CHINUA ACHEBE
“AN IMAGE OF AFRICA: RACISM IN CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS” (1975) Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987. London: Heinemann, 1988. 1-13.
Achebe’s interest here is in Joph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which exemplifies, in his view, the “desire – one might say, the need – in Western psychology to t Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and yet vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (2). It “projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilisation, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality” (2).
To this central end, Achebe argues, the river Thames is contrasted to the river Congo, its “very antithesis” (3), where the action in the novel is centered. Achebe argues that what worries Conrad is
not the differentness . . . but the lurking hint of kinship, of common
ancestry. For the Thames too ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’
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It conquered its darkness, of cour, and is now in daylight and at peace.
But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the
terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and
居家风水falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first
beginnings. (3)
A key technique in this regard is what Leavis terms an “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery” (3). Achebe argues that duplicity inheres in this: when a writer
while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact is in reality十四薪是什么意思
engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment
of emotive words and other forms of trickery, much more has to be at stake
than stylistic felicity. (3)
Rather, Achebe argues, Conrad is performing the “role of purveyor of comforting myths”(3).
However, Achebe is most interested in the novel’s characterisation, that is, its portraits of African people. Achebe notes Marlow’s (the narrator’s) comments about Africans en mas: “What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours . . . Ugly” (qtd. in Achebe, 4). Assuming perhaps wrongly that Conrad and his narrator are one and the same, Achebe argues that in his portraits of particular Africans Conrad prefers that things remain in their appointed “place” (5). He may not admire so-called “savages”
(5), but he rents and even despis the pudo-civilid African, described by Marlow as
己的笔画顺序a “dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs” (qtd. in Achebe,
5). Other Africans who are painted as savages (e.g. the Amazonian mistress of Kurtz) are less disturbing becau they function in their appointed place. Achebe rents most of all, however, that Conrad grants white Europeans the capacity for language (“human expression” [6])which he denies the African, permitting him only grunts and the “violent babble of uncouth sounds” (6).
Achebe then turns his attention to an obvious criticism of his argument, one that Wilson Harris himlf takes up in his own defence of Heart of Darkness. It might be argued, he admits, that
the attitude to the African . . . is not Conrad’s but that of his fictional
narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be
holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly Conrad appears to go to
considerable pains to t up layers of insulation between himlf and the
moral univer of his story. . . . [However,] he neglects to hint, clearly and
adequately, at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the
actions and opinions of his characters. . . . Marlow comes through to us not
only as a witness of truth, but one holding tho advanced and humane
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views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all
Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by atrocities in Bulgaria or the
Congo of King Leopold of the Belgians or wherever. (7)
Achebe’s point is simply that “Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist” (8), a “simple truth” (8) which is “gl
osd over in criticism of his work” (8) becau “white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked” (8). The Africa constructed (not mirrored) by Conrad is
Africa as tting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor.
Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into
which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody e
preposterous and perver 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 dehumanisation 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 dehumanisation, which
depersonalis a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of香水店
art. My answer is: No. (8-9)
Achebe believes that “there remains still in Conrad’s attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain” (9). “Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that word should be of interest to psychoanalysts” (9), Achebe argues, such as Fanon.
Achebe admits that Conrad is now dead and that one can do nothing about his personal attitudes. However, what concerns him is the popularity of the text in literature departments in the English-speaking world given that it is a book
which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a
ction of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and
continues to do in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a
story in which the very humanity of black people is called into question.
(10)
Achebe refus to accept the alleged “evidence of a man’s eyes when I suspect them to be as jaundiced as Conrad’s” (10). For Achebe, “Conrad’s picture of the peoples of the Congo ems grossly inadequate even at the height of their subjection to the ravages of King Leopold’s International Association for the Civilisation of Central Africa” (11). This is borne out, he argues, by the fact that at the very moment Conrad is describing, as a noted art historian has written, a mask made by the Fang people who lived north of the Congo and are “among the world’s greatest masters of the sculptured form” (11) was proving very influential upon the work of Picasso and company who, with it, initiated a revolution in the form of European art.
Achebe concludes by pointing out that Conrad
did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is
the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely
brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which
can certainly u clo psychological inquiry the West ems to suffer deep
anxieties about the precariousness of its civilisation and to have a need for
constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in
civilisation, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in
primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the
grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray--a carrier
on to whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that
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he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Conquently Africa is something
to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the
man’s jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa or el. Mr Kurtz of
Heart of Darkness should have heeded that warning. . . . But he foolishly
expod himlf to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! The
darkness found him out. (12)
Achebe does not hold out much hope that the West will
rid its mind of old prejudices and [begin] to look at Africa not through a haze
of distortions and cheap mystifications but quite simply as a continent of
people--not angels, but not rudimentary souls either--just people, often
野生灵芝highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterpri with
life and society. (12)
Achebe is pessimistic becau of the “grip and pervasiveness, . . . the wilful tenacity with which the West holds it in its heart” (12). Indeed, what may be wor is that such beliefs may not today be consciously chon through “calculated malice” (13) but by something “more akin to reflex action” (13).
