Hampson suggested that the first impression is that Marlow condemned imperialism, that the redeeming idea (of civilising the natives) is going to be elaborated upon. However his desire to assert the redeeming idea forces him (or Conrad) to switch into a figurative language which subverts the idea he is trying to assert. One can imagine that it must have been a difficult task for Conrad to write about a part of the world he knew little or nothing about or a story which was already in the popular imagination unexpressed. What resulted was a fore-grounding of the idea i.e. "something you can set up, and bow down before and offer a sacrifice to" [becomes] someone who set themselves up as something for others to bow down before and offer a sacrifice to" (10). This exposed the literalness of a language that is supposed to be figurative. That is, the figurative moves into the background and the literal comes to the foreground. The story concerns not the redeeming idea behind imperialism but a people who set themselves up as a god for others to bow down before. To prove Conrad's duplicity Hampson made the point that the former had a particular audience in view and was writing to meet their Victorian tastes:

Since he was writing Heart of Darkness for Blackwood Magazine, Conrad had a fairly good idea of the nature of his immediate readership: conservatives and imperialists in politics, and predominantly male. He wrote his agent J.B. Pinker : There isn't a single club and mess-room and man-of-war in the British Isles and Dominions which hasn't a copy of Maga [...] The title I am thinking of is "The heart of Darkness" - but the narrative is not gloomy. The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilising work in Africa is a justifiable idea.(10)

This echoes Marlow's opening speech above and confirms Conrad's endorsement of imperialism in the suggestiveness that Conrad saw 'the civilising work in Africa a justifiable idea'.

Reasons for Disagreements

The reason for so much controversy on the subject of Conrad's racism is, as most of those critics referred to above have agreed with Achebe, that Victorian liberal politics "required all Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by atrocities", which liberalism "took many forms in the minds of different people but always managed to side-step the ultimate question of equality between white people and black people" (7). Achebe quotes Albert Schweitzer, who gave up his successful life as a musicologists and Theologian for missionary work in Africa : "The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother" (7). He added that the reason Conrad's racism "is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against the African is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked" (8). Added to this is, of course, the embarrassment of the moral burden of History, which the literary establishment might want to avoid.

My contribution

Post-colonial criticism recognises the text as "a vehicle of imperial authority "(10). Heart of Darkness would therefore be seen as one of the many texts, relying on 'myth and metaphor', which unwittingly supports the suppression of any one people on the coloniser's presumption that these people were inferior. The myths in the case of Heart of Darkness is the popular Victorian one that Africans are savage, uncivilised barbarians. Note the comparison of Africans to Apes : "Six black men advanced in a file... Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails." (22). This can be traced back to the influences of Charles Darwin's thesis of human evolution, which has no incontrovertible proof up to now. In other to justify imperialism it was necessary to create an inferior or the colonial Other. Thus the Africans became for Marlow an Other, whose Otherness was nevertheless defined by him. For example those natives who worked with him became "black fellows" not the negation suggested by the word 'nigger', 'pre-historic' man or 'savage'. He regrets the death of his black helmsman only because "he [the helmsman] had steered: "for months I had him at my back - a help - an instrument" (73). It was a master-slave relationship. Missing his helmsman was not more than regretting the loss of a useful tool. Besides in other for him to be subject there had to be an object for whom he is subject. Thus the death was nauseating for him because for once he experienced his consciousness as a negation i.e. when for one fleeting moment the helmsman negates this subject-object relationship by dying on him. And since to be conscious is to be conscious of somebody, and since the dead body embarrassed the pro(ject) of himself into the world as a Transcendence, to save himself from this feeling of nausea he promptly throws the body overboard to the fishes.

In his pro(jects) of himself as a Transcendence Marlow uses the instrument of words. This explains his volubility, his word-drunkenness, his highly figurative and ambiguous language. Words after all were harmless and would not kill or destroy like Kurtz's degenerate violence and raids into the interior of the land in search of ivory, or the abuse and murder of Africans that he witnessed on his way into the interior. Nevertheless the binary pairing of such words as African/European, primitive/civilised, Black/ white prehistoric/modern Savage/civilised , with their European pre-coding suggests a consciousness which is self-aware and also Other-aware, and which in his Other-awareness insisted on necessarily being the foundation of the Other's Otherness. Further "Consciousness of an object is the consciousness of being conscious of an Object. Therefore all consciousness is self-consciousness " (x). When Marlow was conscious of the Africans (say the helmsman before he died) it was a "non-reflective consciousness" (x). They were simply there. But when he met Kurtz he was forced to posit himself as an 'object of reflection'. For once the image of the harmless magnanimous narrator slips. He despised and loved kurtz as the same time. He despised Kurtz because at the meeting of this alter-ego, this image of wild degenerate and savage Europe, performing satanic rites with the natives, he experienced Kurtz's consciousness and his own consciousness together in a feeling of unease or of shame. His mask slips. He saw himself for what he really was not but was in danger of becoming. A savage. For it took savagery for Kurtz, who was his alter-ego, to achieve the amount of notoriety, which commands respect from the wild untamed Africans, who equated him to a god. He admired Kurtz because this was the man he would really have liked to be (of course that was only implied) but did not have the courage or the savagery to be; in short he was jealous! He almost killed kurtz at a point; his genteel civilised superior Victorian prudishness hampered him. Besides for a moment in the narrative the Subject-Object relationship, which he had to the Africans was suddenly reversed. He was objectified in the transcendence of a look i.e. of Kutz's look. And it made him feel uncomfortable - another reason why he could have killed Kurtz. But Killing Kurtz would be to kill a future pro(ject) of himself (in Kurtz), which was anyhow doomed to failure if he was to retain his Subjectness in relation to the African Other, wh

o he perpetually objectified. It would have finally made the African who had enough restraint not to eat him and the other white men in the steam-boat more noble. The fact of the possibility of a common humanity was disturbing for Mallow. If meaning is defined by linguistic codes which are generally agreed upon then the animal imagery which mallow reverts to have a certain association of meaning in his mind, and for this meaning to have any validity then he must have experienced or be aware of something in his consciousness equivalent to the images conjured up by such words or imagery, which was concretised in the extra-textual world. Put differently these images may simply be a catalogue of his Possibles since as an Existent he was always in a continuous process of becoming. He realised that he could be a kurtz if he wanted to be but this would have jeopardised his position as pure Transcendence for the already stereotyped African Other or even for Kurtz, who had 'gone native'. But he was guilty of Bad Faith because in refusing to accept the humanity of the Africans he negated himself; he could not be the foundation of his own being. He did reluctantly admit "if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise"(52) .Thus he makes a compromise, noted the "remote kinship" and later on hurriedly 'escapes' f ro m the vicinity in the steam-boat, guns primed to shoot if the 'natives' dared come near but, conveniently, never really having a need to do so. It would equate him with Kurtz and jeopardise his Transcendence. "But what thrilled you was the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough;"[...] The African's humanity was 'ugly'. Apart from words, the liberal Victorian political and racist ideology of the day also became tools in his pro(ject) of his future self, the logic of which ideologies insisted that a human being had white skin: a black man did not have a white skin; therefore a black man was not human - in so far as 'human' was to be understood as related to a certain predefined series of qualities (i.e. intelligence, beauty, productivity, whiteness et cetera ) which defined the human given as an ontological phenomenon. It is self-evident that Conrad was racist.

A Note on Conrad's Personal History

It is important to note that Conrad was himself a colonised consciousness. Josef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski to give him his original name was polish by birth. But it was a Poland which in 1857 ( the year of his birth) was under Russian colonisation. Poland was at that point in time shared out amongst Russia, Austria and Prussia. Due to the vicissitudes of dwindled family fortune and the death of parents after his father was exiled by Russian authorities for his part in the independence bids of Poland, he grew up with an uncle, who put him in school in Krakow and later sent him to a private tutor in Geneva. But he was not much interested in schooling and persuaded his uncle to let him join the French merchant marine. After some time he ended up on British ships and became a British subject.

It is understandable then that he presumably had to warm his way as a writer into the hearts of his adopted countrymen. He must have lapped up the politics and ideology of his day to that end. Thus the racial condescension of Heart of Darkness could be seen as the price he had to pay for his valued citizenship, the genteel snobbery from someone who himself was once heavily snobbed and by sheer good fortune found himself among those chosen by divine fiat to rule the world. As for his flowery language, this could be put down to an effort to out-Herod Herod, to prove his mettle with the language since polish and then French were the languages he spoke first.

By the standards of the day he was not an affluent man and as a writer he probably had to rush out pot-boilers at some points to shore up his income from a sailors wage or lack of it when grounded. We do know that at some point he made efforts to get employment on a trading vessel for the Congo - just like Mallow. Like Mallow he also had an aunt, who was a kind of benefactor and mother-surrogate for him. Clearly he was a conformist and dipped richly into his own immediate personal environment without contradicting too much of it for his story's plot. And if racism was part of his environment then all for the better. On the whole it could be said that Conrad had reasons to defer to his fortunes to be an 'establishment man' unlike some of his literary contemporaries. And for a man who had been at sea the lure of sheer adventure gave in to the assumed notion of the writer as a conscience of his society. True he paid his dues. He condemned imperialism, but we know what tongue-in-cheek manner that assumed.

A note on the style and Imagery

Critics have equally praised and condemned Conrad's multi-layered prose. It gives rise to the problem of a clear authorial point of view. According to Burden:

The first readers, and many since, persistently complain however about the lack of a clarity and the daunting abstract quality of the book. Their response is partly preconditioned by the expectations of the political controversy that is topical at the time of its writing and also an integral part of the book's meaning. The perceived ambiguities work against a single meaning being the only meaning, and also provide unsurmountable problems for those wishing to derive a clear authorial intention from the work (70).

Naturally this kind of ambiguity serves the author very well in hood-winking the general reader and at the same time satisfying the conservative politics of his time. The recurrent images of darkness and light has the biblical validity of missionary Europe: "for ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the lord : walk as children of light " (Ephesians 5: 8). This was an ingenious way for Conrad to achieve his best seller and at the same time keep his reader guessing. Heart of Darkness is an Apocalypse - a highly figurative literature (which might make it self-contradictory i.e. the idea of darkness in Heart of Darkness is explained only by its absence) or text of a 'prophetic' or 'revelatory' nature. It is then fitting that it should borrow the moral high tone and religious, mystical images reminiscent of the Bible. But to paraphrase Shakespear, 'the devil cites scripture to his own purpose'. An the purpose in this case is to condemn imperialism and at the same time prop up the sentiments and prejudices upon which it "sharpened its iron tooth " (13). Colonialist literature - according to Elleke Boehmer, is literature primarily concerned with colonial expansion. "It was literature written by the coloniser and for colonising Europeans about non-European lands dominated by them" (3). It represented the coloniser's point of view. In other words it was part of the support structure or ideology making the colonising work honourable and just. Thus Conrad helped unwittingly build Empire.

Conclusion

From the fore-going the question of whether Conrad was a racist or not should be deducible. He wrote anti-semitic sentiments in his private letters, he was a gun-runner for the Carlists in their bid to seize the throne of Spain for Carlos de Bourbon; a desperate man, he attempted suicide in 1887, and like all desperate men he must have been a good schemer and, for all we know, might have written Heart of Darkness in its ambiguous inflammatory form to serve his private survivalist ends. And to put it in typical Achebe fashion, it is easy for the man who defecates to forget the stench of his own excreta but the man who has to clean it up cannot forget. And this is what is now making Conrad turn in his grave.



References

Achebe, Chinua: "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Hopes and Impediments. Selected Essays 1965-87.

Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness.