‘Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ with a novel view
It is an irony, in keeping with the tone of “Heart of Darkness,” that
Chinua Achebe’s 1977 essay that denounces the novella as racist and
imperialist and as such unworthy of its place in the canon should have
so thoroughly “invigorated Conrad studies,” as D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke
observes (61).
It seems not only to have added fresh life to Conrad studies but to
have caused the focus of renewed critical attention to center on that
very condemned novella, as can be seen from the fresh spate of works on
“Heart of Darkness,” among them these three. All of them not only
acknowledge Achebe’s charges but do so by historicizing the novella,
providing the multiple contexts in which those arguments might be better
- or differently - understood.
D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke’s “Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” is
part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, and is aimed at those
beginning “detailed study” of the novella, outlining the range of
responses and critical opinions the novella has occasioned over the
years.
To this end, the book assembles an array of contexts in order to
understand the novella’s cruxes and controversies, both the cultural and
historical, as well as the biographical, literary and intellectual. The
treatment of these contexts is broader than in Armstrong’s casebook, but
of necessity more abbreviated.
The book’s argumentative edge is on view from the first pages in
which Goonetilleke argues against those who position Conrad as
Euro-centric, racist, and/or imperialist and does so by contextualizing
the work in ways generally familiar to readers of casebooks such as
Armstrong’s and of much current scholarship.
However, Goonetilleke’s use of the biographical context provides a
somewhat novel view of a writer who was not simply “homo duplex” but an
unusually complex individual, shaped by his Polish past, his travels
with the French Mercantile Service and then with the British Merchant
Service, the literatures of Poland, France, and England, as well as his
years as an English writer living on England’s south coast.
Goonetillike argues that we need to consider more closely how
Conrad’s years at sea brought him into contact with non-European
cultures of the various countries the merchant services took him to,
with peoples of the West Indies, South-East Asia, Australia, and Africa.
Unlike other modernists, such as Woolf and Joyce, who never traveled
outside of Europe, Conrad, Goonetillike emphasizes, was a migrant writer
who came to his subject in 1899 with more nuanced and informed thoughts
about non-Europeans than most of his contemporaries.
I am intrigued by this view but also a bit sceptical since most
writers on the subject aver that Captain Korzeniowski most likely
confined his exploration of those foreign lands his years as sailor,
mate, and master took him to, to the European-dominated ports in which
his ships weighed anchor. But this is a fresh view, one that should be
seriously considered.
In the second section, “Critical History,” Goonetilleke summarizes
and comments upon the novella’s reception in six sections: the initial
reviews, the period of 1930 - 1959 and the novella’s general rise, the
period dominated by politics, philosophy and ethics from 1960 - the
1970s, the decades of the 1970s and 1980s that he entitles “Beyond
formalism,” and a final section on “Post-colonial criticism” that he
divides into early and more recent.
This breakdown and the major contributors to and general observations
about the nature of each period could serve the student/scholar
embarking on a more formal reception study of the novella.
This guide is in conversation with major commentators on the novel:
Edward Said, JanMohamed, V. S. Naipaul, and China Achebe, and he does so
quite directly, using contextual evidence to refute or, at least,
complicate many of their assertions about Conrad’s racism and
imperialism. He discusses the cultural context of Social Darwinism and
its attendant racism which, he demonstrates, “Heart of Darkness”
opposes.
He argues that, unlike most of the adventure and travel writing of
the day, in his fiction “Conrad breaks with nineteenth-century
stereotypes of unrestrained savagery” (20) and locates the darkness in
Europe rather than in Africa.
He provides cogent external evidence that supports the many
indictments of imperialism he locates in the work, among which was
Conrad’s role in the Congo Reform movement (13). Indeed, Goonetilleke
quotes E. D. Morel who headed up the Congo Reform Association as saying
that “Heart of Darkness” itself was “the most powerful thing ever
written on the subject” (14).
More surprisingly than his countering of some postcolonial views,
Goonetillike even takes on Conrad himself and asserts that the chief
character in the story is Kurtz, not Marlow, even though Conrad had
written that the story should be seen as “something quite on another
plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the Centre of Africa”
(CL 2: 360).
While Goonetillike goes on to write with great insight about Kurtz
and about what we learn about him, albeit indirectly through Marlow, I
have never been sure what is to be gained by proving that Kurtz is more
important than Marlow or vice versa. They seem to me inextricable, the
narrated and the narrator who both come into being through Marlow’s
telling.
However, Goonetillike argues his point well that “Kurtz was no
innocent who simply became a victim of Africa” but an extraordinarily
gifted European who acts opportunistically and barbarously. In any case,
he insists throughout on the separability of Marlow and Conrad.
Part of Conrad’s irony, he argues, is in his depiction of Marlow as
something of a chauvinist and a misogynist. In response to those who
have accused Conrad of sexism, Goonetillike argues that actually many of
Conrad’s female characters are strong individuals and, in the case of
Marlow’s aunt, have more social power than the men (43).
He goes on to make use of current work on Conrad from a feminist and
gender theoretical view, that of Johanna M. Smith and Nina Pelikan
Straus in particular (63), and in his third section, “Critical
Readings,” Ruth Nadelhaft’s feminist perspective is included along with
other seminal recent essays that represent a range of theoretical
perspectives.
The fourth section, “Adaptations,” lists various versions of the
novella, particularly and at some length the film Apocalypse Now. The
fifth section, “Further Reading and Web Resources,” will serve students
and interested readers well for it not only contains an up to date
selected bibliography of critical print sources on the novella, as well
as on his life, but also a useful list of web resources.
- Andrea White, California State
University at Dominguez Hills |
