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)

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.')

Abjection

If abjection in Kristevian terms (I totally just made that word up) means to throw off aspects of oneself onto a figure, also simultaneously throwing it under the public gaze, then Marlow is certainly guilty of this. In HOD we see how he gets disturbed by thinking about the river as being connected to the Thames, and therefore just a different part of a whole--implying that people are not so very different as our cultures and societies leads us to believe, but perhaps are all the same. If so, then interior qualities such as the desire for chaos, violence and the carnivalesque get abjected onto the native Others in the novel. We see this most clearly in Kurtz, who lets his inner beasts run free, horrifying and at the same time fascinating Marlow, as a white man who outdoes the natives in barbarism.

I think the same happens in Lord Jim, but very differently. Marlow, as narrator, is free to shape the narrative and hence reader perceptions of Jim. In Chapter 26, he sees Jim as "a figure set up on a pedestal, to represent in his persistent youth the power, and perhaps the virtues, of races that never grow old, that have emerged from the gloom...like a shadow in the light." (201 of my Signet edition) He valorizes Jim as a symbolic figure of heroism and virtue. I'm not sure if this is a reverse kind of abjection, but it certainly seems that Marlow's reading of Jim is shaped by this and perhaps then, symptomatic of his own desire to be likewise or at least to be able to throw his humanist aspirations onto someone else, however unworthy he may be. It is of course also significant that Jim is seen here as symbolic, a kind of empty signifier perhaps, who gets filled in slowly by various narrative accounts.

(300 excluding pointless asides :))

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)

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)

"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)

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

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)

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-

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?”

(290 words)

“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.

(words:274)

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.

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.

[286words]

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'.

(300 words)

- Kelly Tay

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)

(224 words!)