Joseph Conrad

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2007 by Gorra, Michael

The picture of the isolated individual-of "Man"-that emerged in the Conrad scholarship of the postwar period often worked in tandem with the formalist emphasis of the New Criticism to strip his work of its context, to relieve it of its moorings in the world. Guerard's account of "Heart of Darkness" proved enormously persuasive. Some version of it was taught to several generations of American students, and yet it seems today to provide a cautionary tale about critical overreaching. It makes me think of Oscar Wilde's suggestion, in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that "All art is both surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril." Or perhaps one should simply recall Marlow's own claim, as he tries to avoid snags and keep his boat's engine running, that "There was surface-truth enough in these things" to keep one busy.

Nothing written about Conrad since the days of Leavis and Zabel has been so influential as Chinua Achebe's 1975 essay, "An Image of Africa." If to Guerard the Congo provides but a backdrop for Marlow's voyage into the soul, for the Nigerian novelist it is central, a place with its own peoples and histories and its own claim to an autonomous place in the imagination. Though in some sense Achebe agrees with Guerard-agrees that in "Heart of Darkness" Africa itself plays but a minimal role. Only he then turns to attack Conrad as a "bloody racist" for having written a book that treats the continent "as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril." And however overdrawn his argument, Achebe does have a point, even as he recognizes that Conrad himself "did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book."

Instead the tale relies on a set of commonly-held European assumptions about the continent as a whole-on an "Africanist discourse," in Christopher L. Miller's phrase. For Marlow, "going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world," a journey in two directions at once, both back and in; though the two coalesce when Marlow announces that the Africans "were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it-this suspicion of their not being inhuman." And if you are man enough, he adds, you will admit the kinship you feel with them, and your "desire to go ashore for a howl and a dance." The river allows one both to underscore and to escape one's own modernity, making Africa into a primitivist metaphor for man's original state, even as it also provides an emblem for the human heart. It is the "Dark Continent," the home of "black" people to whose skin the language itself assigns a moral tinge. At the same time, as Miller notes, such a discourse takes the darkness of that skin as marking the absence of light, a sign that there's something missing. So as a boy Marlow looks at a map of Africa and thinks of it as a "blank space of delightful mystery," a blankness that provides the excuse for a land grab.