Blog Assignment #2

          Chinua Achebe is a professor of African literature at the University of Massachusetts and wrote a criticism of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. He has some very strong opinions about what he thinks about Joseph Conrad as a person and as a writer. 

  Achebe has a few main points in his essay. He claims “that Joseph Conrad was a  thoroughgoing [bloody] racist”(343). He goes on to say that Conrad dehumanized the African race and disregarded their language. Chinua Achebe states that this book could not be considered a “great work of art” because it “celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race”(344). Another main point that Chinua Achebe addresses in his essay is that Joseph Conrad’s work is the epitome of the need of “Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest”(337). 

  In Chinua Achebe’s essay, I liked how he used tone and harsh language to really portray how he felt about this novella and also about Joseph Conrad. He said, “his [Joseph Conrad’s] method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy”(338). He reduces this book, which has been studied for years, to being only two sentences. Achebe also uses context from the book throughout his criticism. This only reinforces and gives evidences to his critiques, which only makes his judgements stronger. Another thing that I really liked about Achebe’s essay was that he actually addresses the issue of racism in the novella. He wrote, “Conrad...was strangely unaware of the racism  on which it [imperial exploitation] sharpened its iron tooth”(349). Achebe goes on to say “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”(343). He claims that he is one of the only critics that has ever brought up the issue of racism in Heart of Darkness. 

  I did not like that he was so harsh about the novella and said just about nothing good about it. He is a very highly respected man and what he says about this book, and others, carries a lot of weight. If someone were to read this critique then he or she may not ever read the book because of the things he said about it. I also didn’t like that he didn’t adequately address counter examples in his essay. He just gave negative examples and very few positive examples in the novella. Although I found weaknesses in Chinua Achebe’s criticism, I agreed on most of the points he made about Joseph Conrad and of Heart of  Darkness.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Armstrong 336-49.

Armstrong, Paul B, ed. Heart of Darkness. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.