Time Lapse

Acebe goes on the offensive in his article in attacking Conrad.  He has an abundance of reasons as to why Conrads book is all wrong.  But one of his reasons I found invalid.  He mentions how when Conrad took his venture down the Congo, Achebe's father was still a baby.  He goes on to say, he cannot believe anything in the book, unless he sees it with his own eyes. Yet there surely is a vast difference of the Africa then and the Africa when Achebe wrote the book.  I'm not saying the what Conrad wrote is the way it was, but it is a possibility. 

Comments

[Mara B.]

I think that is cetainly a good topic to discuss, Ryan. I'm sure the Africa Achebe knows is similar to when Conrad experienced it. Yet it is inevitable that it has changed over the years in between the two.

[anon]

This is a problem many critics have had. Morell in fact travelled down the Congo with a copy of Heart of Darkness and read it as a kind of travel fiction, which is clearly ridiculous.
I haven't read Achebe on Conrad so I can't really comment on it, but it seems he is falling into the same trap as Fleischman, Leavis, Berthoud etc who all treat Conrad as a kind of 'modernist sage', a voice like that of Carlyle or Ruskin.

Have you read Conrad's diary of his trip to the Congo? (It is in the back of the Norton edition if you want to). When you read this you'll see that his trip up the river was actually fairly uneventful and it is definitely wrong to reduce the novel into autobiographical terms.

Take Lord Jim as another example. Places in Lord Jim are deliberately kept vague to prevent this kind of reading.

I think it is better to see Heart of Darkness as an ontological narrative (that is a narrative of being), in the sense of Marlow's iterative narrative, his act of selfhood through the telling of the story. I think it doesn't matter if Conrad's Africa is 'wrong'.

‘Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world’ (2. p.48)

It is simultaneously a literal, figurative, and allegorical landscape. If it is reduced into terms of 'real' Africa it is easy to make the mistake of pidgeon holing Conrad into a kind of reductive morality, or even of presenting him as a racist or misogynist.