heart of darkness racism essay

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Heart of Darkness

Joseph conrad.

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Students and critics alike often argue about whether Heart of Darkness is a racist book. Some argue that the book depicts Europeans as superior to Africans, while others believe the novel attacks colonialism and therefore is not racist. There is the evidence in the book that supports both sides of the argument, which is another way of saying that the book's actual stance on the relationship between black people and white people is not itself black and white.

Heart of Darkness attacks colonialism as a deeply flawed enterprise run by corrupt and hollow white men who perpetrate mass destruction on the native population of Africa, and the novel seems to equate darkness with truth and whiteness with hollow trickery and lies. So Heart of Darkness argues that the Africans are less corrupt and in that sense superior to white people, but its argument for the superiority of Africans is based on a foundation of racism. Marlow , and Heart of Darkness , take the rather patronizing view that the black natives are primitive and therefore innocent while the white colonizers are sophisticated and therefore corrupt. This take on colonization is certainly not "politically correct," and can be legitimately called racist because it treats the natives like objects rather than as thinking people.

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The Trouble with “Heart of Darkness”

“Who here comes from a savage race?” Professor James Shapiro shouted at his students.

“We all come from Africa,” said the one African-American in the class, whom I’ll call Henry, calmly referring to the supposition among most anthropologists that human life originated in sub-Saharan Africa. What Henry was saying was that there are no racial hierarchies among peoples—that we’re all “savages.”

Shapiro smiled. It was not, I thought, exactly the answer he had been looking for, but it was a good answer. Then he was off again. “Are you natural?” he roared at a girl sitting near his end of the seminar table. “What are the constraints for you? What are the rivets? Why are you here getting civilized, reading Lit Hum?”

It was the end of the academic year, and the mood had grown agitated, burdened, portentous. In short, we were reading Joseph Conrad, the final author in Columbia’s Literature Humanities (or Lit Hum) course, one of the two famous “great books” courses that have long been required of all Columbia College undergraduates. Both Lit Hum and the other course, Contemporary Civilization, are devoted to the much ridiculed “narrative” of Western culture, the list of classics, which, in the case of Lit Hum, begins with Homer and ends, chronologically speaking, with Virginia Woolf. I was spending the year reading the same books and sitting in on the Lit Hum classes, which were taught entirely in sections; there were no lectures. At the end of the year, the individual instructors were allotted a week for a free choice. Some teachers chose works by Dostoyevsky or Mann or Gide or Borges. Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar from the Department of English and Comparative Literature (his book “Shakespeare and the Jews” will be published by Columbia University Press in January), chose Conrad.

The terms of Shapiro’s rhetorical questions—savagery, civilization, constraints, rivets—were drawn from Conrad’s great novella of colonial depredation, “Heart of Darkness,” and the students, almost all of them freshmen, were electrified. Almost a hundred years old, and familiar to generations of readers, Conrad’s little book has lost none of its power to amaze and appall: it remains, in many places, an essential starting point for discussions of modernism, imperialism, the hypocrisies and glories of the West, and the ambiguities of “civilization.” Critics by the dozen have subjected it to symbolic, mythological, and psychoanalytic interpretation; T. S. Eliot used a line from it as an epigraph for “The Hollow Men,” and Hemingway and Faulkner were much impressed by it, as were Orson Welles and Francis Ford Coppola, who employed it as the ground plan for his despairing epic of Americans in Vietnam, “Apocalypse Now.”

In recent years, however, Conrad—and particularly “Heart of Darkness”—has fallen under a cloud of suspicion in the academy. In the curious language of the tribe, the book has become “a site of contestation.” After all, Conrad offered a nineteenth-century European’s view of Africans as primitive. He attacked Belgian imperialism and in the same breath seemed to praise the British variety. In 1975, the distinguished Nigerian novelist and essayist Chinua Achebe assailed “Heart of Darkness” as racist and called for its elimination from the canon of Western classics. And recently Edward W. Said, one of the most famous critics and scholars at Columbia today, has been raising hostile and undermining questions about it. Certainly Said is no breaker of canons. But if Conrad were somehow discredited, one could hardly imagine a more successful challenge to what the academic left has repeatedly deplored as the “hegemonic discourse” of the classic Western texts. There is also the inescapable question of justice to Conrad himself.

Written in a little more than two months, the last of 1898 and the first of 1899, “Heart of Darkness” is both the story of a journey and a kind of morbid fairy tale. Marlow, Conrad’s narrator and familiar alter ego, a British merchant seaman of the eighteen-nineties, travels up the Congo in the service of a rapacious Belgian trading company, hoping to retrieve the company’s brilliant representative and ivory trader, Mr. Kurtz, who has mysteriously grown silent. The great Mr. Kurtz! In Africa, everyone gossips about him, envies him, and, with rare exception, loathes him. The flower of European civilization (“all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”), exemplar of light and compassion, journalist, artist, humanist, Kurtz has gone way upriver and at times well into the jungle, abandoning himself to certain . . . practices. Rifle in hand, he has set himself up as god or devil in ascendancy over the Africans. Conrad is notoriously vague about what Kurtz actually does, but if you said “kills some people, has sex with others, steals all the ivory,” you would not, I believe, be far wrong. In Kurtz, the alleged benevolence of colonialism has flowered into criminality. Marlow’s voyage from Europe to Africa and then upriver to Kurtz’s Inner Station is a revelation of the squalors and disasters of the colonial “mission”; it is also, in Marlow’s mind, a journey back to the beginning of creation, when nature reigned exuberant and unrestrained, and a trip figuratively down as well, through the levels of the self to repressed and unlawful desires. At death’s door, Marlow and Kurtz find each other.

Rereading a work of literature is often a shock, an encounter with an earlier self that has been revised, and I found that I was initially discomforted, as I had not been in the past, by the famous manner—the magnificent, alarmed, and (there is no other word) throbbing excitement of Conrad’s laboriously mastered English. Conrad was born in czarist-occupied Poland; though he heard English spoken as a boy (and his father translated Shakespeare), it was his third language, and his prose, now and then, betrays the propensity for high intellectual melodrama and rhymed abstraction (“the fascination of the abomination”) characteristic of his second language, French. Oh, inexorable, unutterable, unspeakable! The great British critic F. R. Leavis, who loved Conrad, ridiculed such sentences as “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” The sound, Leavis thought, was an overwrought, thrilled embrace of strangeness. (In Max Beerbohm’s parody: “Silence, the silence murmurous and unquiet of a tropical night, brooded over the hut that, baked through by the sun, sweated a vapour beneath the cynical light of the stars. . . . Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and pale, was covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory like everything else, only more so.”)

Read in isolation, some of Conrad’s sentences are certainly a howl, but one reads them in isolation only in criticism like Leavis’s or Achebe’s. Reading the tale straight through, I lost my discomfort after twenty pages or so and fell hopelessly under Conrad’s spell; thereafter, even his most heavily freighted constructions dropped into place, summing up the many specific matters that had come before. Marlow speaks:

“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands. You lost your way on that river as you would in a desert and butted all day long against shoals trying to find the challenge till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants and water and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

In one sense, the writing now seemed close to the movies: it revelled in sensation and atmosphere, in extreme acts and grotesque violence (however indirectly presented), in shivering enigmas and richly phrased premonitions and frights. In other ways, though, “Heart of Darkness” was modernism at its most intellectually bracing, with tonalities, entirely contemporary and distanced, that I had failed to notice when I was younger—immense pride and immense contempt; a mood of barely contained revolt; and sardonic humor that verged on malevolence:

“I don’t pretend to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing. We had enlisted some of these crew. Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face: they had brought along a provision of chaps on the way for a hippo-meat which went rotten and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the Manager on board and three or four pilgrims [white traders] with their staves—all complete. Sometimes we came upon a station close by the bank clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel with great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome seemed very strange, had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ‘ivory’ would ring in the air for a while—and on we went again into the silence, along empty reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of our winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the stern-wheel.”

Out of sight of their countrymen back home, who continue to cloak the colonial mission in the language of Christian charity and improvement, the “pilgrims” have become rapacious and cruel. The cannibals eating hippo meat practice restraint; the Europeans do not. That was the point of Shapiro’s taunting initial sally: “savagery” is inherent in all of us, including the most “civilized,” for we live, according to Conrad, in a brief interlude between innumerable centuries of darkness and the darkness yet to come. Only the rivets, desperately needed to repair Marlow’s pathetic steamboat, offer stability—the rivets and the ship itself and the codes of seamanship and duty are all that hold life together in a time of moral anarchy. Marlow, meeting Kurtz at last, despises him for letting go—and at the same time, with breathtaking ambivalence, admires him for going all the way to the bottom of his soul and discovering there, at the point of death, a judgment of his own life. It is perhaps the most famous death scene written since Shakespeare:

“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

“ ‘The horror! The horror!’ ”

Much dispute and occasional merriment have long attended the question of what, exactly, Kurtz means by the melodramatic exclamation “The horror!” But surely one of the things he means is his long revelling in “abominations”—is own internal collapse. Shapiro’s opening questions set up a reading of the novella that interrogated the Western civilization of which Kurtz is the supreme representative and of which the students, in their youthful way, were representatives as well.

When Shapiro asked the class why they thought he had chosen “Heart of Darkness,” hands were going up before he had finished his question.

“You chose it because the whole core curriculum is embodied in Kurtz,” said Henry, who had answered Shapiro’s earlier question. “We embody this knowledge, and the book asks, Do we fall into the void—do we drown or come out with a stronger sense of self?”

Henry had turned the book into a test of the course and of himself. Conrad had great personal significance for him, which didn’t surprise me. An African-American from Baltimore, Henry, in his sophomore year at Columbia, had evolved into a fervent Nietzschean, and, though Conrad claimed to dislike Nietzsche, this was a Nietzschean text. The meaning of Henry’s life—his personal myth—required (he had said it in class many times) challenge, struggle, and self-transcendence. He was tall and strong, with a flattop “wedge” haircut and a loud, excited voice. Some months after this class, he got himself not tattooed but branded with the insignia of his black Columbia fraternity—an act of excruciating irony unavailable to members of the master race. Kurtz, however horrifying, was an exemplar for him as for Conrad’s hero, Marlow.

A freshman of Chinese descent from Singapore, who was largely reared on British and Continental literature, also saw the book as a test for Western civilization. But, unlike Henry, she hated the abyss. Kurtz was a seduced man, a portent of disintegration. “Can we deal with the knowledge we are seeking?” she asked. “Or will we say, with Kurtz, ‘The horror’?” For her, Kurtz’s outburst was an admission of the failure of knowledge.

And many others made similar remarks, All of a sudden, at the end of the course, the students were quite willing to see their year of education in Western classics as problematic. Their reading of “the great books” could be affirmed only if it was simultaneously questioned. No doubt Shapiro’s rhetorical questions had shaped their responses, but still their intensity surprised me.

“The book is a kind of test,” said a student from the Washington, D.C., area, who was normally a polite, bland schoolboy type. “Does its existence redeem the male hegemonic line of culture? Does it redeem education in this tradition?” By which I believe that he also meant to ask, “Could the existence of such a book redeem the crimes of imperialism?” That, at any rate, was my question.

The students were in good form, bold and free, and as the class went on they expounded certain points in the text, some of them holding the little paperback in their hands like preachers before the faithful. All year long, Shapiro had struggled to get them to read aloud, and with some emotional commitment to the words. And all too often they had droned, as if they were reading from a computer manual. But now they read aloud spontaneously, and their voices were alive, even ringing.

“For this course, it’s a kind of summing up, isn’t it?” Shapiro said. “We began with the journey to Troy.”

“It has a resemblance to all the journeys through Hell we’ve read,” said a student I will call Alex, a thin, ascetic-looking boy, the son of a professor. He cited the voyages to the underworld in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, and he cited Dante, whom Conrad, in one of his greatest moments, obviously had in mind. Marlow arrives at one of the trading company’s stations, a disastrous ramshackle settlement of wrecked machinery and rusting rails, and there encounters, under the trees, dozens of exhausted African workers who have been left to die. “It seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno,” he says.

“They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then glancing down I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs which died out slowly. The man seemed young—almost a boy—but you know with them it’s hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held—there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck—Why? Where did he get it. Was it a badge—an ornament—a charm—a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck this bit of white thread from beyond the seas.

“Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing in an intolerable and appalling manner. His brother phantom rested its forehead as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence.”

Despite the last sentence, which links the grove of death to ancient and medieval catastrophes, there is a sense here, as many readers have said, of something unprecedented in horror, something new on earth—what later became known as genocide. It is one of Conrad’s bitter ironies that at least some of the Europeans forcing the Congolese into labor are “liberals” devoted to the “suppression of savage customs.” What they had perpetrated in the Congo was not, perhaps, planned slaughter, but it was a slaughter nonetheless, and some of the students, pointing to the passage, were abashed. Western man had done this. We had created an Inferno on earth. “Heart of Darkness,” written at the end of the nineteenth century, resonates unhappily throughout the twentieth. Marlow’s shock, his amazement before the sheer strangeness of the ravaged human forms, anticipates what the Allied liberators of the concentration camps felt in 1945. The answer to the question “Does the book redeem the West?” was clear enough: No book can provide expiation for any culture. But if some crimes are irredeemable, a frank acknowledgment of the crime might lead to a partial remission of sin. Conrad had written such an acknowledgment.

That was the heart of the liberal reading, and Shapiro’s students rose to it willingly, gravely, ardently—and then, all of a sudden, the class fell into an acrimonious dispute. Alex was not happy with the way Shapiro and the other students were talking about Kurtz and the moral self-judgment of the West. He thought it was glib. He couldn’t see the book in apocalyptic terms. Kurtz was a criminal, an isolated figure. He was not representative of the West or of anything else. “Why is this a critique of the West?” he demanded. “No culture celebrates men like Kurtz. No culture condones what he did.” There was general protest, even a few laughs. “O.K.,” he said, yielding a bit. “It can be read as a critique of the West, but not only of the West.”

From my corner of the room, I took a hard look at him. He was as tight as a drum, dry, a little supercilious. Kurtz had nothing to do with him —that was his unmistakable attitude. He denied the connection that the other students acknowledged. He was cut off in some way, withholding himself. Yet I knew this student. I had seen him only in class, but there was something familiar in him that irked me, though exactly what it was I couldn’t say. Why was he so dense? The other students were not claiming personal responsibility for imperialism or luxuriating in guilt. They were merely admitting participation in an “advanced” civilization that could lose its moral bearings.

Henry, leaning back in his chair—against the wall, behind Alex, who sat at the table—insisted on an existential reading. “Kurtz is an Everyman figure,” he said. “He gets down to the soul, below the layers of parents, religion, society.”

Alex hotly disagreed. They were talking past each other, offering different angles of approach, but there was an edge to their voices which suggested an animus that went beyond mere disagreement. There was an awkward pause, and some of the students stirred uneasily. I had never seen these two quarrel in the past, and what they said presented no grounds for anger, but when each repeated his position, anger filled the room. Shapiro tried to calm things down, and the other students looked at one another in wonder and alarm. The argument between Alex and Henry wasn’t about race, yet race unmistakably hovered over it. In a tangent, Henry brought up the way Conrad, reflecting European assumptions of his time, portrayed the Africans as wild and primitive. He started to make a case similar to Achebe’s (whose hostile essay is included in the current Norton Critical Edition of the text), then stopped in midsentence, abruptly abandoning his position. In our class on “King Lear” and at other times over the past several months, he had argued explicitly as a black man. But at that moment he wasn’t interested. A greater urgency overcame him—not the racial but the existential issue, his own pressing need for identification not just as an African-American but as an embattled man. “Good and evil are conventions,” he said. “They collapse under stress.” And this, he insisted, was true for everyone.

“The book is also about the difference between good and evil,” Alex retorted. “Everyone judges Kurtz.” But this is not correct. Marlow judges Kurtz; Conrad judges Kurtz. But back in Brussels he is mourned as an apostle of enlightenment.

I looked a little closer. Alex was like the fabled “wicked son” in the Passover celebration, the one who says to the others “Why is this important to you ?”—denying a personal connection with an event of mesmerizing significance. I knew him, all right. A pale, narrow face, a bony nose surmounted by glasses, a paucity of flesh, a general air of asexual arrogance. He was very bright and very young. Of all the students in Shapiro’s class, he was—I saw it now—the closest to what I had been at eighteen or nineteen. He was incomparably more self-assured and articulate, but I recognized him all too well. And I was startled. The middle-aged reader, uneasy with earlier versions of himself, little expects his simulacrum to rise up as a walking ghost.

Henry sat sheathed in a green turtleneck sweater, dark glasses, and a baseball cap; I couldn’t see his expression. But Shapiro’s was clear: he was not happy. He had perhaps gone a little too far with his rhetorical questions, striking sparks that threatened to turn into a conflagration, and he quickly moved the conversation in a different direction, getting the students to explicate Conrad’s use of the word “darkness.” Conrad lets us know that even England—where Marlow sits, telling his story—used to be one of the dark places of the earth. For a while, teacher and students explicated the text in a neutral way. All year long, Shapiro had gone back and forth between analyzing the structure and language of the books and attacking the students’ complacencies with rhetorical questions. But sober analysis wasn’t what he wanted, not of this text, and he soon returned to the complicity of the West, and even the Western universities, in a policy that King Leopold II of the Belgians—the man responsible for some of the worst atrocities of colonial Africa—always referred to as noble and self-sacrificing.

“How else would you guys be civilized except for ‘the noble cause’?” Shapiro said. “You guys are all products of the noble cause. Columbia’s motto, translated from the Latin, is ‘In Thy light shall we see light.’ That’s the light that is supposed to penetrate the heart of darkness, isn’t it?”

“But enlightenment comes only by way of darkness,” said Henry, still at it, and Alex demurred angrily again—no darkness for him—and for a terrible moment I thought they were actually going to come to blows. The women in the class, who for the most part had been silent during these exchanges, were appalled and afterward muttered angrily, “It’s a boy thing, macho showing off. ‘Who’s the biggest intellectual?’ ” True, but maybe it was also a race thing. Though Shapiro restored order, something had broken, and the class, which had begun so well, with everyone joining in and expounding, had come unriveted.

Is “Heart of Darkness” a depraved book? The following is one of the passages Chinua Achebe deplores as racist:

“We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of and clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories. “The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were . . . No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.”

Achebe believes that “Heart of Darkness” is an example of the Western habit of setting up Africa “as a foil to Europe, a place of negations . . . in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.” Conrad, obsessed with the black skin of Africans, had as his real purpose the desire to comfort Europeans in their sense of superiority: “ ‘Heart of Darkness’ projects the image of 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 dismisses the grove-of-death passage and others like it as “bleeding-heart sentiments,” mere decoration in a book that “parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today,” and he adds, “I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question.”

Chinua Achebe has written at least one great novel, “Things Fall Apart” (1958), a book I love and from which I have learned a great deal. Yet this article on Conrad (originally a speech delivered at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1975, and revised for the third Norton edition of the novel in 1987 and reprinted as well in Achebe’s 1988 collection of essays, “Hopes and Impediments”) is an act of rhetorical violence, and I recoiled from it. Achebe regards the book not as an expression of its time or as the elaboration of a fictional situation, in which a white man’s fears of the unknown are accurately represented, but as a general slander against Africans, a simple racial attack. As far as Achebe is concerned, Africans have struggled to free themselves from the prison of colonial discourse, and for him reading Conrad meant reëntering the prison: “Heart of Darkness” is a book in which Europeans consistently have the upper hand.

Reading Achebe, I wanted to argue that most of the students in the Lit Hum class—not Europeans but an American élite—had seen “Heart of Darkness” as a representation of the West’s infamy, and hardly as an affirmation of its “spiritual grace.” I wanted to argue as well that everything in “Heart of Darkness”—not just the spectacular frights of the African jungle but everything, including the city of Brussels and Marlow’s perception of every white character—is rendered sardonically and nightmarishly as an experience of estrangement and displacement. Conrad certainly describes the Africans gesticulating on the riverbank as a violently incomprehensible “other.” But consider the fictional situation! Having arrived fresh from Europe, Marlow, surrounded by jungle, commands a small steamer travelling up the big river en route to an unknown destiny—death, perhaps. He is a character in an adventure story, baffled by strangeness. Achebe might well have preferred that Marlow engage the Africans in conversation or, at least, observe them closely and come to the realization that they, too, are a people, that they, too, are souls, have a destiny, spiritual struggles, triumphs and disasters of selfhood. But could African selfhood be described within this brief narrative, with its extraordinary physical and philosophical momentum, and within Conrad’s purpose of exposing the “pitiless folly” of the Europeans? Achebe wants another story, another hero, another consciousness. As it happens, Marlow, regarding the African tribesmen as savage and incomprehensible, nevertheless feels a kinship with them. He recognizes no moral difference between himself and them. It is the Europeans who have been demoralized.

But what’s the use? Though Achebe is a novelist, not a scholar, variants of his critique have appeared in many academic settings and in response to many classic works. Such publications as Lingua Franca are often filled with ads from university presses for books about literature and race, literature and gender, literature and empire. Whatever these scholars are doing in the classroom, they are seeking to make their reputations outside the classroom with politicized views of literature. F. R. Leavis’s criterion of greatness in literature—moral seriousness—has been replaced by the moral aggressiveness of the academic critic in nailing the author to whatever power formation existed around him. “Heart of Darkness” could indeed be read as racist by anyone sufficiently angry to ignore its fictional strategies, its palpable anguish, and the many differences between Conrad’s eighteen-nineties consciousness of race and our own. At the same time, parts of the academic left now consider the old way of reading fiction for pleasure, for enchantment—my falling hopelessly under Conrad’s spell—to be naïve, an unconscious submission to political values whose nature is disguised precisely by the pleasures of the narrative. In some quarters, pleasure in reading has itself become a political error, rather like sex in Orwell’s “1984.”

As much as Conrad himself, Edward W. Said is a self-created and ambiguous figure. A Palestinian Christian (from a Protestant family), he was brought up in Jerusalem and Cairo, but has built a formidable career in America, where he has assumed the position of the exiled literary man in extremis—an Arab critic of the West who lives and works in the West, a reader who is at home in Western literature but makes an active case for non-Western literature. Said loathes insularity and parochialism, and has disdained “flat-minded” approaches to reading. Over the years, he has gained many disciples and followers, some of whom he has recently chastised for carrying his moral and political critiques of Western literature to the point of caricature. Said has repeatedly discouraged any attempt to “level” the Western canon.

His most famous work is the remarkable “Orientalism” (1978), a charged analysis of the Western habit of constructing an “exotic” image of the Muslim East as an aid to controlling it. In 1993, Said published “Culture and Imperialism” as a sequel to that book, and part of his intention is to bring to account the great European nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, examining and judging them as a way of combatting the notion—still alive today, Said says—that Europeans and Americans have the right to govern the inhabitants of the Third World.

Most imaginative writers of the nineteenth century, Said maintains, failed to connect their work, their own spiritual practice, to the squalid operations of colonialism. Such writers as Austen, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson, and Flaubert were heroes of culture who either harbored racist views of the subject people then dominated by the English and the French or merely acquiesced in the material advantages of empire. They took empire for granted as a space in which their characters might roam and prosper; they colluded in evil. Here and there, one could see in their work shameless traces of the subordinated world: a sugar plantation in Antigua whose earnings sustain in English luxury a landed family (the Bertrams) in Austen’s “Mansfield Park”; a central character in Dickens’s “Great Expectations” (the convict Magwitch) who enriches himself in the “white colony” of Australia and whose secret bequest turns Pip, the novel’s young hero, into a “London gentleman.” These novels, Said says, could not be fully understood unless their connections to the colonial assumptions and practices in the culture at large were analyzed. But how important, I wonder, is the source of the money to either of these novels? Austen mentions the Antigua plantation only a few times; exactly where the Bertrams’ money came from clearly did not interest her. And if Magwitch had made his pile not in Australia but in, say, Scotland, by illegally cornering the market in barley or mash, how great a difference would it have made to the structural, thematic, and metaphorical substance of “Great Expectations”? Magwitch would still be a disreputable convict whom Pip would have to reject as a scoundrel or accept as his true spiritual father. Were these novels, as literature, seriously affected by the alleged imperial nexus? Or is Said making lawyerlike points, not out of necessity but merely because they can be made? Indeed, one begins to suspect that a work like “Mansfield Park” is useful to Said precisely because it’s such an outlandish example. For if Jane Austen is heavily involved in the creation of imperialism, then every music-hall show, tearoom menu, and floral arrangement is also involved. The West’s cultural innocence must be brought to the bar of justice.

In the end, isn’t Said’s thesis a vast tautology, an assumption that imperialism did, indeed, receive the support of a structure that produced . . . imperialism? By Said’s measure, few writers would escape censure. Proust? Indifferent to French exploitation of North African native workers. (And where did the cork that lined the walls of his bedroom come from? Morocco? The very armature of Proust’s aesthetic contemplation partakes of imperial domination.) Henry James? Failed to inquire into the late-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism and overseas expansion that made possible the leisure, the civilized discourse, and the spiritual anguish of so many of his characters. James’s celebrated refinement was as much a product and an expression of American imperialism as Theodore Roosevelt’s pugnacious jingoism. And so on.

When Said arrives at “Heart of Darkness” (a book he loves), he asserts that Conrad, as much as Marlow and Kurtz, was enclosed within the mind-set of imperial domination and therefore could not imagine any possibilities outside it; that is, Conrad could imagine Africans only as ruled by Europeans. It’s perfectly true that “Heart of Darkness” contains a few widely spaced and ambiguous remarks that appear to praise the British variety of overseas domination. But how much do such remarks matter against the overwhelming weight of all the rest—the awful sense of desolation produced by the physical chaos, the death and ravaging cruelty everywhere? What readers remember is the squalor of imperialism, and it’s surely misleading for Said to speak of “Heart of Darkness” as a work that was “an organic part of the ‘scramble for Africa,’ ” a work that has functioned ever since to reassure Westerners that they had the right to rule the Third World. If we are to discuss the question of the book’s historical effect, shouldn’t we ask, on the contrary, whether thousands of European and American readers may not have become nauseated by colonialism after reading “Heart of Darkness”? Said is so eager to find the hidden power in “Heart of Darkness” that he underestimates the power of what’s on the surface. Here is his summing up:

Kurtz and Marlow acknowledge the darkness, the former as he is dying, the latter as he reflects retrospectively on the meaning of Kurtz’s final words. They (and of course Conrad) are ahead of their time in understanding that what they call “the darkness” has an autonomy of its own, and can reinvade and reclaim what imperialism has taken for its own. But Marlow and Kurtz are also creatures of their time and cannot take the next step, which would be to recognize that what they saw, disablingly and disparagingly, as a non-European “darkness” was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence, and not, as Conrad reductively says, to reestablish the darkness. Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that “natives” could lead lives free from European domination. As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them.

I have read this passage over and over, each time with increasing disbelief. It’s not enough that Conrad captured the soul of imperialism, the genocidal elimination of a people forced into labor: no, his “tragic limitation” was his failure to “grant the natives their freedom.” Perhaps Said means something fragmentary—a tiny gesture, an implication, a few words that would suggest the liberated future. But I still find the idea bizarre as a suggested improvement of “Heart of Darkness,” and my mind is flooded with visions from terrible Hollywood movies. Mist slowly lifts from thick, dark jungle, revealing a rainbow in the distance; Kurtz, wearing an ivory necklace, gestures to the jungle as he speaks to a magnificent-looking African chief. “Someday your people will throw off the colonial oppressor. Someday your people will be free. ”

Dear God, a vision of freedom ? After the grove of death? Wouldn’t such a vision amount to the grossest sentimentality? Instead of doing what Said wants, Conrad says that England, too, has been one of the dark places of the earth. Throughout the book, he insists that the darkness is in all men. Conrad is as stern, unyielding, and pessimistic as Said is right-minded, positive, and banal.

Achebe indulges a similar sentimentality. Conrad, he says, was so obsessed with the savagery of the Africans that he somehow failed to notice that Africans just north of the Congo were creating great works of art—making the masks and other art works that only a few years later would astound such painters as Vlaminck, Derain, Picasso, and Matisse, thereby stimulating a new direction in European art. “The point of all this,” Achebe writes, “is to suggest that Conrad’s picture of the people of the Congo seems grossly inadequate.”

But Conrad certainly did not offer “Heart of Darkness” as “a picture of the peoples of the Congo,” any more than Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” set in a Nigerian village, purports to be a rounded picture of the British overlords. Conrad, as much as his master, Henry James, was devoted to a ruthless notion of form. Short as it is—only about thirty-five thousand words—“Heart of Darkness” is a mordantly ironic tale of rescue enfolding a philosophical meditation on the complicity between “civilization” and savagery. Conrad practices a narrow economy and omits a great deal. Economy is also a remarkable feature of the art of Chinua Achebe; and no more than Conrad should he be required to render a judgment for all time on every aspect of African civilization.

Achebe wants “Heart of Darkness” ejected from the canon. “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,” he writes. “My answer is: No, it cannot.” Said, to be sure, would never suggest dropping Conrad from the reading lists. Still, one has to wonder if blaming writers for what they fail to write about is not an extraordinarily wrongheaded way of reading them. Among the academic left, literature now inspires restless impatience. Literature excludes: it’s about one thing and not another, represents one point of view and not another, “empowers” one class or race but not another. Literature lacks the perfection of justice, in which all voices must be heard, weighed, balanced. European literature, in particular, is guilty of association with the “winners” of history. Jane Austen is culpable because she failed to dramatize the true nature of colonialism; Joseph Conrad is guilty because he did dramatize it. They are guilty by definition and by category.

In the end, Achebe’s and Said’s complaints come down to this: Joseph Conrad lacked the consciousness of race and imperial power which we have today. Poor, stupid Conrad! Trapped in his own time, he could do no more than write his books. A self-approving moral logic has become familiar on the academic left: So-and-so’s view of women, people of color, and the powerless lacks our amplitude, our humanity, our insistence on the inclusion in discourse of all people. One might think that elementary candor would require the academy to render gratitude to the older writers for yielding such easily detected follies.

Why am I so angry? A disagreeable essay or book does not spell the end of Western civilization, and liberal humanists, of all people, should be able—even required—to listen to points of view that are contrary to their own. But what Achebe and Said (and a fair number of other politicized critics) are offering is not simply a different interpretation of this or that work but something close to an attack on the moral legitimacy of literature.

“There is no way for me to understand your pain,” Henry said the next time the class met, speaking to everyone in general but perhaps to Alex in particular. “Nor is there any way for you to understand mine. The only common ground we have is that we can glimpse the horror.”

It was a portentous remark for so young a man, but he backed it up. Launching into a formal presentation of his ideas about “Heart of Darkness,” he rose from his seat behind Alex to speak. At one point, shouting with excitement, he brushed past him—“Watch out, Alex!” he warned—and threw some coins into the air, first catching them and then letting them drop to the table, where they landed with a clatter and rolled this way and that. Everyone jumped. “That’s what the wilderness does,” he said. “It disperses what we try to hold under control. Kurtz went in and saw that chaos.”

Henry had a talent for melodrama. “Chaos” was another Conradian notion, and I shuddered; our first class on Conrad had come close to breaking apart. Today, however, Shapiro had restored civility, beginning the class with a sombre speech. Hunching over the long table, his voice low, he said, “I had to feel a little despair the other day.” He warned the students against shouting past one another. He spoke very slowly of his own ambivalence in teaching a book that challenges the very nature of Western society. “It’s very hard when you teach a course like Lit Hum, which the outside world represents as the normative, or even conservative, view of social values—it’s very hard to find yourself. As you read Conrad, do you say, ‘Am I going to step away from this culture?’ Or do you say, ‘I’m going to interact with it in some way that recognizes the contradictions and lies that culture tells itself’?”

And Shapiro went on, slowly reëstablishing the frame of his class, situating the book in the year’s work and in the work of the élite university that sits on a hill above Harlem.

Looking back on our little Kulturkampf, I realize now that however much I disliked Achebe’s and Said’s approach, they helped me to understand what happened in the classroom. Just as Alex fought so angrily to keep Western civilization untouched by the stain of Kurtz’s crimes, I initially wanted “Heart of Darkness” to remain impervious to political criticism. In truth, I don’t think any political attack can seriously hurt Conrad’s novella. But to maintain that this book is not embedded in the world—to treat it innocently, as earlier critics did, as a garden of symbols, or as a quest for the Grail or the Father, or whatnot—is itself to diminish Conrad’s achievement. And to pretend that literature has no political component whatsoever is an equal folly.

However wrong or extreme in individual cases, the academic left has alerted readers to the possible hidden assumptions in language and point of view. Achebe and Said jarred me into seeing, for instance, that Shapiro’s way with “Heart of Darkness” was also highly political. I will quickly add that the great value of Shapiro’s “liberal” reading is that it did not depend on reductive control of the book’s meanings: when the class, provoked by Shapiro’s questions, broke down, it did not do so along the clichéd lines of whether Conrad was a racist, or an imperialist. On the contrary, an African-American student had read the book seeking not victimization through literature but self-realization through literature, and white and Asian students, with one exception, had tried in their different ways not to accuse the text but to interrogate themselves. Their responses participated in the liberal consensus of a great university, in which the act of self-criticism is one of the highest goals and a fulfillment of Western education itself. A benevolent politics, but politics nonetheless.

Reading Conrad again, one is struck by his extraordinary unease—and by what he made of it. In the end, his precarious situation both inside and outside imperialism should be seen not as a weakness but as a strength. Yes, Conrad the master seaman had done his time as a colonial employee, working for a Belgian company in 1890, making his own trip up the Congo. He had lived within the consciousness of colonial expansion. But if he had not, could he have written a book like “Heart of Darkness”? Could he have captured with such devastating force the peculiar, hollow triviality of the colonists’ ambitions, the self-seeking, the greed, the pettiness, the lies and evasions? Here was the last great Victorian, insisting on responsibility and order, and fighting, at the same time, an exhausting and often excruciating struggle against uncertainty and doubt of every kind, such that he cast every truth in his fictions as a mocking illusion and turned his morally didactic tale into an endlessly provocative and dismaying battle between stoical assumption of duty and perverse complicity in evil. Conrad’s sea-captain hero Marlow loathes the monstrous Kurtz, yet feels, after Kurtz’s death, an overpowering loyalty to the integrity of what Kurtz discovered in his furious descent into crime.

“The horror” was Conrad’s burden as man and artist—the violent contraries that possessed him. But what a yield in art! Certainly T. S. Eliot and others understood “Heart of Darkness” to be one of the essential works of modernism, a new kind of art in which the radically disjunctive experiences of the age would find expression in ever more complex aesthetic forms. Seen in that light, the spectacular intricacy of Conrad’s work is unimaginable without his participation in the destructive energies of imperialism. It’s possible that Achebe and Said understand this better than any Western reader ever could. But great work galls us, drives us into folly; the fervor of our response to it is a form of tribute. Despite his “errors,” Conrad will never be dropped from the reading lists. Achebe’s and Said’s anguish only confirms his centrality to the modern age.

At the end of the second class, Henry spoke at length of Kurtz’s progression toward death and Marlow’s “privilege of watching this self encounter itself,” and Alex was silent, perhaps humbled. My antagonism toward him eased. I had not much liked myself as a young man, I remembered. Alex had resisted the class consensus, which took some courage, or stubbornness, and if he thought he was absolved of “darkness” he had plenty of time to discover otherwise. In Shapiro’s class, liberal humanism had resisted and survived, though the experience had left us all a little shaken. It was hard these days, as Shapiro noted, to find yourself.

“I don’t want to say that this is a work that teaches desperation, or that evil is something we can’t deal with,” Shapiro said. “In some ways, the world we live in is not as dark as Conrad’s; in some ways, it is darker. This is not a one-way slide to the apocalypse that we are witnessing. We ourselves have the ability now to recognize, and even to fix and change our society, just as literature reflects, embodies, and serves as an agent of change.”

The students were relieved. They wanted reconciliation and peace. And one of them, it seems, had, like Marlow, discovered what he was looking for. He had “found” himself. “We scream at the wilderness, and the wilderness screams back,” Henry said, concluding his presentation with a flourish. “There’s a tension, and at that point of tension we resolve our nature.” ♦

An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Excerpt)

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Chinua Achebe first delivered this critique in the Second Chancellor’s Lecture at the University of Massachusetts on February 18, 1975. It was later published in the Massachusetts Review in 1977 and reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness (1988).

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Moving Beyond "Huh?": Ambiguity in Heart of Darkness

Introduction.

One week before we begin reading it, I pull out a copy of the Norton Critical Edition of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness . "This is our next project, Heart of Darkness ," I say to 32-37 (sometimes) attentive faces. I flip through the book, pinch pages 3-77 of the 500-plus-page book between my thumb and index finger, and hold it up. "These pages here are the text of the novella. That's it." My students look at me and at each other, confused. Then the chorus of voices ensues: "What do you mean?" "That's it?" "Yay!" "You're lying. Um, I mean, are you lying to us?"

Then my favorite question: "Wait. Then how come the book is so big?" I smile slyly. "It's stuff about the novella," I answer. And they're hooked, as if anticipating initiation into some clandestine society for Heart of Darkness aficionados—but then they begin reading it, and their excitement fades and frustration takes its place.

That students find the text difficult to understand is an understatement. Not only do they struggle with the syntax, they are perplexed, among other things, as to what is the "right" interpretation of Marlow's journey up the Congo or what Kurtz's character or the cannibals represent or what those "stupid black hens" symbolize. As a result, they become reluctant readers of a piece of literature that critics continue to write about and debate today. Such reluctance on their part raises the question: Why teach Heart of Darkness ? Good question.

Heart of Darkness is a text that my students, even the best ones, struggle with each year. It makes them doubt themselves, their intelligence, and for some, even their potential success in college. Many of them are the best and the brightest at Overfelt and so fearless in many other ways, and yet this work makes them afraid to take chances, to explore possible meanings because they do not want to be wrong. They want concrete answers and are unable to accept/maneuver the gray areas, but it is in that gray area that literature comes alive.

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley and the third-largest city in California (and the 10 th largest in the U.S.), William C. Overfelt High School serves East San Jose, or colloquially the "East Side." The student body of approximately 1,470 students (9-12) is working class and predominantly low-income. The community faces tremendous poverty and high crime rates; in fact, the City of San Jose has identified Overfelt's attendance area as a "gang hot spot." The significant economic and social hardships facing the community have a major impact on student achievement as measured by mandated testing.(1) Though our API has steadily increased since 2004, less than a third of our students score proficient or advanced on the English Language portion of the STAR tests.(2) Yet, on the standardized tests given every year in California(3) in April, the month I think of as the harbinger of "testing season," the scores of some of my students rival those of students from schools that consistently score—on a scale that tops out at 900—in the high 800s or better. Their scores, however, are not enough to erase the stigma of a low-performing school and nor lift it above the rising tide of emphasis placed on achievement tests to determine the quality of instruction in the classroom and teacher effectiveness.

Hoping to raise test scores, Overfelt recently adopted a small learning community model school-wide. I belong to Fiat Lux ,(4) the "honors" academy. I am one of the lucky few at the school to have a resource period to co-lead a team of six teachers, including myself. We are cognizant that due to the make-up of Overfelt's student body, school-wide resources have focused on improving the achievement of our middle- and lowest-achieving students. Fiat Lux agrees the school must do this, but we also know we cannot ignore the needs of our highest achieving students, often overlooked because "they will do well no matter what." That is neither the case nor is it just. So, our goal is to develop curriculum that engages and challenges students, and to create community among our students who, unlike others, are placed in the academy mostly owing to their test scores and grades rather than their own choice. We want to ensure they are not forgotten in the push to improve instruction among the less gifted students and close the achievement gap. But of course, these are not the only students who take Advanced Placement classes.

In the hopes of shrinking that gap and to ensure no student who wants to take AP is denied access to its challenging curriculum, Overfelt has maintained an open-door policy in regards to AP classes. That means that enrollment in the course is not predicated on any kind of prerequisite with the exception that students must have taken (but need not have passed) AP English Language in the 11 th grade. Received an F in English 3 (college-prep junior English)? Go ahead and take AP. D's in freshman and sophomore English classes? Not a problem. Sign up for AP. Counselor strongly advised against AP? Disregard that. Take AP. I am, however, by no means advocating that students who do not have the "proper credentials" be excluded from enrolling in AP. There are too many factors accounting for why students do not do well in their classes before enrolling in AP English Literature. For example, it is all too common that students must work to help support their families, to care for younger siblings (and/or cousins in multi-family households) while parents (or aunts and uncles) work, or do both. So, while every parent or guardian I have met wants their child to do well in school, often something has to give in order that basic needs are met first; unfortunately, that something is often schoolwork. Another reason some students did not do well in English 3 is because they did not find the course engaging or challenging, and so they did not work for the grade they easily could have earned. These students often thrive in the AP classroom. And then there are those students who know they have not acquired many of the skills students normally have in order to be successful in an AP classroom but are nevertheless willing to challenge themselves; these students are often my most diligent and hard working. Regardless of how my students come to me, I strongly believe that with the right support, with instruction that engages them, they can be successful in my classroom, even with the most challenging of texts, such as Heart of Darkness .

So, again the question: why teach a text as difficult as Heart of Darkness to a class of students, the bulk of whom will struggle even with scaffolding? Simple: There is value in that struggle. This is one of those times when the journey is just as important as the destination.

First, it would not be surprising if Heart of Darkness were one of the required readings they encounter in college. It is what some critics believe to be "'among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language.'"(5) That students have a working familiarity with it and have previously spent time analyzing it will work in their favor. They can use the skills they learn analyzing Heart of Darkness to access independently other texts that are just as difficult. They will learn that different types of texts require different approaches, that as readers, they must read Heart of Darkness (and other texts like it) with intent.

Secondly, Heart of Darkness is especially fertile ground for interpretation. One theme students will see immediately has to do with race and the character of Marlow. Several questions arise. Can—as W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley argue in "The Intentional Fallacy"(6)—we ignore Conrad's intent when we judge Heart of Darkness ' success as a literary work? If one believes that Conrad and/or the text is racist, does that negate any value it has as literary art? Or can the work be judged on its own merits, regardless of what Conrad intended? If students come to the conclusion that Conrad and/or Marlow is racist, can the text still be read as an indictment of imperialism, or must it be read as Chinua Achebe did, a warning against the dangers of allowing darkness to overwhelm civilization? These are the text-specific questions students will deal with in their discussions in class, conversations I hope they will continue outside the confines of our classroom walls.

Finally, my students are on the verge of new lives. Many will be on their own for the first time, away at college and making adult decisions for themselves, from the mundane to the serious. They are coming of age in a world in which the use of social media connects us to people on the other side of the globe by simply clicking "Accept Friend Request," where it is more commonplace to text than to call, where we have over a thousand "friends" we've never met and whose voices we've never heard, where strangers follow our 140-character thoughts on issues big and small. This begs the following question: Have we become merely observers of life rather than participants, posting pictures of our lives rather being actively engaged in them? Heart of Darkness is a work fraught with such questions about the nature of humanity, about our responsibilities and obligations to ourselves and to others to act in ways that are humane, and what the consequences are for us as a people when we act in inhumane ways or fail to stop others from doing so.

Content Objectives

The goal of my unit is to teach my students interpretation skills specifically using Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness . And as I write this unit, I keep coming back to the question, Why Heart of Darkness ? It is the question I go back to every year as I plan the readings and works we will study during the course of the school year. While I am cognizant of the fact that it is the one work that students either love or hate; that there seems to be no middle ground; that those who hate Heart of Darkness are the ones who "just don't get it" and struggle mightily with not just vocabulary (which can certainly be daunting but not insurmountable) but with the enormous amount of symbolism and ambiguity in Conrad's work, they need not stay lost in the murkiness of the landscape, unable to glean meaning from the actions of the novel's characters. I would like to provide them a way to navigate all this by guiding them through close readings of particular passages (which we will do as a class, then they will do in pairs or small groups, and finally individually), and allowing them to process information both verbally through class discussions and in writing via journals and essays. (Enduring Understanding 1, below)

By the end of this unit, it is my hope that students will have (further) developed their skills in the art (or science) of interpretation through close reading and analysis of the text, and learned the importance of supporting their opinions with appropriate evidence from the text. (Enduring Understanding 3, below) With these skills, they will be able to access other complex texts—whether they be novels, poems, or expository texts—with confidence.

Essential Questions

During the last week of classes before Overfelt tore down the wing in which my first classroom was located in order to replace it with a new, state-of-the-art science wing, my colleagues and I, who were being relocated to the new C-wing designed for 21 st century collaborative learning communities, invited students both current and former to leave messages on the walls, their good-byes to the place where they had been nurtured as scholars, where many of them had laughed, cried, fought, made up, made friends, and, for some, likely made a few enemies. Word spread, and they came—before school, between classes, at break, during lunch, and after school. They took up permanent markers to leave impermanent messages bold and tender and cryptic and funny on walls that would soon be a pile of rubble to be hauled away, leaving no physical evidence of the sometimes life-changing events that had taken place within them. But, of the over two hundreds epitaphs scrawled on my walls and doors and windows, only one brought tears to my eyes, a simple eight-word statement by a 2006 graduate:

I became a better person in this classroom.

That epitaph sums up why I believe the essential questions below are integral to the teaching of Heart of Darkness .

I do not see my job as simply to teach English literature and writing. I believe that as an educator, I have an obligation to help my students become better people, responsible and informed citizens of the communities they (will) live and work in, which, in this age of Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Tumblr, and Instagram, are becoming more than ever interconnected and increasingly interdependent. They are inhabiting a global community, and the essential questions below will get them thinking about their place in society and how their actions or inaction may have consequences far beyond their ken.

Essential Question 1 (below) is the foundation question. In determining whether Heart of Darkness is a racist text, students must examine the very current argument about whether we are living in a "post-racial" society. But even before they can begin discussing that question, they must come to some answer about what that phrase even means. They can then explore whether there is value in reading literature that engenders such strong reactions in readers that there is still debate over whether or not it should be taught. My hope is that they will come to the conclusion J. Hillis Miller reaches in his essay entitled "Should We Read Heart of Darkness ?": not only should the novella be read, but we have "an obligation to do so,"(7) and that if we do not, we have abdicated our authority to come to an informed decision about whether the text should be read. Rather than depend on someone else's opinion, we need to

perform a reading in the strong sense, an active responsible response that renders justice to a book by generating more language in its turn, the language of attestation, even though that language may remain silent or implicit.(8)

My hope is that this examination will lead naturally to the questions that follow, that they will eventually come to the conclusion of the old adage, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it."

• Is Heart of Darkness a racist text?
• Does man control his own destiny?
• How do the characters reflect the society in which they live?
• What do these characters' decisions and actions say about human nature and how we respond to our environment?
• What makes us human?
• What does it mean to act humanely?
• Are we required to act when we see other human beings treated inhumanely, and if so, do the times and culture we live in negate that obligation or excuse our failure to do so?

Enduring Understandings

• Interpreting difficult text is a skill that can be mastered.
• Knowledge of an author's background, and the historical and cultural context of a piece of literature lead to a better understanding of the work.
• Literary interpretation must be substantiated by evidence in the work itself.

Modernism and the Modernist Novel

Though there is no exact date when the Modernist period in English literature began, it is generally accepted that the seeds of its inception began to be seen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its emphasis on the inner self and consciousness, its view of society in decay or decline, and the sense of loss, alienation, and disillusionment, is often described as a reaction to world events that called into question Victorian ideals and sensibilities and to the Romantic world-view in which the focus was on nature and the individual. It eschewed the conventional characteristics of literature; the omniscient third-person narrator was replaced by the first-person or multiple narrators, and stream-of-consciousness style narration made its appearance. Heart of Darkness fits this description.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born writer who did not begin learning English, his third language, until he was in his 20s. He lost his mother when he was eight, his father when he was twelve, and was raised by his uncle thereafter. From a very young age, he was fascinated with the sea, recounting that when he was nine years old, he pointed to the blank part of a map of Africa and announced emphatically, "When I grow up I shall go there. "(9) In 1874 at sixteen years of age, Conrad left Poland to Marseilles, France, to work with the French shipping company, C. Delestang et Fils. In 1878, he joined the British Merchant Service, in which he served fifteen years. He became a British citizen in 1886. He travelled the world as a seaman, sailing to places such as the Caribbean, the West Indies, South America, Bangkok, and Singapore, before signing with a Belgian company to command a steamboat in the Congo,(10) this experience being the basis of Heart of Darkness . He authored several books, including his first, Almayer's Folly in 1895, and Heart of Darkness , which was published in serial form in 1899.(11) He died in 1924 and is buried in Canterbury Cemetery.(12)

Belgium and the Congo Free State

In King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa , Adam Hochschild recounts Belgium's King Leopold II's policies that resulted in "killing in the Congo [that] was of genocidal proportions, [but] was not, strictly speaking, genocide," in that "the Congo state was not deliberately trying to eliminate one particular ethnic group from the face of the Earth."(13) Rather, "Leopold's men were looking for labor."(14) The millions of lives lost in their search for and use of labor was "to them [ ] incidental."(15)

In 1885, after several years of negotiation with the United States and other European powers, King Leopold was granted sovereignty over the Congo Free State by the International Association of the Congo.(16) The guise under which he secured power over the Congo, that of a humanitarian mission, was vastly different from the reality of what occurred. Hochschild details the "four closely connected sources" that resulted in a tremendous population loss during 1885 and 1910, with the greatest loss of life in the 1890's: "1) murder; 2) starvation, exhaustion, and exposure; 3) disease; and 4) a plummeting birth rate."(17) The population from 1885 to 1919 was estimated to be "'reduced by half,'" according to a 1919 Belgian commission.(18) Based on a census conducted in 1924, the population during that year was estimated to be ten million, which means that "during Leopold's period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.(19)

Articles and Essays for Discussion

Students will read the following texts because all address the question of whether Conrad and, thus, the novella are racist. Because I want students to interpret Heart of Darkness and, individually and as a class, come to their own conclusions about it, they will read these articles after reading Heart of Darkness . I want these pieces to serve as a starting point for the less text-specific inquiries of the Essential Questions above. These essays will encourage them to consider other interpretations, to analyze how those interpretations differ from their own, and to evaluate not only the validity of the conclusions and the evidence used for others' interpretations but also to re-examine the evidence they use to support their own interpretations and conclusions.

Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness "

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), the Nigerian-born poet, novelist, and professor at Brown University, details several instances in the novella that he believes prove that "Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist."(20) His essay is a revised lecture he originally delivered at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975. In it, he writes that from a Western perspective, Africa is viewed as "a foil to Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest."(21) He seems to argue that the novella warns that "[t]ragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place."(22) He disputes the argument that "the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness 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"(23) and contends instead that if Conrad had meant to distinguish Marlow from himself, he failed miserably. To Achebe, it was an effort "totally wasted" because Conrad provided no "alternative frame of reference by which [readers] may judge the actions and opinions of his characters."(24) He concludes by conceding that Conrad did indeed "condemn[ ] the evil of imperial exploitation"(25); nevertheless, Conrad was "strangely unaware"(26) of the racism on which such practices were predicated and that inability to see or recognize it is why he believed Conrad was a racist.

Hunt Hawkins, " Heart of Darkness and Racism"

In his essay, Heart of Darkness and Racism, Hunt Hawkins, professor of English at University of South Florida, takes issue with Achebe's reading of the novella. Although he agrees with Achebe that "much of Heart of Darkness dehumanizes Africans" and that "the image Conrad projects of African life can hardly be called flattering,"(27) Hawkins asserts that Conrad's depiction of the Congo cannot and should not be read as representative of "all the cultures and situations" in Africa.(28) Moreover, he claims that Conrad was a critic of imperialism:

Conrad became a staunch, if complicated opponent of European Expansion. Heart of Darkness offers a powerful indictment of imperialism, both explicitly for the case of King Leopold and implicitly (despite Marlow's comments on the patches of red) for all other European powers.(29)

He believes that Conrad's "comparative reduction and neglect of Africans" in the novella was intentional.(30) He seems to argue that Achebe's observation that Africans are rarely seen in the novella is an intentional omission on Conrad's part. He interprets the passage in which Marlow journey's up the Congo, describing it as "traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world"(31) not as evidence that Conrad supported imperialism because of an inherent sense of superiority of European culture but rather as a way to focus readers on the idea on European hypocrisy, that those who purported to desire bringing civilization to Africa "[did not] live up to their own ideals as civilizers"(32) and in fact may have called into question the "validity" of those very ideals. Conrad's marginalization of Africans in the novella was a deliberate decision to have the narrative structure mimic societal structure.

He ends by saying that the value of Heart of Darkness is clearly evident in the fact that the title has become synonymous with the atrocities perpetrated in cases of human rights abuse and that "[f]ar from condoning genocide, Conrad clearly saw humanity's horrific capacity and gave it a name."(33)

Paul B. Armstrong, "[Reading, Race, and Representing Others]"

Of the critical essays to accompany our study of Heart of Darkness , the most difficult and most likely in need of scaffolding is Armstrong's.

Armstrong acknowledges the different ways in which Heart of Darkness has been interpreted, on the one had as a text perpetuating racist stereotypes (as advocated by Achebe) and on the other as "a model of…the most promising practices in representing other peoples and cultures."(34) He then posits that it is neither. Rather, " Heart of Darkness is a calculated failure to depict achieved cross-cultural understanding."(35) In other words, Marlow fails to participate in "truly reciprocal"(36) dialogue with the Africans that is required for a true appreciation and respect and understanding of cultures and people different from our own. Though he has many opportunities to engage in such "[ ]dialogical encounters," he does not take advantage of them but rather remains an aloof observer of the people and the landscape and activities going on around him,

... a tourist who sees the passing landscape through a window which separates him from it, and he consequently commits the crimes of touristic misappropriation of otherness even as he is aware of and points out the limitations of that position.(37)

Marlow's inability to bridge the power gap that separates him from the native Africans becomes representative of the text's inability to engage in the type of dialogue necessary to begin understanding. Armstrong sees Achebe's accusations similarly, as a failure to recognize Heart of Darkness as an opening salvo exploring the possibility of connecting with the "Other"; yet the charges Achebe makes in his response are valuable because "they break the aura of the text and reestablish reciprocity between it and its interpreters by putting them on equal terms" and that acknowledging "how unsettlingly ambiguous this text is about the ideals of reciprocity and mutual understanding" allows us to begin to "engage in the sort of dialogue with it which Marlow never achieves with Africans or anyone else."(38)

Teaching Strategies

Before we begin, I will provide 1) a very short overview of Modernism and the Modernist movement in literature, 2) a brief biography of Conrad, and 3) introduce them to the historical and geo-political context of the novella. (Enduring Understanding 2, above) This is necessary because many of my students will have some general knowledge of European and American imperialism but not the specific history of Belgian encroachments on the Congo and the devastating effects of the Belgian government's policies and practices on the native African population. This will be the starting point for students to explore the broader issue of the effects of imperialism on both the perpetrators and its victims. Finally, using Heart of Darkness , students will learn to look closely at the literary devices used by Conrad to arrive at some understanding of the questions raised by the work, themes that they may encounter on the Advanced Placement English Literature Examination, which they are all required to take in May.

Class Discussions: Whole Class, Socratic Seminar, Fishbowl

I love having my students engage in class discussions. They are a wonderful way to get students thinking and to practice putting their thoughts together in words coherently and logically, and to do it more quickly than they thought they could. They learn to articulate their opinions in academic language and to support their ideas with evidence from the text, which they must read closely and deliberately in order to participate cogently and thoughtfully.

At the beginning of the school year, I provide students a list of phrases that they use to help them converse like literary critics. At first they make a big show of using the phrases and we all laugh, but it quickly becomes part of their discussion lexicon. These phrases become an integral and necessary part of maintaining a college-level classroom culture, one in which students own the language of literary criticism.

At the very least, students will have engaged in whole-class discussion by the time we begin our study of Heart of Darkness . Usually, I lead the first formal, graded one. Sometimes, however, I will have a student whose behavior in informal discussions makes me think he or she will be particularly adept at running a discussion with minimal guidance and participation from me—and very rarely will that student disappoint. I use whole class discussion at the beginning of the school year to gauge students' comfort level with participation and to begin getting them comfortable with participating verbally since they are required to do so quite often in class.

In a fishbowl discussion, I choose ten students to begin in a circle discussion. They will need to bring discussion questions and their text(s) in order to participate. In order for a student on the outside to enter the discussion, he or she must "tap out" a student in the circle. This teaches students not just manners but also how to listen closely to argument and how to segue smoothly, with as minimal disruption as possible to the flow of conversation.

Of the three discussion formats,(39) the Socratic seminar is perhaps my favorite method. Because of the size of my classes (it is not unusual to have 35 students in a class), the seminars are conducted over two days, with one group (the quiet ones) going on the first day and "the talkers" on the second day. Neither group is immutable; students may, based on their performances in prior seminar and discussions, be moved (or ask to be moved) from one group to another.

In general, before they come to me in AP English, students have not had much opportunity for formal class discussions, and few students have even participated in informal class discussions. Because of this lack of experience, I spend 15-20 minutes detailing for them the procedures and my expectations.(40) More importantly, it is an excellent method to get students accustomed to college-level dialogue about books. The Socratic seminar also addresses many of the impending Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English-Language Arts, especially when used in conjunction with Heart of Darkness and the essays above. Requiring them to support their interpretations with evidence from the text helps them learn to synthesize ideas to come to perhaps a new or better understanding of the text.

Oral Reading

Because of the difficult nature of the text, I will read much of chapter one aloud while students follow along in their books (although, if I have particularly strong readers, I may call on them periodically to read part of a paragraph or short section), stopping often to ask comprehension questions. This oral reading is a crucial step, necessary before students are assigned to small groups of no more than four to work through chapters two and three together. I do this to model for them how to handle Conrad's long, syntactically complex sentences, and to demonstrate the importance of slowing down and attending to punctuation, something they often ignore in their attempt to "just get through the chapter," and so they will know how to read when they are working together. Though group readings may seem to slow down the process, students benefit from their discussion about how they see the text and what they see in it to help them in interpreting what they see.

Dialectical Journal

"Dialectic" is defined by Merriam-Webster as "discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation," or, more simply, "an intellectual exchange of ideas."(41) Dialectical journals are an excellent way for students to write succinct responses to short passages. They may make connections to the text (text to text, text to self, text to world), or they may analyze a particular literary device or technique. Dialectical journals are also useful in preparing students for class discussions. It focuses them on a specific text and requires them to read closely. Students are allowed to use their journals during discussions to help them pinpoint where in the text a particular idea and supporting quote can be found, allowing their conversations to be organic and academic at the same time.

In-class essays ( i.e. , "timed writes")

For each of the Advanced Placement subjects, the College Board administers examinations that purport to evaluate a student's mastery of the subject matter. For English Literature, the examination includes a multiple-choice section and an essay section that requires students to respond to specific prompts on a poem or pair of poems, a short prose passage, and a thematic question (often referred to as "Question 3") for which they choose an appropriate piece of literature. So, every year, before I return students' first in-class essays to them, I ask them what "AP" stands for, and every year the first verbal response (because their first response is to look at me like I have lost my mind) is "Advanced Placement." That is when I tell them they are both right and wrong.

For our purposes, I tell them, they need to add a second definition of what "AP" stands for: "Answer the Prompt." They laugh when I tell them this, and so do I. But when I pass back their essays with both a letter grade and number score based on the AP scoring guide, their laughter quickly dies out; some quietly share their scores with the person next to them; others shrug and shake their heads in response to silent inquiries about how they did. I introduce the essay this way not to discourage them as much as it is to humble them a bit, to break them of their preconceived notions that the way they have "always" written in their past English classes, that the process that has gotten them the "As" they so covet will be "good enough" in AP. They quickly learn that 1) even the highest achieving of them need lots of practice in writing responses that adequately address the prompt, 2) grammar and mechanics count even on timed essays, and 3) 40 minutes to write an essay on a prompt as complex and involved as the AP prompts is not an easy task but is a doable one. Students, therefore, will write several in-class essays to prepare them for the AP exam essays.

The timed essays, however, are more than just preparing for the Advanced Placement exam. Like discussions, the timed essays are a way for students to practice expressing cogently and thoughtfully their interpretations of the text.

Classroom Activities

This first week will be dedicated to "getting our feet wet." I will conduct a short lecture to provide background knowledge of the text: biographical information about Conrad and the geographical setting and historical and political context of the novella. We will then begin chapter one. They will use reading questions developed by Kris Tully and Robert Litchfield(42) to work through this and the other two chapters. I will read some of chapter one, stopping often to check for understanding and to allow students to ask for clarification and write answers to the reading questions, and to identify and define vocabulary words. I will also have students read along with an audio recording of the novella(43) so that they can hear how different readers emphasize different words in the same text. This should lead to a brief discussion of whether and how that affects their own understanding and interpretation of text.

Students will then assemble in their assigned groups to complete chapter one and begin chapter two. As they read, I will be circling among them, answering questions and asking them some of my own in order to push them to come to some understanding on their own. If a particular group seems to be having particular difficulty, I may sit with them for an extended period of time (as I will do throughout the unit). In addition to answering the reading questions, as they read students will annotate directly in their texts, noting any questions they may have, examples of figurative language, and/or words or phrases that have a special resonance for them. At the end of each class, each group will assign nightly homework to its own members so that they stay on schedule. Groups are encouraged to spend time outside of class working together, although this is not always possible when students have sports or familial obligations.

The first part of week two will be dedicated to students completing group readings of chapter two. We will spend class time identifying and defining problematic words in the chapter. This will also be time for students to ask clarifying questions about characters and plot before they take a test on chapter one so that I can assess whether they understand the text on the most basic level. If they do not, we will spend time reviewing.

We will conduct a whole-class close reading of what I call the "maps" passage in which Marlowe relates his childhood fascination with maps ("Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps" to "The snake had charmed me.") and the allure of the "mighty big river" which "resembl[ed] an immense snake uncoiled…."(44) I will use the document camera to project the passage onto the screen while they annotate indirectly their texts.

We will end the week with a whole-class discussion led by me or by a student volunteer. Each student will come to class with five questions that fall on the higher end of Bloom's Taxonomy, which we will have discussed earlier in the school year. They must also have their text in order to participate. At this point in their reading, students will have developed a preliminary opinion about whether Heart of Darkness is a racist text. Students will explore this issue, citing specific evidence from the novella to bolster their arguments. Depending on the quality of the discussion, the issues raised, and student interest, the discussion may go a second day.

Students will start the week by taking a test on chapter two. They will also begin their group readings of chapter three. The major assignments for this week are the close-readings students will do in pairs. The passage is about Marlowe's description of his initial visit to the Company offices.(45) They may begin in class and, if they do not finish, will complete the analysis for homework. The next day we will debrief as a class and discuss their interpretations of the passage.

For the fishbowl discussion, students will come to class with five discussion questions. I will have placed ten chairs in the middle of the classroom. I will choose the initial ten participants, who take their places in the circle, with one student to open the discussion. Those not in the fishbowl may enter the discussion after ten minutes have elapsed. A student who wishes to participate in the discussion taps the shoulder of the student whose place he wishes to take. Once in the circle, a student must remain for at least five minutes and may not leave until "tapped out" by another. As always, depending on the quality of discussion, the issues raised, and student interest, the fishbowl may go on to a second day.

To begin our final week, students will complete chapter three in their groups. We will, as we have done for each of the first two, identify and define problematic words and review the chapter prior to the chapter three test.

Once students have completed chapter three, I will assign the essays by Achebe and Hawkins to read and journal, using the dialectical method for the upcoming Socratic seminar. For the dialectical journal, students will use a spiral-bound notebook. For each entry, students will fold the page in half lengthwise. On the left, they write quotes (one per entry) they would like to analyze, citing the page number on which the quote can be found. On the right-hand side of the page, they will record their responses. They may explore the effect or possible meanings of figurative turns of phrase; they may write about personal connections they have made, or how a particular situation is relevant to the world today. Entries may not , however, be solely of the personal connection type, e.g. , "This reminds me of a time in my life when…." Students will write a total of ten entries for both essays combined. As they are reading Achebe's and Hawkins' essays outside of class, in class we will read, annotate, and discuss Armstrong's essay. Because of its complexity, we will spend the whole class period for this.

At the end of the week, we will hold the Socratic seminar, which will span two days. The classroom will be arranged with enough chairs in the center of the room for half the students to discuss. There will also be in the circle a "hot seat," which will allow a student outside the circle to ask a question or make a comment of the current seminar participants. The "hot seat" is only for asking a question or making a comment; a student in the seat may not remain to participate in the discussion. Students will each receive a seminar check sheet with rubric (see Appendix B, below). Each student will write their names on the "Outer Circle" line and the name of their partner on the "Inner Circle" line (partners are chosen by me). Again, students will come with five questions for discussion. I will write the essential questions on the board. Students are required to bring their text and may use their notes on Armstrong's essay and journal of Achebe's and Hawkins' essays. The quiet students will discuss on the first day, the "talkers" on the second day. On both days, I will choose a student to open the discussion. A student may begin the discussion with one of the essential questions or with one of her own. Because of the nature of discussion as it often develops and the different viewpoints and experiences of students, students may turn out not to stay focused on the essential questions. If this happens, I will only intervene if the discussion strays very far afield.

The culminating activity will be the timed write using the AP English Literature Exam 2004 released prompt.(46) Students will have the class period to write the essay.

Appendix A: Implementing District Standards

Common Core State Standards (CCSS or Standards) for English-Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects

Although there are at least ten standards that apply, for purposes of the unit, the three standards most pertinent are:

Reading 1: During discussions and in dialectical journals and essays, students will be required to "[c]ite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain." This requires that prior to discussion or to the writing of their essays, they must have read and evaluated the texts to be discussed. It is in their dialectical journals that they may note questions that become the basis for discussion.

Writing 2(a), (e), and (f) : In their essays, students are required "to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content." A well-written essay will—in cogent, formal prose throughout—introduce the topic at issue, organize arguments logically, and provide a concluding section that pulls together their arguments succinctly but not perfunctorily.

Speaking and Listening 1(a), (c), (d) : Essential to understanding literature is the free exchange of ideas. The expectation is that students will have read the assigned readings, thought about them, and will come to class willing to share their thoughts and ideas and any questions they may have. They are evaluated not only on the quantity of the comments they make but, more importantly, on the quality of their comments, including but not limited to whether: 1) their comments move the discussion forward; 2) they are listening to others' comments and observations, and responding thoughtfully; inviting more reticent members of the class to participate; 3) they are not simply agreeing with another's comment but providing further explanation as to why, as well as not simply disagreeing with another's comment but explaining why their view differs. Students must also cite specific evidence from texts in order to receive credit. Comments that are particularly insightful, that synthesize several points of view or opinions, are rewarded; comments that do not move discussion forward, are not. Comments made in side conversations do not receive credit.

Socratic Seminar Rubric

A+—50 points: Participated in 9 categories and spoke at least 15 times.

A—47.5 points: Participated in at least 7 categories and spoke at least 10 times.

B—42.5 points: Participated in at least 4 categories and spoke at least 6 times.

C—37.5 points: Participated in at least 2 categories and spoke at least 3 times.

D—32.5 points: Participated in 1 category and spoke at least once.

F—25 points: Present but no verbal participation.

Comments Grading Scale:

1. What went well: To get the full three points for this section, you must list at least three (3) things your group did well during the discussion. You are evaluating the group's performance, not merely your own.

2. Improving the process: You are evaluating BOTH sessions. Here is your chance to state what should be changed when planning our next discussion. Your suggestion might be about the way the discussion is structured—for instance, how much time we spend on one topic before going to another. You might offer a very specific critique of class behavior in the discussion—for instance that people are interrupting one another too often. Or, you might suggest a change in which group members are chosen. In something as complex as a seminar, I cannot envision a time when it will be truthful to state, "No changes are necessary," so I will give you zero (0) points for this [last] response.

Insightful comments: To get the full four (4) points for this section, you must record or summarize at least two insightful comments, which may be made by someone in your group or in the other group, or one from each session. To be truly insightful, a comment must show original thought (the speaker has been thinking on his or her own here) and cannot be merely a fact that anyone who opens the text can read for him- or herself. In other words, it cannot be a statement such as "Jocasta hanged herself," "Oedipus used Jocasta's brooches to blind himself," or " Oedipus the King was a tragic play."

Annotated Bibliography

Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." In Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Context Criticism . Edited by Paul B. Armstrong. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 2006.

Adelman, Gary. Heart of Darkness: Search for the Unconscious . Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Armstrong, Paul B. "Reading, Race, and Representing Others." In Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Context Criticism. Armstrong, ed.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Context Criticism . Armstrong, ed .

Hawkins, Hunt. "Heart of Darkness and Racism." In Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Context Criticism. Armstrong, ed.

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa . New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. This book details, thoroughly and often graphically, the history of and atrocities perpetuated on the native Africans of the Congo under the reign of King Leopold of Belgium.

Miller, J. Hillis. "Should We Read Heart of Darkness ?" In Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Context Criticism . Armstrong, ed.

Simmons, Allan. Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Reader's Guide . London: Continuum, 2007.

Unrau, Norman J., and Robert B. Ruddell. "Interpreting Texts in Classroom Contexts." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 39, no. 1 (1995): 16-27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40016717 (accessed July 6, 2013).

Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. "The Intentional Fallacy." In The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry . Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1954. 2-18. This essay explores the place that authorial intent plays in the interpretation of poetry. Although the focus of the essay is on the interpretation of poetry, the discussion is certainly applicable to something such as Heart of Darkness .

1. Chapter 1 "School Profile," William C. Overfelt Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) Report 2012-2013. WASC is the organization that provides accreditation for public and private schools, colleges, and universities. The states of California and Hawaii, as well as U.S. territories including, but not limited to Guam and American Samoa, fall under its jurisdiction. Last year, after a year of self-study, Overfelt was granted by WASC six more years of accreditation, with a third-year mid-term report. This is the longest period that WASC grants to any institution. More information about the organization can be found at: http://www.acswasc.org.

2. On the 2012 STAR tests, the last year for which we have data, 37% of freshmen, 32% of sophomores, and 25% of juniors scored proficient or advanced.

3. For several decades, California has measured student achievement in 1 st through 12 th grades based on results from a variety of annual tests, most recently the California Standardized Testing and Reporting Tests (STAR Tests) and California Standards Tests (CSTs); however, the state will be joining a growing number that utilize tests based on the Common Core State Standards, colloquially known as Common Core. During the 2013-2014 school year, Overfelt will be a preparing for implementation beginning with the 2014-2015 academic year.

4. Latin: "Let there be light."

5. Chinua Achebe, "Image of Africa," quoting Albert J. Gerard, 337.

6. Though Wimsatt and Beardsley wrote specifically of poetry, I believe that the same general issues they discuss can be applied to fiction.

7. J. Hillis Miller, "Should We Read Heart of Darkness ?" in Heart of Darkness , 474.

8. Ibid . , 463.

9. Joseph Conrad, "Conrad in the Congo," in Heart of Darkness, 242.

10. Gary Adelman, Heart of Darkness , xii-xiii.

11. Ibid . , xiv-xv.

12. Allan Simmons, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, 8.

13. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost , 225.

15. Ibid., 225-26.

16. "Imperialism and the Congo," in Heart of Darkness , 99.

17. Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost , 226.

18. Ibid., 233.

20. Achebe, "Image of Africa," in Heart of Darkness, 343.

21. Ibid., 337.

22. Ibid., 340.

23. Ibid., 342.

25. Ibid., 346

27. Hunt Hawkins, " Heart of Darkness and Racism," in Heart of Darkness , 366.

28. Ibid., 367.

29. Ibid., 368.

31. Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 33.

32. Hawkins, " Heart of Darkness and Racism," in Heart of Darkness , 369.

33. Ibid., 375.

34. Paul B. Armstrong , Reading, Race , 430.

35. Ibid., 431.

37. Ibid., 432

38. Ibid., 444.

39. For all three formats, I require students to come to class with five discussion questions on the upper-end of Bloom's Taxonomy and having read the assigned text. Whole-class discussions require a discussion leader whose job it is to make sure that discussion flows freely and to maintain order should conversation become quite animated.

40. A few days prior to the seminar, students are asked to rate themselves on a scale of 1-5, "1" for those who almost never say anything to "5" for those who proudly claim, "Just try and shut me up!" I then place them into one of two groups: the talkers and the quiet ones, with those students who rated themselves 3 (+/-) interspersed in the two groups.

41. dialectic. Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary . Encyclopaedia Britannica Company. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dialectic (accessed July 12, 2013).

42. The original questions were developed by the late Robert Litchfield, College Board consultant and teacher at Point Loma High School in San Diego. Kris Tully, English teacher at University High School in Tucson, Arizona, revised the questions into their current form. The questions can be found and downloaded at: http://teacherweb.com/CA/PalisadesCharterHighSchool/StephenBerger/Heart-of-Darkness-Reading-Questions.doc

43. The audio recording I will use can be accessed in iTunes and is provided by LoudLit.org, a site "committed to delivering public domain literature paired with high quality audio performances." Heart of Darkness, read by David Kirkwood and narrated by Tom Franks, is one of several novels, short stories, poems, and historical documents. Their limited library can be accessed at http://www.loudlit.org/collection.htm.

44. Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 7-8.

45. Ibid., 10 (The paragraph beginning with "A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow,…" and ending at " Bon Voyage ").

46. A pdf of the exam can be viewed and downloaded at the College Board's website: http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/ap04_frq_english_lit_36149.pdf. There are also examples of student responses to the prompt.

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Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Critical Investigation

This paper deals with the concept of racism, which is considered as a dark chapter in the history of the world.Throughout history, racist ideology widespread throughout the world especially between blacks and white. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which is his experience in the Congo River during the 19th century dealt with the concept of racism, which was clear in this novel because of the conflicts that were between black and whites and it explained the real aims of colonialism and expansionism in Africa, which were for wealth and power. This paper shows Marlow’s limitations as a narrator, his ethnocentricity and color consciousness and inability to comprehend inscrutable Africa that lead him to side with the colonizers against the Africans and how his approach is shared by Conrad as well. A bitter irony lies in the fact that the people who look apparently civilized in the novel are most savage in reality. In fact, power, jealousy and greed for ivory or money have metamorphosed them into corrupt, monstrous, brutal animal. My point of argument is that Conrad in Heart of Darkness has biasness for European colonialism, though the biasness is not so much conspicuous but ostensible, covertly and allusively maintained throughout.

Related Papers

Eduardo Marks de Marques

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is among the best works of literature of the 20th Century. The story of the journey up the Congo river in Africa, made by a sailor who was incharge of collecting the ivory from the colony can be read through several different criticalperspectives. The goal of this thesis is to apply a postcolonial reading (based, mainly, onEdward Said’s theory of Orientalism) in order to perceive how Conrad portrayed imperialismin the Belgian colony of Congo, as well as the mechanisms the author used to construct theblack African characters in his narrative. The narrative showed to be a reflection of the web of ambiguities and ambivalences that characterized the imperial ideology – theory and practice being so distant from each other.

Ayisha Aslam

Postcolonial literature consists predominantly of works written over the last few decades, there are still many discussions concerning the status of authors who wrote at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Of these, one of the most frequently discussed is, of course, Joseph Conrad, whom most contemporary scholars see as being one of the first postcolonial writers — someone who criticized the sometimes ruthless and pointless colonial expansion of European empires and the concept of the “White Man’s Burden.” The works which attract particular attention are, of course, those which relate to Conrad’s African experience: An Outpost of Progress and the excellent, albeit over exploited novella Heart of Darkness.

Janet J Graham

Dejan Andjelkovic

Bekir Yılmaz

Mariama Muarif

Imperialism or colonialism is an aspect through which the ironic renovation of human civilization gets exposed. It is a definition of unsolicited dominance, a methodical process of exploitation that has been utilized by the superior nations to expand its territories in the name of enlightenment or progress. This system of manifesting hegemony or authority is not at all a recent phenomenon but has been going on through ages. However, it was the nineteenth century when this process of exploitative imperialism had perfectly outshined its effect with the autocratic strategies of numerous empires such as the British, the Dutch and so on. The imperialists or the colonizers of these empires discovered and raided several parts of the world. Their settlement of colonies not just fueled up the evil features of racism, slavery and corruption but it also represented the brutality or revulsion of distorted power. Their oppression has been sugarcoated in most of the literary pieces of the nineteenth century to signify colonialism or imperialism as an extremely vital occurrence for the people who do not share the similar culture or tradition with those exploitative empires. Now, on this particular aspect it is necessary to claim that the dichotomy of dominant versus subordinate is not a fixed notion and it changes over time with the exchange of powers. Therefore, the colonizers who started their journeys of victimization and manipulation with immense authority as well as boastful rationality eventually had to become the victims of their own.

Introduction Geographical discoveries and economic developments from the sixteenth to nineteenth and to the early half of twentieth centuries deeply influenced to every field of life from the politic to the literature, cultures and the lifestyles of people. The geographical discoveries and the need of imperial powers for the markets changed the balance. As the results of changes during the 16 th century, some governments such as Portugal, Russia, France and England became the great powers of the world in terms of colonialism and imperialism. Besides discovering new lands and markets they also advanced technologically that enabled them to dominate over their colonies. The aim of this study is to explain colonialism, imperialism and capitalism and their relationships. The colonization process will be discussed in terms of historical development and how it was started. In addition, colonialism process will be explained through its causes and effects. The study aims to focus on fifteenth and sixteenth century colonial period accepted as the beginning of modern colonialism and to emphasize the colonial and imperial ideologies of western nations not only among the Africans but also through the other parts of the world. The relationship between colonizer and colonized people will be discussed as a subject matter that shows different features in different periods of time. Decolonization is defined as the separation of the colonies from their colonizers. This works aims to represent changes and developments during the decolonization which cannot be associated with a certain period of time. The basic concepts related to the nineteenth century ideologies and attitudes of West toward Africans will be examined and discussed in order to clarify basic ideas that the novel reveals to the readers. Joseph Conrad's experiences of his childhood related to imperialism and colonialism, and the harsh circumstances that he witnessed will be discussed. The politic, and economic problems that change the way of his life, will be examined and also these problems he witnessed that is associated with his decisions and future are going to be explained in terms of their relations with his psychological problems which cause him to make same fatal mistakes. His life and his experiences, career and his devotion of the sea will be discussed in the sense that how this all affects his vision through his famous novella Heart of Darkness. Apparently, Joseph Conrad is very much influenced by his experiences and repressed memories which shape his literary perspective. Heart of darkness is discussed as one of the most famous literary texts written on the western imperial activities in the first half of the twentieth century. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is an eminent writer of postmodern literature who represents the colonial ideology of colonizer during the late of the nineteenth century. The main intention of famous writer is to draw attention to the exploitation of Africans and to illuminate what is going on through the dark center of Africa. The story is mainly based upon the experiences of Charlie Marlow, who associated with the writer. Joseph Conrad narrates Congo as a center of colonialism and imperialism upon the activities of western civilization that he witnessed. Colonizing activities of European countries in Heart of Darkness enable to perceive the brutality of colonization and imperialism. As a work of modern period Heart of Darkness not only represents the colonial and imperial facts about West in Africa and also it shows how western nations have certain attitudes against both Orient and the others who are rejected as primitive or undeveloped. The author also represents the general atmosphere of the Victorian period. The general views of Europeans towards Africans and their mistreatment will be examined through critical discussions of Hart of Darkness upon the views of the scholars and the critics in terms of colonization and imperialism. Besides, it represents the general condition of Africa in the nineteenth century and aims of Western civilizations. The book represents Africa as a common property of Europeans in the 19 th century.

Lorenzo Servitje

In Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlow comes to the Congo for the development of his experience and self, in the belief that a man is shaped by what he does, and that the character is formed by what happens to him. But surrounding all of man's efforts in the Congo there is a presence: Kurtz listened to it and went mad, and Marlow recognizes it but refuses to listen, neutralizes the appeal of the unknown and survives Kurtz, who succumbed to the fascinating wilderness. In 1899, eleven years earlier than «The Secret Sharer», Conrad published Heart of Darkness, the tale that «delineates the archetypal pattern he continued to refine through his career» (Andreach, 1970:44). In this obscure story Conrad wants to communicate his great conviction that, "even if man fails in his attempts at authenticity, the very struggle to attain it gives intensity to an otherwise plain and inauthentic existence." (Bohlmann, 1991:48). The long-lived popularity of this book over the last one hundred years rest on "its plot of adventure, its humor, and its plain narrative manner-each incidentally averting the audience.'s attention from racist and misogynist undertones." (Scheick, 1994:45).

Journal of Modern Literature

Charlie Wesley

The possibility of native resistance to colonial tyranny and the threat of the loss of colonial “order” is a sustained anxiety throughout Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Critics have largely ignored or downplayed these inscriptions of resistance in Conrad's text. Much of the criticism that surrounds this novella, according to Patrick Brantlinger, is focused on the European subjects of the text, and therefore renders Africa and its native peoples as a kind of backdrop. Literary critiques of Heart of Darkness that do discuss the African natives tend to portray them as victims rather than having any kind of agency. This latent fear of native resistance demonstrates the fantasy of stability and superiority endemic to imperialism: a narrative that the imperial administration must continually tell itself.

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• Introduction

Heart of Darkness

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Heart of Darkness , novella by Joseph Conrad that was first published in 1899 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and then in Conrad’s Youth: and Two Other Stories (1902). Heart of Darkness examines the horrors of Western colonialism , depicting it as a phenomenon that tarnishes not only the lands and peoples it exploits but also those in the West who advance it. Although garnering an initially lacklustre reception, Conrad’s semiautobiographical tale has gone on to become one of the most widely analyzed works of English literature . Critics have not always treated Heart of Darkness favourably, rebuking its dehumanizing representation of colonized peoples and its dismissive treatment of women. Nonetheless, Heart of Darkness has endured, and today it stands as a Modernist masterpiece directly engaged with postcolonial realities.

Heart of Darkness tells a story within a story. The novella begins with a group of passengers aboard a boat floating on the River Thames . One of them, Charlie Marlow, relates to his fellow seafarers an experience of his that took place on another river altogether—the Congo River in Africa. Marlow’s story begins in what he calls the “sepulchral city,” somewhere in Europe. There “the Company”—an unnamed organization running a colonial enterprise in the Belgian Congo —appoints him captain of a river steamer. He sets out for Africa optimistic of what he will find.

But his expectations are quickly soured. From the moment he arrives, he is exposed to the evil of imperialism , witnessing the violence it inflicts upon the African people it exploits. As he proceeds, he begins to hear tell of a man named Kurtz —a colonial agent who is supposedly unmatched in his ability to procure ivory from the continent’s interior. According to rumour Kurtz has fallen ill (and perhaps mad as well), thereby jeopardizing the Company’s entire venture in the Congo.

Marlow is given command of his steamer and a crew of Europeans and Africans to man it, the latter of whom Conrad shamelessly stereotypes as “cannibals.” As he penetrates deeper into the jungle, it becomes clear that his surroundings are impacting him psychologically: his journey is not only into a geographical “heart of darkness” but into his own psychic interior—and perhaps into the darkened psychic interior of Western civilization as well.

After encountering many obstacles along the way, Marlow’s steamer finally makes it to Kurtz. Kurtz has taken command over a tribe of natives who he now employs to conduct raids on the surrounding regions. The man is clearly ill, physically and psychologically. Marlow has to threaten him to go along with them, so intent is Kurtz on executing his “immense plans.” As the steamer turns back the way it came, Marlow’s crew fires upon the group of indigenous people previously under Kurtz’s sway, which includes a queen-figure described by Conrad with much eroticism and as exoticism.

Kurtz dies on the journey back up the river but not before revealing to Marlow the terrifying glimpse of human evil he’d been exposed to. “The horror! The horror!” he tells Marlow before dying. Marlow almost dies as well, but he makes it back to the sepulchral city to recuperate. He is disdainful of the petty tribulations of Western civilization that seem to occupy everyone around him. As he heals, he is visited by various characters from Kurtz’s former life—the life he led before finding the dark interior of himself in Africa.

A year after his return to Europe, Marlow pays Kurtz’s partner a visit. She is represented—as several of Heart of Darkness ’s female characters are—as naively sheltered from the awfulness of the world, a state that Marlow hopes to preserve. When she asks about Kurtz’s final words, Marlow lies: “your name,” he tells her. Marlow’s story ends there. Heart of Darkness itself ends as the narrator, one of Marlow’s audience, sees a mass of brooding clouds gathering on the horizon—what seems to him to be “heart of an immense darkness.”

Heart of Darkness was published in 1902 as a novella in Youth: And Two Other Stories , a collection which included two other stories by Conrad. But the text first appeared in 1899 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine , a literary monthly on its thousandth issue, to which its editor invited Conrad to contribute. Conrad was hesitant to do so, perhaps for good reason—although Heart of Darkness received acclaim among his own literary circle, the story failed to secure any kind of popular success. That remained the case even when it was published in 1902; Heart of Darkness received the least attention out of the three stories included, and the collection was eponymously named after another one of the stories altogether. Conrad didn’t live long enough to see it become a popular success.

Heart of Darkness first began garnering academic attention in the 1940 and ’50s, at a time when literary studies were dominated by a psychologically oriented approach to the interpretation of literature. Heart of Darkness was, accordingly, understood as a universalist exploration of human interiority—of its corruptibility, its inaccessibility, and the darkness inherent to it. There was something lacking in these critiques , of course: any kind of examination of the novella’s message about colonialism or its use of Africa and its people as an indistinct backdrop against which to explore the complexities of the white psyche.

That changed in the 1970s when Chinua Achebe , the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart , levelled an excoriating critique against Heart of Darkness for the way it dehumanized African people. Achebe’s critique opened the doors for further postcolonial analyses of the work, was followed by those from other academic perspectives: feminist readings, for example, revealed a similar kind of effacement done unto its female subjects. Although Heart of Darkness has remained on many syllabi since the 1970s, it now occupies a much more controversial position in the Western canon: as a story that, while levelling critiques against colonialism that were novel for its time, and which was formative for the emergence of modernism in literature, is still deeply and inexcusably entrenched in the white male perspective.

On the most superficial level, Heart of Darkness can be understood through its semiautobiographical relationship to Conrad’s real life. Much like his protagonist Marlow, Conrad’s career as a merchant marine also took him up the Congo River. And much like Marlow, Conrad was profoundly affected by the human depravity he witnessed on his boat tour of European colonialism in Africa.

But it’s overly reductive to boil Heart of Darkness down to the commonalities it shares with Conrad’s own experiences. It would be useful to examine its elements crucial to the emergence of modernism: for example, Conrad’s use of multiple narrators; his couching of one narrative within another; the story’s achronological unfolding; and as would become increasingly clear as the 20th century progressed, his almost post-structuralist distrust in the stability of language. At the same time, his story pays homage to the Victorian tales he grew up on, evident in the popular heroism so central to his story’s narrative. In that sense, Heart of Darkness straddles the boundary between a waning Victorian sensibility and a waxing Modernist one.

One of the most resoundingly Modernist elements of Conrad’s work lies in this kind of early post-structuralist treatment of language—his insistence on the inherent inability of words to express the real, in all of its horrific truth. Marlow’s journey is full of encounters with things that are “unspeakable,” with words that are uninterpretable, and with a world that is eminently “inscrutable.” In this way, language fails time and time again to do what it is meant to do—to communicate. It’s a phenomenon best summed up when Marlow tells his audience that “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence… We live, as we dream—alone.” Kurtz—as “eloquent” as he may be—can’t even adequately communicate the terrifying darkness he observed around him.“The horror! The horror!” is all he can say. Some critics have surmised that part of Heart of Darkness ’s mass appeal comes from this ambiguity of language—from the free rein it gives its readers to interpret. Others posit this as a great weakness of the text, viewing Conrad’s inability to name things as an unseemly quality in a writer who’s supposed to be one of the greats. Perhaps this is itself a testament to the Heart of Darkness ’s breadth of interpretability.

Examining Heart of Darkness from a postcolonial perspective has given way to more derisive critiques. As Achebe put it, Conrad was a “thoroughgoing racist,” one who dehumanized Africans in order to use them as a backdrop against which to explore the white man’s interiority. Achebe is right: although Conrad rebukes the evils of colonialism, he does little to dismantle the racism that undergirds such a system, instead positing the indigenous people of Africa as little more than part of the natural environment . This work has been held up as one of the West’s most insightful books on the evils of European imperialism in Africa, and yet it fails to assign any particularity to African people themselves.

Feminist discourse has offered similar critiques, that Conrad has flattened his female characters similar to the way he’s done so with his African ones. Women are deployed not as multidimensional beings, but as signifiers undistinguished from the field of other signifiers that make up the text. They are shells emptied of all particularity and meaning, such that Conrad can fill them with the significance he sees fit: the African queen becomes the embodiment of darkened nature and an eroticized symbol of its atavistic allure; Kurtz’s Intended, meanwhile, is just a signifier for the illusory reality of society that Marlow is trying to protect against the invading darkness of human nature . Neither woman is interiorized, and neither is named—a rhetorical strategy that seems less about Conrad illustrating the failures of language than it does about him privileging his masculine voice above any possible feminine ones.

Much contemporary analysis—the aforementioned postcolonial and feminist critiques included—is centred not on text itself, but on other commentaries of the text, thereby elucidating the way that discussions in academia might unwittingly perpetuate some of the work’s more problematic elements. Thus, Heart of Darkness is occupying an ever-changing position in the literary canon: no longer as an elucidatory text that reveals the depths of human depravity, but as an artifact that is the product of such depravity and which reproduces it in its own right. The question then becomes: Does the Heart of Darkness still belong in the West’s literary canon? And if so, will it always?

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Exploration of Racism in The Heart of Darkness

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Heart of Darkness

An examination of racism in heart of darkness jeff caves 12th grade.

Heart of Darkness has long been considered a triumph of 20th century English-language literature and its exploration of the darkness inside man has long provoked analysis by critics. But renowned Nigerian author and preeminent scholar on African culture, Chinua Achebe, has a markedly different view. In a 1975 lecture, he denounced Heart of Darkness as an example of pervasive racism, dismissal of African culture, and European arrogance and ignorance. He argued that if it was to be taught, it should be used only as an example of the horrifically backwards views of Joseph Conrad and of the period it was written in. His lecture and subsequent essay sparked a scholarly uproar with many strongly denouncing Achebe’s views and arguing that while racist, Heart of Darkness was far ahead of its time and indeed sought to highlight European abuses of power in Africa. Hunt Hawkins is among these scholars and his counter-argument to Achebe represents the far more relativist view of many critics and seeks to place Conrad’s novel and its views in the context of its era and its author’s life.

Achebe’s critique focuses on the depiction of Africans in Conrad’s novel. Their depiction is effectively that of sub-humans. As he points out, no African...

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Views of Racism in Heart of Darkness

What is the meaning of racism? According to the American Heritage Dictionary, it means hatred or intolerance of another race or other races. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, is a treasure for criticism on the authors stand on racism. Many believed him to be a racist writer, and many others believed that the novel only implicated the beliefs of his time. He was not only believed to be a racist but also ignorant. All the critics accusing him for being racist and others defending him present very strong arguments, but in the end, it is always up to the reader to decide from which point of view he/she wants to interpret the novella. If the novella is, infact, viewed under the lens of todays beliefs, it appears to be a very racist work. The language of the story would strongly represent the racist views of the writer in todays times.

Joseph Conrad develops themes of personal power, individual responsibility, and social justice in his book Heart of Darkness. His book has all the trappings of the conventional adventure tale – mystery, exotic setting, escape, suspense, unexpected attack. Chinua Achebe concluded, “Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good story-teller into the bargain”. Yet, despite Conrad’s great story telling, he has also been viewed as a racist by some of his critics. Achebe, Singh, and Sarvan, although their criticisms differ, are a few to name.

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Chinua Achebe, a well-known writer, once gave a lecture at the University of Massachusetts about Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Throughout his essay, Achebe notes how Conrad used Africa as a background only, and how he “set Africa up as a foil to Europe,” while he also “projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization.” By his own interpretations of the text, Achebe shows that Conrad eliminates “the African as a human factor,” thereby “reducing Africa to the role of props.”Normal readers usually are good at detecting racism in a book. Achebe acknowledges Conrad camouflaged racism remarks, saying, “But Conrad chose his subject well – one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with psychological pre-disposition…”. Having gone back and rereading Heart of Darkness, but this time reading between the lines, there are many elements in the book that seem racist that didnt seem before. Racism is portrayed in Conrad’s book, but one must acknowledge that back in the eighteen hundreds society conformed to it. Conrad probably would have been criticized as being soft hearted rather than a racist back in his time.

In supporting these accusations against Conrad, Achebe cites specific examples from the text, while also, pointing out that there is a lack of certain characteristics among the characters. Achebe then compares the descriptions of the Intended and the native woman. Explaining that the savage “fulfills a structural requirement of the story: a savage counterpart to the refined European woman,” and also that the biggest “difference is the one implied in the author’s bestowal of human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other.” This lack of human expression and human characteristics is what Achebe says contributes to the overflowing amount of racism within Conrad’s novella. Human expression is one of few things that make us different from animals, along with such things as communication and reason. This of course, being that without human expression, the native woman is considered more of a “savage…wild-eyed and magnificent,” possibly even “bestial.”

Conrad constantly referred to the natives, in his book, as black savages, niggers, brutes, and “them”, displaying ignorance toward the African history and racism towards the African people. Conrad wrote, “Black figures strolled out listlessly… the beaten nigger groaned somewhere” . “They passed me with six inches, without a glance, with the complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages” . Achebe, also, detected Conrad’s frequent use of unorthodox name calling, “Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers. His in ordinate love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts” . Conrad uses Marlow, the main character in the book, as a narrator so he himself can enter the story and tell it through his own philosophical mind. Conrad used “double speak” throughout his book. Upon arriving at the first station, Marlow commented what he observed. “They were dying slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom” .

Marlow felt pity toward the natives, yet when he met the station’s book keeper he changed his views of the natives. “Moreover I respected the fellow. Yes. I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance”. Marlow praised the book keeper as if he felt it’s the natives’ fault for living in such waste. The bureaucracy only cared about how he looked and felt. The bookkeeper did not care for the natives who were suffering less than fifty feet from him. He stated the natives weren’t criminals but were being treated as if they were, but at the same time he respected the book keeper on his looks instead of despising him for his indifference. Conrad considered the Africans inferior and doomed people. Frances B. Singh, author of The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness”, said “The African natives, victims of Belgian exploitation, are described as ‘shapes,’ ‘shadows,’ and ‘bundles of acute angles,’ so as to show the dehumanizing effect of colonialist rule on the ruled” . Another similar incident of “double speak” appeared on the death of Marlow’s helmsman. Marlow respected the helmsman, yet when the native’s blood poured into Marlow’s shoes, “To tell you the truth, I was morbidity anxious to change my shoes and socks” .

How can someone respect yet feel disgusted towards someone? Singh looks into this question by stating, “The reason of course, is because he (Marlow) never completely grants them (natives) human status: at the best they are a species of superior hyena”. As I have mentioned before, Conrad was not only believed to be racist but also ignorant. He would often mix ignorance with racism when he described the natives. “They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly”.

The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell?”. The end result of Conrad’s ignorance of not knowing the behavior of African people concluded his division of the social world into two separate categories: “us,” the Europeans, and “them,” the Africans. Achebe concludes Conrad’s ignorance towards the natives by stating, “Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’… a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and ferment are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality”.

“Heart of Darkness was written, consciously or unconsciously, from a colonialistic point of view” . Conrad didn’t write his book to the extreme of racism. Overall, the natives appeared better humans than the Europeans in Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s ignorance led to his conformity to racism. His ignorance of not completely “granting the natives human status” leads him to social categorization. C. P. Sarvan wrote in his criticism, quoting Achebe, “Racism and the Heart of Darkness,” “Conrad sets up Africa ‘as a foil to Europe, a place of negations… in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.’ Africa is ‘the other world,’…”. In an attempt to refute Achebe’s proposed difference between the two women, C.P. Sarvan said that Conrad perceived the native woman as a “gorgeous, proud, superb, magnificent, terrific, and fierce” person whose “human feelings were not denied.” In comparing the two views, one must step back and consider that both views are only interpretations on what Conrad may have intended. Since no one can ever really know what his actual meanings were for these two women being so similar (in their movements), and yet so different (in their character), only individual explanation can be brought up. This in particular, is what brings me to question both Achebe and Sarvan’s points.

By reorganizing Conrad’s descriptive words, Sarvan was able to propose that Conrad did not intend for the mistress to be perceived as the “savage counterpart.”(Achebe, p. 255) Yet, at the same time, both Sarvan and Achebe each write about what they think to be the right thing. It seems to me that Achebe was looking for racism in this short novel, and that Sarvan was so taken back by Achebe’s accusations, that he himself, went and looked for ways to defend Conrad.

However, this particular shortcoming of the native woman is not the only one that Achebe finds. As stated earlier, communication is very important in our society and to “civilization” (as known by the Europeans of the time). While reading Heart of Darkness, I noticed a significant difference in the levels of communication that were allotted between the Europeans and the Africans. This drastic difference in speech was at the core of Achebe’s argument that Conrad deprived the Africans of human qualities. Achebe pointed out that “in place of speech they made ‘a violent babble of uncouth sounds,'” also saying that “it is clearly not of Conrad’s purpose to confer language on the ‘rudimentary souls’ of Africa.”  Here lies the problem that I have with Achebe’s article.

Assuming that the lack of speech (in Conrad’s eyes) is a racist factor–which is a valid assumption–Achebe still did not support his comment that “Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.”Without outside knowledge (beyond the book), Achebe had no basis to charge Conrad with this rather harsh comment. By completely agreeing with either writer, one would be denying him/herself the right to find their own opinion regarding racism in Heart of Darkness. As it is presented by the critics, the arguments clearly state that racist statements are present in the novella. It is also believed that during the time that this novella was written, Conrad lived in a society where African people were not considered equal, to man, they were even considered sub-human. Not to excuse Conrad, but racism was everywhere and what came from it was people who wrote about it naturally and who did not think of a “politically correct” way to put things.

It is my opinion that Chinua Achebe searched for things that he felt could be considered racist, and when they were found, he’d call the author some harsh names and accuse him of slander. Of course, that is only my opinion, and I point this out, because Achebe did not–he only wrote what he felt. Belief that Conrad was a racist is not hard to come by, especially after reading Achebe’s convincing essay.

However, interpretation is the key word. Many agree that Conrad did have quite a few racist passages in his story, but they also believe that Achebe does not open his mind completely, in his analysis of the work. “Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves”(Achebe, p. 260) is what Achebe points to in explaining Conrad’s journey and how it turned into the novella. This particular passage can be used to describe Achebe himself. It seems that Achebe was closed-minded in his essay regarding racism. He did not propose any other possibilities regarding the novella, only to say that a conceivable reason for this is that “it is the desire…in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe.” Achebe only set forth his views and did not take into account other interpretations of the same passage, as did Sarvan. Conrad was a master of prose as many critics admitted, even those who proclaimed him a racist. The writing of Heart of Darkness was not only to show the potential of what man could become, but what he already was. Marlow is the everyday man, longing to become something that he cannot even fathom. Kurtz was the ideal man that Marlow, or any man for that matter, longed to become.

Kurtz was tormented in his last days because he saw the evil that was in European trade and imperialism. In this, he finds a reassuring simplicity in the ways of the natives. Conrad conveys this theme to those who search for a quality that resides in all men, rather than seeking the errors of one group or person, which is what Achebe accused Conrad of doing as he portrayed the natives as niggers and common savages. The evils of society set in motion for what Conrad sought to banish from human thought. All men have the capacity to be evil or good, yet the one ideal that determines this state of being is the realization of what good and evil truly are.

If every person accepted what one man said to be the truth, our world would be completely turned upside down. The individual must decide for him/herself. Both Chinua Achebe and C.P. Sarvan did just that. Each read something that he did not like and wrote about what he thought to be true. When Achebe found Conrad to be a racist, he directed his arguments towards proving his point. When Sarvan found Achebe to be misleading, he presented his case. If the novella was written in todays times, it could be considered a very racist piece of work. Readers decide for themselves about whose arguments are more convincing or more appealing to them. Every person is a critic with a different point of view on the issues of this novella.

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