Why Academics Should Continue Reading Heart of Darkness

OR: English professors can't have been terribly wrong for the last century, right?

My argument for in support of the professors who have taught and continue to teach Heart of Darkness is simple: Heart of Darkness should certainly be taught in colleges across the world because it is an incredibly dense work of fiction.

In my previous blog, I basically agreed with Chinua Achebe that Heart of Darkness is a racist text. Achebe makes numerous valid points explaining this, and I made a couple similar, less adequate references in support of the same. But while Achebe goes so far as to say Joseph Conrad was a racist and that it is an abomination that we teach his text , I say that the work itself is great enough that we can learn from it despite the contextual shortcomings of its author. I will concede that Heart of Darkness is racist. So is Shakespeare’s Othello. But like Othello, Conrad’s work is dripping with complexity: it can be studied as a literary work, as a psychological work, as a sociological work, as a historical work, as a political work, etc. You can see that complexity simply by looking at the different titles of the essays in our anthology. We, as readers, have to put the work’s racism in context and be able to draw pertinent conclusions from it in spite of its primitive views about race. I look at it this way: in 200 years, when the entire civilized world is vegetarian, are future students going to be barred from reading works by every barbarian who ate meat? I sure hope not, and I don’t think that will be the case.

Achebe argues that we must eradicate this text (and presumably all racist texts) from the Western Literary Canon (volume 59) because the only way the West will stop taking advantage of other races is through “abandonment of unwholesome thoughts” (348). I argue that cutting great, complex works out of our curriculum doesn’t help us remove our unwholesome thoughts. In fact, I believe that education is the driving factor in learning from our unwholesome thoughts and moving past them.

In short, with the benefit of hindsight, I think that minds across the globe can benefit a great deal from analyzing Heart of Darkness . Hopefully, academia has moved past looking at the work as a literal description of black people. Hopefully, academia has learned to contextualize a work when it is studied. Hopefully, academia is skilled enough at analyzing a complex work that it can look through the ugliness it presents and formulate new thoughts about the present and the past.

I think the biggest flaw in Achebe’s essay comes at the conclusion, wherein he decides against ending on a positive note:

“In my original conception of this essay I had thought to conclude it nicely on an appropriately positive note in which I would suggest from my privileged position in African and Western cultures some advantages the West might derive from Africa once it rid its mind of old prejudices and began to look at Africa not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystifications but quite simply as a continent of people….But… I realized no easy optimism was possible” (348).

His pessimism was the downfall of his essay. Just like the West needs to have more faith in Africans’ concept for humanity, Achebe needs to have more faith in the West’s.

(NOTE: Here’s a link to the definition of literary canon. I think it’s a very useful term for literature connoisseurs to know. Plus I sat for about ten minutes trying to remember the term and typing things like “what is the term for a group of literary works that is commonly taught in college courses” into Google before I finally remembered it. I’m trying to prevent you from doing the same.)