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.

(300 words)