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SUGGESTION BOX

« Here today Gone tomorrow, Betsy Wing | Main | Interview with Betsy Wing »

Aug 09, 2006

Comments

Betsy Wing

This is a terrific reading of WHITE SPIRIT. I forwarded a question (from you, perhaps) to Paule about the influence of Conrad's novel and haven't had a reply yet. It will be interesting to see how much of the influence is conscious...

Anne

Thank you, Betsy. I'm very interested to learn that she did NOT read Conrad. I find her answer, about the landscape inspiring the situations and the language, really rich. Thank you.

phezz

According to contemporary sort of leftist and academic, Conrad was not a writer foremost, but a racist, and sexist, or advocate of Euro. imperialism. Who cares about a marvelous prose style, great sense of description, penetrating insights, etc. conrad is part of the Oppressor, man. Indeed, HOD and other Coanrd works are not novels to the usual sentimental marxist or feminist, they are case studies, or statements of politics and ethics: and of course the leftist or feminist can intuit JC's sadistic personality after reading only a few paragraphs.

These "postmodernist" interpretations are not only a complete misreading of Conrad, but reveal the academic leftist's own sort of inverted sunday-school morality: " Yes Conrad was a nazi deep down! Here's proof." What a f-n joke.

Anyone who has read HOD closely perceives how much Conrad detests the Belgians--the opening scenes, with the grove of death and so forth are more than adequate to show that. Kurtz is not some heroic character, either. That's not so say he's evil either: he's somewhat shadowy, like most JC characters.

What most academics and lit. snobs don't realize is that the Conradian ambiguity--the mists, and the haunting imagery--is about perception, about the difficulty of discerning meaning and "values": it's vague, somewhat insubstantial. THe usual academic doesn't want Conradian sublimity or complexity, she wants like books and movies that re-affirm her Norma-Rae moralism, with Big Daddy and Western rationality as the villains. She wants her feminist-marxist cartoons.

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