I quote from a post on the Milton-L list from about a year ago:
****** Yes. literature must be about something. But (1) I presume you are not going to ask something to be ontological, that literature provides and internally justifies truthful statements about the real world itself. Does Hell really have burning lakes, or Paradise a real tree of life? I think (2) that we decide on the something as a first act of interpretation, not as an outcome, particularly about a work with as vast a compass as Paradise Lost. We may be interested in Eve and patriarchy (the something), then read relevant passages of the poem and other opinions to decide for ourselves what we think the poem has to say about Eve and patriarchy. As there are more than fifty articles and one book on Eve (not all about patriarchy), with diverse and incompatible conclusions drawn from the poem, it would be hard to say that the poem itself produces a mimesis of Eve and patriarchy. Instead, (3) as you observe through Gadamer, an interpretation comprises (at least) the text, our interests in the text (not drawn from the text itself), and within those interest various beliefs that we bring to the poem. Those interests must influence our interpretation, provide content to the interpretation, and (more often than we would like to admit) direct and may provide all of the material of an interpretation. How do we read He for God only, she for God in him? Well, it depends. If we decide it is not ironic, then it may become either a claim for the actual relationship between men, women, and God (with the usual biblical citations), or a statement of female oppression (with various real-world treatments of women quivering in the background). If we decide it is ironic, (it is seen through Satans eyes, after all, and the narrator is not reliable), then we begin a journey through the poem that has Eve resisting patriarchy, or ironically defending patriarchy as a necessary component of civil order. None of these can be justified by the poem alone. I claim that (4) mimesis works in one direction, from the reader to the poem, as a means of understanding and organizing the interpretative process, but that mimesis does not work in the other direction, that we learn from the poem on its own terms something about the world. I believe a careful reading of Aristotles poetics will reach the same idea, that fictions have necessary properties that require mimesis to understand but preclude mimesis as a poetic outcome.
Perhaps a classic formulation of the problem I mean can be found in Kerrigans The Sacred Complex He says, The survival of literature as anything more than an artifact depends on our ability to extend its original reference into a genuinely revelatory description . . . of the world we inhabit now. (p2) He then proceeds to self-consciously read the poem through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis. This is not revelation, it is (very ingenious and interesting) imposition of an external theory of the world. If anyone believes that the poem cannot be made to confute rather than defend a Freudian view, they have not been reading criticism latterly.
I realize this makes the justification of literature itself difficult. If it does not teach us about the world, or make a better world (by teaching virtue, or otherness, or any of the other things so many even recent scholars have advanced in favor of beauty and instruction, still the most common justification), or critique or defend our cultural, moral, political order, or order our thoughts, or create a consciousness (all of which may be considered mimetic), what does it do? I do not know the answer to this question. It may have no answer (rather like saying what poetry is). But it seems to [me] that literature on its own revealing truths of the world cannot be one of them. ********
Michael writes: "It is interesting. But I think the problem with Conrad's book is actually much simpler and more profound. He wanted to get at truth, and instead he produced mystification, when the truth was right in front of his face."
It's been over a half century since I read the book. (It's interesting that others have not read it in decades but can remember it. The number of books I have read once over half a century ago and still have some memory of is rather small.) What I remember mostly is the French warship firing into the African continent. What I don't remember is any indication in the text that Conrad was trying to get at the truth, or even any indication of what domain such truth, if aimed at, would exist in: politics, human memory, ethics, truth and personal relations, etc. It would seem obvious to me, though, that it would be the reader who would select that domain and read the text within that context. Michael read it within the context of "Looking for the Truth of Leopold's Congo." Not finding it in Conrad's text, and assuming that Conrad's aim must have been his, he sees the text as a moral and political, and thus literary, failure.
Sorting out my few remember fragments of the text, I tend to see it's 'domain' as somehow to be found in the relations between Marlowe and that warship on one had, Kurtz's 'intended on the other hand. (That is, I see Marlowe as central, no more related to Conrad than Clarissa to Richardson or Stendhal to Fabrizio.) A lot would have happened on that voyage, and Marlowe's tale, we assume, is a selection of all those many happenings, among them that ship firing into that immense continent. It throws an air of futility over the whole of the narrative. (NOTE: this _does_ mean that the text exhibits a sort of imperviousness to the immense human tragedy that forms its matter but not its subject.] It also introduces truth itself as one thread in the narrative, for the observerss can see the puffs of smoke, hear the ships guns, but (if I remember after all these years) the reason for that firing is unknown, and this lack of knowledge is I think noted in the text. Those who have read it more recently can correct me on this. So Conrad is playing with a rather offensive 19th-c cliche, the "dark continent," the "unknown" (to Europeans) continent. His very title is a cliche, a deliberate one I presume. Marlowe penetrates into the heart of Africa which in European myth is the heart of darkness. Darkness conceals. And the decision Marlowe has to make at the end (and no other character in the stoyr has any decisions to make) is what to tell the intended. He lies, but by this time there are so many unanswered questions that anything he might say is equally a truth and a lie.
But by bringing in the intended, Conrad glances at the most usual form of the tale at the heart of "The Novel" from Richardson on: Two strangers meet (they might nominally have known each other all their lvies, but they are strangers nevertheless) and they either do or do not form a social relation where none existed before. And this Master Plot is duplicated by the relationship formed (or not formed) by the meeting of implied author and implied reader. And the most ordinary form of it is to be found in the work to which the rest of English (even European) literature is a s eries of footnotes: Paradise Lost, in which boy meets girl (Book 8), boy loses girl (parting at the beginning of Book 9), boy gets girl back (the first fallen fucking), boy loses girl (they blame each other), boy gets girl again at last. The narrative of Kurtz and his intended, like the narrative surrounding the French warship, is left untold and unknown to Marlowe. What was its truth? What was the truth of the warship's guns? (The 'girl' can, of course, be an abstraction: in Absalom, Absalom it is The South.) I can't develop this farther because it's been too long since I read anyof the texts in which Marlowe is central as he is in Heart of Darkness.
Conrad, then, can formally disapprove of imperialism without in the least denying himself the storehouse of imagery provided by the history of European ravaging of the world. And that is just a fact, not either a truth or an untruth, and if the reader wants the novel to provide political truth, then the reader needs to provide it throguh an historial analysis of that fact. It is after all not the truth that Leopold was a bad guy that is important now: it is understanding of our enemy, and this reduction of the world to a storehouse of imagery with which to tell the tale of the "abstract - isolated - individual" in all its possible varieties is certainly one rather important aspect. And that is a "truth search" which could lead us interestingly back to the present. But that is another concern.
Carrol