Over the course of the last two decades the name of Joseph Conrad has incongruously become, at least within the academy, synonymous with racism, imperialism, and the patriarchy. Conrad’s political star began to wane when Chinua Achebe, in a now famous essay of 1975, called Conrad “a thoroughgoing racist,” claimed that Heart of Darkness “celebrates” the dehumanization of African people, and attacked Conrad as a “purveyor of comforting myths”--comforting, that is, to Europeans. This theme has been picked up by other eminent intellectual opinion-makers: in his recent book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said (though an admirer of the writer) regretted Conrad’s inability to “grant the natives their freedom” or even to imagine that “Africa or South America could ever have had an independent history or culture.” Feminist scholar Nina Pelikan Straus has charged Conrad with “complicity in the racist, sexist, imperialist … world he has inhabited with Kurtz.”

And so it goes. As a result Conrad, or at any rate Heart of Darkness, his best known novel and the one which has traditionally been taught in literature survey courses, has by now become a hot potato few professors enjoy tossing about with students primed to interpret every text in light of the contemporary political issues of race, class, and gender. In Great Books,[1] his account of the Lit-Hum course at Columbia University, David Denby describes the class spent on Heart of Darkness as the most explosive unit of the entire year, bringing previously hidden hatred and rage dangerously close to the surface. In today’s heavily politicized academic environment, the single important issue about Heart of Darkness has become the question of whether the novel is, or is not, racist. The very use of the word “racist” in association with Conrad is an anachronism and should indicate how radically our Zeitgeist has changed since Conrad’s day, and how inappropriate, even irrelevant, our own ideological terms turn out to be when applied to writers of a century ago.

The fact is that if one uses the word in the way that it is understood by Achebe and the many academic critics who have followed him, not only Conrad but every one of his contemporaries was a racist: systemic racism was an integral part of the world view of 1899 (when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness). Though the Congress Party had been established in India some fifteen years earlier, Indian self-rule was, in Europe, a concept that had yet to be accorded significant respect. The Europeans who felt sympathy toward Africans expressed that sympathy not through political solidarity but by donating to missionary groups that would Christianize and “civilize” the continent, whose population was still overwhelmingly illiterate. The Boer War in South Africa, a conflict contemporaneous with the writing of Heart of Darkness, was a fight for Dutch, not for African, autonomy. So—Conrad was a racist, as indeed who was not?

Still, it seems unfair to pick specifically on Conrad, surely one of the less politically baneful of the great modern writers. Eliot was an occasionally vicious anti-Semite, a fact of which his readers must always have been aware and of which the general public has lately been reminded by Anthony Julius’s book T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. Pound was a vociferous booster of European fascism; Lawrence laid out a plan for a proto-Nazi society that anticipated Hitler’s by more than a decade. Waugh declared himself a supporter of Franco and Mussolini. Even Woolf, exhibit A in the current feminist canon, was guilty of a really appalling social snobbery, and Forster, for all his impeccable liberal credentials, cravenly resisted coming out of the closet, or openly speaking out for homosexual causes.

Compared with many of his illiberal peers, then, Conrad seems to have gotten a bum rap. It is, at any rate, peculiar that Conrad—who as a native of partitioned Poland, growing up under Russian domination, was more a victim of imperial expansion than a natural propagandist for it —should have been chosen as the favorite scapegoat of anti-colonialist writers. Heart of Darkness was in fact one of the first important works of art to draw attention to the degradation and destruction inherent in the colonial system and to imply that it might be a force for evil rather than for good. Indeed, it is probably the novel’s success on that front that has put it in the canon and kept it there.

In a new study of Conrad’s work, One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, a professor at Tulane University, attempts to remove the figure of Conrad from the raging factions of the academy and view him in the context of his own place and time. Not that Harpham could be called a counterrevolutionary: he gives a hearing to every critical school and treats it with respect when respect is due —and often when it is not. One of the more ridiculous contributions to Conrad criticism quoted by Harpham is from Terry Eagleton, Warton Professor of English at Oxford, who says that the scene in Nostromo where Nostromo and Decoud drift on a lighter in the Golfo Placido reflects an awareness of the “crisis in the ideology of the Western bourgeois class” and “the history of imperialist capitalism.” Another gem is from Wayne Koestenbaum of Yale, who claims that writing collaboration between men, as practiced by Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, represents a “metaphorical sexual intercourse.” What Harpham does achieve is a level of coolness and reason that is to be admired in the heated context of contemporary cultural studies—though he has the unfortunate academic habit of using five words where one would suffice, and of going to painful lengths to state the obvious.

Harpham’s opening chapter concentrates on Conrad’s identity as a Pole—in other words, as a citizen of a country that had ceased to exist some sixty years before his birth, with its third partition between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Poland, as Harpham points out, “did not exist as a sovereign state, and was, rather, a theoretical entity, the absent cause of a defiant but literally groundless patriotism.” Conrad described Poland as being “compressed between Prussian Germanism on one side and Russian Slavonism on the other. For Germanism it feels nothing but hatred. But between Polonism and Slavonism there is not so much hatred as a complete and ineradicable incompatibility.”

Poland, unlike its reactionary neighbors, had long boasted flourishing liberal traditions and had developed a unique, democratic form of government—the “Royal Republic”—at a historical moment when other Central European powers were still absolute monarchies. Conrad was the son of a vociferous patriot and rebel against the Russian oppressors, and was brought up with the enlightened ideals of the szlacht (gentry) class to which he belonged, a class which, as Harpham points out, “confuses the most fundamental distinction of traditional Marxist theory—that between the ruling class and the revolutionary class—by being both.”

Thus Conrad, despite his adoption of England and the English language, was in a position to regard imperialism—even the imperialism of England, his adopted country—with cynicism if not hostilty. In fact, as Harpham correctly states, Conrad’s fictional stance “with respect to the national-imperial project, whether English, Dutch, French, or American, is rigorously equivocal.” Imperialism is a large, perhaps the largest, fact in the world he writes about: he describes its workings, but to judge it is the reader’s job, not his own. As for racism, Harpham claims that “Conrad seems capable of placing racist and nonracist thinking on the scale and finding them equal, just as he finds people of different races equal notwithstanding the many inequalities in their circumstances.”

Conrad’s decision, at the age of sixteen, to join the British merchant navy and leave Poland for a life at sea was obviously a significant one for both his life and his work, but it is doubtful whether its ramifications need so many, and such florid, explanations as Harpham gives us. “The ship is a mere point of salience in an homogenous cosmic colloid, one node of a general system of meditation that can accommodate, it seems, all differences,” he writes, in one of the book’s sillier passages. Still, Harpham makes a number of striking points, and I was surprised to find myself thoroughly convinced by his demonstration of a consistent homosexual subtext in the fiction.

His argument is not that Conrad was a closet homosexual, but that his attitudes towards sex were complex and unresolved: not too surprising, when one considers the consistent ineptitude with which Conrad treated women in his fiction. He appears to have tried whenever possible to avoid the subject altogether, and a letter he wrote to Edward Garnett bears this theory out: “The Secret Sharer between you and me, is it. Eh? No damned tricks with girls there.” “Conrad,” Harpham writes, “is not insensitive to or disrespectful of a biological imperative to propagate, but his enthusiasm for this imperative is decidedly restrained.” Yet the critic goes on to prove that sex, even when ostensibly banished from the author’s novels, is nevertheless discreetly present, usually in homoerotic form.

Harpham does not gloss over Conrad’s shortcomings. As Leavis said, Conrad’s “classical status will not rest evenly upon his whole oeuvre,” and Harpham goes well beyond Leavis’s list of gripes, such as Conrad’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery,” his imposition of “a ‘significance’ that is merely an emotional insistence on the presence of what he can’t produce,” and a “certain simplicity of outlook and attitude.” These faults and others make Conrad quite off-putting to a sizeable proportion of his readers. He is often sickeningly sentimental. His humorlessness makes his fiction unnecessarily heavy going; Harpham intelligently notes Conrad’s “only access to humor” to be a certain habitual tone of “bitter irony.” Harpham also points to Conrad’s habit, attributable to his artistic vocation as a symbolist, of building his novels around an emotional vacuum:  

Even the more imposing figures can function as “nothing”: Lord Jim is merely the center of a moral problem of responsibility; Kurtz is merely the center of the imperial encounter with the Other; Nostromo is merely the center of the struggle between the force of international capital and emergent nationalist political movement. All are more significant for what goes on around them, including narration, than for what they are or do.

This is true, and it is the reason that Conrad so often is just plain boring. The moral problem tends to be made evident early in the narrative, and its subsequent playing out by a cast of characters whose only life is in their function within a constructed moral scheme can be tedious.

Harpham also skewers Conrad’s frequent verbal floundering, his apparent inability to get to the point. He expresses his own suspicion that Conrad is “simply incapable of achieving the commonplace, of writing —for example—an ordinary letter.” Conrad himself, perhaps in defense of this inadequacy, once gave the opinion that “explicitness is fatal to the glamour of all work” and, on the first page of Under Western Eyes, wrote that “words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.” Well, up to a point. A little bit of explicitness does not always come amiss; on the other hand, a habit of repetitive insistence, of which Conrad is also guilty, can be just as detrimental to the effect as is vagueness.

Conrad was a complex literary figure and Harpham, to his credit, does not attempt to make him the less so by forcing him into an simplistic classification like “racist” or, on the other hand, “anti-colonialist.” To do so would make Conrad more the partisan and less the artist. Chinua Achebe’s essay on Heart of Darkness proposes that great art can only be “on the side of man’s deliverance and not his enslavement.” I believe that this is demonstrably, if unfortunately, wrong— though I suppose that much depends upon one’s definition of “deliverance,” and also upon just how rigorous one’s definition of “great” might happen to be. Harpham’s own arresting explanation of literature’s many “scoundrel geniuses” is to propose that greatness, just possibly, might be “in-separable from certain kinds of reprehensibility.” But perhaps the truth is that ideally art is neither moral nor immoral, but impartially amoral.

Notes
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See Roger Kimball’s review “David Denby Goes to School” in The New Criterion (November 1996). Go back to the text.

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