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)