After reading both Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa" I can't help but to bring up last weeks discussion on racism. Before class a I 100% positive that the book was not racist because of the time period. I thought it was okay that Marlow was calling African Americans "mysterious nigger," (pg. 33) and such because that's what was excepted in those times. But than Prof. Lee made a very good argument. She said, and I am not quoting I am trying to remember, something along the lines of just because the word racist isn't around does that mean that your not being racist. After she sad that I looked at the book in an entirely new light. I now saw that the main character Marlow was racist and there was no excuse for the fact of the year the book was set in he was still making racist comments. There is no excuses left the character in the book is racist, but Achebe is arguing that Conrad himself is a racist. Now this is where I get highly upset, how could you prosecute a man for his writings. The character Marlow was a racist, but Conrad is not Marlow. While Conrad did write Marlow to be a racist character, this does not mean that he himself is racist. I believe that Achebe was treating Conrad and Marlow as one person, and speaking as though Marlow was real. He was forgetting the mere fact that Marlow is a character in a book. This book is not an autobiography it is not about real people per say. So Achebe really needs to make the distinction between the two. You can see Achebe starts to intertwine both the man and the character on page 8, "Certainly Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his storey. He has, for example, a narrator behind the narrator. the primary character is Marlow, but his account is given to us through a filter of a second, shadowy person." You can see that Achebe is fighting for an argument, he is saying that Conrad is the narrator behind the narrator? How does he know that it's Conrad's voice being heard. Achebe is a great writer, but just because his beliefs are shown through his writings doesn't mean that every writers does. Achebe is crucifying Conrad's book, and doesn't want it taught in schools, but does he realize that this is the third time I've looked and this book and it's also the third time I've read Achebe's argument. Achebe's argument is the argument heard around the world, and while I could write all night about why I believe he's wrong I'm going to stop before the battery on my computer dies.
It's very dangerous to start believing that everything that a writer writes about is what they believe, some do only write about what they believe, some just write to try and pay the bills, and other write because they love it. If we all start saying that everything a person writes about is what they believe, people will have to start to filter what they write and what the publish, because they may not necessarily want their writings and beliefs to behind intertwined.
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I am going to try to add to this argument because I really liked a lot of the points you made and, as I'm sure you agree, much more can be said to refute Achebe's characterization of Conrad as a racist.
ReplyDeleteOne point in particular I want to mention is Achebe’s idea that Conrad is fixated with blackness, and his use the following quote to strengthen his argument, “A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms.” Achebe comments on this quote, “…as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to wave white arms! But so unrelenting is Conrad’s obsession [with blackness].”
I strongly disagree that this quote from the Heart of Darkness represents Conrad’s obsession with blackness. In fact, I think it highlights one of the strongest aspects of the book: the contrast between black and white, light and dark, as Professor Lee details. While it may seem that Conrad overdoes it in his description of the black figure, I think his threefold use of the word black just adds to this contrast. In fact, earlier in the same paragraph, he describes Kurtz as rising, “unsteady, long, pale, indistinct, like a vapor exhaled by the earth…” These words draw attention to Kurtz’s whiteness and lightness—I hope this doesn’t make me sound racist but physically, it would be hard to describe a black man as indistinct, like vapor, or the way I’m reading it—see through. Kurtz is essentially being described as see-through, and reading that not 4 lines before the sentence about the black man really emphasizes the physical differences between them—the see-through, pale, white man vs. the black, black, black man. Therefore, I don’t think that Conrad is being racist or ‘obsessed with blackness’ in his description of the black figure, or throughout the novel. Any emphasis he makes on a black man or black place just adds to the feeling of difference between the white and black aspects of the novel and that’s not racist—that was the reality of the time!! Maybe Marlowe’s perceptions are racist, and that’s a fair argument to make. I agree with you that Conrad wrote Marlowe to be a racist character, though I think he becomes more accepting as the novel goes on but that’s a conversation for another time. But I don’t think Conrad’s depiction of racism makes him racist. I think his ability to thoroughly depict the situation that was a reality of the time, racist descriptions and all, make him a great writer.