Powerful Laughter

Far from feeling sadness at the 'black dravidian coolie['s]' death, the elephant's demise, or the police officer's gross misjudgment, I found "Shooting an Elephant" rather funny. Sardonic humour seems to delicately lace the text, affording a story that is more ridiculous than appalling.

Consider the shooting of the elephant. The first shot is anti-climatic, with neither the 'bang' nor 'kick' heard or felt, and the 'knocking down' of the elephant taking 'five seconds'. The elephant is personified as a 'senil[e]' old person 'sagg[ing] flabbily' and 'slobber[ing]', evoking images directly in opposition to concepts of aging gracefully. This denies the elephant a grand, tragic death, but instead turns the affair into a tragicomedy. In addition, laughs are extended to the bumbling police officer whose idiocy is behind this botched shooting. By failing repeatedly to shoot fatally, the officer's attempts to 'struggle' against being 'laughed at' by the crowd are, ironically, futile. Worse, readers are added to the laughing crowd.

What then is the significance of the employment of sardonic humour? Here, Orwell departs from Conrad's formal and serious tone in "Heart of Darkness" where 'the horror' of the imperialist enterprise is revealed as something obviously and overtly terrible. Instead, Orwell's use of sinister comedy allows us to laugh at it in a shifty fashion, and this goes further in critiquing imperialism. Our scornful laughter is more powerful than merely agreeing with 'the horror' in Conrad's text- laughing implicates us in the matter, forcing our subscription and attestation to colonialism's macabre face. The colonial enterprise is then fiercely critiqued for its capitalization on incidental 'pretext[s]' that make them 'legally in the right', while really, all that is craved for is 'solely [the] avoid[ance] of looking a fool'. This, being exposed covertly through the tragicomedic mode, is to me a stronger statement.

(299 Words)

Multiple Narratives

The way in which Lord Jim is narrated is rather fragmented, even with Marlow as the principle narrator of the story.  There is the omniscient narrator who introduces the story, for one, and within Marlow's own storytelling there are several narrators too with their own viewpoints and stories to tell, not least Jim himself.  Beyond that, Marlow's narrative is split up further by the letter to the unknown sympathetic listener; the perspective in the letter is arguably different from that offered in Marlow's earlier speech, since it happens later in time, taking into account the events that happened since then.

All the narrators have their own viewpoints, though Marlow acts as the mediating and interpretive agent through which they expound their tales.  But Marlow is also mediated by the omniscient narrator of the novel, who in turn can be said to be mediated by Conrad himself.  Yet we trust all of them to be telling the truth - at least, their version of the truth, for Conrad makes plain the biases in each of the voices. Even the omniscient narrator takes sides in the novel, notably when he paints an unsympathetic picture of Jim in the introduction.

But since the viewpoints clash with each other, the end result is that we never get an authoritative picture of Jim, the main subject of the discourses.  Differing perspectives, pawing away at the truth, but not quite getting there; this is one of the hallmarks of modernist technique.  Looking back at Passage to India, we find different perspectives on the caves and on India itself that never resolves into a neat whole; Lord Jim, though written earlier, takes this a step further, on the midway point between PtI and something like To The Lighthouse with its streams of consciousnesses.

- Yingzhao (296 words)

Ack, I nearly forgot about this...

*SPOILER (BEYOND CHAPTER 30) ALERT*
(But I've only skimmed the remaining chapters because I'm too busy freaking out over a big pres I've got tomorrow aaaaaah so apologies if I misconstrued anything.)

Part of the point I'd intended last week (lost in pruning) is that Conrad's portrayal of women reads to me as if he were even more of a misogynist, a reading underscored by Lord Jim. I've only read three Conrad works and in each the fate of the 'heroines' is to pine for their dead love for the rest of their "soundless, inert li[ves]," (331) even where they were (and often) the cause of that death. Conrad's misogynism is fairly documented, and in Gestures of Healing, Clayton notes that Marlow might not have "lied" - "the Intended can be equated with the Horror." (84) To continue my lost point: in missing this entirely and seeing her only as the positively-portrayed "refined, European woman," (14) Achebe performs an act of misogyny parallel to the racism he accuses Conrad and his admirers of, one that is "such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely undetected." (19)

If arguing Achebe's concern is mainly for African benefit, not women - nor Asians - all the more he should understand the limits of Conrad's own concerns. Jim gives us a stellar opportunity to put ourselves in Achebe's shoes: Conrad's portrayal of Asians is considerably 'high[er]-res' than his Africans - corresponding to the depths of his relative experience - and I feel he does us "beggars" a greater disservice. The good Dain Waris is so due to his "European mind," (213) Jim gets his heroic end at the relatively complex but ultimately vengeful hands of Doramin, rinse and repeat. Drawn in finer strokes, we are thus decisively cast as inferior even to a flawed specimen of whiteness - but that doesn't make Conrad any more a "bloody racist" (19) than the average 19th/20thC European: ala Althusser, we cannot escape from our contextual ideology.

(As a non-word-counted aside - I'm not harping on and on about Achebe because I'm anti-anti-racism, I just think that it's flawed for him to criticise Conrad and negate Darkness out of his and its context - I mean, I devoted an entire term paper last semester to slamming Michael Bay (for Transformers (2007)) as a "bloody racist" - but unlike Conrad, Bay is working within a historical context (i.e. ours) where he should 'know better.')

creeping twenty feet underground: the politics of representation

Jim’s willingness to stand trial after abandoning the Patna, and his habit of running away from areas where the story of his role in the Patna might circulate, work together to comment on the politics of representation.

After his ‘abandonment’ of the Patna and the consequent loss of his seaman’s certificate, Jim slides away from public view, hopping from shore to shore in order to avoid re-encountering traces of his unhappy past. Instead he locates himself in places where knowledge of his disgrace has not yet circulated. In the words of Michael Valdez Moses, Jim seeks the places “where narration lags behind the event” (64). When Jim’s story is narrated by others, he becomes defined by his representation within that narrative. Jim does not want to be defined by the shameful narrative of his past, seeking instead a clean slate where he can “rewrite” his story.

Ashamed as he is of his actions following the non-sinking of the Patna, Jim does not shirk from the public or from legislative judgment. “Do you not think you or anyone could have made me if I…I am – I am not afraid to tell?” asks Jim (112). This ‘telling’ constitutes an act of agency – when he speaks for himself Jim can at least try to bring out the nuances of his subjective experience on the ship, an agency that is denied him when his story is related by a third party.

To me, Jim’s escapist tendencies derive not so much from a desire to forget/deny his actions on the Patna, but rather, the desire to tell his own story in his own words, to define himself in his own narrative. This desire is not dissimilar to post-colonial writers and such who “write back” against colonial inscriptions.

(293 words, excluding reference)

* Quote from Moses taken from:
Moses, Valdez Michael. "Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics. from Modernism and Colonialism. Ed.Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses. London: Duke University Press, 2007.

"one of us"

Conrad, at the end of his note at the end of the novel, calls Jim "one of us". Marlow himself repeats this phrase throughout his recountings. The immediate reading of this would be to see Jim as a kind of everyman, whose moral dilemmas are somehow universal, and are ours as well. Yet it must be noted that by being "one of us", Jim is not "one of them". He is not one of the prilgrims sleeping below deck on the Patna, nor is he one of the indigenous Malays at Patusan. Jim's socio-cultural affinities are not hence not as universal as we might expect; he is more of an every-European that an everyman.

Conrad does not claim to offer any point of view other than an European one, and we can perhaps blame Conrad for being racist (again) or Orientalist. But Conrad consciously delineates the cultural and linguistic difference between Jim (and Brown) and the Malays. He is, as is Jim and Marlow, sharply aware of the dialectics of Us and Them, of Self and Other. For as much as we try to dissolve the binaries that keep man and man at bay, we will never be able to fully enter the mind of another. Yet in the brief moments of human connection, like when Marlow and Jim make eye contact in the courtroom, where truly universal issues like justice and honour arise, is there "truth disclosed in a moment of illusion", and then might Jim truly become "one of us" - not simply a character, but human in shape and form.

What were you trying to do Conrad?

We keep coming to this discussion of whether the native is given a voice or not. If he’s given one, we criticize it as the author attempting to ventriloquize or speak for the native. If the native isn’t given a voice, then we turn around and say the native is a subaltern. So what does the native have to say so that he doesn’t appear ventriloquized? In line with this is the description of the East or basically, foreign lands. If the author describes it positively, he runs the risk of exoticization. If he describes it as being in a bad state, then we say he’s being all white and pompous. How much is the author of literature in that era trapped? This is all an outcome of last week and us trying to verify whether Conrad is racist or not. I feel like I’m reading for clues to either exonerate him or incriminate him.

Which is what I was doing when I was reading the bit about the pilgrims in chapter 2- are the Muslims being typically portrayed as dogmatic followers of the faith? Conrad keeps reiterating how they all have abandoned everything just for the sake of going Mecca. And why are they “the unconscious pilgrims of an exacting belief” (he later repeats similarly “exacting faith”)? Conrad’s personal view that Islam was demanding in its requirements? The German skipper likens them to “cattle” and like cattle they are abandoned on Patna, nothing to be heard from them except that one “water” request.

OR is Conrad suggesting that their faith saved them? Even the “screw-pile lighthouse, planted by unbelievers…seemed to wink at her (Patna)…as if in derision of errand of faith”. This seems speculative but like I said, am trying to exonerate Conrad as much as incriminate him.

(299 words)

Do You Know Lord Jim?

“I know my own mind”.

In those five words, Jim thwarts the attempts made by Marlow, the unknown narrator and the author himself, in a bid to understand and “grasp” Jim. Uttered assuredly by Jim, those words encapsulate the enterprise of reading, interpretation and representation.

The entire novel has Marlow recounting the past to his avid listeners, and in the process of narrating, Marlow embarks on a quest on reading and interpreting Jim for himself, and for others. The frustration for Marlow, (and us), lies having to “read” through a flurry of past actions, events and words, and interpret them, in order to understand Jim and the fascination that Marlow has of him. Jim, when excited, is usually fails to string together a coherent thought or sentences, instead, his actions are more “revealing” to Marlow. Following the opening quote, it is Jim, and only Jim, who can “know” his own mind, for language encounters its limits in this novel. (Note the excessiveness of language and the manner in which Marlow narrates- it is never linear in its progression to the end.)

Conrad, however, complicates things when Jim is shown to doubt himself. The incident of Patna, where he jumps off the ship is one such incident where Jim, doesn’t seem to fully understand his actions and himself. Readers then, are given privy, to a representation of Jim’s psyche as he starts to come to term with his actions; “There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well- into an everlasting deep hole…”

A question then arises- how are we to understand others, if we don’t understand ourselves? It is with this question in mind, that the hypocrisy of the colonial enterprise comes to fore- particularly under its flag of a “civilizing” mission.


(298 words)

crumbling conrad

Last week we talked about collapsing binaries in HOD. This week, I found it almost impossible to ignore the (and this is of course completely subjective) deeply ingrained theme of failed establishments. Before the dust of one crumbling framework can settle, another one pops up (or rather, down).

Crash 1: Take the repeated allusion to ships for instance—how many of them are damaged, derelict, sinking? If a ship can indeed be said to represent human conquest of the sea/unknown, then we can read these ships as floating and failing institutions of sorts.

Crash 2: The maritime industry is also a failed establishment: firstly because officers onboard the Patna are described as debased, alcoholics, violent, morally questionable (leaving pilgrims to drown is just mean, bordering on blasphemous), and secondly because even the team of inquirers set up as a watchdog system to oversee the former can be read as itself flawed and indicative of internal contradictions—Captain Brierly defects to be on Jim’s side, arranging for him to run away.

Crash 3: Language as a stable institution pretty much also crumbles in the text. Words like “water” or “cur” generate much misunderstanding and violence, characters seem unable to find the words to say (terms like “magnificent vagueness” and “glorious indefiniteness” cue this), and French is left untranslated (something which should trigger ideas about authenticity and the limited capacity of language as a conveyor of meaning).

Crash 4: Patusan, arguably, is de-established place, a backwater. Even its political structure crumbles since the people want to overthrow the rajah, and later on Jim (since men try to assassinate him).

Why all the anti-establishmentarianism? Perhaps a modernist desire to resist absolutism or reflect the increasingly fragmented and unstable quality of a world that is going to the dogs is in play here.

(298words)

Cryptic Creepy Crawlies

Stein’s room was filled with “horrible miniature monsters, looking malevolent in death and immobility, and his cabinet of butterflies, beautiful and hovering under the glass cases of lifeless wings” (167). The “[c]atacombs of beetles” and “graves of butterflies” sets the stage for the discussion of Jim (168, 175). 

Pondering over an “extraordinary perfect specimen” of a butterfly he had chanced upon and captured after surviving an ambush by his adversaries, Stein draws references between butterfly (masterpiece) and Man (amazing, but not a masterpiece). 

There are obvious parallels between the butterfly and Jim. Both are associated with death. The butterfly was found and caught after a killing, while Jim was known for the Patna incident. Both are extraordinary and rare. Both are admired by their respective collectors (Stein - entomology and Marlow - human specimens). 

One can draw references between the studying of the butterfly to the study of Jim. However, Marlow and Stein talked in coded terms and “avoided pronouncing Jim’s name” (177). It seems to me whether Jim should be a beetle (unsavory image) and “creep twenty feet underground and stay there” (165) or “fly high with a strong flight” like the butterfly (172). 

The discussions on being a romantic, of Absolute Truth and Beauty as “elusive, obscure, half-submerged” (178) suggest a pained nostalgia of the departure of Victorian values and perhaps, literary style (butterfly as a Victorian symbol too). The prospect of preserving the dead  (tradition and culture) with the dead (literature?), similar to what entomology does, is not a satisfying one. However, there are no other options, giving rise to an immense pessimism of loss and mortality, themes closely associated to modernism, and the Empire (through Stein). 

(283)

Words, facts, words, facts, let's call the whole thing off...

This is something I found rather amusing. We’ve just ploughed through scores of words, reading accounts, “facts” about Jim’s life, adventures and misfortunes (and some other characters along the way) but we are not closer to knowing who the ‘real’ Jim is. I, as the reader, was drawn to his character, like the way Kurtz did, into wanting more, more what? More facts about him to satisfy my curiosity but “as if facts could explain anything” right? Anyone can talk about anyone or anything, describing events, personalities, trivia etc. but all this excess talk does not tell us who the person is – an entire novel was dedicated to Jim but he remains “inscrutable at heart”.

Maybe the text or the character of Jim is not meant to be understood. The complex and intense alteration to a person after a ‘life-changing’ event cannot be explained or interpreted. By positing that “he is one of us”, Conrad has removed the centre from the author, the narrator or even the reader. It is a rejection that all positions are mere interpretations since that implies that there is a truth or centre in which meaning exists in fixity. Rather the text has become “infinite” in as much as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.

In the modernist world, literature, speech and writing, it seems, is a battle of interpretations. Authors, critics, us students of Literature, need (and distress!) to communicate and the greater the need, the greater the snowball effect of overflowing words. Language is at once superfluous, excessive and full of poverty because language trivializes the individual’s experience, it makes the unique common and reduces the individual to a definition - a “fact”. So perhaps Lord Jim should remain “inscrutable at heart”

(294 words)

A blending of frames: Jim as episteme and epistemological mystery

I found Lord Jim interesting in the way it seemed to bridge literary genres and modes of knowing: on one hand, Jim’s story, taken alone, seems to fit the structure of a Romantic bildungsroman (indeed, Lord Jim is sometimes subtitled A Romance) following the rise and fall of a hero figure. At the same time, this linear narrative is fractured by the text’s layered structure and Citizen Kane-style drifting between sub-narratives and voices, as filtered through Marlow – Conrad’s modernist aspect, so to speak.

Conrad’s amalgamation of modernist forms and earlier literary genres works on many levels. It can be read as representing the conflict at the heart of the colonial project, which seeks to fit itself within an ordered grand narrative that somewhat mirrors the bildungsroman (bringing knowledge to the uncivilized, encouraging the progress and growth of man – both coloniser and colonized). This is continually defeated, however, by reality in its many facets, which breaks up this imposed narrative into the grey areas that we have seen in the texts studied so far.

This is linked to the fundamental unknowability of things, which is the question that Marlow and the novel itself grapple with. Jim remains an epistemological mystery (as both subject and object) despite his heroic trajectory – which, ironically, is triggered by a failure of knowledge: Jim thinks he knows the outcome of the Patna, but its reality eludes him. Marlow and the other characters’ fascination with Jim, Marlow’s attempts to steer the course of Jim’s life, and his attempts to frame Jim’s story in various forms of narratives, echoes our fascination with the text: he/it evades our frames of knowledge, and we try to make sense of him/it but never really succeed because he/it cannot fit within a prescribed framework (or genre) of knowing.

296 words

Conrad's Modernism

Conrad’s later novels (in this instance, Lord Jim), I think, show distinct differences in terms of race, between the White Man (Jim) and the community of “natives” in the fictional Patusan. For example, the reader is informed of the differences between Jim and “Jim’s own servant”, Tamb’ Itam (206): while the former is described in terms of his whiteness – “white lord” – the latter has a “complexion [that] was very dark” (206). Racial binaries here are important to the text precisely because different qualities and characteristics are affiliated with different racial terms. By virtue of his ‘whiteness’, Jim as part of a ‘more superior’ race, can become “the virtual ruler of the land” (208). Jim, in other words, becomes like a symbolic White Rajah; he is a Romantic paternalistic figure that leads Patusan to civilization. Conrad is drawing upon traditional tropes of the White Man as the father figure in colonial discourses.


Despite drawing clear racial boundaries, these differences seem to be aestheticized in a modernist manner mainly through employment of multiple narrators and achronological narration. Through different narrators who present Jim’s story differently – Tamb’ Itam, Stein, Jewel etc – the reader is not given one, single, authorial portrait of Jim. Rather, the reader is presented with competing portraits of Jim; ultimately, what the reader is left with is a composite image of Jim. To add to this ‘modernist chaos’, Conrad confuses the time sequence of events, making it difficult for readers to follow the sequence of events that happened. In the Patusan section, as in the Patna section of the novel, there are movements back and forward in time: time goes back to the “seventeenth-century” (173) history of Patusan and time fast-forwards to the date where Marlow saw “the coast of Patusan . . . nearly two years afterwards” (185).

(299 words)

Linguistic confusion symptomatic of the failure of the British colonial enterprise

I was intrigued by how Conrad’s treatment of language in Lord Jim reveals its critique of the British colonial enterprise. When Jim leaves for Patusan on board a ship, he meets a half-caste captain whose English is expressed as a verbally confused mishmash/incoherent jumble. The captain’s “flowing English” is described as seemingly “derived from a dictionary compiled by a lunatic.” The “crazy” or foolish quality of the captain’s speech stems from how unintelligibility and inarticulacy result when he attempts to pepper his language with stock phrases and clichés that he mimes/apes/mimics from the rhetoric of the British colonial civilizing mission of the “white-man’s burden.” This mental colonization of the captain by the hypocritical values and rhetoric of British colonialism results in an inappropriately inflated and highfalutin exaggerated-ness in his speech that becomes comic because the phrases are wrested out of their originally idealistic, moralistic and allegedly “noble” context and jarringly used to describe everyday, mundane administrative and official realities with which it is incompatible. The text clearly mocks the confused and inapt employment of language:

Had Mr. Stein desired him to “ascend”, he would have “reverentially”—(I think he wanted to say respectfully—but devil only knows)—“reverentially made objects for the safety of properties.” If disregarded, he would have presented “resignation to quit.” Twelve months ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr. Cornelius “propitiated many offertories” to Mr. Roger Allang and the “principal populations”, on “conditions which made the trade “a snare and ashes in the mouth”[…]

To me, this verbal confusion can be read as symptomatic of the social and political disorder that has resulted from British colonialism and the chaos that has ensued from the failures of its white mission in Patusan.

(291 words)

The Captive White Man

I was immersed in Marlow’s narrative of Jim’s state of flux without an anchored centre, moving from port to port as the memories of the Patna catches up with him. And just as he seems to be anchored, figuratively and literally, the heroics of his adventures at Doramin’s Bugis stronghold throw up an analogy that provoked my thoughts on his Hollywood cinema-style road to fame á la Rambo.

Marlow describes Jim as a “captive in every sense”. He even goes as far to say that he was also “captivated” by Dain Waris. He describes Dain Waris as “open to the Western eye” but at the same time embodying the “mystery of unrecorded ages” (164). From this I infer that Dain Waris serves as perfect specimen of the cultured native, and yet a better European than most real ones. The two characters’ fascination in Dain Waris then directs our attention to their gravitation towards an amalgamation of both Occidental and Oriental categories as prescribed by Edward Said – and yet their continued “captivity” in those separate roles.

This complicates the relationship of the European and the Asian that is viewed through a lens of binary oppositions, for Dain Waris and Jim are figures in the liminal middle ground of these two polarities. And perhaps, for a way to reach the middle ground, violence must be exacted. Jim the Occidental assures himself a space in the midst of the Orientals by violence in leading the attack on Sherif Ali’s fort, and Dain Waris the Oriental gains recognition by the Occidental by being instrumental in the war effort (169).

But still, their basic differences in ethnicity render their positions in this hybrid class unequal in power. Jim the Occident-turned-Hybrid obviously holds more power over Dain Waris the Oriental-turned-Hybrid. The shackles of “captivity” remain.

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)

"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