Conrad, Casement, and the "Horror" of Congo

OK. It is time to get ourselves back to work on the blogsite. We will soon be viewing the American retelling of the Heart of Darkness narrative as presented by Francis Ford Coppola in his dramatic meditation on the misadventure that was the Vietnam War ("Apocalypse Now Redux"). This will give us another way of exploring the problem of the other as that other is found to lie within ourselves. But, before we get too far into this exploration, I wish to share a few comments about Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916) and his report on the savagery of the rubber trade in the Putumayo. While the record of these facts was published in 1913, it offers a window on the mistreatment of indigenous peoples very much like what we have read about already in Heart of Darkness. In the early 1890s, Casement and Conrad were together in the Congo ("The Congo Diary," 13th June, 1890--"Made the acquaintance of Mr. Roger Casement, which I should consider as a great pleasure under any circumstances and now it becomes a positive piece of luck.") and what they observed there would be explicit again in the Putumayo. Intriguing for us in this respect is Conrad's reflection on this time and the manner in which his description of Casement suggests the portrait of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. Here is Conrad in a letter :

"Before the Congo I was just a mere animal."

Then, inflating prose on Casement, he reports,

"He was a good companion, but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo report, Putumayo--etc) he made his way, and sheer emotionalism has undone him. A creature of sheer temperament--a truly tragic personality: all but the greatness of which he had not a trace. Only vanity. But in the Congo it was not visible yet."

Writing about his experience in the Putumayo, where he was dispatched as a British Consul to report on the treatment of "British Colonial Subjects, and Native Indians" by the government, Casement reveals nothing of this tragic quality. Indeed, quite the opposite. Here, in a letter to a close friend he casts light on the circumstances of his task to represent the outrage in the region:

"I knew the Foreign Office would not understand the thing [meaning his report], for I realized that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race of people once hinted themselves, whose hearts were based on affection as the root principle of contact with their fellow men, and whose estimate of life was not something to be appraised at its market price." (Casement Report on the Administration of the Congo Free State, 1904. http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob73.html)

Another reason why the British might have had difficulty grasping Casement's account was that its facts were appalling to the Victorian conscience, the very conscience against which Conrad strains in telling his narrative of Kurtz at the far inner reaches of the Congo:

"The number of Indians killed by either starvation--often purposely brought about by the destruction of crops over whole districts or inflicted as a form of death penalty on individuals who failed to bring in their quota of rubber--or by deliberate murder by bullet, fire, beheading, of flogging to death, and accompanied by a variety of atrocious tortures, during the course of these 12 years, in order to extort these 4,000 tons of rubber, cannot have been less than 30,000, and possibly came to many more."

And yet, with the scope of this meditated slaughter, as with the irrational violence of the rubber extraction in the Congo, Conrad's portrait of this pitiable terror in the Heart of Darkness "attempted to penetrate the veil [of the deceptions of the civilizing project] and was anxious to retain its hallucinatory quality." The real and the imagined, then, were perpetually intertwined.

This week as we move deeper into the jungle of the Congo and the "epistemic murk" of the colonial rationalization of economic exploitation, let us consider how the history lived and told by Conrad differs from the terror wrought by the Conquistadores. Consider these questions from Michael Taussig's Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing: "Is there not a distinct desire in Heart of Darkness for Kurtz's greatness, horrible as it is? Is not horror made beautiful and primitivism exoticized throughout this book, which Ian Watt calls the enduring and most powerful literary indictment of imperialism."

OK, let's get to work!!

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