Topic 8 - Discourse structure and point of view > Ideological viewpoint > Task C > Our answer

Ideological viewpoint

Our answer to task C

The view of Africa being expressed is that of the 'white man's burden'. Africa is portrayed as an alien place that needs to be brought under control, and the native Africans are seen as uncultured, un-understandable and undeveloped - almost sub-human, in other words. Marlow represents what he sees from the position of the whole ship's company, and that group share an ideological attitude that has often been commented on over the last hundred years as being socio-politically unreasonable

Lexis

1. Africa: the unknown and un-understandable continent

In sentence 1 Africa is represented metaphorically as belonging to a massively distant age ('prehistoric earth') or location ('unknown planet'). In deictic terms, the distal spatial relationship to Europe is thus being immensely exaggerated and an equivalent time-frame is being represented as dramatically distant. Similarly, in sentence 5, men living in the 19th century are being represented as 'prehistoric' because of their non-European culture. In sentence 4 a group of black men are referred to as an 'incomprehensible frenzy'.

2. Africa: the European burden

In sentence 2, Africa is referred to as an 'accursed inheritance' - which suggests that it is owned by the Europeans (they inherited it) and that this ownership is a great burden they have to put up with, rather than an economic opportunity for European trading companies. This is made even clearer by a combination of lexis and grammar in the rest of the sentence ('to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil'). Africa is portrayed as a problem that must be overcome at great cost. In sentence 4, even the steamer appears to have to work against the odds: it 'toils', and in sentence 3, they don't just go round a bend in the river, but 'struggle' round it. In this sentence, although it is the steamer that must actually move, the struggling is characterised metaphorically as being on the part of the men on the steamer (who are just standing on deck, watching the river bank).

Lexis and Grammar in Concert: Africans: an unknown and un-understandable people

We have already noted in 2 above that one of the ideological viewpoint effects comes about because of a combination of lexical and grammatical choice. A combination of lexis and grammar is also used extensively in sentences 2-5 to express the viewpoint of the people on the ship concerning the villagers they see on the shore. In sentence 2, the Subject-Predicator-Complement (SPC) structure of 'there would be a glimpse of rush walls', because there is no verb of perception with the people on the ship as its subject, suggests that what they see just 'happens to them' as the boat goes along. The perceptual noun 'glimpse' at the head of the noun phrase acting as the Complement suggests that the view of the huts they see is brief and imperfect, and this is realised in that they only see part of the huts: 'a glimpse of rush walls'. We infer that huts are being referred to by bringing along our world-knowledge of where rush walls are to be found. Because of the plural marker on 'huts' we can infer that the imperfect view is from so far away that the travellers can only see view of groups of buildings, not individual ones. This phrase is followed by another prepositional phrase beginning with 'of' (and which therefore parallels 'of rush walls'), the noun phrase of which refers to 'peaked grass roofs'. This suggests that the imperfect view has now changed to another aspect of the group of buildings in the distance, the roofs. We are still not told explicitly that they are roofs of buildings. The repeated use of the indefinite article indicates the newness of the information for the white travellers, and this very new and incomplete perceptual experience becomes un-understandable for them in the next part of the sentence, as we shall see.

Once this idea of an imperfect and uncontrolled vision is established, the sentence continues the list of items within the Complement of the clause: ' . . . a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling . . .' But now the imperfect vision (cf. the continuation of the plurals') of the travellers is related not to the buildings, but to the people on the river bank. Presumably the villagers are surprised and excited by the boat and are trying to communicate with its passengers by shouting and waving at them. But we are removed from their viewpoint in all its aspects and so know nothing of their intentions. Indeed we can only 'see' the people if we 'work against the grain of the description' to infer what is going on.

We are presented with what seem to be disaggregated parts of the villagers involved in frenzied, uncontrolled and inexplicable action. The heads of the first two noun phrases are nouns derived from very dynamic intransitive verbs ('burst', 'whirl'). The nominalization of the verbs means that we are not told who is the subject of the action or what the purpose of the action is. These verbal nouns are each postmodified by an 'of' prepositional phrase which refers to some aspect of the people ('yells', 'black limbs'). Thus the 'picture' presented is that of inexplicable action, and this action is presented as performed by parts, or aspects, of the people, rather than the people as complete human entities. The choice of intransitive verbs contributes to this effect because, unlike transitive verbs , no object is involved, and so the actions are not depicted as being directed towards some particular goal.

The factors we have already seen at play in 'a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs' is then continued in a slightly different way in the rest of the list of things presented as seen by the people on the ship: 'a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling'. In 'a mass of hands clapping', the head noun 'mass', which again suggests unclear vision, is postmodified by an 'of' prepositional phrase, the complement noun phrase of which, 'hands clapping' has as its headword a pluralized part of the natives' bodies ('hands'), which is in turn postmodified by a relative clause which has been reduced to its main intransitive verb (cf. 'hands which were clapping'). The rest of the list is then composed of a series of 'of' prepositional phrases parallel to 'of hands clapping' and which are effectively alternative postmodifiers of 'mass'. Each of them has a noun phrase with a different pluralized head noun referring to a part of the native people's bodies and a postmodifying relative clause reduced to a dynamic intransitive main verb. Thus, again and again we are presented with apparently uncontrolled and piecemeal action on the part of individual parts of a large group of people. We can't 'see' how many or who they are (we can't even tell if particular individuals are male, female, old, young), we can only see limbs and other bodily parts moving frantically.

This limited perception of the new and un-understandable is summed up in the noun phrase at the end of sentence 4: 'a black and incomprehensible frenzy'. 'Black' is used as a modifier as it marks a difference between the people on the boat (who are all white) and those on the river bank that is apparently significant for the travellers (the adjective 'black' is used twice in the passage to mark the colour difference). Finally, in sentence 5 we are given a series of possible reasons for the activity on the part of the people on the river bank. The adjective 'prehistoric' modifying 'man' suggests that they relate to a time we are no longer in contact with. The list of verbs is now transitive, purposeful and communicative. But as the list is a list of alternatives we still can't perceive the true communicative purpose of the people on the bank, as the final rhetorical question makes clear.

The overall effect of the consistent combination of lexical and grammatical choices we have seen is to present a new group of human beings (with parents, children, hopes and fears, just like the rest of us) as if they are alien, almost subhuman, without rationality and un-understandable. The travellers' perceptual and ideological view of the people on river bank thus conforms to the view, prevalent at the time that Conrad was writing, that Africa was a continent to be exploited and that the interests of the people who were native to the land they were taking over need not be taken into account because they were so different that they hardly counted as human beings.

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