Joseph Conrad

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2007 by Gorra, Michael

On the level of language, then, Conrad's story participates in the imperialism it appears to condemn; and I myself would argue that his reliance on an Africanist discourse matters far more than the epithet-sometimes ventriloquized, and sometimes not-with which he describes the black sailor of the Narcissus. Over the years Achebe's argument has been both fought with and applauded, challenged and complicated. Conrad's earlier critics had not entirely ignored the questions of race and empire, and his later ones have continued to produce fine close readings, the best of them located at that point where formalism meets philosophy. But Achebe changed-no, broke-the interpretative paradigm. The paradox is that "Heart of Darkness" seems only the more central because of it. Achebe's attack made the piece into a locus of continuing debate about the relation, the inextricability, of imperialism and modernity itself. Many later readings have looked at the tale with an eye for its internal contradictions, using it to explore the relation between language and ideology, to consider the limits of what can and cannot be thought in a given culture at a given time. Said, for example, describes Conrad as unable to reconcile the differences between imperialism's official "idea" and its "remarkably disorienting actuality"; a willing participant in empire who nevertheless "shows its contingency, records its illusions." Marlow's narrative therefore remains inconclusive and his irony unstable, an attempt to probe the meaning of an experience that even at the end seems no more clear than the "black bank of clouds" that spreads over England itself.

Achebe's brickbat deserves much of the credit for the fact that our Conrad is more fully historicized than Zabel's, more firmly situated in his times, a man of 1900 with all its attendant blind spots and biases. But he did not work alone. Earlier scholars had already provided much of the biographical armature on which such contextual readings depend; later ones have followed that river around the sharpest of bends and up into its furthest reaches of implication. In fact Achebe presents only one aspect of Conrad's handling of empire, and to complicate the picture I want to look at another essay from the mid-1970s, another response by a writer from one of Britain's former colonies. V. S. Naipaul's 1974 "Conrad's Darkness" begins with the admission that "It has taken me a long time to come round to Conrad." The Polish writer's work had at first seemed to him marred by an over-elaboration of method, an "unwillingness to let the story speak for itself." Yet Conrad's "originality, the news he is offering us, can go over our heads," and Naipaul soon finds that his books have already defined the "mixed and secondhand" world into which he himself was born. The Caribbean writer comes to realize that "Conrad . . . had been everywhere before me," and not only on the map. Indeed, to my mind Almayer's Borneo resembles the Trinidad of Naipaul's own Mr. Biswas. And it is this sense of Conrad, not as the voice of European racism, but as the most comprehensive of guides to what Naipaul calls the "deep disorder" of our times, that delimits the terrain on which the best recent criticism has staked its claim.