Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [20]
To some extent Achebe is right to identify Conrad’s outlook (which, it is true, is essentially in accord with Marlow’s when it comes to matters of race) as reproducing the prejudices characteristic of his historical era, and it is clear that this passage, in which Marlow affirms the “remote kinship” of his European listeners with Africans, is intended primarily as a spirited dare; that is, it is designed not to elevate the status of Africans but rather to lower that of Europeans. Yet while Achebe had intended his essay to relegate Heart of Darkness to the ash can of history by concluding that a text that thus “depersonalizes a portion of the human race” cannot constitute “a great work of art” (p. 12), it actually has had the opposite result by making readers all the more intrigued by Conrad’s book. Nonetheless, it served Achebe’s end in an important respect by transforming a work that had generally been viewed as progressively anti-imperialist and antiracist into one that now was suspected of being Eurocentric and racist. And the dispute over how to assess the novella has shown no signs of abating in the more than quarter of a century since the essay first appeared.
In addition to the controversy over how we are to understand the way Heart of Darkness represents race, an important related issue is that of how to view the way it represents history. All techniques of reading create specific sorts of attention as well as specific sorts of inattention, and many of those methods used on Heart of Darkness have obscured the historical setting to the point of virtual invisibility. At the far end of the spectrum the story can be read and taught—and often is read and taught—as abstractly and ahistorically as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), another famous tale of a seaman burdened by knowledge acquired on a perilous water journey that he feels compelled to impart to others in the form of a vivid narrative. This tendency, in fact, provided Adam Hochschild with an impetus for writing his historical account of the Congo Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998). As Hochschild observes,
High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and one place (p. 143).
It is no doubt the case that a Euro-American amnesia about the atrocities in the Congo working in combination with prevalent techniques of reading that are predisposed to filtering out historical information have contributed to making Heart of Darkness so readily detachable from its historical setting. Yet this is not the whole story. We must also recognize that the book has tended to be read in an ahistorical manner because, to some extent, that is how Conrad deliberately wrote it. The Congo is never named; Brussels is identified only as “the sepulchral city,” Leopoldville as “the Central Station,” and Stanley Falls as “the Inner Station”; and Kurtz cannot be identified with a single country: “His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (p. 92); as Conrad would affirm in a 1903 letter, “I took great care to give Kurtz a cosmopolitan origin” (Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 94). Conrad thus, while clearly indicating that the setting is Leopold’s Congo, also invites readers to view the events of the tale as a microcosmic reduction of European imperialism in Africa generally. It is consistent with this equivocating tendency that, in revising the manuscript, he excised a passage that clearly alluded to King Leopold (in the original version of the prologue Marlow refers to a