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>"The Heart of Darkness" seemed - and still seems to me - nearer to my
sea-going experience and larger in it's themes. No contest here for me -
just something I feel.
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Conrad and Melville were both fallen aristocrats slumming among sailors.
Heart of Darkness is one of Conrad's few stories about motorized boats--he
preferred sail. It's also one of his few that's not suffused with contempt
for common sailors--a contempt that Melville never expresses--maybe because
there are none on his river packet. It's of course a great book, and I've
taught it several times, which in the US is somewhat politically tricky.
Conrad was certainly as racist as most Europeans, but H of D is if anything
a critique of the sequellae of European racism--it was a part of the battle
to free the Congo Free State from the grip of ruthless commerce and
transform it into a normal colony. He certainly understood difference: "Amy
Foster" should be required reading in England. He wrote a lot of other very
good sea tales.
Conrad invites his readers to share his aristocratic view of the rest of
humanity. Melville's crafty satire invites them to implicate themselves in
the object of his criticism, as he does himself.
Melville never aspired to become a ship's officer--all of his seagoing
experience was in the forecastle. He wrote four books that are concerned to
deal more realistically than Moby Dick or Billy Budd with life at sea:
Typee, Omoo, Redburn and White Jacket. A lot of Typee and Omoo take place
on land, but the others are almost wholly shipboard. Gritty realism,
Whitejacket so much so that it resulted in major changes in the treatment
of seamen aboard US naval ships. He also writes movingly about the his
relationships with other sailors. Critics have extrapolated evidence of
homosexuality from these accounts, I think with little foundation, whatever
Melville's orientation was.
A more useful comparison than H of D-MD might be H of D-Benito Cereno.
Mark
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