“An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe

Remember my Heart of Darkness post from a few days back? Well in it I mentioned an article, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” by Chinua Achebe (available online) and I just finished reading it. I’m going to reproduce their bibliographic information at the bottom of the page, in case someone decides to use it for scholarship, in which case an online text-only version would be unacceptable. As for the article itself, it’s wonderful, beautifully written (which is really saying something because most scholarship, even good scholarship, is usually a snooze), and quite compelling. In it Achebe makes an argument for Conrad being “a thoroughgoing racist,” who “engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery” which leaves “much more … at stake than stylistic felicity.” Kaboom! Achebe just threw down the gauntlet.

Remember when I said, “Heart of Darkness is a classic, it should be read, absolutely, but there just isn’t any emotional resonance to it, at least not for me.” Well I wrote that three days ago, and I am already calling it into question. That’s what I wanted from my class: to dig into this dense text and unpack it. Achebe does this brilliantly, and the “hypnotic stupor” induced by Conrad’s writing would be a likely source of my ambivalence. The other possible cause that Achebe points out is much more sinister, namely “that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.” I hate to admit that Achebe might be right about that, but in a text about imperialism in the Congo the racism was, indeed, expected. I didn’t enjoy it, but it didn’t leap out to me. I only noted it briefly, as though it was a matter of fact, and Achebe calls into question my lack of questioning.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I just finished re-reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) for my Summer class on the British Modern period. I believe it may have been the first time I read it since High School, certainly since undergrad, and I have to say … what? I was surprised that it wasn’t as interesting as I remember it being. I mean it’s impeccably written, I was fairly transfixed by it, not squirming in my seat like I do when I read other things (we’ll get to one of those soon enough), but something is missing. I don’t remember feeling this ho-hum toward it in High School though, and you’d think my tastes would have grown. Basically I remember feeling positively toward it, and I thought it would get better now that I’m more “highly educated,” but I sat there page after page wondering when it was going to get interesting. Then the second it did the author just kind of pulls back and everything fades out, tossing in a smattering of romance, if it can so-be-called. Kurtz went nutso in the Congo, did you know he had a fiancee at home? Everyone thinks he’s the swellest, you know. Do I know that? I feel like I do not. After all the buildup you want to hear Kurtz speak for himself, but maybe Conrad couldn’t write dialog worthy of such a mesmerizing figure, so he left it out. If it is intentionally supposed to make me feel mesmerized by its conspicuous absence, mission not accomplished.

If you’ve never read it, the summary of Heart of Darkness on Wikipedia is entirely adequate. The text itself isn’t the most interesting thing about the novel; what I find interesting are the reactions to it that have rippled out after its publication. I just heard of Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” not from this class mind you, and I’m very much wanting to read it. I also believe that it clearly influenced the forest scene in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. Here’s the thing though, there are professors who teach Conrad, and professors who teach Achebe.

Heart of Darkness is a classic, it should be read, absolutely, but there just isn’t any emotional resonance to it, at least not for me. More than that, it feels very much of its time: British people are here to “civilize” the Congo! Africans are scary! Their primitive landscape drives British people mad with its inescapable darkness! It’s hard to feel anything about that other than befuddlement, probably because a fear of Africans doesn’t exactly loom large in our consciousness anymore. In the novel this “fear” is not a critique, by the way, it’s sincere. Conrad was kind of – to put it mildly – freaked out by Africans. (A Conrad quote from the Achebe Wiki entry is too racist for me to reprint, but should be read if you care to understand my accusation.) There’s nothing that expresses my inability to get excited about this text better than the fact that I – who you all know to be uber verbose – have pretty much nothing else to say about it.

PS: I found the Achebe article online if you’d like to read it, I hope to tackle it this weekend.

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

Trying to get a tiny bit ahead on the reading for the Summer class I’ll be starting Monday (which I’m very excited about by the way) I read Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier over the last few days. Since I read it online I’m not precisely sure about the page count, but I think this would be considered novella or near-novella in length. As I was reading I noticed something: that I was re-reading. Somehow I had completely forgotten that I ever read this novel until I picked it up again, which is one of the delights/horrors of growing up, I suppose. Incidentally the class is on the British Modern period (between WW1 and WW2) so expect a lot of books from that period coming soon, including Joyce, Ford, Woolf, and Conrad, perhaps obviously. Onward!

Published in 1918, The Return of the Soldier is West’s first novel and it follows a shell shocked Captain Chris Baldry as he returns from the front (WW1). Who he returns to are three women: his cousin Jenny who is the narrator, his wife Kitty who he does not remember, and his childhood love Margaret. The strange thing about Chris is that he’s lost the last 15 years of his memory, including the birth and death of his son. Margaret, whose life after Chris has gone in a decidedly southern direction, receives the news that Chris is alive, but shell shocked, and is going to be sent home. Even though Margaret is married and very poor, she forces herself to go to his beautiful estate and tell his beautiful wife the news. Instead of being nice-at-all, Chris’ beautiful wife Kitty takes Margaret for a beggar and accuses her of grifting, which they somehow sort out. Chris, waking up in the hospital, is still madly in love with the now poverty-haggard Margaret and demands to see her. They bring him home to his estate and Kitty puts on every piece of jewelry she has to try and jog his memory; he asks to see Margaret instead. Kitty submits and Jenny, who is incessantly commenting on how ugly Margaret is, brings her to the estate knowing that Chris will be devastated into reality the second his handsome manly eyes see her pug-fuglyness. Except they’re still madly in love and he doesn’t even notice that she’s been ravaged by time and mean living. Still in love Chris and Margaret spend copious amounts of time together under Jenny’s watchful eye as Kitty rage-suffers in the background. Jenny slowly comes around to liking Margaret and eventually siding with her as she realizes that she is a wonderful, stunning human being under that poverty-flesh, while simultaneously realizing that Kitty, while super beautiful and rich, is kind of a nasty dumpling. Finally, one of the doctors (a psychoanalyst) that Kitty brings in “cures” Chris with Margaret’s help, help that Margaret briefly considers not giving, but of course does because she’s a wonderful person. Chris returns to being “every inch a soldier,” which delights Kitty and disappoints everyone else, including me, because she’s a total b-. This “cure,” incidentally, not only takes Marget back out of Chris’ life, but it means he’ll have to return to the trenches immediately. Oh, but Kitty’s happy and that’s all that matters (to her)!

Moby Dick, or, The Card Game by King Post

You already know that I love Herman Melville and you probably already know that I love Kickstarter so when I was sent this project yesterday I practically screamed “Take my money!” at the screen. It’s “Moby Dick, or, The Card Game” by King Post, a game that turns Moby Dick into a tabletop game that’s filled with quotes from the novel. This game also falls into my edutainment teaching philosophy, so, believe it or not, I actually want so I can have it in my classroom. I still need a classroom, but that’s a minor detail. Take my money!