Conrad, Racism & Imperialism

BOOK REVIEWS alism's underlying self-divisions and tensions. One area in which this admirably brief but pointed study might have been more helpful is in presenting more of Clifford's biography, likely a recherché topic for the majority of readers and one not lacking explanatory power in the psychology of the man and his two careers. The unmentioned death of Clifford 's son in the Battle of the Somme is arguably as crucial to his psychic economy (his final decade was spent in a mental asylum) as his second marriage to the popular writer Elizabeth de la Pasture. Holden might have more generously provided in two other areas. Aesthetic judgments are scrupulously avoided, and given his thorough knowledge of his topic, these would have brought not only interest but also authority. Clifford's writings also stand in an isolation that is perhaps too splendid. Comparable minor figures of the period writing in a similar realist vein, Louis Becke, for instance, might have been drawn on further to explore and contextualize some of the tropes discussed. This is largely to cavil, however. Both its ingeniousness and perspicacity make Modern Subjects I Colonial Texts a welcome and useful addition to ELT Press's distinguished 1880-1920 British Authors series. J. H. Stape ______________ Vancouver, British Columbia Conrad, Racism & Imperialism Peter Edgerly Firchow. Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. xvi + 258 pp. $34.95 IN HIS NOW-FAMOUS ARTICLE, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" Chinua Achebe writes that "Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked." Peter Edgerly Firchow's new book is primarily a rebuttal to Achebe and numerous other postcolonial critics who "have paid little attention" to arguments that defend Conrad's treatment of racism and imperialism. These critics, according to Firchow, have "lied" about the novel's racist and imperialist elements because "they are incapable of dealing with a reality that belongs neither entirely to the realm of the angels nor to that of the fiends." Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness offers a detailed view of its author's reading of and response to 101 ELT 44 : 1 2001 the ways in which national, ethnic, and racial stereotypes are presented, transmitted, and perceived in Conrad's novel, and it highlights Firchow 's skills as a close reader and historical researcher. It is unfortunate , therefore, that his digressive lines of argument reduce the results of his research to a collection of loosely connected "imagological" studies. Though very good at generating specific insights into Conrad's novel, Envisioning Africa does not come together as a fully integrated study. The individual exegeses that punctuate Firchow's readings of specific passages do not fit neatly into an overriding thesis. He successfully argues that we must read Heart of Darkness as a "mixed thing"—a story with two contrasting points of view, a mode of presentation that is both realistic and symbolic, a corrosive irony, and a fusion of comedy with tragedy—but he has not found an organizational strategy that presents this mix without confusion. In the opening chapter, "Envisioning Africa," Firchow explains that what Conrad saw and experienced in the Congo should not be confused with the Africa he describes in Heart of Darkness. As a result, we should not seek to determine what the "real" Africa was like; instead, Firchow argues, we should examine "how (and why) Conrad envisioned Africa as he did, and what that vision meant to him and to his readers." In other words, the questions of racism and imperialism in Heart of Darkness can only be answered "in the geography of Conrad's imagination and in the experiences that helped to shape it." The second chapter, "A Mere Animal in the Congo," begins with a letter from Conrad to his trusted literary confidant Edward Garnett, in which the author admits, "[Before] the Congo I was just a mere animal." According to...