Modernism, climate change and dystopia: An ecocritical reading of light symbology in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Eliot's "The Waste Land"

The drive to modernise cannot be divorced from the evolution of technologies that are designed to profit from nature (specifically, the nonhuman, physical world) without concern for long-term effects on the earth and its capacity to carry substantial human populations. While evolving technologies also have other purposes than this transformation of matter to profit, the twenty-first century ecological humanities respond to the way that industrialisation has mobilised environmentally damaging practices over recent centuries. Yet such critiques must also remain aware of the deep patterns that gird philosophies and practices of profit over sustainability. Current events reveal familiar structural tendencies that link them with ancient human predispositions. One of these patterns is the perennial cultural quest to symbolically live "in the light." Mighty empires continue to colonise on behalf of a profane version of this symbolic quest, wherein the idea of inhabiting light - a figure commonly associated with goodness, truth, order and abundance - is intimately yoked to the power of the profit motive. But darkness shadows this modernising project, both as its wasteland (that sense - or fear - of barrenness at the fringes of the city of light) and at its heart (at the very root of the drive to colonise and consume the earth with evolving technologies). This paper examines two of the early twentieth century's most influential texts to uncover the deep anxieties they reveal about the way the symbol of light is co-opted on behalf of the modernising project of colonisation and its technologies. In doing so it shows that the colonising aspect of Western civilisation is indivisible from the aim of mastering the earth (thereby creating ecological devastation in its wake). It then discusses the way that Conrad and Eliot are sensitive to the shadow of this dream, recognise the limits of such an agenda of mastery, and experiment with alternative cosmologies.