UPDATE: 1:15 AM, attempting to write my essay that was due Monday, scouring the text, having my mind continually blown. There is so much in this novella. It is so dense. I feel like I could spend my entire life studying it and still not be able to pierce its impenetrable heart of darkness.

Conrad’s portrayal of race is really very interesting. I don’t know whether or not I would call it racist. It might be, but well meaning, if that even makes any sense. The specific description of the natives as distinct from Europeans tends to make me hyper-aware of racial difference, and at least for me, that dehumanizes both groups of people (I will admit, that a few benign descriptions me profoundly uncomfortable, “woolly head” was one).

Achebe’s criticism feels a little bit unthought out for me; trying to shoot at an easy target without really thinking it out. I think Marlow’s distaste and alienation upon his return to Europe.

A weird thing I wa picking up on in this text is an almost primordial association with sound, voice, and language. Sound is often an act of creation, the entire tale is framed as a onversation. I think even more than the light/darkness dichotomy which is really played with in this text, the sound/silence one is more prevalent. Ultimately though, silence in the text proves futile.

Anyone played Spec Ops: The Line? Really good adapation of Heart of Darkness. In fact there’s a lot of videogame adaptations of Heart of Darkness. Wonder what it is about this story that resonates particularly within the videogame medium?

I LOVE THIS BOOK. what could it possibly be that makes me love this book? Is it the great character structure of protagonist? yes. Is it the terrific plot? yes. Is it also that it indulges in an under-appreciated area like the Congo? yes. This book is whimsical evil, there is not much more to describe my enjoyment in reading the plight of Marlow. Ruthless, manly, cunning and bloodthirsty. Traits that people that want to ascend to power need. I need a great trilogy, I think I found my major because of this book. The history of the Congo, we got imperialism; an attempt of drastic extreme ideologies and an appearance from Che; I have truly found a major that needs drastic and extreme respect. I shall give it that.

I really enjoyed Heart of Darkness, but I’m fairly sure I understood almost none of it. (Lecture tends to be good at clarifying things for me though, so I’m not too worried.)

The first thing I noticed was the chunks of text and lack of paragraph separation, I will admit. I grew used to it as I kept reading, but it doesn’t look very approachable. Also, Conrad’s language is very descriptive, to the point where I would call it flowery. I don’t think this detracts from the understanding of the book, but it’s worth commenting on.

Also, his tone is very conversational. Obviously the whole thing is told in the form of a story, but it’s gratifying as a reader to pick up a book and feel like the author (and, by extension, the characters) are speaking to you directly. He has certain expressions that are just unbelievably gorgeous, and I flagged some pages simply because the words he used made me go back and read the passage again and again. For instance:

“One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same.” (69-70) This is just so eloquently worded … and it applies to a lot of situations. The minor details all blend together and in the long run, the world/sea/life is fairly uniform.

“… the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear …” (72) This is just really accurate, so I thought I’d point it out.

“We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories.” (107) This deals with a few concepts we’ve touched on already in Arts One. It talks about memories as well as the concept of suppressing those memories, intentionally or otherwise, and not leaving a sign (silencing?) past events. Wow, this text is remaking/remodelling previous texts.

A closing word: I intended to flag all the places where ‘darkness’ comes up so I could accurately point out all the things it could mean, but I failed pretty early on and gave up. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to go through it again, because I think the different meanings of ‘darkness’ are definitely applicable. Darkness = desolation, negativity, skin colour, death, the power of the devil, etc.

I hate feeling like I’m missing the point, as I often do with that ‘story about a story’ kind of book. Oh well. All will become clear soon.

Pre-reading, I thought:

• another gender-related text?
• a short text? I haven’t seen this in awhile.
• a short text WITH footnotes? cool, less reading, could prove to be beneficial when writing that essay…

Post-reading:

I felt that even though de Beauvoir advocates for different things than the last text we read, Wollstonecraft, there were many things that they had in common, like the use of Adam and Eve and how the story is essentially a call for action for women. I think I would have enjoyed Wollstonecraft more if these two texts were grouped together instead of Paine. While I thought Wollstonecraft was a bit too wordy for my liking, as her use of adjectives was a bit overkill, de Beauvoir gets to the point a lot quicker, which is probably why this reading was so much shorter.

When I reached the section where de Beauvoir talks about Freud, I was slightly disappointed because I thought that we were done with him, not that I dislike Freud or anything, but I’ve had my fill of Freud-talk for the year. This section would have been a really good essay in response to the set of essay questions on Freud.

A couple ideologies were brought up in this text, the Subject and the Other and the castration complex. The latter I wasn’t completely sold on, maybe because it was reminiscent of Freud, which creeps me out a bit. The Subject and the Other was intriguing. Remembering back to when we read Fanon and discussed “the Other” in that text and the mentioning of the minority groups in this text , I had never previously seen a woman being compared to as a slave.

So I hope this hybrid blog post with the mention of Fanon, Freud, Wollstonecraft and de Beauvoir wasn’t complete crap and will somewhat compensate for my many weeks of missed posts (although I know it won’t, sorry!).

(The title was the first thing that came to my mind… headaches and creativity don’t mix.)

Hi everyone. Sorry for missing the seminar on Friday, got my wisdom teeth pulled (still a little bruised today).

Just finished up The Second Sex. I found the way that Beauvoir reworks psychoanalysis really insightful. Even the form/style which she uses to rework and discuss it is great. She presents certain theories of psychoanalysis and doesn’t just attack them straight away, she discusses them, points out some of their flaws (in a much more amiable way than Paine) and works in her own ideas. I mean, her deconstruction of penis envy is really, really solid:

“The little boy obtains from his penis a living experience that makes it an object of pride to him, but this pride does not necessarily imply a corresponding humiliation for his sisters” (43)

And later she writes

“If the little girl feels penis envy it is only as the symbol of privileges enjoyed by boys” (44)

She’s reverse engineering Freud. Instead of the outside world being symbolic of sexual desires/fantasy/etc, sexual desires are themselves symbolic of an outside world. It helps to find a place for the social in Freud’s psychoanalytic model.

Beauvoir’s mention of the “purposiveness of existence” (46) also provide a really provocative broadening of Freudian psychoanalysis. “If we do not go back to the source, man appears to be the battleground of compulsions and prohibitions that alike are devoid of meaning and incidental,” Beauvoir explains (46). This is something that bugged me about Freud’s work: everything come back to desire – but desire for what? I mean this in the sense that, while sex is the foundation for Freud’s model, it can’t possibly be just the pleasure of sex in itself which drives all of our action. Beauvoir suggests that there’s something more, that there is meaning to be found beyond the “battleground of compulsions and prohibitions.”

As my title addresses, I do not like this book. Sadly like a nihilistic I find the sardonic vibe of irony that every week I am becoming weaker to the ideals of feminism and gender. The ideas increase because of De Beauvoir’s ideas match mind with her heavily leftist views. The pain that I have encountered is severe, from reading this text. As mentioned in my blog from last week, I cannot stand gender, and it makes me quite sad that I have to deal with this barrage. Unlike wollenstonecraft of the week prior de Beauvoir is shorter but dense. Making my hours upon hours of reading that much more difficult. As the electronic music blares and the movies play around me I deal with the idea of equality that stimulates me. Even I have a deep and burning hatred of the book, there are ideas that I do agree with. But I do ask the people who read this blog, where is the book that disgusts masculinity, and the plight of men? where is my book, talking about how men are not just chauvinistic, but were deep and complex creatures that have the mentality to only do what is needed? Until that book comes out and is critically acclaimed by the masses, I will not accept a book of feminists as an acceptable topic.

I am so ecstatic about this text that I can come up with neither a good title nor a good opening. This woman is seriously amazing, and I think I like this mostly because it’s not aggressive feminism but instead a push for equality. Her tone is readable and her language isn’t too flowery, and she refers to other philosophers we’ve read (and hated), particularly Freud. In fact, she dismisses Freud’s Electra complex as ‘nonsense’ on page 43, so she must know what she’s talking about.

“Some say that, having been created after Adam, she is evidently a secondary being; others say on the contrary that Adam was only a rough draft and that God succeeded in producing the human being in perfection when He created Eve.” (lvi-lvii) This is a nice way to put the creation dilemma, and she goes on to say that we must get rid of the concepts of superiority and inferiority. Great.

“It is not the lack of the penis that causes this complex, but rather woman’s total situation; if the little girl feels penis envy it is only as the symbol of privileges enjoyed by boys. The place the father holds in the family, the universal predominance of males, her own education – everything confirms her in her belief in masculine superiority.” (44) I like this way of justifying her disbelief in penis envy. I think penis envy is just a simplified way of explaining that because men have traditionally held power, some women wish that they were men (or at least more like men, so they could have power as well). This makes a lot of sense and it’s completely true.

“All psychoanalysts systematically reject the idea of choice and the correlated concept of value, and therein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system.” (46) This dismisses traditional psychoanalysis in an educational way and points out the fatal flaw with a system that is widely believed to explain many of life’s phenomena.

To conclude, I just really love this, and I feel like it’s more of an ‘everyone is equal and all superiority/inferiority should be thrown out the window. As Simone de Beauvoir says, “The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual.” (And we shouldn’t just be part of some complex or some phenomenon or some idea; we should just be people.)