Conrad on The Writer's Approach to Art

"I would require from [the writer] many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope; and hope, it will not be contested, implies all the piety of effort and renunciation. It is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth. We are inclined to forget that the way of excellence is in the intellectual, as distinguished from emotional, humility. What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many men at various times that there is much evil in the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern writers. That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to approach seriously the art of fiction. It gives an author—goodness only knows why—an elated sense of his own superiority. And there is nothing more dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations an author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation."

[Emphasis mine]

Perhaps as a cautionary note: despite the allusions to religiosity, Conrad's view need not necessarily have to be read in a non-secular way for it to be meaningful as a suggestion for a way of life.

Conrad's Notes on Life & Letters

Those interested to gain a more intimate understanding of Conrad may access his notes and letters via the following link:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1143/1143-h/1143-h.htm

Best.

surface effect

I like the idea of high resolution/low resolution as brought up in class, but I do agree with the person (sorry I wasn't sure who!) that there are certain moments where the Africans are brought up in high resolution: the Africans paddling the canoe (who give a link to reality), the sick Africans near the river, the 'noble' cannibals on the boat, and the strange African woman.

(Of course, I have to admit that I'm not sure of the extent of Prof. Lim's analogy, so I'm taking the idea of 'resolution' as referring to one's sensation when reading descriptions)

I guess what that means is that its not enough to describe in high resolution or low resolution, but rather to evoke depth: without that, they are still objects, though perhaps aesthetically crafted ones. The African woman seems a partcularly striking example: a long description, but ultimately she remains opaque.

Perhaps this is why Conrad seems impressionistic: the narrative contains fragments in high resolution, seemingly solid, but merely glossing over an elusive, ambiguous reality. Conrad's narrators often provide very evocative, detailed descriptions, yet are always aware that they are merely 'scratching the surface of reality', so to speak.

This concern with surface and depth also occurs in Lord Jim: during Jim's trial, he considers "that only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appaling face of things. This "serried circle of facts" would seem to bring out a "truth", but it effectually only brings out a high-res image. What is suggested as essential is Jim's own testimony, what he thought he saw: not the objective truth, (that Jim absconded), but the subjective reasons for it - a trick of the eyes.

Zotero

Knock yourselves out!

Post-Lecture Thoughts

Just had a few thoughts about class today:

Samantha raised the point that in order for Conrad to destabilize a certain (European) perception of the cannibals, he nevertheless had to appeal to and represent precisely the notion of cannibal that he wants to write against. This is an example of what the philosopher Jacques Derrida finds paradigmatic of language: the experience of the aporia, where it must be structurally necessary for concepts to engage in a critique and destruction of themselves, by opening up possibilities of contestation and interdeterminacies that nevertheless remain intrinsic to the very notion of the "purity" of the concept itself. The charge of Conrad "ventriloquising" African subjects can also be read in this light: in order not to ventriloquise, he must still ventriloquise: language must remain forever open and inadequate to itself, even though it tries to close down this "something undecided" about it.

Deconstruction then goes beyond a simple "destabilizing" quality of the binaries that the group presented about in class. To see the real significance of this breaking down of binaries is to see that our binaries are not and never originary; it is to see that it is on the basis of an originary indeterminacy that these binaries are even allowed to appear in the first place. They are effects of an interminable "play" that allows meanings to disseminate, come into being and contest each other. This then opens up possibilities for readings to challenge what we (or English civilization) have always taken as natural: if everything was set in stone, there would never be anything left for us to do to change what had been given to us.

Was it a badge- an ornament- a charm- a propitiatory act?

“Heart of Darkness” and “Apocalypse Now” are prodigiously racist. But Heart of Darkness is an impenetrable text and Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” is governed by vibrating indignance. I read the novel as a fairly straightforward text. It had glimmers of profound meaning throughout, but essentially I read it literally as a journey toward inexorable, illuminating truth. Human (Kurtz’s) end is to mean something, if not exactly a discourse on mortality. The specular qualities in Marlow and Kurtz’s relationship cohere the sense of a relay: Marlow accesses meaning when Kurtz accesses death. His narrative only reaches apotheosis when Kurtz dies and grants him experiential value in his story, if not authenticity.

Meaning is thus presented as mere (pithy yet strangulated) articulation of this “horror”. Death is to grant us knowledge of life in its last few moments but I don’t see Kurtz’s last words as particularly enlightening. It’s choked off, definitely not authoritative, and ironically diminished at the very moment it is realized. In fact, this cry is, I would argue, inarticulate. It’s something atavistic that has more in common with the incomprehensible babble of the natives than it does with the civilized language that Achebe argues Conrad withholds from the rudimentary souls to “let the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts.” It emphasizes the powerlessness of Kurtz on his deathbed, and the failure of language here is echoed in Marlow: he extrapolates the candour, conviction, revolt and glimpsed truth because he has need to. “And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the difference, and all the truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps!” Yeah, perhaps. I, on the other hand, excavate more significance in the contemptuous pronouncement “Mistah Kurtz- he dead.” (300 words)

Nur Khairunnisa Ismail

The Limitations of Culture

The introduction to my edition describes Heart of Darkness as ‘the creation of a writer who was neither a passive product of his own culture nor fully able to transcend the assumptions of that culture’, and I believe that this is really the best way to approach the novella.  Indeed, the impact of the novella in the years immediately following the novella’s publication was that of an anti-imperialist tract, among other things; it was only when Achebe’s essay was published that a greater controversy started to make itself heard.  Achebe’s concerns are certainly valid, and he has clearly thought about the issues regarding HoD in great depth; however, it is clear that his issue isn’t just with the novella, but with the entire condescending Western mindset that he feels is implicit in it.  Conrad has failed to completely ‘transcend the assumptions of [his] culture’.  And yet he was certainly not a ‘passive product’ of Western culture; one of his short stories, ‘Amy Forster’, can be read as a damming indictment on the unreasoning prejudices of his own adopted people (the British), and as mentioned, HoD paints European imperialism in a none-too-flattering light (though it curiously omits the British; that, however, is another discussion entirely).  Achebe made HoD a scapegoat in his quest to shock his Western audience into seeing the flaws in their own viewpoints, and to judge by what has come since, he has in large part succeeded.  But I feel that it is unfair to then simply dismiss HoD as ‘not great literature’, for, as other posters have noted, there is much more to the novella than a man who is held back by his cultural assumptions.

-Yingzhao (279 words)

A Pile of Bones

In writing an anti-imperialist novella, or a story about the oppression of a race, how else could an author depict the atrocities committed onto the subjugated race if not by portraying the worst of extremes in the roles of the bully and bullied to provoke thought? Achebe’s point that Conrad is a ‘bloody racist’ becomes irrelevant since I think the question should perhaps be ‘how racist are the readers’?

We see the failure of technology as we “travel back to the earliest beginnings of the world”. The colonizers’ enter Africa with steamships, weapons and their progressive ideologies but cannot escape Africa’s call to return to animalism. Kurtz the epitome of the white colonizer who is supposed to be on top of the food chain is reduced to crawling in the jungle. Kurtz’s regression into animalism suggests that the cycle of evolution has come full circle and that the natives are the fittest in the game of survival and all intruders have to beat a retreat.

The measuring of Marlow’s crania was surreal. The isolated head leads us to the display of impaled skulls outside Kurtz’s house. The clinical manner in which it was conducted was very perfunctory. Like the accountant, director and wool knitting lady, Conrad portrays everyone as part of a circus act, each performing their respective “monkey tricks”. Identities are superfluous since “what does [it] matter if the trick is well done”? This makes the job of superimposing identity-less accountants and wool knitting ladies onto these skulls rather easy. Europeans, Africans and animals ultimately return to a state of bones. Race, gender, power politics are rendered meaningless. . .

(266 words)

politics and aesthetics: how agenda shapes our reading

In response to Lynnette's comment that

"To reduce the novella to the single issue of (non)-representation of African people is an unfair appropriation of literature for overtly political means."

I was having an argument/discussion with Ian about the Western canon. He believes that text should be judged only based on their aesthetic value and not be tainted by the politics of literature (am I wrong Ian??). It is almost impossible to not read feminism in a text by a woman or post-colonial agenda in a text by a writer from the "third-world". Indeed, sometimes the politics of literature overshadow the literature as an literary art form in itself.

Text now function more as sites of ideological contestation and the production and consumption of more contemporary text are such that both the reader and writer are encouraged and conditioned to engage with such politics.

The first time I read Said's argument on how the household in Mansfield Park in relationship to imperialism is problematic, I was shocked how he could take a very minor point and generate a full essay. However, reading Achebe in the same light, perhaps the point is not so much to condemn Conrad as a racist as to

1. reflect how readers have been conditioned to uncritically view the Western Canon as beyond moral/ethical reproach
2. reexamine the way readers align themselves to the now-flawed dominant culture
3. radically reshape the way we read
4. create and reclaim intellectual space for the non-dominant culture

While I agree with Lynnette's point that one should not judge a book based on it's political position, the second best thing one can do is to reveal it's flawed political position and open the text up for re-evaluation in light of the politics of representation.

Achebe and His Image of Conrad

While talking to a fellow year 4 , Sonia about the Achebe article and how I felt about it, the similar topic of whether Kipling was a racist in his representation of the colonised in his novels came up as well. Sonia pointed out the Edward Said essay on Kim in her Penquin edition (which i don't have)and how he posited that Kipling should not be overtly ridiculed by today's post-colonial academia as a racist as he was writing (to paraphrase)"within the colonial sphere of his time". I had previously expressed my opinion to Sonia that Achebe was rather over-reacting towards Conrad's representation of the Other,

I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today.

pg 11 for example,

and had failed to recognise the context in which Conrad was writing, as a product of his time "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz [Conrad]" (71). Rather, I would posit the use of "reading against the grain" or deconstructive reading to "reclaim" the text in recognising the erroneous representation of the Other and “righting wrong”, but stopping short of criticising the author per say.

Another bone I have to pick was concerning Achebe's argument about Conrad's anxiety in the "lurking hint of kinship" in the novel. I would have to disagree. For brevity's sake, I will focus on the Congo/Thames representation. Rather than an antithesis, I felt that it was rather to draw a parallel of the Thames to the Congo, a reminder of Britain's past as the colonised rather than coloniser. A return to the "darkness" of its past, appealing to colonial anxiety rather than Conrad's.

(300 words excluding asides and citations)

Creating Unstable Images

OTHERNESS
(i)Geographical/Physical Otherness
“Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where a man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.”(para 8, Achebe)

(ii)Cultural/ Social Otherness
“…what thrilled you was just 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”
(as quoted of Heart of Darkness in Para 12 of Achebe)

Here is the idea of the
(i)Relation of other to the self and
(ii) that (shocking) self realization of similarities (rather than the differences between)
What is it really that is different/dissimilar?

PORTRAYAL:
(i)Narration and authorial interjection(s)
“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.”(para 16, Achebe)

(ii)Western Interpretations- exoticization/stereotyping and general deliberate inaccuracy:
“As I said earlier, Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it.(para 30, Achebe)

The question to ask here, as it was with A Passage to India, is what can we really glean from the western view of a non western continent in terms of its geography, peoples and culture? If the narrator is crutched by another narrator, the implication of multiple perspectives and constantly altering views/representations is surely one that complicates and possibly destabilizes the notion(s) of western ‘supremacy’?

Thoughts?

politics, politics

Achebe criticises Conrad for racism and the dehumanisation of the African people in his writing, stating at one point that HoD calls “the very humanity of black people” into question. While this blog is peppered with evidence in support of this statement, I’m quite uncomfortable with how literature is reduced to a battlefield on which Achebe wages his political war on the West.

An essay by Arif Dirlik from my long ago post-colonial class problematizes the reading of history and literature as “alternative forms of politics”, in particular referring to the “displacement of political questions to the realm of culture”. In the essay, these issues are discussed with regard to Asian-American writers and the expectation that they ‘represent’ or ‘give voice to’ the minority group to which they belong. Dirlik argues against these expectations, stating that literary representation should not be used as a tool to replace the political representation that minority groups lack in civil society.

In the same way, Achebe has a bone to pick with HoD that clearly isn’t just about literature. The figurative violence inflicted upon African bodies in HoD (and much of Western art) is symptomatic of the exploitation and literal violence done to these bodies under colonialism (Fanon says it all!). Heart of Darkness certainly represents a historical moment that is deeply prejudiced against Africa; however, it does not necessarily follow that it is an offensive and deplorable book. While it is next to impossible to divorce art from its political context, neither is it reasonable to judge a work of art purely for its political and ideological position. To reduce the novella to the single issue of (non)-representation of African people is an unfair appropriation of literature for overtly political means.

(288 words - a nice, lucky number)

issues of representation

The first thing that came to my mind when I read Achebe’s essay was that he was over-reacting, and I found myself thinking about Things Fall Apart. In that novel, the African characters are of course much more nuanced than in HOD, but the English characters are also in comparison not as developed. Which is of course acceptable, because “on the grounds of actuality,” TFA is about helping the world understand and “learn about the customs and superstitions of an African Tribe.” This made me wonder which was the lesser of the two evils, trying to give a more ‘nuanced’ representation of both sides, and in doing so inevitability? having to represent the consciousness of someone else as well and then risk being accused of misrepresenting and doing injustice and violence to it, or not intentionally representing the consciousness of “the other,” and then be accused of generalizing, dehumanizing, and being a “bloody racist”?
ha. Actually I’m a bit confused, I hope I’m making sense here.

"Native Dialects"

Re: Achebe's observations abt the use of the term "native language". Although it's inevitable that all novels feature people and thus generalize, stereotype and misrepresent them to some extent, HoD does quite deliberately take speech away from the native inhabitants. Colonizers must impose their systems of control and in doing so, rewrite existing "native" systems in their language. It's a form of linguistic violence which usurps and debases other languages, much like colonization itself does.

We see how the Africans are often portrayed a black, faceless mass: "a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of eyes rolling." (51) It's easy to why they are portrayed so--to show them as a mob is to render them lacking individuality and hence humanity. Often their language is a "complaining clamour" to Marlow's ears, and he is frequently unable to distinguish whether they are welcoming, threatening or anything else because it's not English, therefore barbaric and mere noise. Nothing is said of any subtlety of expression in their faces either, except how ferocious they appear--because they are ugly black faces and nothing is to be read in them. Only Kurtz's mistress is described in any detail, and we all know what Conrad/Marlow thinks of women. One might think that Marlow, being a veteran sailor, would have picked up some of the "native" African language, but he does not condescend to even acknowledge it. The book by Towser/Towson is a ray of enlightening salvation amidst this uncivilization for the Russian--a means to preserve his sanity and most importantly, his "whiteness". (The English) Language and the written word are shown here to be a means of distinction and a mark of superiority--a championing tool of colonization.

(294)

The heart of art lies outside itself

Read in relation to each other, the question that arises from both texts appears to be a metaphysical one: is there an essence to art that can be disentangled from its author, its setting, its shameful racist tendencies (or insert authorial vice)? This is paralled, perhaps, by Heart of Darkness’ question of whether there is an essence to man, released from the trappings of society.

Achebe says that because Heart cannot be untangled from its “bloody racist” author, it should not be considered art as such. For Marlowe, while Kurtz was “remarkable” for having “stepped over the edge”, man is perhaps better off trammeled by society.

But another answer to the original question (and one that I am more inclined towards) seems to present itself in the embedded structure of Heart itself. Marlow is both teller and part of the narrative, as is the shadowy “I”, as is Conrad himself. The effacing of authorial voice and the intentional similarities between Marlowe and Conrad just makes it all the more ambiguous to pin the text down to a unitary narrative. Similarly, Heart should be read not just as itself but as part of a body of narratives that grows with time: part of colonial discourse, part of the postcolonial reaction (by Achebe, for instance), part of modernism and so on. Perhaps then a work of art lies not in its essence but in how it can be taken out of itself to generate more fruitful narratives.

This quote from Heart seems particularly relevant: “to [Marlow] the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze…” (18)

283 words

ps. As a point of interest, there’s a slight parallel between Achebe’s criticism of Conrad and the recent decision by Britain’s exam board to ban a poem on knife crime by Carol Ann Duffy from the GCSE syllabus. Duffy’s riposte, in the form of a poem, also brings out a drawback to Achebe’s argument: where does one draw the line, since every author in history can probably be accused of being close-minded (and thus culpable of violence) in some way?

Let it remain and be a stain...

Canonization- who decides what’s great literature? What makes great literature? In a reading done for another class, the author of that article said that great literature has to have a purpose, basically arguing against Art for Art’s sake. According to him then, ought HoD be canonized? What purpose did it serve other than for the colonized to give themselves pats on the back for being white and civilized and to perpetuate the African stereotype? See, as I read Achebe, I found myself agreeing with him, that HoD ought to be removed from the Western canon (since we are reading it even now as Achebe pointed out).

But then I thought, no it shouldn’t be. Because we aren’t sharing Conrad’s sentiments as the people of his times did or people 50 years later still did when Achebe wrote his article. We see the blatant racism, we see the Manichean aesthetics in place. Let me put it this way- the first ever time I heard of HoD was in JC when my White Lit teacher condemned the book for its blatant racism. So it would have been tragic if Conrad’s novel had been removed from the Western canon because then Achebe wouldn’t have seen/known the day a white man would slam the book. Achebe got what he wished for only because the book has remained in the canon. It being canonized has allowed it to proliferate outside the Western culture and world but while its fame reaches, its sentiments don’t. And now, even Whites are disgusted by the book.

It being canonized is a good thing- let it remain like a stain upon the Western literary history. If HoD once turned people against Africa, let the new readings turn people today against HoD and those who condoned and celebrated such a mentality.

(300 words)

PS: Prof Koh, you didn't "mark" my previous post. Just a reminder (",)

Heart of Darkness - Artworthy?

In "An Image of Africa", Chinua Achebe states:

“It seems to me totally inconceivable that great art or even good art could possibly reside in such unwholesome surroundings.”

Which got me thinking: what qualifies as art? Who decides what is and what isn’t art? Is it possible for art to be untainted – without a trace of racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, atheism? Does Conrad’s positioning (by Achebe) as a “bloody racist” exclude Heart of Darkness from the category of great art / “permanent literature”?

I personally do not see the great art-ness of Heart of Darkness (yet), but I do think that all art is tainted. To me, all art necessarily involves violence – a violence done unto reality by its transference onto canvas / paper. Art is about perspective, and Heart of Darkness is Conrad’s perspective of Africa (albeit a racist one).

Taken from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jconrad.htm:
Conrad crystallized his often quoted goal as a writer: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, above all, to make you see. That - and no more, and it is everything."

That is exactly what Heart of Darkness does. Conrad recreates the Africa he perceived which mirrors “the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination”. Can we blame him for being born into a century of imperialism and blindness? I think not. Heart of Darkness is indeed racist but it enables its 21st century audience an insight into Western colonial perception of Africa, and hopefully by doing so it prevents us from continuing the ‘colonial legacy of racism’.

(271)

Here are some quotes pertaining to art which I found interesting:

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity. ~ Barenboim, Daniel

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. ~ Oscar Wilde

All great art comes from a sense of outrage. ~ Glenn Close

The white man's anxiety

i do agree with Achebe that Europe and its people were at once as primitive as the africans and Conrad's work dismisses or leaves out any mention of this past, almost as though Europe has always been forward and civilised. I also completely agree with the point that when we talk about Africa and its rituals, superstitions and customs, Conrad, like many of us, speak of it as though such customs are exclusive to a place like Africa, failing to see that any community, even a "civilised" one has its own set of customs that may always be deemed as odd by an outsider. Hence, defining Africa and speaking of its culture without considering that we speak about this culture from our own specific locations and cultures and assumptions, which are equally limiting and alien, is what i think Achebe criticises Conrad for.

there is also this question of progression. how is the progress of an empire defined? Does not a community progress if it chooses not to follow the temlpates of modernism, and instead secure its culture and customs? Conrad's text favours this sort of progression, where language, race, speaking, body behaviour are the marks of a civilised and rational being. And somehow like Achebe says, Conrad has this anxiety to be able to describe and put in words everything that he encounters, but alot of which transcend the ability to be described. We see this in Forster's novel too where India constantly escapes being pinned down and being known. But India's and Africa's progression does not lie it their knowability but on the contrary, in their evasiveness. So they are not an "antithesis" to Europe, nor like Achebe says are they reflections of Europe's past. On the contrary i feel they stand very distinctly, uncomparably from Europe, and this is the white man's anxiety.
299 words

Conrad, “a thoroughgoing racist”?

I agree to a certain extent with Achebe that Conrad does fall prey to perpetuating discriminatory representations of Africans. For example, they are constantly described as being black “shapes” (1968) or “figures” (1976), almost as if they were inanimate objects void of humanity, with no “inherited experience” (1985) nor language. The constant reference to them yelling, clapping and stamping their feet also builds on the stereotype of them being a “black and incomprehensible frenzy” (1985)!

However, I don’t think that this is a deliberate attempt by Conrad to induce “hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery” as Achebe charges him with, nor do I think that Conrad implies any denigration in his descriptions. I think Conrad’s critique of colonialism still overrides these racial stereotypes and some of these descriptions could in fact ironically expose the depravity of the colonisers. For example, Conrad constantly refers to the Africans as the “blackness”, or “the heart of darkness”, alluding not only to the physical colour of the Africans but also perhaps to them being relatively more primitive. While these can be read as stereotypes, they could ironically also expose the moral corruption of the colonisers when the colonisers themselves ultimately become associated with this very “heart of darkness”. For example, Kurtz is described as being “an impenetrable darkness” himself—a man “lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines” (2010). This physical blackness and darkness of the Africans thus becomes transplanted into a metaphor for the white man’s depravity and state of soul.

Thus, while Conrad does fall prey to racial stereotyping, I do not think that he means it pejoratively and is probably not the “thoroughgoing racist” that Achebe paints him out to be.

(294 words)

Africa through the Viewfinder

In my Asian American Literature class, Prof Walter Lim used the idea of camera resolutions to talk about Amy Tan’s problematic portrayal of the Chinese in The Joy Luck Club. In brief, Tan easily depicted America in “high-res”, providing details, whereas China was in “low-res”. She could only give rough sketches and generic descriptions.

I am aware the issues are not the same as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but I believe the same concept applies. Conrad seems to have only one type of description for the natives: they are “brutes”, “savages” and black figures walking around. His depiction of the landscape of the Congo is also generic, and it seems the only valuable thing he has to say about it is its “darkness” or its ominous and mysterious air, always shrouded in yellow fog. Very “low-res” indeed. I must disclaim that I am not here to attack Conrad’s racism, only to point out that his depiction of the natives is so one-dimensional and generic, while full details are provided for White characters, such as Mr. Kurtz.

I feel that this “high-res”-“low-res” way of viewing things is still prevalent in our world today. My church had a Christmas musical one year based on a song by Scott Wesley Brown, called “Please Don’t Send Me to Africa”. I remember feeling disappointed to see that this modern day musical still had Africans dancing around in nothing but sticks and banana leaves. In this sense, Achebe is very right to say that the media today still gives us pictures of Africa as exotic, tribal, primitive, other-than-West. Despite travel documentaries that depict a wider, more humanised sense of African nations today, the ones looking through the viewfinder are ultimately still the collective West, no?

(290 words)

Academia and Ideologies.

“Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves”

Texts, particularly fictional texts, often do not tell us much except about themselves. This brings us back to the notion of representation within texts- and the precarious relationship it has with the author. Since we’re all mere cultural products of the prevalent ideologies- who is responsible for the representation?

“It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it”.

Perhaps this is why Achebe posits the change to move “the bloody racist” out of our literary canon. It seems to be the only way to negotiate within the system that is largely Eurocentric.

Now, Achebe writes with a passion against HoD’s position as part of “permanent literature”. His points are valid on all account. I’d like to posit that instead of perpetuating the distorted image of Africa within HoD, the continual dissection of Conrad’s text in academia allows for alternative interpretations of Conrad. Ideologies present within our present reading of the text, the readings before us and the context during Conrad’s time become evident with each dissection. Shoving HoD to the back shelves of the literary canon would merely leave such racist sentiments to perpetuate freely without voices like Achebe to point it out for us.

(225 words)

Defending Achebe (just 'cos I'm trying to be different :P)

I’m quite fascinated by the discussions that Achebe’s article has thus far generated on the blog – they’re all very interesting, and mostly defend Conrad’s work. When I first read Achebe’s article I was quite disturbed by his aggressiveness in attacking HOD, and his assertion that HOD is ‘an offensive and deplorable book’ (11). But when I read all the people defending Conrad, I wonder if perhaps Achebe could be defended as well? I mean, his criticism must have some valid points in it to frequently be prescribed as the article to be read alongside HOD.

Thinking deeper about Achebe’s article, I realize that Achebe wasn’t solely attacking Conrad per se. Achebe, to me, was just using Conrad’s HOD to prove his bigger point: Western literary texts that deal with the empire mostly tend to perpetuate the overarching view of the empire as the Other; in this case, Achebe’s Africa is the Other. When Achebe wrote

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 (3).

Doesn’t it echo some of the other readings we’ve done on this course? That oftentimes, these binaries are present in these literary works and our readings of them could influence our own perceptions of Africa. Art has the power to influence, and Achebe worries that this influence is a negative one – one that continues to encourage these binaries rather than break them down. Hence, at the end of his criticism, Achebe proposes a possible change, ‘Perhaps this is the time when it can begin, when the high optimism engendered by the breathtaking achievements of Western science and industry is giving way to doubt and even confusion’ (14).

(297 words)

-Yuen Mei-

Marlow's attitudes towards the "savages"

I found Marlow’s attitudes towards the African natives fascinating. Using derogatory terms like “niggers” and “savages”, he ostensibly perpetuates racial prejudices of British colonists. However, he criticizes European imperialism as a corrupting force that imposes its own materialist values of economic greed onto the natives, displacing them from the restraining values of their own cultures, compelling them to serve alien imperialist materialist aims. Imperialism causes the savage’s fall from innocence”; it is a debilitating force that destroys the cultural integrity of African societies. Although Marlow does not go so far as to call the African “a noble savage” (a primitivist concept: prelapsarian condition of essentialised humanity unencumbered by the corrupting forces of civilization), he does describe the “pure, uncomplicated savagery” of the Africans” as a positive relief from the horrors that Kurtz (who presents himself to the natives as a “supernatural deity”) has unleashed in the Congo out of material lust for ivory. Although he is initially condescending in calling the Africans “prehistoric” due to their lack of cultural, technological and intellectual sophistication, he recognizes that the values of European civilization may not necessarily be superior. His recognition that Africans possess a “humanity” just like his is evident in how he comes to the revelation that the African drums may possess “as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.” He perceives Africans less tainted by European values in a positive light, calling the twenty cannibals on his steamer crew “men one could work with”, admiring their morality in not eating the whites on board. On the other hand, he is contemptuous towards mentally colonized Africans who ape European values, calling one of the obsequious Africans “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs.”

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Incomprehensible heart of darkness

Once upon a time, England was a dark, primeval place and the desire to escape this past was so strong, that perhaps one reason why England took on the role of the colonizer was to suppress this memory, to suppress the unconscious savage within the self. Could this be happening to the reader as well? That we fear the identification, the common ancestry and recognition of “kinship” with the African? In Conrad’s words, “the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly.”

So Conrad relegates the African into a world of “black and incomprehensible frenzy”. Words like “incomprehensible”, “unspeakable”, inscrutable” are repeatedly used to describe the African – which posit Africa as a locus of primitivism, separate from civilization, separate from the world we know today. This negates the fact that African groups have their own order and belief, and denies the value of what cannot be expressed by the English language (“violent babble”, “words that resembled no sounds of human language”).

It’s interesting, as mentioned last week in lecture, how we as readers tend to identify ourselves with the colonizer and the African as the Other. As such, Conrad's racism is too easily forgiven. In a way, we are so desensitized and so comfortable with racism that manifestations of racism simply brush us by. What Achebe was trying to do then was to alert readers of the implicit racism in everyone, and that the stereotypical assumptions we have of Africa, our own image of Africa, is further reinforced by books like Heart of Darkness. Aside from whether Conrad was racist, the main question is whether such a book "which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race…be called a great work of art?”

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300 words is a very good idea: reframing binaristic language into modernist fragmentations

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (HOD) is structured around the Manichean framework that Fanon talks about in his article: the binary between the colonizer and the colonized. This is exactly Achebe’s grouse with Conrad’s text. In terms of language in HOD, Conrad makes clear the inevitable and embedded distance that separates the colonizer from the colonized. There are numerous examples of this: I take as my main example the difference between Kurtz, the Pride of Empire and the “six black men” (18). While Kurtz is “a prodigy…an emissary of pity, and science, and progress” (30), in other words, the symbolic embodiment of the values that are advocated by Empire, the “six black men” are criminals who have deviated from these values. The anxieties of deviance and degeneration that grip the British Empire result in the exertion of physical control over them: “each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain” (18).

Although the difference between White pride and Black savagery (“unhappy savages”) is made clear, Conrad, it would seem to me, reframes this difference into a framework of modernist aesthetics. While Conrad’s use of language is clearly structured around binaries, language itself becomes fragmented, incoherent and shrouded in mystery, in a typical modernist manner. These six men “were called criminals” yet they were like “an insoluble mystery from over the sea” (18). There are many examples of how language breaks down in the text despite it being structured around binaries: phrases are repeated – “but what’s the good?” (82), Marlow tells a lie at the end of the novel even if he says that he “hate[s], detest[s]s, and can’t bear a lie” (32), and Kurtz can only repeat “the horror! The horror!” in a manner that is wholly inadequate to his experience.

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“Mistah Conrad--he dead.”

Achebe’s essay on the Western Romantic imagination that is still pervasive and continued today paraded Conrad as a “bloody racist” to prove his point. Picking on the misogynistic representation of the Africans in terms of language (the lack of it too) and culture, Achebe argues that Conrad is perpetuating the racism through the ineffective “cordon sanitaire” of Marlow in HOD.

What is problematic about Achebe’s An Image of Africa is that he polemises the readership of HOD to the faction of Conrad scholars and supporters, and those of his view that Conrad is a misogynist. Are we supposed then to take up sides too? If we were to take Roland Barthes’ view in The Death of the Author, that we have to replace the author as “the only person in literature” with us, the readers, then we have to kill off Conrad, even Achebe, in this matter as we decide for ourselves what to make of HOD.

I agree with Achebe that Conrad might have been viewing Africa through tainted lenses, but can I fault him for being a historical being conditioned by the society that he had existed in? My own reading of HOD is that Marlow’s narrative to the rest of his company travelling on the Thames is more concerned with the moral degradation of the colonizer as he becomes absorbed into the world of the colonized as a god or superior being. The misogyny, sidelined as they are, paints Marlow as the racist, and not Conrad. Barring any other texts in Conrad’s canon or personal information, I believe that HOD by itself does not serve as incriminating evidence of Conrad’s racism.

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Of Gramm(odern)tology: Achebe's Conrad

Chinua Achebe’s polemic claim that Conrad’s novel is a blatantly racist text hinges upon the claim that the African continent and its inhabitants merely form the dialectical backdrop that sustains the psychodrama of the disintegration of the European mind and morals; and that Africans are not provided with a language and an identity from within the text that affirms them as human beings. However, Achebe’s claim that Conrad fails “to hint… at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge” (7) Marlow, and hence the assumption that the language of the novel is unproblematically objective seems flawed when Conrad constantly points out how any act of narration, mired as it is in an interminable solipsism, cannot “convey… any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning” (50).

Indeed, in as much as Achebe draws out the historical specificity of Conrad’s ideological blind-spots, he neglects to further reflect on the consequences of the historically contingent nature of the language of the text itself. By constructing a notion of a Conrad who has control over his text, Achebe fails to see the alternative of an author-function (qua Foucault) whose ability to enunciate is predicated upon the various discourses that European artistic representation makes available. In this account, to write and represent is to be historical: meaning is no longer in the hands of what the author intends (as Achebe seems to want to say when he compares Marlow to Conrad himself). Achebe’s own discourse then, provides an avenue with which Conrad’s discourse can be challenged: the only way is to constantly read the text and read (and re-read) it well, to read for its assumptions and the places where these discourses can be subverted. The loss of certainty that Marlow speaks gives Conrad's text its life.

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This 300w business is KEEL(HAUL)ING me...

I'm picking on a single Achebe point - the contrast between the women. Although the seemingly positive light the "savage and superb" African is presented in can be deflected by analysing her portrayal as a version of the exoticised noble savage and heeding Achebe's claim that "she is in her place and so can win Conrad's special brand of approval," I believe that the portrayal of the "refined, European woman" that Achebe sees her as a "savage" and inferior "counterpart to" (14) is not as positive as Achebe clearly makes it out to be either. She is strongly aligned with the twisted Kurtz and while Conrad "bestow[s]…human expression" (Achebe, 15) upon her, her words "silenc[e]" Marlow "into an appalled dumbness," (155) and invoke in him "a chill grip on [his] chest" (157): "eloquent" she may be, she is nevertheless a ghastly "phantom." (156) Her final pronouncement is also significant - what "she knew…was sure" (157) of is wrong. Next to her oppressive, horrifying, and mistaken figure, the "barbarous and superb woman" who "did not so much as flinch" (146) at the whistle seems to me rather the preferable encounter. Furthermore, she does speak, "shout[ing] something," (145) albeit something that Marlow does not understand - but neither does he seem to understand the "appall[ing]" declarations of love for Kurtz expressed by the other.

With just this, I'm not really contesting Achebe's claim that Conrad was "a bloody racist," (19) but I feel he oversimplifies Darkness, as this example shows. I find it interesting that reading Achebe seems to produce audience indignation on Conrad's behalf. As my post might indicate, I feel this justified, but I also wonder whether, ala Gikandi's conclusion, it arises because we still can't "displace" Conrad "from the ritualised place that he occupies in the modern" (476) library.

Inquiry

Possible to attempt the mid-term essay topic with Conrad's Heart of Darkness? For the question specified "novel", and Heart of Darkness is widely considered a novella.

--- Yisa

more than racism

Early on, Max noted that the "essentializing of Africa and Africans in HOD renders them into mere inanimate objects". Achebe suggests that this tendency in HoD is at least partly due to Conrad's own "irrational hate" and "bloody" racism, since "even after due allowances have been made for all the influenes of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility, there remains... a residue of antipathy".

This is to suggest that what irks Achebe is not that Conrad was a racist, his objectification of Africans seems out of proportion to "normal" standards of racism: it obsessively repudiates and belittles the claim to kinship between European/African. I'd like to complicate this notion by suggesting that Conrad actually tacitly accepts the claim, but the implications are grave since Colonialism is justified by the difference between the European and Native. This logic reveals itself in the Master/Slave dialectic: the moment of struggle is followed by a period of continual violence that entrenches the difference between the two beings (C.f Levine and fanon).

By removing this difference, colonialism is revealed as merely a system of greed, at its heart a desire to possess the other as an object. One senses this in what appears to be Kurtz's boundless rapacity.

I suspect there’s a sense of being implicated in a wrong that nonetheless seems to have preceded you, and promises to outlast you: faced with this, what remains except an intolerable guilt and shame?

Perhaps this is why Conrad leaves them only as an indistinct and threatening shadow at the edge of the narrative rather than being more explicit. Kinship is only affirmed in an extreme moment, that of mortality and death, and in a sense that recognition is a kind of death, in that one loses one's bearings, loses one's basis for understanding the self.

home sweet home

I don’t often like to dwell on the grotesque, but I did spend some time wondering about the significance of Kurtz’s house. Now, I can see how mounting “heads on stakes” could be a perverted form of native commodification—akin to hunting antelope and displaying their antlers on the wall. What stimulates my interest is why Kurtz would want to make those faces face in. We see how even Marlow says, “They would have been…impressive…if their faces had not been turned to the house.”

Could Conrad be trying to stir us into thinking about the colonizer reveling in the gaze of the colonized, desiring the native to look upon and emulate/mimic the colonizer? In that sense we can see the one head which is facing out (and which was “smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber”) to be rejecting that prescribed position of subjection. That head then becomes a symbol for the “dream” of decolonization and liberation.

Or, we could read the heads on stakes as a subversive form of Foucault’s theory of surveillance. Kurtz’s house then becomes something like a panopticon. Since Kurtz wants to be watched, the natives who were punished by Kurtz and thus beheaded now become his symbolic surveillances. Instead of the normal panopticon where one guard watches many inmates, we have a situation where many inmates are forced to watch or admire one guard. This form of native humiliation is magnified when we are told that “the chiefs [of the people] came every day to see him [and] would crawl…” The rest is left to the imagination but it is easy to see how compelling the native to gaze upon its own humiliation is potentially disempowering.

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The Novella: A Fitting Choice for Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

While there is much contestation over the definition of a novella, most agree that 1) it is a piece of prose fiction that is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel and 2) Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (HD) is one such text.

I would like to suggest that the significance of Conrad's choice of genre, the novella, goes beyond that of a lighter read for students such as ourselves. Given the subjects that Conrad tackles, the novella is an appropriate form for his text.

What exactly does Conrad tackle in HD? (Arguably), HD reflects upon the late 19th-early 20th century anxiety of the fragmentation and collapse of empire. This is best seen through the character of Kurtz, the face of colonialism gone 'mad', 'echo[ing] loudly within [itself] because [it is, in reality,] hollow at the core'. In addition, a sense of uncertainty pervades his text with words such as 'inscrutable', 'indefinable' occurring. This is compounded with a smattering of ellipses that ultimately deny 'comprehension'. This emphasizes the text's modernist aesthetic, with an acute sense of awareness that one is never able to know something fully, and cannot claim to.

Going back to Conrad's choice of genre, the novella is a departure from the conventional triple-decker Victorian novel that tries to enclose the world within its covers. It is instead a more modest piece of work that reflects skeptically on the tradition of assuming the 'representability' or 'wholeness' or of an entity, be it a person, a place, a story, a history, etc. The novella, with its absence of 200 more pages, is therefore an appropriate form within which Conrad can place his tale, because the 'meaning of an episode [lies not] inside like a kernel but outside', always elusive, just 'as a glow brings out a haze'.

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- Kelly Tay

A Charming Music Box

To spur on further thoughts on this week's reading: the following words have been taken from Jean Genet on what triggered him to write "Les Negres", or "The Blacks" -- perhaps one of the most difficult yet profound works on the philosophical structures of racism in twentieth century literature. As you may know, Genet was a twentieth century French writer who is most famous perhaps for his works including "Our Lady of the Flowers," "The Thief's Journal," and for his political (also described as existentialist and Absurdist) plays ranging from "The Balcony" to "The Maids."


Genet on what made him think of writing "Les Negres":

"The point of departure, the trigger, was given to me by a music box in which the mechanical figures were four Blacks dressed in livery bowing before a little princess in white porcelain. This charming bibelot is from the eighteenth century. In our day, without irony, would one imagine a response to it: four white valets bowing to a Black princess? Nothing has changed. What then goes on in the soul of these obscure characters that our civilization has accepted into its imagery, but always under the lightly foolish appearance of a caratydid holding up a coffee table, of a train bearer or a costumed servant bearing a coffee pot? They are made of fabric, but they do not have a soul. If they had one, they would dream of eating the princess.

When we see the Blacks, do we see something other than the precise and sombre phantoms born of our own desire? But what do these phantoms think of us then? What games do they play?"

Racist Conrad. So what?

Achebe is right in highlighting certain aspects of Conrad's work that appear to be racially derogatory, but to call him "a thoroughgoing racist" obscures aspects of the work that aim to resist received conceptions of the colonial enterprise. Conrad never set out to subvert racial stereotypes, but to expose what many Europeans back home never knew about Africa and the violence inflicted upon its people, To achieve this polemic, humanizing the colonized is not a pre-requisite; Conrad only needed to dehumanize the colonizer. It is his depiction of the ironic reversal of the civilized becoming savage, of the divergence between reality and interpretation, which infuses the work with its timeless power. I think the racist strand within HD does not render Conrad's work complicit with colonialism. Rather, it underscores the pervasiveness of colonial discourse in his day; how Conrad, for all his progressiveness, was still unable to fully transcend the thinking of his time.

Another irony: Achebe's essay is now perennially read alongside Conrad's work, but this is possible primarily because of Achebe’s professorship at a top liberal American college. Franz Fanon himself was educated in Lyon, in the homeland of his colonizers. Perhaps this highlights the ambivalent and contradictory relationship between the colonized bourgeosis public intellectual and structures of knowledge production belonging to the colonizer, and how the former leverages upon the latter in a kind of neocolonial bootstrapping that only reinforces Western authority, like an extension of Gramscian hegemony.

Cursory thoughts on Achebe's criticisms of Heart of Darkness

Disclaimer: As specified in class by Dr. Koh, this entry shall strive to keep its length within the limits of 300 words.


One has to be cautious or reflexive when dealing with the question of the narrator, or narration: To whom does the voice belong? An implication of this consideration would be, the impulsion of any voice does not extend, necessarily or simply, from just one singular source. The voice of the text isn’t that which utters only at a singular register, but as a reflection of the concord of voices blending over counterpoints and dissonances to constitute a speaking whole. The contention of which would lead us into the realm of the ventriloquist: in the passages quoted by Achebe, the character Marlowe speaks; but Achebe claims these passages as evidence of Conrad’s inherent racism, the implication of which would be the absolute (or should one say imperialistic?) denial of any possibility that Conrad could have deployed that voice (the racist voice of Marlowe) as a strategy to inform the reader of a particular attitude towards apprehending the dark continent’s Other. For on a literal level, the text registers as a narrative of Marlowe’s narrative of his African exploits, and Achebe’s contention seems to lie with only this latter aspect of Conrad’s text: Marlowe’s narrative. Achebe appears to have excluded from his consideration the entire passage that begins the novella before Marlowe himself begins to speak (and one asks: To whom does this voice belong? Conrad’s or someone else’s?). Would a consideration of these passages subtract from what Achebe has to say in his criticisms, or would it enhance his position? In any case, Achebe’s reasoning could be summarized as follows: because Marlowe exhibits racist traits in his narrative of the African Other, hence Conrad is racist; or, hence Conrad must be in agreement with whatever racist sensibilities that Marlowe might have. Very problematic indeed.

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--- Yisa

Response to Chinua Achebe reading

As mentioned in the article, “Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray – a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate”. I was thus reminded of this particular quote I have read in the Preface written by Oscar Wilde for his own book, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray)

I think the quote pretty much explains itself in opposition to Achebe’s point about “artistic good faith”.

In addition, I think that the plurality of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is precisely what makes it so interesting and perhaps, worth spending time studying. HOD can be read as a racist text, but at the same time, its subversion of the Empire’s civilizing mission also critiques the Empire’s idea of progress as a form of regression.

If I may add, I believe that pluralism is central to the reading of modernist texts.

I shall conclude with another one of my favourite quotes:

“Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital” (Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray)

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