The Eco-critical Underbelly

Abstract

The Eco-critical Underbelly Dennis Denisoff (bio) Joseph Conrad first published Heart of Darkness in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1899, before republishing it as part of his book Youth: and Two Other Stories in 1902. As such, it literally appeared on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But its opening paragraph suggests the more complex, philosophical cusp on which it also arose, one that captures the sense of fatalism and human insignificance that characterized an increasingly intense eco-critical perspective of the sixty-odd years around the turn of the century. Conrad's novella opens with an image of inertia verging on apathy: "The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide."1 The unfixed setting on the water, the quiet, windless swing of the craft, and the moment just before the recoil of the tide all situate the story about to unfold at the spatial and temporal cusp of a moment. Meanwhile, the human, in this first paragraph, is notably absent. The Nellie seems to think and act on its own motivations, if at all, resigned to its bobbing place in the landscape, afloat with nothing to do but wait. One senses an effort on Conrad's part to open his rumination on morality and free will not from a human perspective but through the more dispersed lens of an ecological network within which humans, assuming they exist, are relatively inconsequential. In The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877), first entitled Studies in the History of the Renaissance in the 1873 edition, Walter Pater suggests we focus on a similar moment of physical life to capture the dispersive outlook of the modern age, [End Page 55] the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? … Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents … This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.2 Pater here captures a sense of the ecological akin to that of Conrad's opening—air, land, water, and human all melding, morphing, dissipating. Conrad writes, "Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun."3 By the time of this slightly later passage from Heart of Darkness, Conrad has introduced some human characters, but they are lethargic, meditative, an extension of the larger context. The environment remains the dominant force, the anthropomorphic "anger" of the gloom the strongest evocation of any sort of energy suggestive of human vitality. While Pater, in his conclusion, captures the intermingling experience of a human's sensorial moment, by the time we get to Conrad's work, the emphasis has shifted to the insignificance of the human individual within vaster scales of time and space.4 I do not wish to suggest that this comparison captures a full transition in the modern world from a humanist perspective to a form of posthumanist existentialism, but to note the way in which both individualism and the sense of a loss of selfhood could arise from a similar ontological consideration. Conrad's and Pater's images eloquently capture this journal's name, Cusp. Especially enticing, the authors evoke the growing cultural awareness through the later nineteenth and...