Here are some of my favorite Thought Portal posts of September.
In this episode, Alisha Grauso (@AlishaGrauso), Amanda Timpson (@amandarin), and Jessica Ellis (@baddestmamajama) join host Emily Edwards (@MsEmilyEdwards) in studio to rip him a new one, and provide context for the FBoi Archetype
...Coppola retained the basic structure of Conrad's novel for his film. As Heart of Darkness follows Marlow's journey through the different Company stations and eventually upriver to Kurtz, Coppola's film moves in an analogous way. The protagonist is an Army Captain (Willard) who receives his orders, gathers his crew, and creeps up the Nung River until he meets and assassinates a renegade soldier (Col. Walter Kurtz). Both the Company and the Army want their "Kurtzes" dead, because both Kurtzes detest and expose their superiors' motives and methods. Their willingness to go all the way terrifies their superiors, who do not want to be so blatantly reminded of their real goals (ivory in the Heart of Darkness and power in Apocalypse Now) and methods of attaining them….
I would argue that they both are seeking power thru imperialism.
...Like Conrad's Company, Coppola's Army is a disorganized band of men whose hypocrisy is questioned by the central characters. As the Company masquerades as a philanthropic and humane institution bringing "light" to Africa (recall Kurtz's painting), the Army (as embodied by General Corman and Colonel Lucas, the men who give Willard his mission) pretends to be greatly disturbed by the fact that Col. Kurtz has broken from their command and begun fighting the war in his own way. The Army has charged Col. Kurtz with the murder of four Vietnamese double agents, which is the ostensible reason why they want to "terminate" his command. Willard, however, sees through their façade and remarks to himself, "Charging someone for murder out here was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500." As the Manager feigns great concern over Kurtz's health in Heart of Darkness, General Corman acts pained and upset when he tells Willard, "Every man has a breaking point. Walter Kurtz has obviously reached his."...
...Willard, like Marlow, becomes more perceptive to the moral darkness around him as the film proceeds. An important difference between these characters, however, is that Willard begins the film as a man already accustomed to the "horror" around him….
...As the war continued, Kurtz kept winning battles and becoming stronger — and it was this strength that made him threatening to the Army, just as Conrad's Kurtz (who brings in more ivory than all other stations combined) unnerves the Manager. Just as "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz" in that he embodied many of the Europeans' values about the White man's power over the natives, so has "all America" contributed to the making of Col. Kurtz — a man who once personified the traditional American values of strength and valor, but who became — once he glimpsed the darkness of war — someone who could not uphold the hypocrisy of which he was once a major part….
Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
It’s Food Season at the Allusionist. Last episode we learned all about compiling recipes, turning food into words. This time, we meet someone who turns words into food. When Kate Young of the Little Library Cafe spots a foodstuff or a feast in a novel, she finds ways to cook it in reality, whether it’s delicious (Babette’s Feast), evil (Edmund’s Turkish delight in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe) or poisonous (the crab and avocado in The Bell Jar).
In the lecture she gave when accepting the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, Morrison presented a view of language that remains frighteningly resonant:
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek—it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.
But it is Moby-Dick’s premonitory brilliance that continues to make it relevant. Melville predicts mass extinction and climate breakdown, and foresees a drowned planet from which the whale would “spout his frothed defiance to the skies”. And in its worldwide pursuit of a finite resource, the whaling industry is an augury of our globalised state.
Moby-Dick may be the first work of western fiction to feature a same-sex marriage: Ishmael, the loner narrator (famous for the most ambiguous opening line in literature) gets hitched – in bed – to the omni-tattooed Pacific islander, Queequeg: “He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.” Other scenes are deeply homoerotic: sailors massage each others’ hands in a tub of sperm oil and there is an entire chapter devoted to foreskins (albeit of the whalish variety).
The alluring figure of Queequeg is one of the first persons of colour in western fiction, and the Pequod carries a multicultural crew of Native Americans, African Americans and Asians (evocatively reflected in the paintings of the contemporary black American artist Ellen Gallagher). It is a metaphor for a new republic already falling apart, with the pursuit of the white whale as a bitter analogy for the slave-owning states. It is why, in 1952, the Trinidadian writer CLR James called Moby-Dick “the greatest portrayal of despair in literature”, seeing an indictment of imperialism in Ahab’s desire for revenge on the whale.
acclaimed for his sensual books about the “exotic” inhabitants of the Marquesas islands. But by 1849, his output had become increasingly obscure, and that October, he arrived in London, seeking inspiration. Installed in lodgings overlooking the Thames at Charing Cross, he spent his time visiting publishers and getting drunk. Stumbling home, he saw whales swimming down Oxford Street. It was if they were haunting him.
A month later, after a diversion to Paris, he returned to New York with a new book he had been given: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Its tale of perverted nature and overweening ambition fed into Moby-Dick. The first version of the book was published in Britain in 1851, entitled The Whale. It came out in the US later that year as Moby-Dick – and failed, miserably. When Melville died 40 years later, he and his book were long forgotten.
