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'A Bloody Racist': About Achebe's View of Conrad Author(S): Cedric Watts Source: the Yearbook of English Studies, Vol Maney Publishing 'A Bloody Racist': About Achebe's View of Conrad Author(s): Cedric Watts Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 13, Colonial and Imperial Themes Special Number (1983), pp. 196-209 Published by: Maney Publishing on behalf of Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3508121 Accessed: 21/10/2009 10:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Yearbook of English Studies. http://www.jstor.org 'A Bloody Racist': About Achebe's View of Conrad CEDRIC WATTS Universityof Sussex In the lecture entitled 'An Image of Africa' (MassachusettsReview (Winter, I977), 782-94), the distinguished novelist Chinua Achebe declared: 'Con- rad was a bloody racist'. Heartof Darkness,he claimed, is 'an offensive and totally deplorable book' in which Conrad has adopted 'the role of purveyor of comforting myths'. The lecture was variously cool, mocking, sarcastic, and angry; and disconcerting enough. Like many other readers, I have long regarded HeartofDarkness as one of the greatest works of fiction, and have felt that part of its greatness lies in the power of its criticisms of racial prejudice. Particularly disconcerting, then, was this attack, coming from an important and influential black novelist whose work ThingsFall Apartcan be regarded as 'a Heartof Darknessfrom the other side'. In this essay I attempt to defend Conrad's tale from some of his strictures and discuss the criteria involved. Achebe is black and I am white; he argues that whites have long overpraised Heartof Darknessprecisely because it reflects their racial preju- dice, whereas he sees clearly: he resembles the boy who declares that the Emperor has no clothes. There seems to be an insinuation, as Achebe proceeds, that whites are disqualified on racial grounds from judging the text. However, I have taken heart from my acquaintance Lewis Nkosi, the black playwright and critic, who has worked on Conrad with me at Sussex. When I asked him whether he agreed with Achebe that Conrad was a racist, he smiled and promptly quoted one of Marlow's most telling observations: '"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than our- selves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."' (From the wall of my room, various pictured culture-heroes looked down on us: Shake- speare with a ring in his left ear, rufous D. H. Lawrence, Rochester holding the laurels over the head of his monkey, and Dizzy Gillespie with his uniquely erect trumpet-barrel.) Achebe's main claims are these. Conrad, in the 'offensive and totally deplorable' Heart of Darkness,has won the acclaim of white readers by pandering to their prejudices: Conrad dramatizes Africa as 'a place of negations ... in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest'. The blacks are dehumanized and degraded, seen as grotesques or as a howling mob. They are denied speech, or are granted CEDRIC WATTS I97 speech only to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Furthermore, Marlow (who is Conrad's mouthpiece) is guilty of liberalism, which entails a paternalist form of racialism. As the tale unfolds, the author displays 'a preposterous and perverse kind of arrogance in ... reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind'. However talented Conrad may be, his tale preaches racial intolerance; it is on the side of enslavement rather than deliverance; and it is therefore to be condemned. Achebe's paper was originally presented as a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, and one can imagine that he (like some of his fictional protagonists) relished the prospect of stirring things up, perhaps shocking his hosts and taking a cultural revenge. No doubt the paper had the value of arousing vigorous debate. But there remains a saddening perversity about it. One is reminded of Conrad's observation: 'Fraternity means nothing unless the Cain-Abel business.'1 The blacks have enough enemies; it is saddening to see Achebe attack one of their friends. In ThingsFall Apart Achebe showed himself capable of fine discriminations; it is a pity that that capacity appears to have been eroded by bitterness. Above all, the historical sense which was so keen in his novels appears to have been forgotten in this lecture. IfAchebe had but recalled that Heart of Darkness appeared in 1899, when Victoria was on the throne, when imperialistic fervour was extreme and the Boer War was soon to begin, he might have been more prepared to recognize various unconventional qualities of Conrad's tale. Achebe makes a few concessions, but these tend to be withdrawn as the attack gathers momentum, resulting in apparent self-contradiction. Thus, early in the argument, we are assured that Conrad 'is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain'; yet later we are told that 'Conrad's famed evocation of the African atmosphere ... amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy' (the repetition is not illustrated), while the story concerns merely that 'breakup of one petty European mind' (Achebe ignores Kurtz's representative signifi- cance). In fact Achebe pummels the text so heavily as to obliterate any distinction between Conrad and Kipling, or for that matter between Conrad and any third-ratejingoistic writer. However, his denunciations do have the ironic effect of drawing attention to the very strengths that he seems unable to perceive; and they suggest that a critic should not be deterred by its apparent obviousness from reiterating what is important in a work. Far from being a 'purveyor of comforting myths', Conrad most delib- erately and incisively debunks such myths. The myth of inevitable progress, for example; the myth that white civilization is necessarily morally superior to 'savagery'; the myth that imperialism is the altruistic matter of'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways': all these are mocked by the 1 JosephConrad's Letters to R. B. CunninghameGraham, edited by Cedric Watts (London, 969), p. 117. I98 Achebe'sView of Conrad tale. It is an organizational principle of Heart of Darkness that reassuring cliches are evoked and then subverted, just as salutary affirmations are sought, briefly established, and then undermined. The very opening of the tale makes this clear when the primary narrator offers resonant and apparently authoritative tribute to the Thames and her adventurers, but only for his words to be dramatically undercut by the entry of Marlow with his 'And this also ... has been one of the dark places of the earth' - which completes perhaps the most brilliant 'false start' in literature. The fourth paragraph's tacit reference to 'Youth' ('Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea') has helped to create the impression that the anonymous narrator speaks with authorial force, so when Marlow enters it is as though, in life, an author had been interrupted by a character whose experience and intelligence exceed the author's. Achebe asserts that the tale celebrates the 'dehumanization' of the blacks; yet it is precisely against such dehumanization that the tale amply protests. Of all the people described, by far the happiest, healthiest, and most vital are the group of blacks seen paddling their canoe through the surf of the coast: 'They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks - these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there.'2 It is a locus classicus ; a dramatized ontological argument; a point of reference against which we may judge the depredations of the white man, when we see by contrast the mortal lassitude of the natives in the grove of death, the hopeless weariness of the blacks in the chain gang, and the absurd hybrids who are the 'reclaimed'. Furthermore, against this instance of natural vitality we may measure the state of the 'hollow men', the European pilgrims; against such 'muscle and bone' we may measure the 'flabby devil' of colonialist rapacity. Indeed, Conrad's implications are remarkably close to the points made here by Achebe in 1966: Without subscribing to the view that Africa gained nothing at all in her long encounter with Europe, one could still say, in all fairness, that she suffered many terrible and lasting misfortunes.
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