Ten Lessons in Theory by Thomas Calvin;

Author:Thomas, Calvin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Lesson Seven

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism”

—or, the fates of literary formalism

I. “not a pretty thing”

In Chapter 19 of Voltaire’s 1759 novel Candide, the eponymous hero and his companion Cacambo find themselves on the outskirts of the South American town of “Surinam, then belonging to the Dutch.”

As they drew near the town, they saw a negro stretched upon the ground, with only one moiety of his clothes, that is, his blue linen drawers; the poor man had lost his left leg and his right hand.

“Good God!” said Candide in Dutch, “what art thou doing there, friend, in that shocking condition?”

“I am waiting for my master, Mynheer Vanderdendur, the famous merchant,” answered the negro.

“Was it Mynheer Vanderdendur,” said Candide, “that treated thee thus?”

“Yes, sir,” said the negro, “it is the custom. They give us a pair of linen drawers for our whole garment twice a year. When we work at the sugar canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg; both cases have happened to me. This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe. (1759/2009: 95–6)

At the beginning of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad has his narrator Marlow matter-of-factly announce that “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (1902/1996: 21). The rest of Conrad’s novel—which follows Marlow into the conquered interior of “the dark continent,” into “the horror” of the brutally exploitative ivory business in the Belgian Congo, to the very edge of Mister Kurtz’s murderous abyss, and then safely back to European “civilization” again—can be read, and has been read, as an explicit dramatization of this ostensibly anti-imperialist and anti-racist observation.1 So that at the novel’s end, when Marlow sits in Brussels, in the comfortable and “lofty drawing-room” of Kurtz’s “intended,” and surveys all the “pretty things” that surround him—

The bent gilt legs and back of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner; with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus. (1902/1996)

—the ugly point is driven “home” yet again: The “pretty things” of a given civilization aren’t all that pretty, are actually riven with “bloody racist” contradictions, if you look into them “too much,” which is why those who get to enjoy the “pretty things” tend not to look into them very much at all.

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, we don’t have to look too hard at the “things” produced by monumental white civilization to see much that isn’t pretty. Late in the novel, Denver, the surviving daughter of Sethe—a character based, as Morrison relates in her foreword to the novel, on “the story of Margaret Garner,

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