Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (review)

Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, by Peter Edgerly Firchow. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2000. xvi+258pp. ISBN 0-8131-2128-0.

More than 25 years have passed since Chinua Achebe called Joseph Conrad a "bloody racist," and the scholarly world has yet to recover. Scarcely a year goes by without another earnest attempt to soften or rebut Achebe's charges, generally by the judicious invocation of historical context. Achebe himself has stood by the offending comment, even as an entire industry of postcolonial studies has grown up to reiterate the claim in more theoretically polite terms. Achebe's essay, "An Image of Africa," has by now attained a canonical status of its own, being regularly anthologized and invoked whenever discussion turns to Conrad's 1899 novella. Whatever one's ultimate judgment of "Heart of Darkness" itself, Achebe's remark had the decided merit of restoring what Edward Said calls the "worldliness" of the text--its powerful, messy, disturbed and even harrowing implication in the shameful violence of European imperialism. Expelled from the hushed precincts of the modernist pantheon, Conrad's text--despite, or perhaps thanks to, Achebe's intervention--retains an actuality that other masterpieces from the turn of the last century can only envy.

Worldliness respects no protocols. Neither careful research nor closer reading can hope to alleviate the anxiety occasioned by Achebe's defiance of academic etiquette, or to restore "Heart of Darkness" to a pristine aesthetic state. Indeed, to construe the controversy as a scholarly "debate" is arguably to misrecognize both the force of Achebe's speech-act and the forms of authority brought into play. It is to presume the value of consensus in the very face of dissent. Calling the bluff on civilization, however, changes the rules of the game, as Marlow himself finally acknowledges.

Envisioning Africa is, in many respects, a work of impressive scholarship. It is painstaking in its coordination of textual detail, scrupulous in its account of Conrad criticism, admirably thorough in its references. Firchow's sense of his mission--"to do justice to the political and social significance of Heart of Darkness while at the same time doing justice to its aesthetic power"(xi)--could not be more sincere. But the book is preoccupied with rectifying what it sees as a category error: Heart of Darkness, Firchow declares, "is a work of art and not a sociological treatise, for it is only in relation to its aesthetic significance that we can establish what its real social and intellectual-historical meaning is . . . It is, after all, not primarily because of its concern with racism and imperialism but because of its great aesthetic power that it remains [. . .] one of the chief focal points of critical controversy and debate in the fields of literary theory and literary criticism" (x). This insistence on rebuilding a wall of separation between art and "sociology," aesthetic and historical interests, amounts to a categorical parti pris that renders the remainder of Firchow's work superfluous. Since, from this vantage, the status of Conrad's text is unassailable, there is little left to do besides appreciate the quality of the author's vision.

Unfortunately, Firchow's method turns out to be ill-suited to his aim. Rather than taking his stand on the formalist grounds implied by his aesthetic views, he sets out to subject the text to a microscopic analysis. Proceeding virtually phrase by phrase, he doggedly pursues historical context, critical discussion, rhetorical nuance, textual implication, often to the detriment of aesthetic perspective. An entire chapter, for instance, is devoted to explicating Conrad's statement that "before the Congo I was just a mere animalî; after worrying away at the phrase, Firchow finds it necessary to inform us that "by saying he had been an animal Conrad did not, of course, mean that before going to the Congo he had been in...