The issues of race and imperialism woven into
the narrative of the Heart of Darkness?
“We all come from Africa,” said the
one African-American within the class, whom I’ll call Henry, calmly pertaining
to the supposition among most anthropologists that human life originated in
Sub-Saharan Africa . What Henry was saying was that there are not any racial
hierarchies among peoples—that we’re all “savages.” Shapiro smiled. it had been
not, I thought, precisely the answer he had been trying to find , but it had
been an honest answer. Then he was off again. “Are you natural?” he roared at a
woman sitting near his end of the seminar table. “What are the constraints for
you? What are the rivets? Why are you here getting civilized, reading Lit Hum?”
it had been the top of the tutorial year, and therefore the mood had grown
agitated, burdened, portentous. In short, we were reading Conrad , the ultimate
author in Columbia’s Literature Humanities (or Lit Hum) course, one among the 2
famous “great books” courses that have long been required of all Columbia
College undergraduates. Both Lit Hum and therefore the other course,
Contemporary Civilization, are dedicated to the much ridiculed “narrative” of
Western culture , the list of classics, which, within the case of Lit Hum,
begins with Homer and ends, chronologically speaking, with Woolf . i used to be
spending the year reading an equivalent books and sitting in on the Lit Hum
classes, which were taught entirely in sections; there have been no lectures.
At the top of the year, the individual instructors were allotted every week for
a free choice.
Some teachers chose works by
Dostoyevski or Mann or Gide or Borges. Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar from the
Department of English and literary study (his book “Shakespeare and therefore
the Jews” are going to be published by Columbia University Press in January),
chose Conrad. The terms of Shapiro’s rhetorical questions—savagery,
civilization, constraints, rivets—were drawn from Conrad’s great novella of
colonial depredation, “Heart of Darkness,” and therefore the students, most of
them freshmen, were electrified.
Almost 100 years old, and familiar
to generations of readers, Conrad’s little book has lost none of its power to
amaze and appall: it remains, in many places, an important start line for
discussions of modernism, imperialism, the hypocrisies and glories of the West,
and therefore the ambiguities of “civilization.” Critics by the dozen have
subjected it to symbolic, mythological, and psychoanalytic interpretation; T.
S. Eliot used a line from it as an epigraph for “The Hollow Men,” and Hemingway
and Faulkner were much impressed by it, as were Welles and Francis Ford
Coppola, who employed it because the floor plan for his despairing epic of usa
citizens in Vietnam, “Apocalypse Now.”
In recent years, however,
Conrad—and particularly “Heart of Darkness”—has fallen under a cloud of
suspicion within the academy. within the curious language of the tribe, the
book has become “a site of contestation.” in any case , Conrad offered a
nineteenth-century European’s view of Africans as primitive. He attacked
Belgian imperialism and within the same breath appeared to praise British
variety. In 1975, the distinguished Nigerian novelist and essayist Chinua Achebe
assailed “Heart of Darkness” as racist and involved its elimination from the
canon of Western classics. And recently Edward W. Said, one among the foremost
famous critics and students at Columbia today, has been raising hostile and
undermining questions on it. Certainly Said is not any breaker of canons. But
if Conrad were somehow discredited, one could hardly imagine a more successful
challenge to what the tutorial left has repeatedly deplored because the
“hegemonic discourse” of the classic Western texts. there's also the
inescapable question of justice to Conrad himself.
Written during a little quite two
months, the last of 1898 and therefore the first of 1899, “Heart of Darkness”
is both the story of a journey and a sort of morbid fairy tale. Marlow, Conrad’s
narrator and familiar friend , a British merchant seaman of the
eighteen-nineties, travels up the Congo within the service of a rapacious
Belgian trading company, hoping to retrieve the company’s brilliant
representative and ivory trader, Mr. Kurtz, who has mysteriously grown silent.
the good Mr. Kurtz! In Africa, everyone gossips about him, envies him, and,
with rare exception, loathes him.
The flower of European civilization
(“all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”), exemplar of sunshine and
compassion, journalist, artist, humanist, Kurtz has gone way upriver and then
"> sometimes well into the jungle, abandoning himself to certain . . .
practices. Rifle in hand, he has set himself up as god or devil in ascendancy
over the Africans. Conrad is notoriously vague about what Kurtz actually does,
but if you said “kills some people, has sex with others, steals all the ivory,”
you'd not, I believe, be far wrong. In Kurtz, the alleged benevolence of
colonialism has flowered into criminality. Marlow’s voyage from Europe to
Africa then upriver to Kurtz’s Inner Station may be a revelation of the
squalors and disasters of the colonial “mission”; it's also, in Marlow’s mind,
a journey back to the start of creation, when nature reigned exuberant and
unrestrained, and a visit figuratively down also , through the amount of the
self to repressed and unlawful desires. At death’s door, Marlow and Kurtz find
one another .
Rereading a piece of literature is
usually a shock, an encounter with an earlier self that has been revised, and
that i found that i used to be initially discomforted, as I had not been within
the past, by the famous manner—the magnificent, alarmed, and (there is not any
other word) throbbing excitement of Conrad’s laboriously mastered English.
Conrad was born in czarist-occupied Poland; though he heard English spoken as a
boy (and his father translated Shakespeare), it had been his third language,
and his prose, now and then, betrays the propensity for top intellectual
melodrama and rhymed abstraction (“the fascination of the abomination”)
characteristic of his second language, French. Oh, inexorable, unutterable,
unspeakable! the good British critic F. R. Leavis, who loved Conrad, ridiculed
such sentences as “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention.” The sound, Leavis thought, was an overwrought, thrilled
embrace of strangeness.
Out of sight of their countrymen
back home, who still cloak the colonial mission within the language of
Christian charity and improvement, the “pilgrims” became rapacious and cruel.
The cannibals eating hippo meat practice restraint; the Europeans don't . That
was the purpose of Shapiro’s taunting initial sally: “savagery” is inherent
altogether folks , including the foremost “civilized,” for we live, consistent
with Conrad, during a brief interlude between innumerable centuries of darkness
and therefore the darkness yet to return . Only the rivets, desperately needed
to repair Marlow’s pathetic steamboat, offer stability—the rivets and therefore
the refore the ship itself and the codes of seamanship and duty are all that
hold life together during a time of ethical anarchy. Marlow, meeting Kurtz
eventually , despises him for letting go—and at an equivalent time, with
breathtaking ambivalence, admires him for going all the thanks to rock bottom
of his soul and discovering there, at the purpose of death, a judgment of his
own life. it's perhaps the foremost famous death scene written since
Shakespeare.
Much
dispute and occasional merriment have long attended the question of what,
exactly, Kurtz means by the melodramatic exclamation “The horror!” But surely
one among the items he means is his long revelling in “abominations”—is own
internal collapse. Shapiro’s opening questions found out a reading of the
novella that interrogated the Western culture of which Kurtz is that the
supreme representative and of which the scholars , in their youthful way, were
representatives also .
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