The Dark Continent?

Frits Andersen

Description

Africa: a forgotten continent that evades all attempts at control and transcends reason. Or does it? This book describes Europe's image of Africa and relates how the conception of the Dark Continent has been fabricated in European culture--with the Congo as an analytical focal point. It also demonstrates that the myth was more than a creation of colonial propaganda; the Congo reform movement--the first international human rights movement--spread horror stories that still have repercussions today. The book cross-examines a number of witness testimonies, reports and novels, from Stanley's travelogues and Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Herge's Tintin and Burroughs' Tarzan, as well as recent Danish and international Congo literature. The Dark Continent? proposes that the West's attitudes to Africa regarding free trade, emergency aid and intervention are founded on the literary historical assumptions of stories and narrative forms that have evolved since 1870.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• European

Informations

• Publié par: Aarhus University Press
• Date de parution: 31 décembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788771248548
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 43 Mo

Extrait

Frits Andersen · The Dark Continent?
160 + 3 mm 63 mm
Africa: a forgotten continent that evades all attempts FRITS ANDERSEN
at control and transcends reason. Or does it? This
book describes Europe’s image of Africa and relates
how the conception of the Dark Continent has been
fabricated in European culture – with the Congo as
an analytical focal point. It also demonstrates that the
myth was more than a creation of colonial propaganda;
the Congo reform movement – the frst international
human rights movement – spread horror stories that
still have repercussions today.
The book cross-examines a number of witness
testimonies, reports and novels, from Stanley’s
travelogues and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Hergé’s
Tintin and Burroughs’ Tarzan, as well as recent Danish
and international Congo literature. The Dark Continent?
proposes that the West’s attitudes to Africa regarding
free trade, emergency aid and intervention are founded
on the literary historical assumptions of stories and
narrative forms that have evolved since 1870. The Dark
Continent?
Images of Africa in European
Narratives about the Congo
aAARHUS UNIVERSITY PRESS
100554_cover_the dark continent_.indd 1 02/12/15 13:10The Dark Continent?• CONTENTS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• I NDEXThis page is protected by copyright
and may not be redistributed. • R IGHTSThe Dark
Continent?
Images of Africa in European Narratives about the Congo
By Frits Andersen
Aarhus University Press |• CONTENTS
4 THE DARK CONTINENT? • NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• I NDEXThis page is protected by copyright
and may not be redistributed. • R IGHTS I THE CONGO IN PROSE – INTRODUCTION 25
1 Life and Works: Reading Stanley 25
2 Traveller on Global Terms 39
Bula Matari, Breaker of Rocks 40
Mr Stanley, I Presume?: New Journalism 49
World Literature 62
3 Prose: A Framework and Reading Perspective 71
Prosaic Model Examples 76
Travel Literature 86
Wonder 98
4 Literary Topography of the Congo 109
The River “That Swallows All Rivers” 110
The Discovery 121
5 Anthropoetic Narrative and Method 133 II H.M. STANLEY –
MAGIC AND MARKET 143
1 Moving Perspective:
Through the Dark Continent (1878) 147
“Monarch-of-all I-survey” 150
Elastic Composition 153
Rhetoric and Violence 156
Stanley’s Real and Invented Discoveries 161
Shibboleth 168
“An African Museum” 175
Stanley’s “singular fascination with white paper” 184
2 Conflicting Testimonies: In Darkest Africa (1890) 190
A Province in the Back of Beyond 192
Dubious Motives 195
The March 199
Mt. Stanley 208
“Mystery” and “Misery” 213
Testimonies under Pressure 218
Realism and Loyalty: Mounteney Jephson 225
Sentimental Aesthete, Cannibalistic Voyeur: James Jameson 233
Double Perspective 247
The Forest 254
The Marketplace 267
Aftermath 278
3 The Space of Prose: Magic and Pragmatism 285
The Book as Fetish: Stanley’s Magic 288
Open and Closed Spaces: Stanley’s Oblivion 317III RED RUBBER –
TALES OF TERROR 329
1 Heart of Darkness in Travel Literature 337
Modernist Form and Embodied Experience 342 as Adventure Fiction 347
Heart of Darkness as Gothic Romance 350
“The Congo Diary” and “The Up-river Book” 354
2 Atrocity Accounts 371
The Congo Reform Association: Morel, Casement, Twain 379
The Reform Association’s Construction of Conrad as Eyewitness 393
3 “The Espionage System”: Red Rubber in Prose 399
“The Transfer” 403
“An Outpost of Progress” 406
The Danish Congo Novels of Jürgen Jürgensen 407
Two Danish Travellers to the Congo 419
Transnational Colonial Criticism in Mirbeau’s “Red Caoutchouc” 426
The Album and World Art 433
“Red Caoutchouc” 437
4 The Field: Red Rubber and Heart of Darkness
between Nationalism and World Literature 444IV THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 453
1 The Congo in Travel Literature: History and Oblivion 457
The Whip and the Pointer 462
Indignation and Pathos: Feminisation and Non-disclosure 478
Reports: The Collapse of the Travel Account 484
Tragic Tourism and Gothic Science 497
The Congo in Oblivion 508
2 The Congo in Novels: Graham Greene,
V.S. Naipaul and Urs Widmer 523
Graham Greene, A Burnt-out Case 523
V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River 532
Urs Widmer, Im Kongo 542
3 The Congo in Popular Literature: Bizarre Truths
in Bizarre Stories 553
Apes 555
Leopard Men, Tintin, Tarzan and Trader Horn 560
Tintin au Congo 564
Tarzan and the Leopard Men 573
Trader Horn 583
4 The Congo, I Presume: Anthropoetic Narrative 588V THE CONGO IN PROSE 599
1 Congo Literature: A Cross-sectional View 610
2 Place 618
3 Testimony 624
4 Atrocity Accounts and Human Rights 629
5 Oblivion and Historical Narrative 637
6 World Literature and Globalisation 641
Notes 653
Bibliography 669
Index 684
Rights 689The Congo’s position in global media around the year
1900 can be compared to that of Iraq and Afghanistan
today. The country’s immense resources and its late and
savage colonisation made it a battlefield where travel
accounts, testimonies, reports and novels competed
to shape the European reader’s images of Africa.f
Preface
n an account from 1907 of an automobile journey through Belgium, the Netherlands
and Germany, the reader comes across a chapter titled “Red Caoutchouc”. The nar-Irator has stopped over in the Belgian port of Antwerp and is looking in the window
of a shop, where some product samples of unusual colour and shape are displayed.
When he enters the shop, he is proved right in assuming that they are rubber samples
from the Congo – the raw material from which his car tyres are made, thus facilitating
the wonderful journey, its staggering speed and this new way of perceiving the world.
Octave Mirbeau’s travel account is a futuristic celebration of the car, its speed and the
new century. However, when the narrator takes a couple of steps into the shop, more
disturbing films are played out on his inner screen: initially, a series of images that could
be taken out of King Léopold’s propaganda magazines, showing the colony as an idyll
and the natives as happy rabbits jumping about at the edge of the woods; subsequently,
the narrator imagines a series of photographs that depict atrocities and terrors, massacres
and mutilated bodies. These photographs give rise to both fascination and indignation,
leading the narrator to condemn Léopold’s brutal rubber collection methods, while at
the same time acknowledging that his own enthusiasm about cars and progress make
him an accomplice – both a participant and bystander. After this, the narrator switches
to an objective, documentary style, before the chapter fades out in a satirical passage
that critically addresses all the presented images of Africa and ways of referring to the
Congo; it all reflects back on himself.
A combination of experimental narrative and sophisticated, precise criticism, Octave
Mirbeau’s La 628-E8 became, perhaps surprisingly, a scandalous success, published in
several languages and a luxury edition with illustrations by Pierre Bonnard. The author,
critic and journalist Mirbeau employs a plethora of strategies in his travel account
without letting the reader escape his grip. In the passage about “Red Caoutchouc”,
Mir• CONTENTS
• NOTES P RE ACE 1 1
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• I NDEX This page is protected by copyright
• R IGHTS and may not be redistributed.
The many travel accounts and novels based on the experiences of Scandinavian contract
workers in the Congo constitute a forgotten chapter in Danish literary history. The novels introduce
and draw on reader expectations of the exotic, but the writer’s own ideas and perspective are
often affected, challenged, and shaken. Otto Lütken was a steamboat captain working in the
Congo from 1907 who had to return prematurely in 1915, as he was suffering from malaria. His
Mozuri’s God (1928) was followed by other disturbing stories, including Black Moral and Fataki
(1932). In 1930, Lütken published “Joseph Conrad in the Congo”, an article about Heart of
Darkness and his reaction to the novel.
• CONTENTS
1 2 THE DARK CONTINENT? • NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• I NDEXThis page is protected by copyright
and may not be redistributed. • R IGHTSf
beau’s display of various images of Africa is unlabelled – he does not specify who he is
attacking. He assumes that the reader can distinguish between – and recognise – them as
widespread, typical ways in which people talk about the Congo. To use a contemporary
term: the reader is expected to recognise them as ‘discourses’.
The Congo’s position in global media around 1900 can be compared to that of Iraq
and Afghanistan today. Vast numbers of stories were competing to raise interest in
Africa, and the continent was displayed in spectacular ways at the great World’s Fairs
and cultivated through the abolitionist movement’s captivating travel accounts from
“the dark continent”. Towards the turn of the century, the Congo’s immense natural
resources and late colonisation turned it into a battlefield where travel accounts,
testimonies, reports and novels were competing to shape European readers