Heart of Darkness in War Nerd Reading List

Aug 30, 2017 Rich Uncle Pennybags rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Chinua Achebe has a great polemical essay on this that's worth checking out after you read it. He has, I would say, three main points, all of which are worthy of consideration:

1. This book's treatment of Africa and Africans is dehumanizing and racist; the black characters hardly have any humanity and mostly serve as symbols of savagery or backdrop for a psychological drama of European characters.

Frankly, my initial thought was that this one was so obvious it hardly needed mentioning. Except...

2. Chinua Achebe has a great polemical essay on this that's worth checking out after you read it. He has, I would say, three main points, all of which are worthy of consideration:

1. This book's treatment of Africa and Africans is dehumanizing and racist; the black characters hardly have any humanity and mostly serve as symbols of savagery or backdrop for a psychological drama of European characters.

Frankly, my initial thought was that this one was so obvious it hardly needed mentioning. Except...

2. Conrad scholars and other admirers of the book display an incredible, almost willful blindness to the first point.

Achebe has lots of examples, and the more I think about this, the truer it is. At the time of writing, the Wikipedia description of the book rather implausibly reads: "This setting provides the frame for Marlow's story of his obsession with the ivory trader Kurtz, which enables Conrad to create a parallel between London and Africa as places of darkness. Central to Conrad's work is the idea that there is little difference between so-called civilised people and those described as savages; Heart of Darkness raises questions about imperialism and racism." This is not technically *inaccurate*, but it leaves you with quite a misleading impression -- perhaps you are left imaging a morality tale involving rapacious Europeans and dignified Africans being subjugated by them. In fact, the picture Conrad wants to draw is the "savage" African landscape essentially turning Kurtz into an African. He thinks there is distressingly little stopping Europeans from *descending* to the level of African savages, and not that all races are essentially equal.

Personally, I blame this in large part to our feeling these days that, if we liked something, we must ascribe unrelated virtues to it. So action movies all have to have deeper themes below the surface, if we enjoy wrestling it has to subvert exploitation somehow, and if we like a book set in Africa we have to credit the author with racial views more enlightened than he ever actually held (obviously this works better with an author who's dead). Many people are not comfortable saying "yes, the book is racist, but, nevertheless, I liked it."

3. A book this racist can't be considered great literature.

This is where I disagree with Achebe. In spite of its liberal use of racist caricature, this is a truly brilliant, foreboding psychological thriller that gives you lots to think about (there's a reason it inspired Apocalypse Now).

It always gets a little murky trying to judge the value of artwork with outright racist or sexist themes, but disregarding every book with these flaws would eliminate too much literature from consideration for my liking, especially books written before the 20th Century.

Anyway, it's short, so you're free to draw your own conclusions. ...more

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