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There is an unavoidable Nachträglichkeit (indignity) in reading after the Holocaust. As Omer Bartov writes, the Holocaust has “projected its impact both forward and backward in time, an explosion of destructive energy at the heart of Western civilization that compels us to rethink our assumptions about the nature of humanity and culture, history and progress, politics and morality.” Bartov’s insight about the temporality of our reflections on the Holocaust has been realized by a number of contemporary historians who have taken concepts from the well-developed historiography of the Holocaust and, with due caution, used them to illuminate genocides, atrocities, and discourses of race-hate in the imperial and colonial encounter from both before and after the Second World War. However, in contrast, there has been little parallel work done in developing the constellations of ideas developed in the study of the literary and cultural representations of, and responses to, the Holocaust to other literary texts, even those that concern “limit events” such as genocide. Issues that arise regularly and in an interwoven way in Holocaust studies—including debates over the relationship between representation, fiction, memoir, history, and the events of the past, over writing and how we might understand truth, over ethics and responsibility , the concept of working through and so on—have not, so far, been used to explore other literary texts. The aim of this chapter is to attempt such a reading : that is, to explore, in an unprogrammatic way, a canonical text—which concerns both genocide and colonialism—in the light of the methodological concerns and issues developed from the study of Holocaust literature. Read through eyes sensitized to a range of difficulties and questions raised by the Holocaust, many of the celebrated and complex characteristics of Heart of Darkness () are illuminated. I focus below on three: first, the historical context for and ideas about a “genocidal universe” and what this means for understanding the novella, especially in light of what we know about different sorts of 190 10 Reading Heart of Darkness after the Holocaust ROBERT EAGLESTONE perpetrators; second, the nature of complicity; third, the importance of secrecy both within the text of Heart of Darkness and in relation to the forces that shaped its writing and publication. A. Dirk Moses suggests that there are ideological and political “conceptual blockages” that obstruct discussions of the Holocaust in relation to colonial and post-colonial genocides. In the micro-context of Heart of Darkness and its reception there are at least three such blockages. First, many are unwilling to recognize that there was a genocide on the Congo. I address this historical matter below, but its consequence is what concerns me initially. From Holocaust studies we learn that a genocidal situation is “upside down”: doctors torture and do not heal; midwives bring children into the world to let them die or kill them; freedom means slavery; progress means savagery; work means death. The world of Heart of Darkness and of the Congo Free State (CFS) is not simply bad or colonial ; it is radically disoriented, the world, pace Maurice Blanchot, of the disaster. Nothing is what it seems and ideas generally held about the novella, about Kurtz, for example, look very different in this upside-down world. Without taking this on board, the novella’s content, context, and publication history are indecipherable. Following from this, a second blockage concerns Joseph Conrad as well as the principal narrator Marlow. In his meditations on the novella, W. G. Sebald writes that during the march from Matadi to Nselemba in JuneAugust , “Jósef Korzeniowski began to grasp that his own travails did not absolve him from the guilt which he had incurred by his mere presence in the Congo.” While many critics seek to exculpate both Conrad (historically) and Marlow (fictionally), I argue below that, as Sebald evocatively but unambiguously suggests, Conrad (in the historical record) and Marlow (in the novella) are, bluntly and despite their reservations, low-level genocidal perpetrators. In turn, again, this leads to a third “conceptual blockage,” concerning the relationship between the past and a literary text. Without wanting to rehash three generations of critical debate about the nexus of text and history, it’s clear that texts about the Holocaust—and so by extension, here, Heart of Darkness—are called to account by different types of questions about the text in history. Whereas many works in literary history make the autonomy of art from its history central to its aesthetic value...

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