangerous nearness to directly advocating Kurtz' position of nihilism (both self-worshipping and genocidal flavors) is in part a call for us all to clap at the right moment to bring the threatened hero back to life. The story may be finally objectionable but it's not obscure.
So I wonder what the aversion is on Bloom's part that stops him from seeing this, or did the day he wrote that brief intro. That too much is given to fate/necessity? But that's exactly what he seems to admire in its influence, that it perfects for mass production the black hole-based novella engine identified, praised and slightly bit crucially misunderstood by Blanchot. It's the Ring video again ("there is a continent where if you so much as set foot on it in one week's time you will die or go mad"), really - stakes raised to the uttermost, not a life but life itself shown as hinging on an answer that isn't quite findable. Inside the text, though, would be Conrad's correction. One step outside is where you're supposed to find it (same with Benito Cereno - and probably Bartleby - probably often, in Melville - and presumably "Young Goodman Brown"? Which I now see all over in HoD, it may even be through that proxy that McCarthy's haunted by it). Maybe the trouble is that Bloom finds the rhetoric too convincing and the use to which it's put much less so - that it's de facto obscure because the lighting broke, too easily reads like an unintended Miss Lonelyhearts (surely another of its American descendants, though late-Twain in tone). Maybe there wasn't quite space to explain that, given the venue?
And yet he also evades the Crowley. And the Judge. Voice, imagination, mind - the storyteller at least should be free. Shrike and the Judge exemplify that freedom, even if they seek to take it from others, hence feed Bloom's faith even if intended as attacks? Whereas the exuberance in Heart of Darkness seems fully committed to the pretense that it isn't one, that none could ever be? Maybe that's the self-contradiction, the ruining inclarity.
(And yet the Crowley. Though we don't know what he wrote for that ten-years-late 25th edition.)
