Chinua Achebe's famous attack on Heart of Darkness refuses to consider either the text's dramatization of Marlow's consciousness or Conrad's strategic use of the distance between himself and his English narrators. Conrad is not presenting an image of Africa but rather Marlow's experience of Africa and Marlow's attempt to understand and represent that experience. Marlow is a fictional character whose consciousness operates according to contemporary codes and categories. If Marlow's perceptions are at times racist, it is because those codes and conventions were racist.

As Anthony Forhergill has pointed out, Marlow is "conscious enough of some racial stereotypes to turn them ironically against their white users", but he is ultimately caught up in complicity and contradictions at a cultural and political level. However, Conrad's narrative method (which Achebe dismisses) represents a more radical stance than Marlow's, since it objectifies and problematizes Marlow's narrative, his perceptions and representations.

The nub of Achebe's criticism of Conrad is the kind of reading of Heart of Darkness that sees it only in psychological terms: "Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the bread-up of one petty European mind?" As Achebe asserts, a psychological reading that focuses only on Kurtz or Marlow and ignores the social and historical context replicates the dehumanization of Africans that Heart of Darkness' critique of imperialism deplores. Achebe also argues that African representation in European writing, and that Heart of Darkness does nothing to remedy this. His history of the Congo is written from the perspective of European contact with the Congo and his narrative generally is firmly fixed within a racist and imperialist Christian framework.

Edward Said commented that Heart of Darkness exposes in the discourses of imperialism . Africa is not the arbitrarily selected backdrop for a story about "The break-up of one petty European mind": Kurtz's "break-up" is the result of his place in the hierarchically structured engagement of Europe and Africa; Kurtz is a victim of one of the discourses of imperialism; and Kurtz's history shows how damaging that discourse is to both Africans and Europeans.

As Benita Parry observes, Conrad's position was similar to that faced by anthropologists when they return to their own country to write up their research. Conrad shows his understanding of the parameters within which he was writing by mirroring them in Marlow's relations with his audience. Marlow's audience, like the readership of Blackwood's Magazine, is made up of males of the colonial service class. Marlow is forced to confront the problem of making his experience intelligible to an audience that readily manifests the limits of its understanding and tolerance: "Try to be civil, Marlow, growled a voice". Marlow adopts various rhetorical strategies in relation to this particular audience, and, as we have seen, Conrad similarly shapes his narrative strategies to a specific implied reader. But, far from purveying "comforting myths" (as Achebe alleges), the narrative strategies of both Conrad and Marlow work to subvert many of the assumptions accepted by their audience.

One area where this clearly happens is in relation to imperialist discourse and its antithetical language of "light" and "darkness", "civilized" and "savage".

As Eric Woods has argued, light/darkness imagery in imperialist discourse contained an ambivalence that proved ideologically useful. On the one hand, as this speech illustrates, it implies a moral imperative (to bring light into areas of darkness) and thus justified missions and settlements. On the other hand, it also served to consolidate fixed categories, a perception of "us" and "them". By contrast Conrad's handling of this imagery breads down this sense of fixed opposition and undermines the implied "moral imperative". After the first narrator evokes "the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames", Marlow responds to his images of light and darkness by observing "And this also...has been one of the dark places of the earth", Marlow then explains this statement by reference to the Roman colonization of Britain, where the "savages" feared by the "civilized man" are the natives of the Thames valley. The ascription of "savagery" to the other is clearly a projection of the fears of the colonizer in an environment and among a people he can not comprehend. By the end of the narrative, with the return to the Thames, it is clear that "darkness" is not something safely in the past, nor is it something "other". Instead of affirming the opposition of darkness and light, civilized and savage, Marlow's narrative works to destabilize it: darkness is located at the heart of the "civilizing" mission.

As Frances B. Singh suggests, while Heart of Darkness is clearly critical of colonization, and presents the Africans as the innocent victims of European greed and will-to-power, the imagery of darkness it uses as metaphysical discourse associates "evil" with the categories used in anthropological descriptions of "primitive" peoples. The narrative carries the implication that Kurtz's "evil" is signalled by his "going native", and that "evil, in short, is African". While the narrative makes it clear that the till-to-power implicit in the very idea of a "civilizing mission" is what leads Kurtz to set himself up as a god, the fact that he sets himself up as a tribal god reinstates the idea of racial superiority at a deeper level than the critique of colonialism. (12)

(12) ã Heart of Darkness with the Congo Diary

Introduction and Notes ã Robert Hampson, 1995

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.

Pages: 31, 32, 33, 34 and 35.

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