From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 22:13:59 MDT
*Pace* Robert Bradbuty, who will be moaning at pain at the sight of these
floods of off-topic irrelevancies:
At 08:53 PM 9/2/02 -0700, Lee wrote:
>In 10th
>grade our quite sharp English teacher was interpreting "Heart
>of Darkness" for us, and getting us to reach for all the
>symbolism. Then a dear girl (forgotten her name) asked
>suddenly, "Mrs. Spaugh, do you really think that Conrad
>intended all this?". "Why no, surely not!" said Mrs.
>Spaugh, and at that point I (probably wrongly) considered
>all the *symbolism* to be of even less value than I
>had thought!
Aargh! There is a famous Renaissance painting of a naked courtesan (or the
like) stretched seductively on a couch; framing the scene is an immense
richly rose-hued velvet curtain that folds to the left in a way the eye
takes in without really seeing (it's backdrop, right? nothing to see here,
folks, move along). It takes some effort to notice that the fold is a vast
vulva. Did the painter mean this? Almost certainly, but it wouldn't matter
if he hadn't. There's an unconscious libidinous glow suffusing our witness
of the painting. Symbols don't have to be ladled in by hand, nor do they
need to be added unconsciously, but perhaps it helps if they *work* un- or
pre-consciously. And a considerable amount of the most interesting literary
and visual reading of the last three decades derives from deliberately
`deconstructing' the layers and narrative and ideological components of
`texts' (poems, books, paintings, movies, cars, haircuts...) to unmask some
of what once would have been called `symbols'.
A coarse sense of this comes whenever you pick up an old sf anthology and
read about the 24th century; you can usually tell almost instantly within 5
years when the tale was written, because encoded into it, below the
writer's own awareness, is a vast melange of preconceptions, fashion
givens, political observances, sexual politics, technological assumptions,
etc. The very fact that these discursive elements are *not* `ladled in by
hand' is the index of their usefulness in revealing all kinds of chewy
stuff about the people who created them, their Zeitgeist, etc.
How we and critics in previous years, decade or centuries `received' or
`read' these unintended or deliberate layers is also of immense interest.
What Conrad thought he was doing is unknowable to us (even if he told us
what he thought, or what he wanted us to think he thought he thought), but
the symbols are there flickering, most drawn from the cultural air he
breathed, some of his own devising, and perhaps a great deal that we,
asynchronously, insert ourselves. Is it really preferable to ignore all
this and just read the tale for its `sheer fun'? (Assuming anyone ever got
any fun out of Conrad...)
Damien Broderick
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