Week 4 - 19/8/07
a) Do you think Conrad and Coppola are identifying one of the root causes of continuing violence in the world today?
I believe that both Conrad and Coppola are identifying one of the root causes of continuing violence in the world today. That is, that so long as man passes judgment on another, there will be justification for violence and the need to ‘civilise’ others at any cost.
At the very beginning of Heart of Darkness, Marlow draws a parallel between England entering into The Congo at the turn of the century and the Romans arriving to civilise England, “nineteen hundred years ago”. I think the reason Conrad is trying to draw this parallel is to show how similar the invasion of England by Rome was compared to the invasion of The Congo by Europe. The Romans thought that England was “the very end of the world” full of “Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages - precious little to eat fit for a civilised man” (Greenblatt 1893). Living like this was considered evil and dark and therefore it was the Romans’ duty to come to this dark place and civilise these people.
In much the same manner, the Europeans were instilling their way of life upon the savages of The Congo. Conrad admits that the Romans were nothing more than just “conquerors” of the earth who took away from “those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves” (Greenblatt 1894). This is precisely what was happening in The Congo at the time. The natives were seen through the eyes of western civilisation, which considered them and their culture barbaric. Conrad describes men wearing “fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins” (1934) and a woman “treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments…She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent” (1935). His entire description of the natives of the Congo is about how western eyes view them. He is saying that we are still passing judgment on those who are different from us and it is because of this that these horrific events happen.
In much the same way, Coppola is telling his audience that the Americans were doing exactly the same thing that the Romans and the Europeans did, when they entered Vietnam. The United States entered into Vietnam to save the Vietnamese from a life that they believed was dark and evil. There is no end to what man will do if he believes that his way of life is far superior to that of others. History has shown, time and time again, that one of the root causes of violence is that man judges his fellow human beings according to his own standards.