Simona Livescu An Image of Africa: Opacity in Achebe's Heart of Darkness 2003
A fierce Achebe radically condemns Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist" in his article, arguing that Heart of Darkness is not a piece of great literature, but "an offensive and deplorable book" (Achebe 1791). He structures his argument around a few central ideas, such as the grotesque perception of the Africans by the protagonist, the antinomy between the Thames and Congo River, the lack of historical fact, and the parallel between the African and the European women, among others.
Achebe misinterprets Conrad's work, and exhibits opacity to the narrative's message. He seems to purport, as any reader, a subjective interpretative reading of Conrad's book, with the peculiarity of continuously taking fragments out of their contexts, and creating an entire ideology behind them.
His main argument is that the European Conrad presents Africa as "the other world," "the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality" (Achebe 1785). He misreads, and disregards the fact that many other readers see Conrad's Africa as a place where the white man brings and meets his own darkness and bestiality. Having no real emotional availability of exploring this continent whatsoever, Conrad's European responds to it either by exploiting what he can (as the manager, the Company, and its representatives do), destroying what he cannot (e.g. killing the locals and blowing up hills unnecessarily), or displaying occasional prejudice, indifference and confusion (as Marlow does). Everything the reader knows about Africa is through Marlow's subjective perception of what he sees or does not see, of what he hears or does not hear, and, ultimately, of what he self-ironically understands or fails to understand. The reader has another type of anxiety than the one mentioned by Achebe: s/he anxiously waits to see if any truly significant contact with Africa, its people, or its culture occurs throughout the book. Instead, the phrase "Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized impression," is emblematic, and indicative that this contact does not, and probably will not happen (Conrad 19).
Conrad assumes no task of presenting a good, objective or factual image of Africa, as Achebe would prefer; instead he critically exposes a refraction of this image in the European white middle class tainted perception. Indeed, many "normal readers," whom Achebe credits to be "well armed to detect and resist" underhand activity from the part of a writer, read into the novel its universal psychological implications that override Africanness or Europeanness. Marlow remains insulated from any real contact with the local culture; his stuck-to-the-river journey serves to preserve a confused and contemplative attitude in him, rather than an involved state of mind. His African experience comprises very little fact, proves mostly sensorial, observant and rather interested in itself as an object of study than in the surroundings. Describing the Other's eyes or looking into them serves just as a mirror. Legend has it that Narcissus contemplated his beauty in the lake daily, and ended up drowning in it. After his death, jealous nymphs came and whined to the lake, his closest companion, that only he had the privilege to know the full extent of how beautiful Narcissus was. The lake, astonished, replied that he had never noticed, because he had always been busy admiring his own beauty in Narcissus' eyes (Coelho 13). Africa holds the great role of "the other," helping to expose the white colonial man, and dismantle the entertained illusion of how great his psyche is, (if the African nature does not get him for his baseness and insolence first; disease-stricken employees of the Company die in a significant number in the jungle). If Africans and Achebe are not interested in Conrad's compassion (perfectly justified), maybe they would be interested in the honor Conrad bestows upon this continent by choosing Africa as a valuable background to shed truth on how limited and horrific the psychology of the white man is under all his "civilized" veneer. In spite of being "safely dead," Conrad reminds the entire world that there is an Africa that was brutally colonized once (and partly maybe still is, in Frantz Fanon's view), and keeps the debate going about its past and present fate by having put his talent at work to write about this particular place (and not Siberia, Newfoundland, or Indonesia).
Another argument Achebe brings in order to prove Conrad's racism is the apparent antithetical significance of the two rivers. Achebe thinks that Conrad presents a Congo River as posing a danger to the white man, who could fall victim to "the avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy" (Achebe 1785). The description of a hostile animistic nature suggests resistance rather than obstinate racism. Nature seems to have a mind of its own, perceiving and reacting to invading aggression. The sabotaging message that it sends is a leitmotif often employed in world literature. Mihai Eminescu, the national poet of Romania, wrote in nineteenth century a historical poem about a famous battle between Romanians and the Ottoman Turks. Before the fight begins, the mighty Ottoman Sultan requires the local king to surrender, and he answers the Sultan Bayazid by suggesting that, in spite of possessing significant fewer armed forces, nature will prove instrumental against him,
"But I defend the poverty and the needs of a struggling land
And therefore all the rocks and streams and hills that guardian stand
And all that grows and moves and breathes to me is ally true,
While every blade of grass and stone is enemy to you;
We have small hosts, yet love of soil had ever power to rid
This flowering land of all its foes. Prepare then, Bayazid !"
Conveniently, Achebe praises Conrad's gift as a novelist whenever it suits his ideology, "The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return," disregarding that this particular sentence is quintessential to Marlow's view on the African nature (1790). Achebe goes on to affirm that Conrad portrays one river good, and "the other bad" (1785). The Congo River and the Thames are symbolical as being both roads of darkness, violated and marked by British and, respectively, Roman imperialism. Darkness is what colonialist Britain brings to Africa (through the Company and Kurtz, and even Marlow), and what itself had experienced at the hands of the Romans centuries earlier. Conrad's pessimism indicates that humankind propagates evil, does not learn or progress, but rather mimics an endless spiraling motion. Marlow is the link between the two rivers, and he comes full circle. He takes Thames' darkness with him on the Congo River, and brings Kurtz's darkness back with him on the Thames, which, ironically, is populated presently by individuals whose sole attributed identity is their imperialist-colonizing function: the Director of the Company, the Accountant, and the Lawyer. The same way that darkness transmigrates from Kurtz to Marlow, it had also traveled from the Romans to the British, and then to the African continent. This "heart of a conquering darkness" is that part of human consciousness that Jung would integrate in the collective unconscious, or Freud would separate as the human eternal id (Conrad 104). Kurtz darkens the heart of Africa, (the Inner Station) with his "horror". The story is "dark, too dark" to be shared with the Intended, but obviously not too dark to be transmitted to the Accountant, the Director, and the Lawyer. The people now populating the Thames with Marlow can tolerate it better because they may have been subjected to recognizing it within themselves (or will be) during their voyages into the unknown.
Another one of the passages Achebe quotes by arbitrarily severing it from the passage before and the passage after, one of his building stones for the accusation of racism, describes Marlow's perceptions of the African people, illustrated by an episode when he encounters a boat paddled by them. The isolation Marlow feels among European men with whom he has "no point of contact," seems to keep him "away from the truth of things" (Conrad 17). The only thing that helps evade the feeling of the uncanny (Freud's unheimlich) is the voice of the African surf, "positive," "like the speech of a brother," holding "reason" and "meaning" (Conrad 17, 18). The only momentary "contact with reality" for the dissociated Marlow is the sight of a boat paddled by a few black fellows, who "shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks," being "as natural and true as the surf along their coast" (Conrad 18).
Here Marlow is introducing fraternity (and not just distant kinship, as Achebe imputes to Conrad) by direct/indirect comparison, even if perceived only in a sensorial manner through tactile, auditive, and visual signs. The sight of the black fellows is as natural and true as the surf along their coast, "being a "great comfort to look at" (Conrad 18). Why does Achebe, a fellow writer, capable to detect stylistic "trickery" choose not to see the entire context, the association of the brotherly surf with the image of the black fellows as being the only sign of reason and meaning for Marlow (or the "racist" Conrad) amidst an European milieu bordering the absurd? In direct contrast, a French warship, which would fire projectiles of little screeches "incomprehensible, firing into a continent", provokes qualifications of "insanity," and "lugubrious drollery" from Marlow (Conrad 18). Achebe concentrates on the fragmentary, not seeing the forest from the trees, being too concerned with constructing the ideology of racism.
A closer look at the significance that Conrad attaches to other excerpts quoted by Achebe offers different perspectives than those supposedly racist, as claimed in the article. What a better finis to Kurtz's career than an "insolent black head in the doorway", saying: "Mistah Kurtz - he dead," could Conrad have given ironically as indicting of Kurtz's behavior (Achebe 1788)? Achebe disagrees, and interprets it as a "proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had joined" (1788). Conrad does anything but serve Kurtz right by proclaiming his physical death by the very exponent of the people whom he had tricked into false adulation and looting, had oppressed, and had killed. Next, Marlow's description of Kurtz's African mistress is viewed by Achebe as "a structural requirement of the story; a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman" (Achebe 1787). He again misses Marlow's point. Structurally, all three women in Heart of Darkness, the aunt, the African mistress, and the Intended sustain Marlow's concept of women as being "out of touch with truth," and "living in a world of their own" (Conrad 16). All three women (regardless of their ethnicity or social status) entertain false myths regarding their man and his mission. The love of Marlow's aunt, "I am ready to do anything, anything for you," provides him with the noble mission of civilizing "ignorant millions" in Africa (Conrad 10, 16). The African mistress seemingly has Kurtz in deep esteem, probably as a charismatic omnipotent figure, disregarding or confusing his murderous actions (the impaled heads), and his brutal looting raids for ivory. Finally, the Intended sets out to live the rest of her life under the illusion that Kurtz's deeds were altogether honorable and great. The structural requirement Achebe proposes may prove not as strong as his partial conviction.
"Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics" (Achebe 1791). By the second half of the article the lines between the critique of the man and his work blur. Achebe's few details about Conrad's other work, or a quotation taken from another yet subjective interpretative biographical work on Conrad, suggest that he ends up doing what he condemns in others: he does not use hard, solid, or historical facts to dismantle a writer's credibility.
Paraphrasing Achebe, one could say Heart of Darkness is a dream for psychoanalytical critics, indeed. A Freudian interpretation will explicate Kurtz's psyche by using the tripartite model of the mind, as a person whose id dissociates altogether from his ego and superego in the African jungle. Marlow describes and tries to make sense of a Kurtz about whom he develops an increasing fascination, upon hearing some idealistic generous phraseology attributed to him, and hearing beforehand accounts of his charismatic power.
Their encounter seems to be one between two individuals whose ids instantly recognize each other, with the distinction that Marlow's id remains regulated by his ego, for he remains surrounded by his continental coworkers. In a Lacanian sense, Kurtz is an individual who loses his sense of self once he loses his social language (he has no other European referential points around, and Conrad implies that he communicates with his mistress in her language). By adopting a new language (linguistically and socially), his new self emerges. Seemingly, his new psyche is dominated by an European id that cannot relate to an African superego, and consequently the ego cannot fulfill its function of regulating the two, leaving Kurtz only at the mercy of his inner pleasure-driven, irrational, and megalomaniac id.
Achebe is right about Marlow's occasional prejudicial outlook on Africa, but he clearly confounds Conrad's authorial stand; he misinterprets Conrad's position about his protagonist's view, and also about the manner of conveying his authorial message to the readers. Conrad not only offers a framed narrative, and employs subtle or obvious irony, such as the other passengers' qualification of Marlow's experience ("inconclusive," "it was just like Marlow to say that"), or Marlow's often self-irony (Conrad 8). He also presents Marlow as an adventurer fascinated by maps and blank spots since early childhood. As opposed to the archetypal hero, Marlow sets on a journey because he left himself fascinated by a shop-window map like a "silly little bird" hypnotized by a snake, and not because he would have had any lofty moral goals (Conrad 10). While advancing up the river, Marlow's heroic quest seems to become identified with the phrenologist's scope: "it would be interesting for science …to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot" (Conrad 15). He becomes interested in Kurtz's personality and predicaments.