Heart of Darkness
Jan. 23rd, 2013 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficTitle: Heart of Darkness
Author: Joseph Conrad
Summary: After my friends protested to me that watching Apocalypse Now was not the same as reading Heart of Darkness, I finally read it. (Thank you Project Gutenberg.) In my office, people put out copies of books they no longer need for work on take shelves--these are usually older printings of books, so almost everything makes its way up there. I have in my office a magpie collection of these books that caught my eye as they were put out. Last time I went through the books in my office, I found four copies of Heart of Darkness.
I read this after having read Chinua Achebe's essay on the novel, so I was reading it asking myself a question. Heart of Darkness is deeply, profoundly racist. The question I was asking myself was if there was worth in it anyway.
I think there is. With a caveat. In the past, this is a book that has been presented on its own, contextless, as a compelling, suspenseful horror story. As in, for example, the 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast. I do not think it should be presented that way at all.
Heart of Darkness, I think, is one of the most articulately put together explanations of what a racist person is afraid of--not that these people are inhuman, but that they are human. Throughout, Conrad conflates the landscape and the people. The jungle, by being primitive, and primal, is capable of stripping the civilization out of the Europeans that venture there. The jungle is a place of amorality, a place that shows Europeans that there is no depth to their convictions. And the Africans are just jumping, spear-throwing features of the jungle. The language used for them, of the jungle breathing them out, and then enfolding them back in again, makes them not people at all. But the fact that they are people is what is horrifying to Marlowe, because it shows, essentially, how far he could fall.
A quote from Achebe's essay:
The value that I see in the book is as an illumination of European thinking as they ravaged Africa in the late colonial period. It is important as a piece of history, in context. So I don't think it should not be read, but I think it should not be read alone. The power of its racism is that its way of speaking about Africans has been the predominant narrative for centuries. For that reason I do not think it can be ignored, but it also can't be the only side of the story.
Author: Joseph Conrad
Summary: After my friends protested to me that watching Apocalypse Now was not the same as reading Heart of Darkness, I finally read it. (Thank you Project Gutenberg.) In my office, people put out copies of books they no longer need for work on take shelves--these are usually older printings of books, so almost everything makes its way up there. I have in my office a magpie collection of these books that caught my eye as they were put out. Last time I went through the books in my office, I found four copies of Heart of Darkness.
I read this after having read Chinua Achebe's essay on the novel, so I was reading it asking myself a question. Heart of Darkness is deeply, profoundly racist. The question I was asking myself was if there was worth in it anyway.
I think there is. With a caveat. In the past, this is a book that has been presented on its own, contextless, as a compelling, suspenseful horror story. As in, for example, the 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast. I do not think it should be presented that way at all.
Heart of Darkness, I think, is one of the most articulately put together explanations of what a racist person is afraid of--not that these people are inhuman, but that they are human. Throughout, Conrad conflates the landscape and the people. The jungle, by being primitive, and primal, is capable of stripping the civilization out of the Europeans that venture there. The jungle is a place of amorality, a place that shows Europeans that there is no depth to their convictions. And the Africans are just jumping, spear-throwing features of the jungle. The language used for them, of the jungle breathing them out, and then enfolding them back in again, makes them not people at all. But the fact that they are people is what is horrifying to Marlowe, because it shows, essentially, how far he could fall.
A quote from Achebe's essay:
Africa 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. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.
The value that I see in the book is as an illumination of European thinking as they ravaged Africa in the late colonial period. It is important as a piece of history, in context. So I don't think it should not be read, but I think it should not be read alone. The power of its racism is that its way of speaking about Africans has been the predominant narrative for centuries. For that reason I do not think it can be ignored, but it also can't be the only side of the story.