Word Count: 1700 Words Format: MLAEssay Topic 1In his essay on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe writes that “Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist”, and that Heart of Darkness is itself a racist book. Do you agree with Achebe?For this essay, I’m interested in your assessment of the second claim (that the book is racist) rather than the first ( that Conrad himself was racist). In other words, your essay should not be a work of psycho-biography, but of literary criticism. You will need to read Achebe’s essay and summarize his argument succinctly in your own essay. Alternatively, you can respond to another critics reading of the novel (Heart of Darkness is one of the most critically- discussed novels of all time, so finding criticism through the library or online resources wont be difficult). If you choose to respond to another critic, you will still need to summarize their argument before responding to it and giving your own reading.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Called “the father of the Afdcan novel,” Chinua Achebe is best known for his fiction
foregrounding the political struggles of Nigeria. His novels to date are Things Fall
.part (I 958), No LOllger at Ease (I 960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People
( 1966), and Atlthills of tT,e Sc,.vamlah (I987). He has also published two short story
collections, an award-winning volume of poetry, four works of juvenile literature, and
four edited collections of African literature. Mornit’g Yet on· Creation Day: Essays
(1975) and Hope.~ and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987 (1988) are overlupping collections of his literary criticism, primarily dealing with the role of the
African writer in society. Both include “An Image of Africa:” His other criticism
includes the slim volumes A. Tribute to James Baldwin (1989) and Home and Exile
(2000), and three volumes directly addressing Nigerian politics: The Trouble with
Nigeria (1983), The World of the Ogbanje (1986), and The University and the Leade,·.~l1il’ Factor in Nige”iGfI Poli.tics (1988).
The large secondary literature on Achebe deals primarily with his career as a novelist. Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s elriJlua AcI,ebe: A Biography (1997) is a detailed account of
Achebe’s life and travels. Catherine Innes’s Chinua Achebe (I990) offers the best
critical survey of his novels as well as his other writings. Though focused on Achebe’s
novels, Simon Gikandi’s Reading el,itlUa Achebe: Langunge atM Ideology iu Fictiou
( 1991) examines them in relation to the critical essays. Chiuua Achebe: A Celebration
edited by Kirsten Peterson and Anna Rutherford (1991), offers tributes to Achebe.
There are many entries in the debate over “An Image of Africa”: defenders of Conmd include Caribbean writer Wilson Harris in “The Frontier on Which Heart of Dark,wss Stands,” Reseclrch on African Literatures 12 (1981); and Hunt Hawkins, “The
Issue of Racism in Heart (~f Darkuess,” Conradiana (1982); following Achebe is
Frances B. Singh, “The Colonialistic Bias of Hea rt ojDarkness,” Conradia’llI 10(1978);
and compromise views are offered by the postcolonial critic Benita Parry in Conradand
Imperialism (1983); and Patrick Brantlinger, “Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism,
Racism, or Impressionism?” Criticism 27 (1985). Later updates include Sandya
Shetty, “Heart of Darklless: Out of Africa Some New Thing Never Comes,” Journal of
Modern. Literatu.re 15 (1989). and Hunt Hawkins, “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Politics and History,” Com’adicma 24 (1992). Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s ChitlUll Achebe (cited
above) contains a usefu I bibliography of his writing and of selected secondary sour<;es,
and [nnes's Chil1Un AcheZ,e (cited above) includes a comprehensive bibliography.
~.
An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness)
[n the fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at
(he University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged fdendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters
were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their
lirst flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and
remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he
asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach?
;'frican literature. Now that was funny, he said. because he knew a fellow
Vho taught the same thing. or pel'haps it was African history, in a certain
community college not fm' from here. It always surprised him, he went on
I. "his is an 81nended version of tht.· ~E"l'ond Chancellor's Lecture at the University of Massachusetts,
,mhcn.t, Febnlary ) 97C;: [Acheb,,',.. not(>~.
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to say, because he never had thought of Mrica as having that kin~ of stuff,
you know. By this time I was walking much faster. “Oh well,” I heard him
say finally, behind me: “I guess I have to take your course to find out.”
A few weeks later I received two very touching letters from high school
children in Yonkers, New York, who-bless their teacher-had just read
Things Fall Apart. 2 One of them was particularly happy to learn about the
customs and superstitions of an Mrican tribe.
. I propose’ to draw from these rather trivial encounters rather heavy conchisions which at first sight might seem somewhat out of proportion to them.
But only, I hope, at first sight .
. The young fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on account of his age, but
I believe also for much deeper ala .. more serious reasons, is obviously
unaware that the life of his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of
odd customs and superstitions and, like everybody else in his culture, imagines that he needs a trip to Mrica to encounter those things.
The other person being fully iny own age could not be excused on the
grounds of his years. Ignorance might be a more likely reason; but here again
I believe that something more wilful than a mere lack of information was at
work. For did not that erudite British historian and Regius Professor at Oxford,
Hugh Tre:vor-Roper,3 also pronounce that African history did not exist?
If there is something in these utterances more than youthful inexperience,
more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the
desire-one might indeed say the need~in Western psychology to set Mrica
up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely
familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will
be manifest ..
‘. This need is not new; which should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhaps make us even willing to’ look at this phenomenon dispassionately. I have neither the wish nor the competence to embark on the
exercise with the tools .of the social and biological sciences but do so more
simply in the manner of a novelist respon.ding to one famous bo~k of European fiction: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darluiess, 4 which better than any other
work that I know displays that Western. desire and need which I have just
referred to. Of course there are whole libraries of books devoted to the same
purpose but most of them are so obvious an”- so crude that few people worry
about them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the
great stylists of modern fiction and a good story-teller into the bargain. His
cO!’!tribution therefore falls automatically into a different class-permanent
‘literature-read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics.
Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conra~ scholar
has numbered it “among the half-dozen greateat short novel a in the English
language.'” Iwill return to this critical opinion in due course because it may
2. Achebe’s first Bnd best-known novel (published
1958); it depicts a traditional Nigerian society from
an African rather than EUropean perspective.
3. English historian (b. 1914) known for his studies of World War 11 and the Elizabethan period;
formerly Reglus professor of modern history
(1957-80).
4. The “.,st-known work (I 902) ofConrad (J 857-
1924). the Polish-born English novelist. In It, a
ship captain named’ Marlow retells his Journey
down the Congo River on behalf of a Belgian company in search of their chief Ivory allent, Kurtz.
5. Albert J. Guerard, introduction to Heart of
Darkness and the Secret SJuJrer, by Jo.eph Conrad
(New York: New American Library, 1950). p.9
[Achebe’s note).
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seriously mod~fy my earlier suppositions about who mayor may not be guilty
in some of the matters I will now raise.
Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the
antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s
vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting peacefully “at
the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled
its banks.”6 But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very
antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River
Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are
told that “going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginning
of the world.”
Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good,
the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness
that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry.
For the Thames too “has been one of the dark places of ihe earth.” It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it
were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk
of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim
to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.
These suggestive echoes comprise Conrad’s famed evocation of the African atmosphere in Heart of Darkness. In the final consideration, his method
amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of
two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. We
can inspeCt samples of this on pages 103 and 105 of the New American
Library edition: (a) “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over
an inscrutable intention” and (b) “The steamer toiled along slowly on the
edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.” Of course, there is a judicious
change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of “inscrutable,” for
example, you might have “unspeakable,” even plain “mysterious,” etc., etc.
The eagle-t!yed English critic F. R. Leavis 7 drew attention long ago to Conrad’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensive mystery.” That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics
have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of
artistic good fhith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes, ino.idents, and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in
his readers, through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of
trickery, much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally, normal readers are·well armed to detect and resist such underhand activity. But
Conrad chose. his subJet;t well-one which was guaranteed not to put him
in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the
need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor
of comforting myths.
The most interesting and revealing passages in Heart of Darkness are, however, about people. I must crave the indulgence of my reader to.quote almost
a whole page from about the middle of the story when representatives
6. Conrad, p. 66′ [Achebe’s note].
7. Influential modern literary critic (1895-1 978};
the following ,(uotation is from The G,-eat Tradi-
tinn: George Eliot, Henry J_s, and Josep” Conrad
(1948; reprint, New York: New York University
Press, 1960), p. 177.
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of Europe in a steamer going down the Congo encounter the denizens of
Mrica:
We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the
aspect of an unknown planet.· We could have fancied ourselves the first
of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at
the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we
struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked
grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands
clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the
droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly
on the edge of the black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric
man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us-who could tell? We
were cut off from. the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided
past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would
be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were
travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving
hardly a sign-and no memories.
The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the
shackled form of a conquered monster, but there-there you could look
at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were-No,
they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it-this
suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They
howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled
you was just the thought of their humanity-like yours-the thought of
your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes,it
was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the
terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning
in it which you-you so remote from the night of first ages-could comprehend. s
Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds
over the Western mind: “What thrilled you was just the thought of their
humanity-like yours … Ugly.”
Having shown us Africa in the mass, Conrad then zeros in, half a page
later,on a specific example, giving us one of his rare descriptions of an
Mrican who is not just limbs or rolling eyes:
And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He
was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was
there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as
seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his
hind legs. 9 A few months of training had done for that really fine chap.
He squinted at the steam gauge and at the water gauge with an evident
effort of intrepidity-and he had filed his teeth, too, the poor devil, and
8. Conrad, pp. 105-6 [Achebe’s note}.
9. An allusion to a famous remark of SAMUEL
(1709-1784), who described a woman’s
preaching as “like a dog’s walking on his hinder
JOHN SON
legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to
find it done at all” (quoted by James Boswell in his
Life of Jol.n.on, 179 I),
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the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental
scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands
and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work,
a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.·
As everybody knows. Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not
exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they
have at least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of
Iweeches; For Com·ad. things being in their place is of the utmost importance.
“Fine fellows-cannibals-in their place,” he tells us pointedly. Tragedy
begins when things leave their accustomed place., like Europe leaving its safe
stronghold between the policeman and the baker to take a peep into the
heart of darkness.
Before the story takes us into the Congo basin proper we are given this
nice little vignette as an example of things in their place:
Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with
reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white
of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed
with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks-these chaps; but
they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement,
that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted
no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. 2
Towards the end of the story Conrad lavishes a whole page quite unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress
to Mr. Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permitted a little liberty) like a
formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure:
She was savage and superb. wild-eyed and magnificent …. She stood
looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of
brooding over an inscrutable purpose. 3
This Amazon is drawn in considerable detail, albeit of a predictable nature,
[‘or two reasons. First. she is in her place and so can win Conrad’s special
bmnd of approval; and second. she fulfils a structural requirement of the
story; a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman who will S’tep
forth to end the story:
She came forward. all in black with a pale head, floating toward me in
the dusk. She was in mourning … She took both my hands in hers and
mUl’murerl, “I had heard you were coming” … She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. 4
The difference in the attitude of the novelist to these two women is conin too many dit’ect and subtle ways to need elaboration. But perhaps
the most significant difference is the one implied in the author’s bestowal of
human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other. It is
deady not part of Conrad’s purpose to confer language on the “rudimentary
~;ouls” of Africa. In place of speech they made “a violent babble of uncouth
H~yed
I. C(>” …. d. p. 106 [Achebe’s no(,,’.
.l. Thid., p. 78 [Achebe’s n”t~l.
3. Ibid., pp. 136-37.
4. Ibid., p. 153 .
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sounds.” They “exchanged short grunting phrases” even” among themselves.
But most of the time they were too busy with their frenzy. There are two
occasions in the book, however, when Conrad departs somewhat from his
practice and confers speech, even English speech, on the savages. The first
occurs when cannibalism gets the better of them:
“Catch ‘im,” he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a
flash of sharp white teeth-“catch ‘im. Give ‘im to us.” “To you, eh?” I
asked; “what would you do with them?” “Eat ‘im!” he said curtly.5
The other occasion was the famous announcement: “Mistah Kurtz-he
dead “6
”
At’ first sight” these instances mightl’5~ mistaken for unexpected acts of
generosity froni Conrad. In reality they constitute some of his best assaults.
In the case of the cannibals the incomprehensible grunts that had thus far
“served them for speech suddenly proved inadequate for Conrad’s purpose of
letting the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts. Weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against
the sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear, unambiguous evidence issuing out of their own mouths, Conrad chose the latter. As
for the announcement of Mr. Kurtz’s death by the “insolent black head in
the doorway,” what better or more appropriatejinis could be written to the
horror story of that wayward child of civilization who willfuIly had given his
soul to the powers of darkness and “taken a ·high seat amongst the devils of
the land” than the proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had
joined?
It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart
of Darkness is not Conrad’s but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and
that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and
criticism. Certainly,” Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up
layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his story. He
has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow, but his account is giv~n .to us through tbe filter of a second, “shadowy
·person. But if Conrad’s intention is to draw a cordon sanital.re between himseif and th~. moral and ‘psyc”h~”ogical_ataise of his narrator, his care’ seems
to me totaI1y wasted because he neglects to hint, clearly and adequately, !it
an’alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and
opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad’s power
to make that provision if he had thought it n …
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