Black Shapes : From Joseph Conrad to Will Self

Published in 2008 and resulting from the multifarious inspiration of Will Self, The Butt is overtly connected to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The protagonist of the novel, Tom Brodzinsky, accidentally injures an elderly man, causes him to die and as a consequence becomes embroiled in a legal minefield that leads him in a journey through the heart of the country. This latter – a tourist resort combining bits of Africa, Middle East, Australia and Carribean – is a wild place actually controlled and ruled by a mythic figure closely resembling Kurtz and clearly echoing Conrad’s “exterminate all the brutes” in a context where no ideology is needed to authorize the colonizers’ power. In trying to revise Conrad’s conclusions on the European imperialist enterprise at the end of XX c, Self seems to connect to even more ambiguous loyalties and get to the conclusion that no native – and therefore no Other – does exist in him/herself. The original native has been simply erased and replaced by a fake native, a projection of the so called civilized man that needs to fight against his/her shadow. Drawing on Said’s and Bhabha’s elaboration of the issue of Orientalism and pointing out some relevant cultural and literary references shaping Self’s vision, we’ll see how the postcolonial vision of the Other has evolved in recent times, emphasizing the diversity but at the same time reducing it to a different version of the same, WASP prototype, that happens to find him/herself in a wild surrounding.