Page 16 (1/2)
University of Massachusetts
Amherst
IN THE FALL of 1974 I alking one day frolish Depart lot It was a fine autuers Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously fresh the sa they careed Then he asked me if I was a student too I said no, I was a teacher What did I teach? African literature Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a felloho taught the sa, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain coe not far from here It always surprised hiht of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know By this ti much faster “Oh well,” I heard hiuess I have to take your course to find out”
A feeeks later I received two very touching letters froh school children in Yonkers, New York, who—bless their teacher—had just read Things Fall Apart One of them was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe
I propose to draw from these rather trivial encounters rather heavy conclusions which at first sight ht seem somewhat out of proportion to theht
The young fellow froe, but I believe also for much deeper and more serious reasons, is obviously unaware that the life of his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of odd customs and superstitions and, like everybody else in his culture, iines that he needs a trip to Africa to encounter those things
The other person being fully rounds of his years Ignorance ain I believe that so more wilful than a mere lack of information was at work For did not that erudite British historian and Regius Professor at Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper, also pronounce that African history did not exist?
If there is so in these utterances more than youthful inexperience, e, what is it? Quite siht indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once reuely familiar, in corace will be manifest
This need is not nehich should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhapsto look at this phenomenon dispassionately I have neither the wish nor the competence to eical sciences but do soto one famous book of European fiction: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which better than any other work that I know displays that Western desire and need which I have just referred to Of course there are whole libraries of books devoted to the same purpose but most of them are so obvious and so crude that few people worry about them today Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of ain His contribution therefore falls automatically into a different class—perht and constantly evaluated by serious academics Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar has nureatest short novels in the English language”1 I will return to this critical opinion in due course because it may seriously uilty in some of the matters I will now raise
Heart of Darkness projects the ie of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where ence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality The book opens on the River Tha peacefully “at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks”2 But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thao is quite decidedly not a River Ee pension We are told that “going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginning of the world”
Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry For the Thames too “has been one of the dark places of the earth” It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace But if it were to visit its prio, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victi recrudescence of the s
These suggestive echoes comprise Conrad’s famed evocation of the African atmosphere in Heart of Darkness In the final consideration, his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy We can inspect sae 105 of the New American Library edition: (a) “It was the stillness of an i over an inscrutable intention” and (b) “The steae of a black and incoe of adjective from time to tiht have “unspeakable,” even plain “mysterious,” etc, etc
The eagle-eyed English critic F R Leavis3 drew attention long ago to Conrad’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible htly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of artistic good faith When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents, and their i hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery, much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity Generally, normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such underhand activity But Conrad chose his subject well—one which was guaranteed not to put hiical predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance He chose the role of purveyor of co myths
The es in Heart of Darkness are, however, about people I ence of e from about the middle of the story when representatives of Europe in a steao encounter the denizens of Africa:
We anderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet We could have fancied ourselves the first ofpossession 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 glirass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black li, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and e of the black and inco us, praying to us, welco us—who could tell? We were cut off frolided past like phanto and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse We could not understand because ere too far and could not rees, 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 conqueredmonstrous and free It was unear
thly, 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 ht of their huht of your rely Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were h 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 di in it which you—you so rees—could comprehend4
Herein lies theof Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western ht of their huly”
Having shown us Africa in the e later, on a specific exa us one of his rare descriptions of an African who is not just li eyes: