Dark Heart or Trickster

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness has been praised by many scholars as work that exposes European imperialism in Africa. However, in 1978, Chinua Achebe, the famous Nigerian novelist, angrily denounced Conrad's story as racist work in an essay that has since been republished in several journals and collections of studies. Many scholars from the Third World have followed in Achebe's footsteps, although Wilson Harris, the famous Guyanese novelist, disagreed with Achebe's interpretation, saying that Conrad stood on threshold that he (Conrad) could not cross himself. I put it differently from Harris. In my paper, I say that Conrad, who was Polish, could not have directly exposed in England at the height of the British Empire the ugly face of British imperialism so he used many indirect or cunning literary methods to tell the story. For example, Achebe is right that Marlow uses racist words, but I show that he does this because these words would be accepted by the English people on the boat, who used the same kind of language and who would therefore accept the story as coming from one of them-and then Marlow turns the meaning of the words inside out. Thus white becomes the color of death in Marlow's story instead of black. Marlow says the city of Brussels is a whited sepulchre. How was it city of death? Because it was built up out of the profits of ivory, which Kurtz (hired by corporation based in Brussels) is responsible for grabbing from the Congo. Although Marlow talks specifically of Belgian and Roman imperialism, which English people would accept because they were not the ones identified as doing those horrible things, his generalizations apply to British imperialism too, and this is something the unnamed narrator of the story understands when he frames and narrates the story told by Marlow. The methods Conrad uses become noticeable when we look at how famous African novelists such as Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong'o in A Grain of Wheat and especially Sudanese Tayeb Salih in Season of Migration to the North remix, rewrite and extend Conrad's fiction and characters-as Conrad did with the fiction of other writers-in order to tell their story of European exploitation of Africa and of its consequences in the post-imperialist, that is, neocolonial period. It takes an enlightened literary critic to recognize that the African writers are drawing attention to what we might overlook in Conrad's fiction. Once upon time, I used to write literary criticism in traditional English way. For example, I referred to many English scholars of Conrad in my chapter on Nostromo published in 1972. However, I now believe that these scholars did not sufficiently recognize and deal with what Conrad meant to Africans and to the Third World because the perception of European scholars may have affected the form of scholarly literary criticism. So I changed my form of criticism to go outside the boundaries of European scholarship. For example, I now use many voices, juxtaposing many types of texts. Thus I make reference to other forms of the media; in this paper, I quote Keith Morrison from his story about my class Elvis as Anthology aired on NBC's television program, The Today Show, in 1992. Morrison, who is Canadian passing for American (as Conrad was Polish passing for English) used some of the strategies Conrad used in Heart of Darkness to tell the story of current imperialism to the audience in the center. Another method I use is to ask series of questions for the reader to think about and answer, thereby drawing attention to things in Conrad's work that European scholars overlook. For example, one of my questions suggests that Conrad is making reference to Dhanballah, the snake god in Voodoo (Voudun), the creator of the waters and the founder of language. The paper implies that Dhanballah drew Marlow to Africa so he could return to Europe and tell the story of what was being done to Africa. Therefore Achebe was wrong when he accused Conrad of being racist against Africans when in fact Heart of Darkness was knowledgeable about, and referred to, an African god at the heart of the story. The unnamed narrator of the story describes Marlow, who has experience of the East, as sitting like Buddha-that is, Marlow is the enlightened one, bringing light from the non-West to the West. Western scholars and teachers today do not seem to know how to deal with Achebe's criticism because they do not want to attack such famous African writer and risk accusations of being racists-so they say apologetically that Conrad's racism belongs to the nineteenth century. My interpretation demonstrates that Achebe is wrong: Heart of Darkness is not racist text but Trickster text, text that is not linear but spiral like snake, using strategy to bring light to the heart of darkness, the heart of imperialism.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.