Humanity of the Primitive in Heart of Darkness, Dialect...

Humanity of the Primitive in Heart of Darkness, Dialect of Modernism and Totem and Taboo The ways in which a society might define itself are almost always negative ways. We are not X. A society cannot exist in a vacuum; for it to be distinct it must be able to define itself in terms of the other groups around it. These definitions must necessarily take place at points of cultural contact, the places at which two societies come together and arrive at some stalemate of coexistence. For European culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this place of contact—this new culture by which to define itself—came from Africa, from those primitive cultures whose society was being studied and in some ways appreciated†¦show more content†¦The European mind at the fringes of civilisation, when confronted with this Otherness, cannot settle on one or the other of these alternatives. European reactions to other cultures tend to oscillate between these two poles, and thus the same culture can seem simple, authentic, concrete, or, on the other hand, odd, uncanny, and arbitrary (ibid.). While this paradigm of shifting viewpoints is exemplified by Marlow in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, it seems to find its resolution in Sigmund Freuds assertion that in many ways the modern man is the primitive man. Marlows oscillation between viewpoints is almost startling in its rapidity. On his very first meeting with the natives of the Congo, he swings from one pole to the other in only a few sentences: They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks—these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement that was as natural and true as the surf along the coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. (Conrad, 17) So in the space of three sentences, the natives go from being grotesque masks to chaps who were as natural and true as the surf along the coast. Marlow is having a great deal of trouble making up his mind over the Africans, and he never really comes to any conclusion. While he is staying in the down river station, Marlow