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.

(296 words)