HUGH MERCER CURTLER is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Southwest Minnesota State University and recently published his eleventh book, Provoking Thought, with Florida Academic Press. Dr. Curtler is frequent contributor to Modern Age.
One of the abominations of our day,
and there are many, is the beast of
political correctness that has been turned
loose on the world. Born of genuine
humanitarian impulses, it now threatens to
devour much of what is greatest in our literature
and forever separate the children of
our culture from what is essential to their
humanity.
Rather than fi ght the beast in its full
fury—for it has grown large and powerful
indeed—I shall snipe at it from the
bushes and hope to wound it seriously,
leaving the coup-de-grâce for another
time and, perhaps, another writer. Thus
I shall focus on Chinua Achebe’s libel
against Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of
Darkness, as set forth in an article entitled
“An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness,” which first appeared
in 1977.1 Though weak and inconclusive,
if not somewhat hysterical, Achebe’s
essay is widely anthologized and generally
embraced by the initiated as Holy Writ.
Hence it is important and a worthy place
to target the beast of political correctness
even after so many years have passed since
the essay first appeared.
I have examined Achebe’s charges in
detail elsewhere, so I will not repeat my
arguments here.2 I shall merely summarize
Achebe’s main point, show how he
has blundered, and, using this as a case in
point, move on to argue against the trend
to sift brilliant literature through the narrow,
constricting sieve of political correctness.
Achebe does not know how to read a
novel, to state the obvious. Of greater
import is the consideration that he has a
great deal of company in his determination
to bring to the novel ideological preconceptions
and a not-so-hidden political
agenda. In contrast, Eliseo Vivas and other
so-called “New Critics” have been displaced
by structuralist, deconstructionist,
feminist, black feminist, Marxist, Freudian,
and New Historicist critics, all of
whom seem, like Achebe, to have reached
predetermined conclusions before they sit
down to read a novel. The maxim of New
Criticism was to open one’s mind, to listen
carefully to what the novelist has to
say, and such a thing Achebe, among many
others, seems constitutionally unable to do;
like the tone-deaf listening to a symphony,
they cannot hear the notes that are being
played. Vivas revealed in his own writings
on the subject a respect for what the author
said that amounted to reverence: no one
held the novelist in higher esteem or listened
more closely to every subtle change
of key or pitch. Such an approach seems
imperative for a full appreciation of a great
work of art, and a great piece of literature
is, above all else, a work of art.
In order to grasp what Joseph Conrad
has to say, we must read the novella
carefully and be certain at the outset (as
Achebe is not) that we separate Conrad the
man from Conrad the novelist. Vivas has
shown in meticulous detail that this distinction
must be made because the “shadowy
forms” in the mind of the person who
decides to write a novel are altered by the
creative process and, as Conrad would
have it, “the apparitions change into living
flesh, the shimmering mists take shape.”3
The author and the person who decided
to write the novel in the first place (the
“poet” and the “man” as Vivas calls them,
respectively) are not to be confused with
one another: the “man” who writes the
novel may have a notion of what he wants
the novel to be, but the “poet” takes over
and the end product, in the case of works of
art, comes as a surprise. Having separated
the two, we must then be careful not to
confuse Conrad the novelist, in this case,
with his narrator, Charlie Marlow.
Achebe makes none of these distinctions,
and this is where he makes his first
mistake. He begins his attack against Conrad
(the man, not the novelist, and not
Marlow) by calling him a “bloody racist.”
He then goes on to say that
the question is whether a novel
which celebrates the dehumanization
of Africans, which depersonalizes
a portion of the human race,
can be called a great work of art. My
answer is: No, it cannot. . . . I am
talking about a book which parades
in the most vulgar fashion prejudices
and insults from which a section of
mankind has suffered untold agonies
and atrocities in the past and continues
to do so in many ways and many
places today. I am talking about a
story in which the very humanity of
black people is called into question.
It seems to me totally inconceivable
that great art or even good art could
possibly reside in such unwholesome
surroundings.4
We are to infer, I take it, that such a book
should be kept away from impressionable
young readers, presumably condemning it
to some sort of politically correct “dust bin
of progress, amongst all the sweepings and,
figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of
civilization,” as Conrad would have said.
And there’s the rub!
To begin with, it is impossible to say
whether Conrad is or is not a “racist,”
especially if we do not begin with the
distinctions of persons mentioned above.
Conrad’s novella certainly does not promote
racism or “celebrate” what Achebe
calls “the dehumanization” of black people.
It does not shout aloud in a crowded
room or call us to arms against a race of
our fellows, although Marlow (not Conrad)
certainly uses the term “nigger” with
reckless abandon. To be sure, the careless
use of this term has become ugly to
us of late, as well it should; but this was
not so in Conrad’s day, and it was even
used by Conrad in the title of one of his
more famous books, a book in which the
whites are drawn to, not repelled by, the
central character, who is black. However
that may be, the usage of such an offensive
term more than one hundred years
ago does not make the user, much less the
author who is merely trying to portray the
user, “racist.” The key here is that neither
Marlow nor Conrad the novelist is urging
his listeners or readers to share a hatred of
black people that Achebe would have us
think Conrad the man exhibits in his tale.
In fact, if one reads the novella with any
discernment whatever, one sees that the
black people tower over the whites, who
are characterized throughout as “mean and
greedy phantoms” who have “invaded”
Africa “with a flabby, pretending, weakeyed
devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”
In the text, the word “nigger” appears
un-self-consciously, as it would if used by
a merchant seaman at the turn of the last
century. It may indeed mark the speaker as
a racist, as judged by today’s standards, but
that hardly warrants the broader conclusion
that the speaker’s creator is also a racist,
much less the even broader conclusion
that the novella itself is “racist,” whatever
that might mean.
The narrator (who may or may not be
Marlow) also uses the term “savage” with
great regularity, another term that is no
longer permitted behind the forbidding
walls of political correctness—even though
the characterization of certain human and
not-so-human types, black and white,
requires it. Additionally, he uses the term
“progress” to describe what is going on
in Africa at the time in such a way that
the word takes on a pejorative meaning
as the tale nears its end in much the way
the phrase “honorable men” does as Mark
Antony nears the end of his funeral oration
for Julius Caesar. This is important because
it gives us an insight into the character’s
true feelings about what he witnessed. In
each case, readers must not simply note the
words the author uses, loaded though they
are with emotive meaning; they must also
pay close attention to the way the author
uses the words in the context of the work
itself. Anyone who attentively reads a
writer who chooses his words as carefully
as Joseph Conrad must be sensitive to
every subtle nuance of meaning, because
only then can we determine what he has
in fact said and not what we presume he has
said. And what Conrad has to say is certainly
of timely interest.
Heart of Darkness presents us with an
intriguing parallel. Just as Kurtz, who traveled
to Africa with lofty ideas, as reflected
in his report to the International Society
for the Suppression of Savage Customs
(seventeen pages of close writing), falls
prey to “sombre pride, ruthless power, [and
to] craven terror” and “presides at certain
midnight dances ending with unspoken
rites . . . offered up to him,” and in the end
goes mad; so also, the idea of civilizing a
continent, bringing Christianity and education
to the native people, degenerates
into a wild scramble for wealth and power
as men go mad with greed. The novella
presents this parallel in poetic terms for
our consideration; I would suggest a further
parallel, no less fascinating, and applicable
to the topic at hand.
Without question, we must respect the
sensibilities of the victims of persecution and
applaud the efforts of those who continue to
draw our attention to the many who suffer.
But a compelling moral idea, awakening
our conscience to the plight of the
disadvantaged, seems to have gone terribly
wrong, degenerating into the bleak reality
of censorship and hostile repression in an
atmosphere choked with righteous indignation
and a grotesque sense of moral superiority.
In each instance, Conrad would have
us locate the root of this decay in our lack
of restraint—in the case of the self-destructive
Kurtz, Western Europe’s attempts to
colonize Africa, and, we might suppose,
the efforts of the well-meaning adherents of
political correctness to raise awareness.
Clearly, in Joseph Conrad, we are dealing
with a profound thinker who, as an art
ist, chooses to convey his thoughts to our
imagination in a manner that both delights
and disturbs. We must, therefore, be careful
when we suggest that such a writer
be disallowed the use of terms that most
closely express ideas and images central to
the tale he is telling. It is no exaggeration
to suggest that the legitimate concerns of
the purveyors of political correctness have
run amok and threaten to replace the open
and free discussion of ideas in the pursuit
of truth with constricted dialogue and suffocating
censorship. Imagine, if you can,
a world ruled by the bullyboys of political
correctness, a world that is denuded of any
word that might possibly aggrieve, a world
in which a passage such as the following,
from one of Conrad’s early novels, is disallowed
because it might offend the blind—a
supposition which is not as far-fetched as it
seems at first glance:
The islands are very quiet. One sees
them lying about, clothed in their
dark garments of leaves, in a great
hush of silver and azure, where the
sea without murmurs meets the sky
in a ring of magic stillness. A sort
of smiling somnolence broods over
them; the very voices of their people
are soft and subdued, as if afraid to
break some protecting spell.
Powerful and affective though this description
may be, Achebe would have us scrutinize
it carefully, looking for concealed
offenses. Any number of times in his calumny,
Achebe criticizes Conrad’s descriptions
when they, he frets, “pretend to
record scenes, incidents, and their impact
[while] in reality [Conrad] is engaged in
inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers
through a bombardment of emotive words
and other forms of trickery.”5
While keeping one eye open for the
possibility of a slippery slope in my argument,
I must nonetheless wonder where
the line is to be drawn in telling a great
writer what he may or may not say. How
is one to know if and when what he writes
might offend someone? We must resist vehemently
the temptation to dictate to a stylist
of Conrad’s caliber what tools he may or
may not employ in his craft. That way lies
a smothering silence and the abandonment
of poetic inspiration altogether. And, in
the end, we all pay the price. An artist of
Conrad’s stature knows much better than
we which words will work and which will
not. Words such as “nigger” and “savage,”
together with unsettling descriptions of
primitive customs and disturbing accounts
of the “land from which the very memory
of motion had forever parted,” are essential
to the subtle nuances of this extraordinary
tale, even if they upset a careless reader.
Taken in context, they must be allowed.
Alongside captivating descriptions such
as these, buried meanings and unsuspected
ironies abound in great literature which is,
at its core, rife with ambiguities, open to
any number of plausible interpretations.
These ambiguities stamp the novel as a
poem, a work of art. Indeed, as suggested
above, in Conrad’s novella the tensions
between “the idea” behind the colonization
of Africa, the “civilizing” of primitive
peoples, and the reality that Marlow
sees with his own eyes (and which Conrad
himself saw and was repulsed by) are central
to the fundamental tensions and uncertainties
that lie at the heart of the story.
Great literature does not preach—
though Achebe would have Conrad deliver
sermons that have been given his blessing.
Great literature is not necessarily nice; it
provokes thought and destroys preconceptions.
It stirs the mud of our prejudices and
forces us to reconsider and reflect, and it
does so in a language that stings and delights
and exhibits for us the human imagination
at full stretch. Certainly Joseph Conrad’s
novels do this as they rise to a level of art
approaching music on nearly every page.
At the same time, they force us to see ourselves
as we really are, stripped of our pretense
and self-importance. Marlow may
well have been a racist. So are most of us.
It is an ugly fact, but it is a fact nonetheless.
And Conrad forces us to see that we, too,
have a heart of darkness.
Literature is not philosophy; it does not
speak discursively in tightly wound arguments
and cogent syllogisms. But there is
profound truth in great literature, and we
will lose sight of that truth if we insist that
it be measured in the graduated cylinders
of a philosophical essay—or a sermon about
man’s inhumanity to man. Truth in literature
comes in the form of insight and the
sudden intuitions that take us deeper into
the human soul and present us with a world
previously unseen. And there is considerable
truth in Heart of Darkness—beginning
with the uncertainty about whether the
“savages” are black or white. It is truly sad
that Achebe cannot see this.
Politically correct critics such as Achebe
would have us screen all literature to weed
out offensive material. They would have us
scrutinize Dostoevsky, Trollope, and Dickens
for anti-Semitic sentiments, despise
Homer and Shakespeare because they are
sexist, or Conrad because he is “racist.”
This sort of censorship reveals a fascist
mentality that is inadmissible in today’s
intellectual elite, and it would almost certainly,
if carried out, result in the death of
great literature, which may be flawed by
the presence of these elements, but which
is great despite its flaws.
To see this more clearly, let us consider
the possibility that Marlow—not Conrad—
is not only, perhaps, a racist but also
a sexist. What if this were true? What difference
would it make to readers of the
novel who take it seriously, and who read
it with the respect it deserves? If the novel
depicts a character who happens to be racist
or sexist, but if it nonetheless maintains
high standards of literary excellence, then
as long as that novel is not promoting bias
in some cunning way, I do not see how the
novel itself can be pilloried as Achebe pillories
Heart of Darkness. In fact, since great
literature is fundamentally ambiguous at its
core, it has no one message; it has many. As
Conrad himself has said, as a work of art, the
novel “is very seldom limited to one exclusive
meaning and not necessarily tending
to a definite conclusion. And this for the
reason that the nearer it approaches art, the
more it acquires a symbolic character . . . .
All the greatest creations of literature have
been symbolic, and in that way have gained
in complexity, in power, in depth, and in
beauty.”6 Whether or not we take Conrad’s
word for it, a case cannot be made against
Conrad’s novella as anything less than great
on the grounds that it exhibits “racist” elements.
Let us consider the presumed charge
of sexist elements in the work.
Early in the novel, Marlow is telling his
listeners aboard the Nellie about his aunt in
Belgium. He muses about her and about
women in general, saying,
They live in a world of their own, and
there has never been anything like it,
and never can be. It is too beautiful
altogether, and if they were to set it
up it would go to pieces before the
first sunset. Some confounded fact
we men have been living confidently
with ever since the day of creation
would start up and knock the whole
thing over.
Now this comment certainly appears to be
stereotypical, and the feminists among us
are sure to object—some louder than others.
However, generalizations must not
always be mistaken for stereotypes, though
they may indeed suggest a stereotype. A ste
reotype is a careless or offhand remark that
is deemed offensive or demeaning to the
person or persons described; it is a generalization
that seems to allow of no exceptions
in the mind of the person putting
it forward. In literature, such stereotypes
may interfere with the reader’s ability to
engage the story aesthetically—as determined
from the nature of the remark itself,
within the context of the novel, and not
because of the extreme sensitivity of the
reader. The Marlowe of Conrad’s novel
Chance seems, in this regard, to be making
offensive, sexist remarks about women
throughout the work. The narrator’s comments
are numerous, seeming to suggest
a fixed mindset on the part of Marlowe;
many of them would understandably be
regarded as offensive by most women, and
they suggest generalizations that allow of
no exceptions in the mind of the speaker.
We might, then, conclude that Marlowe, in
that novel, is sexist and his prejudice flaws
the novel as a work of art. However, this
point could be contested, even in the case
of Chance, as Marlowe’s remarks may simply
be telling the reader something important
from the perspective of the novelist about
the main character. The point is moot, and
in any case the argument for Marlowe’s
supposed sexism cannot be made in the
case of Heart of Darkness.
Consider: Marlow is saying that women,
in his experience, are idealistic, and he suggests
that such is a good thing. He returns
to the notion later in the novella when he
tells the group that “we must help them to
stay in that beautiful world of their own,
lest ours gets worse.” Given that Marlow
has learned fi rsthand how awful the world
of men can be, and given that this is the late
Victorian period when women raised the
children and, together with the Church,
instilled in them whatever moral precepts
might later mold their character, this seems
to be a fairly innocuous comment, and not
without historical interest—if not altogether
central to the novel.
But, as it happens, the notion Marlow
is developing is central to the novel,
which ends with Marlow’s visiting Kurtz’s
intended to return some letters that Kurtz
had left in his keeping before he died. The
intended is described as “beautiful,” but
also characterized as delusional, lost in an
idealized world filled with images of the
Kurtz she thought she knew that stand in
stark contrast to the Kurtz that Marlow
has come to know close-up. The woman
is somehow pathetic, and Marlow could
be charged with patronizing her in lying
about Kurtz, pretending that in the end he
called out her name. But it is important to
Marlow that she be allowed to hold on to
that world, because, we recall, the “idea” of
bringing civilization to the natives in Africa
is the only thing that lends any coherence
whatever to Marlow’ s tottering world; and
one suspects that Marlow has come to see
that this idea, too, is delusional. The world
of ideas and moral precepts, represented by
the intended, must somehow be protected
against the erosion of a brutal and violent
reality. Not only is this idea symbolized in
the intended, but Marlow provides another,
powerful image in the magnificent black
woman who stands proud and majestic on
the bank of the river as the men around her
flee from the piercing sounds of the river
boat’s horn. Achebe completely misses the
significance of this scene, as he criticizes
Conrad for making the black woman a
mere “savage counterpart” to the beautiful
white woman at the end of the novella. She
is anything but a mere device; she is powerful
and grand, and, like the only other
woman in the tale, she represents stability
in a world of chaos. And she is black. That
would appear to be an important point in a
novel that has been dismissed as “racist.”
Thus, even if we agree that there are
racist or sexist elements in the work, it
would nonetheless stand as a powerful
expression of the poetic imagination. As
great literature it does not promote any
particular “point of view,” Achebe’s claims
to the contrary notwithstanding. It places
before us a wild and conflicting array of
viewpoints that amaze and confound. That
is the strength of great literature—novels,
as Conrad would have it “which the Muses
should love”—and the reason that novels
such as Heart of Darkness should be saved
from the fires of derision set by the custodians
of our sensibilities.
In the end, the best defense against
the censorious attempts of thinkers like
Achebe is to let the authors speak for themselves.
Teach the young to read and pay
close attention to what great novelists have
to say. Achebe claims that Conrad “had a
problem with niggers” in his own account
of his first encounter with black people.
This is a personal attack against Conrad
the man, as in his essay Achebe draws on
a number of biographical anecdotes to
prove his point—playing the role of amateur
psychiatrist in the process. But, as was
said above, Conrad the man must not be
confused with Conrad the novelist. The
novelist’s imagination reworks the material
digested by the man and, in obedience
to the rules of his craft and sensitive to the
demands of poetic honesty, writes a novel
that was only dimly projected by the man at
the outset. Thus, contra Achebe, Conrad the
novelist, speaking through Marlow, describes
his first encounter with native people in
rather glowing terms:
Now and then a boat from the shore
gave one a momentary contact with
reality. It was paddled by black fellows.
You could see them from afar
the white of their eyeballs glistening.
They shouted, sang; their bodies
steamed with perspiration; they
had faces like grotesque masks—these
chaps; but they had bone, muscle,
and wild vitality, an intense energy
of movement, that was natural and
true as the surf along the coast. They
wanted no excuse for being there.
They were a great comfort to look at.
To be sure, there are defamatory elements
in this description—such as the allusion
to the “glistening eyeballs” and the “grotesque
masks”—but, bearing in mind that
Conrad is a stickler for details, the passage
exults in these energetic people and fosters
positive emotions in the reader. The
“black fellows” are not terrifying; they are
“a great comfort to look at.”
So also with many of the descriptions
Marlow provides in his encounter with
native people—such as the extraordinary
black mistress of Kurtz—and most especially,
as Marlow notes with approval, the
cannibals, who show remarkable restraint in
the face of extreme hunger, restraint being
precisely the virtue lacking in Kurtz and
Western Europe. If one reads what Conrad
writes in this novella, then, it is impossible
to defend the claim that the writer himself
is racist. It is not even clear that Marlow is,
though I have conceded that point because
it does not make Achebe’s case. It is certainly
not possible to maintain the claim
that this is a “racist” novel, although, again,
one never quite knows what that might
mean. Thus, despite its flaws, Heart of Darkness
should still be read because it is beautifully
written and because we have so much
to learn from it.
Some years ago I visited the office of
a colleague of mine who taught undergraduate
courses in psychology. On her
bulletin board a portrait of Sigmund Freud
was prominently displayed with a red
circle and a line through it. I asked her,
somewhat facetiously, what it meant and
she explained to me, indignantly, that she
detested Freud (the man?) and refused to
assign Freud’s writings to her students
because they were demeaning to women.
Imagine! Throwing out the entire body of
works of one of the greatest minds of the
last century because he said some things
that are upsetting to women—with no
regard as to whether or not some of what he
had to say might be true and enlightening.
Here we have, on a grand scale, the commission
of the fallacy of composition in a
way that penalizes the students who major
in that field of study, a field that might not
even exist if it had not been for Sigmund
Freud! This anecdote illustrates the danger
of politically correct censorship. Writers
and thinkers who do not “toe the line”
are to be ignored and cast out. The criteria
of acceptance are not to be aesthetic
(it is denied that there are such), nor are
they even to be considerations of historical
importance; the criteria of acceptance are
to be political and ideological. The claim is
made that these criteria have always been
employed, and the time has come to get
them right. But that is a moot point, and,
if I am correct in my view of the nature of
great literature, at any rate—that it does
not promote any particular point of view
but remains suspended among diverse and
often conflicting points of view—then,
surely, postmodern theorists who insist
upon “diversity” should promote and not
reject works such as Heart of Darkness.
Despite our technological prowess—and
it is phenomenal—we have precious little
wisdom. The evidence suggests, further,
that we live in an intellectually regressive
age in which students in our colleges and
universities try in vain to express themselves
with hand gestures, repetitious sentence
fragments, and shrunken vocabularies;
they struggle with perfectly ordinary texts,
unable to decipher what the words they
read can possibly mean; upon graduating
from college, an alarming number of them
cannot calculate the tip in a restaurant or
understand an editorial in their local newspaper.
Since the inception of free schools
in the middle of the nineteenth century,
literacy in this country has declined alarmingly.
7 If the commissars of culture, who
now seem to be in control, saddle these
young people with the even heavier burden
of lists of forbidden words and toss on the
dung heap piles of literature that would certainly
improve their minds, given the skill
and the effort to read them carefully, we
can look forward with certainty to future
generations of mindless barbarians who
will stare at their computers stupidly, waiting
for the next command. These are not
pleasant thoughts, but unpleasant thoughts
must be entertained and somehow worked
through if we are to reverse the present
trend. And how better to do that than to
have our young people read the greatest literature
humankind has produced—even if
it should display elements deemed offensive
to some among us?
NOTES
- See “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness,” in Chants of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-
American Literature, Art and Scholarship, ed. Michael S.
Harper & Robert B. Stepto (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1979), 313–25. - See Hugh Mercer Curtler,
“Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of
Darkness,” Conradiana 29, No. 1 (1997), 30–40. - A letter
of Conrad to his aunt, April 1894, in The Portable Conrad,
ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York: Penguin Books,
1976), 730. See also Eliseo Vivas, “Dostoevsky, ‘Poet’ in
Spite of Himself,” The Southern Review 10 (1974), 307–28. - “An Image of Africa,” 319, 321.
- Ibid., 311.
- Conrad
to Barrett H. Clark, May 4, 1918, in The Portable Conrad,
749. - See Richard Sheldon, Separating School and State
(Fairfax, VA: Future of Freedom Foundation, 1994), 38.
For compelling evidence that intelligence literacy is falling
off generally in the United States, see Jane M. Healy,
Endangered Minds (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
