Humanity of the Primitive in Heart of Darkness, Dialect of Modernism an

Humanity of the Primitive in Heart of Darkness, Dialect of Modernism and Totem and Taboo   Ã‚  Ã‚   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 for the first time. The African natives became the new Other, the new way to define what Europe was at that time.   Ã‚  Ã‚   The way in which this redefinition took place was through the institution of a fundamentally hierarchical system. "Primitive" versus "sophisticated," "barbarous" versus "cultured." The anthropology of the time—articulated primarily by Frazer—espoused an evolutionary view of humanity. Societies passed through several stages of development on their way to true civilisation, and, while the Europeans had made it all the way, the Africans were lagging just a bit behind. This, however, created a problem for Europe. If Africans were fundamentally the same as Europeans (albeit farther back on the evolutionary ladder), what did that say about the roots of European society? This uncertainty created a very disjunctive view of primitives in the literature of the time. In his book, The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North suggests that, "The colonial subject is either a part of nature, utter... ... intensely inhuman, Freud shows us that these things are all one. This continuum of thought collapses into one inescapable fact: we are the primitive, and he is us.    Works Cited and Consulted Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1971. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1950. Greene, Graham. The Heart of the Matter. New York: Penguin, 1984. Mahood, M. M. The Colonial Encounter: A Reading of Six Novels. Totowa: Rowman, 1977. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Raskin, Jonah. The Mythology of Imperialism. New York: Random, 1971. Watts, Cedric. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Critical and Contextual Discussion. Milan: Mursia International, 1977.