Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

From Joseph Conrad to Zadie Smith

N. Allen, D. Simmons, N. Allen, D. Simmons

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137366016
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The collection brings together experts in the field of twentieth-century writing to provide a volume that is both comprehensive and innovative in its discussion of a set of newly canonical texts. The book includes new applications of philosophical and critical thinking to established texts.

1

Snags in the Fairway: Reading Heart of Darkness

David Bradshaw

Although there are many ‘infernal sly old snag[s]’¹ for the reader of Heart of Darkness to negotiate, like Marlow’s navigational challenge on the treacherous River Congo, there is always a way forward for the alert and probing reader. Even before Marlow’s tricky and tenebrous tale has begun, for example, the frame narrator provides us with a means of shedding light on it. The crew of the Nellie, he discloses, are ‘tolerant of each other’s yarns – and even convictions’ (3; italics added), so when he launches into his full-throated panegyric on the River Thames in the sixth paragraph of the novella, it may be supposed that his friend Charlie Marlow approves of what he says. As he warms to his account of the Thames as a launch pad of imperial ambition, the frame narrator’s sentiments become increasingly lofty, his language grows ever more purple and his chest ever more puffed out with national pride, yet it is crucial to bear in mind that the British pluck and plundering he celebrates are entirely of a piece with the single-minded ruthlessness that has driven Kurtz ever deeper into the interior of the Congo on behalf of his Belgian paymasters:

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth? . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires. (5)

On the basis of this passage alone the reader might wish to conclude that one of the most unshakeable ‘convictions’ shared by the crew of the Nellie is a belief in the British imperialist mission, whether prosecuted by ‘sword’ or ‘torch’, and his jingoistic cast of mind also explains why the frame narrator concludes the novella’s second paragraph by referring to London, proudly, as not only ‘the biggest’ but also ‘the greatest town on earth’ (3; italics added).

Moreover, the notion that the frame narrator’s ideological leanings might well illumine Marlow’s is given a considerable boost when Marlow himself begins to speak: he commences his tale of African exploitation by evoking the Roman invasion of Britain. Marlow draws a vivid picture of ‘civilised’ Romans encountering Celtic ‘savages’ in surroundings that would have seemed incomprehensibly alien to them and yet which sound remarkably like a cold-climate version of the Congo Free State, the vast personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium, which Conrad journeyed within between January and June 1890 and which disturbed him so profoundly: ‘Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness . . . cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile and death – death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush’ (6). In the late nineteenth century much was made of the British Empire being the Roman Empire redivivus, so the fact that Marlow begins his tale about the ‘Scramble for Africa’ by bringing to mind the Roman conquest of Britain is noteworthy in itself, but he goes on to make an important distinction between the Romans and the Victorian Britons. What saves ‘us’, the British, Marlow argues, is our ‘devotion to efficiency’. The Romans, he suggests, were more conquerors than colonists, out for what they could get, whereas British empire-building has a more grand and noble purpose. ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretence, but an idea . . . ’ (7). And what is this ‘idea’? Well, when Marlow sneers at the Eldorado Exploring Expedition because ‘[t]o tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe’ (30), we might be tempted to conclude that his use of ‘idea’ and ‘moral purpose’ are interchangeable. And if this is so, is Marlow’s desperate desire to rescue Kurtz from himself and his Belgian employers at least partly explained by Kurtz’s almost British sense of ‘moral purpose’ in Africa? ‘Each station’, Kurtz believes, ‘should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course but also for humanising, improving, instructing’, an elevated and almost ‘British’ vision of the colonial project that is dismissed as a ‘pestiferous absurdity’ (32) by the Manager of the Central Station, but which lies close to Marlow’s heart.

As he sits in the Company’s waiting-room before his interview (and note how Marlow’s progress from the outer room in which the two women sit knitting via the waiting-room to the inner ‘sanctuary’ of the ‘great man himself’ (10) anticipates his three-stage journey from coast to Kurtz) Marlow cannot fail to observe ‘a large shining map’ (10) of Africa on the wall. Predictably, he relishes ‘the vast amount of red’ on show – ‘good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there’ (10) – and is utterly contemptuous of the colonialist aspirations of other European nations. No country is mentioned by name at this point in the novella, but Conrad’s first audience would have been thoroughly familiar with the cartographical colour-coding Marlow describes, so that when he says in reference to the map ‘I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre. And the river was there . . . ’, readers would have known that his destination is the Congo Free State and that the city in which his interview is about to take place must be Brussels.

As a boy, we are told, Marlow had ‘a passion for maps’ (7), he would ‘lose [him]self in all the glories of exploration’ (8), and it is striking that even after witnessing the chaotic ineptitude, casual viciousness and sheer brutality of the Outer, Central and Inner Stations, his core belief in the ‘glories’ of the imperialist endeavour remains remarkably unshaken. Returning to the coast on his steamer and with Kurtz discoursing beside him, Marlow envisages the stretch of river they are floating down as ‘the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings’ (68; italics added). The eldorado of Africa and the genocide of Africans are all too easily elided in his mind and this quintessential colonialist mishmash (massacres and conquest; trade and blessings) sounds more like another sound bite from the gung-ho frame narrator or a titbit from the unhinged Kurtz’s report for the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs than the balanced reflection of a man who genuinely believes that British colonialists are motivated by a more righteous calling than were the Roman invaders of Britain.

Sailing down the west coast of Africa on his way to Kurtz, Marlow belittles the colonialist ventures of Britain’s continental competitors. He mocks the French and Germans with equal gusto, summing up their settlements in the Ivory Coast and Little Popo (at that time the capital of German Togo) as no more than ‘a sordid farce’ (13), before going on to describe a French man-of-war firing aimlessly ‘into a continent’: ‘Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech – and nothing happened’ (14). The utter inanity of this bombardment prefigures other acts of brainless ineffectuality in the novella, such as the ‘objectless blasting’ (15) at the Outer Station and the jittery pilgrims ‘squirting lead’ (45) into the jungle, both of which are presumably carried out by Belgians. Yet the main reason Conrad does not make their nationality explicit, I would argue, is not just because the coloured map has done that for him, but because Conrad, unlike Marlow, did not wish solely to denounce the horrors of the increasingly infamous Congo Free State (as he had done explicitly in ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1898)), but to critique the mess, mayhem and hypocrisy that lay at the dark heart of the African scramble tout court. The guiding irony of the novella is Marlow’s racist conviction that British colonisation is efficient, purposeful, principled and exemplary, whereas Britain’s continental rivals are no more than incompetent ninnies. Conrad, on the other hand, was aware that all European colonisation in Africa was being driven by a craving for commodities, territory and prestige, and that any degree of intervention by the European powers brought with it not just disruption but often devastation.

Nevertheless, while Conrad’s critique of imperialism takes in Europe as a whole, Heart of Darkness was one of the key texts that helped to expose the particular vileness of the Congo Free State, and alongside the yellow-coloured area of map with its great, snaking river, Conrad provides other details about the Company’s Belgian provenance that would have struck a chord with a contemporary reader but which are rather less resonant today. For example, one of the few colleagues Marlow warms to in Africa is the ‘lank bony yellow-faced’ (29) foreman of the Central Station. We are told that ‘the passion of his life was pigeon-flying. He was an enthusiast and a connoisseur. He would rave about pigeons’ (29). This hobby and the foreman’s obsessive interest in it could not have indicated his nationality more precisely: modern pigeon-racing had its origins in Belgium and by the late nineteenth-century the pastime was synonymous with that country. Similarly, when Marlow returns to ‘the sepulchral city’ (25, 70) of Brussels he makes uncomplimentary remarks about both its cuisine and its beer, two things for which the city was (and is) actually renowned.

Marlow’s scornful attitude towards continental Europeans, and above all Belgians, is almost as striking a feature of the text as his derogatory comments about black people and may be sourced to the same sorry showcase of late-Victorian bigotry. The ‘plumpness’ (10) of the Company’s chief executive, for example, sets an appropriately tubby model for his employees in Africa: they are perfectly moulded to serve a ‘flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’ (16; see also 21). Equally appropriately, the work-shy time-waster who accompanies Marlow on his overland trek to the Central Station is described as being ‘rather too fleshy and with the exasperating habit of fainting’. When he catches a fever he has to be carried in a hammock, which proves an ordeal for those who must lift him up as he weighs ‘sixteen stone’ (20), while the leader of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition ‘carrie[s] his fat paunch with ostentation on his short legs’ (31). Yet another ‘pilgrim’ is described as ‘a little fat man with sandy hair . . . who wore . . . pink pyjamas tucked into his socks’ (39–40), and in general Marlow’s Belgians are ‘unwholesome’ (41) and effeminate, with even the chief accountant, who is at least dedicated to his job, pilloried as a ‘scented’ (18) ‘hairdresser’s dummy’ (18). Interestingly, Marlow’s short, effete and podgy Belgians seem to have been drawn from the same stock prejudice that prompted Agatha Christie to make her dapper Hercule Poirot so attentive to his toilette, and they are but one of the many racial stereotypes that mill around within Marlow’s Anglocentric head: ‘jolly lager-beer’ (10) drinking Germans are also to be found in that constricted cranial space.

The Outer Station is a scene of ‘inhabited devastation’ (15), and from Marlow’s perspective, a proud citizen of the first country to develop a national railway network, nothing could be more indicative of Belgian lack of backbone than a railway track going nowhere and a railway truck lying abandoned ‘on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off’ (15). Similarly, Marlow tells us that the Manager of the Central Station ‘had no genius for organising, for initiative, or for order even’ and his Station is in a ‘deplorable state’ (22). Charlie Marlow, on the other hand, ever conscious of his nation’s work ethic, engrosses himself in his salvage of the steamer in an effort to keep his ‘hold on the redeeming facts of life’ (23). Indeed, according to Marlow, all the sound and substantial work in the novella is accomplished by men who are English or who have a degree of Englishness in their make-up. The large canoe shipment of ivory which arrives at the Central from the Inner Station, for instance, has been in the charge of ‘an English half-caste clerk’ (32). Dismissed as a mere ‘scoundrel’ by the Belgians, Marlow feels this young man has ‘conducted a difficult trip with great prudence and pluck’ (32). A similar ‘singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work’ (38) is evident in the pages of An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship written by a ‘Master in His Majesty’s Navy’, a volume that Marlow handles with ‘the greatest possible tenderness’ (37), while the devoted harlequin’s taste for ‘English tobacco’ (63) endears him in a brotherly way to the pipe-smoking Marlow, who is ever ready to contrast the spunk, focus and determination of the British with the chubby flaccidity of their Belgian counterparts and the cluelessness of other continental nations.² In this respect it is important to bear in mind that although Kurtz has been ‘educated partly in England’ (49) and ‘[h]is mother was half-English’ (49), he has become, in his fanatical craving for ivory and general moral abandonment, the degenerate embodiment of a continent: ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’ (49). And to his un-making, as the patchwork clothing of his faithful harlequin makes plain: ‘blue, red, and yellow – patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on the elbows . . . ’ (52). The harlequin’s particoloured attire is the shabby counterpart of the colour-patched map in Brussels that details the African possessions of the European powers.

However, Marlow’s conviction that the British do things properly while her continental competitors are incompetent, self-serving amateurs shows him to be sublimely unaware of or simply unmoved by the intense questioning of Britain’s national efficiency that had been gathering pace during the last quarter-century. As G. R. Searle and others have shown, ‘efficiency’ had become a charged word by the fin de siècle and it was imbued with even greater poignancy following the debacle of December 1899, when Boer guerrillas inflicted three defeats on units of the supposedly peerless British Army in the space of a week. In fact, it took the British three long years to defeat the Boers and Arnold White’s Efficiency and Empire (1901) was one of a number of anguished responses to what was widely perceived as nothing less than a national calamity. By the time Heart of Darkness re-appeared in book form in 1902, in other words, few within the governing class were prepared to believe, as Marlow believes whole-heartedly, that the British were paragons of ‘efficiency’.³

With Heart of Darkness open before him, Chinua Achebe accused Conrad of being a ‘thoroughgoing racist’,⁴ but while it is simply undeniable that the novella is riddled with offensive language and despicable slurs about black people, should it be Conrad who stands indicted of racial intolerance? It is Marlow, after all, who frequently uses the word ‘nigger’ (e.g., 9, 19, 23, 24, 26, 30, 45, 66) and repeatedly voices racial prejudices that were all too common at the time. Some Africans are said to have faces ‘like grotesque masks’ (14), while others have a ‘rascally grin’ (16) and ‘rolling eyes’ (35, 40): even the helmsman, dying in agony, is described as having a ‘menacing expression’ (46). Kurtz’s ‘witch-man’ is demonised as ‘fiend-like’ (65) by Marlow, the African jungle is felt to be coeval with ‘the earliest beginnings of the world’ (33), and the cannibals on his steamboat are said to belong to ‘the beginnings of time’ (40). Indeed, Marlow seems to regard Africa and its indigenous peoples not just as out of step with the march of nineteenth-century progress, but pariahs from the family of evolved mankind. He even goes so far as to compare his transit from the Central to the Inner Station as being like a journey ‘on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet’ (35). The jungle is said to draw Kurtz to its ‘pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts’ (65) and to shelter mere ‘rudimentary souls’ (50), ‘monstrous’ (36) and ‘inhuman’ (36) creatures more akin to ‘prehistoric man’ (35) than Homo sapiens. As the cries of the tribal witch-men, ‘words that resembled no sounds of human language’ (67), and the ‘deep murmurs’ of their fellow tribesmen create what Marlow can only describe as a ‘satanic litany’ (67), Kurtz’s ‘barbarous and superb’ (67) paramour is more than likely shot by the departing pilgrims (67). Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that this appalled (and appalling) contempt for black people is another ‘conviction’ shared by all five men on the Nellie. ‘Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara’ (50), Marlow says to his companions on the yawl, referring to the helmsman whose blood has filled his shoes and whose functionality he misses, if not the man himself.

So the obvious response to Achebe’s highly influential reading of the novella, and one that a number of critics have expressed in a number of ways, is that it is not Conrad who spouts the many slights and smears about Africans in the text, but Marlow. His inability to think of Africans as human beings from the same planet as himself is typical of a European colonialist mindset that led to genocidal massacres not just in the Congo Free State but elsewhere in the world, such as the piecemeal extermination of the Aboriginal inhabitants of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Nicola Allen and David Simmons
• 1 Snags in the Fairway: Reading Heart of Darkness
• 2 ‘Hasn’t got any name’: Aesthetics, African Americans and Policemen in The Great Gatsby
• 3 Urban Spaces, Fragmented Consciousness, and Indecipherable Meaning in Mrs Dalloway
• 4 D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the New Century: Literary Canon and Bodily Episteme
• 5 A Handful of Dust: Realism: Modernism/Irony: Sympathy
• 6 Studied Ambivalence: The Appalling Strangeness of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock
• 7 “Come Down from Your Thinkin’ and Listen a Minute”: The Multiple Voices of The Grapes of Wrath
• 8 Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses Revisited
• 9 Time, Space, and Resistance: Re-Reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
• 10 Lucky Jim: The Novel in Unchartered Times
• 11 Six Myths of On the Road, and Where These Might Lead Us
• 12 ‘Hundred-per-Cent American Con Man’: Character in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• 13 Herzog’s Masculine Dilemmas, and the Eclipse of the Transcendental “I.”
• 14 Beyond Postmodernism in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark
• 15 Gender Vertigo: Queer Gothic and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus
• 16 Whole Families Paranoid at Night: Don DeLillo’s White Noise
• 17 Hooked on Classics: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 25 Years On
• 18 Remembering and Disremembering Beloved: Lacunae and Hauntings
• 19 Embracing Uncertainty: Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album
• 20 Samad, Hancock, the Suburbs, and Englishness: Re-reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
• Select Bibliography
• Index