Content Objectives
The goal of my unit is to teach my students interpretation skills specifically using Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. And as I write this unit, I keep coming back to the question, Why Heart of Darkness? It is the question I go back to every year as I plan the readings and works we will study during the course of the school year. While I am cognizant of the fact that it is the one work that students either love or hate; that there seems to be no middle ground; that those who hate Heart of Darkness are the ones who "just don't get it" and struggle mightily with not just vocabulary (which can certainly be daunting but not insurmountable) but with the enormous amount of symbolism and ambiguity in Conrad's work, they need not stay lost in the murkiness of the landscape, unable to glean meaning from the actions of the novel's characters. I would like to provide them a way to navigate all this by guiding them through close readings of particular passages (which we will do as a class, then they will do in pairs or small groups, and finally individually), and allowing them to process information both verbally through class discussions and in writing via journals and essays. (Enduring Understanding 1, below)
By the end of this unit, it is my hope that students will have (further) developed their skills in the art (or science) of interpretation through close reading and analysis of the text, and learned the importance of supporting their opinions with appropriate evidence from the text. (Enduring Understanding 3, below) With these skills, they will be able to access other complex texts—whether they be novels, poems, or expository texts—with confidence.
Essential Questions
During the last week of classes before Overfelt tore down the wing in which my first classroom was located in order to replace it with a new, state-of-the-art science wing, my colleagues and I, who were being relocated to the new C-wing designed for 21 st century collaborative learning communities, invited students both current and former to leave messages on the walls, their good-byes to the place where they had been nurtured as scholars, where many of them had laughed, cried, fought, made up, made friends, and, for some, likely made a few enemies. Word spread, and they came—before school, between classes, at break, during lunch, and after school. They took up permanent markers to leave impermanent messages bold and tender and cryptic and funny on walls that would soon be a pile of rubble to be hauled away, leaving no physical evidence of the sometimes life-changing events that had taken place within them. But, of the over two hundreds epitaphs scrawled on my walls and doors and windows, only one brought tears to my eyes, a simple eight-word statement by a 2006 graduate:
I became a better person in this classroom.
That epitaph sums up why I believe the essential questions below are integral to the teaching of Heart of Darkness.
I do not see my job as simply to teach English literature and writing. I believe that as an educator, I have an obligation to help my students become better people, responsible and informed citizens of the communities they (will) live and work in, which, in this age of Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Tumblr, and Instagram, are becoming more than ever interconnected and increasingly interdependent. They are inhabiting a global community, and the essential questions below will get them thinking about their place in society and how their actions or inaction may have consequences far beyond their ken.
Essential Question 1 (below) is the foundation question. In determining whether Heart of Darkness is a racist text, students must examine the very current argument about whether we are living in a "post-racial" society. But even before they can begin discussing that question, they must come to some answer about what that phrase even means. They can then explore whether there is value in reading literature that engenders such strong reactions in readers that there is still debate over whether or not it should be taught. My hope is that they will come to the conclusion J. Hillis Miller reaches in his essay entitled "Should We Read Heart of Darkness?": not only should the novella be read, but we have "an obligation to do so,"(7) and that if we do not, we have abdicated our authority to come to an informed decision about whether the text should be read. Rather than depend on someone else's opinion, we need to
perform a reading in the strong sense, an active responsible response that renders justice to a book by generating more language in its turn, the language of attestation, even though that language may remain silent or implicit.(8)
My hope is that this examination will lead naturally to the questions that follow, that they will eventually come to the conclusion of the old adage, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it."
- Is Heart of Darkness a racist text?
- Does man control his own destiny?
- How do the characters reflect the society in which they live?
- What do these characters' decisions and actions say about human nature and how we respond to our environment?
- What makes us human?
- What does it mean to act humanely?
- Are we required to act when we see other human beings treated inhumanely, and if so, do the times and culture we live in negate that obligation or excuse our failure to do so?
Enduring Understandings
- Interpreting difficult text is a skill that can be mastered.
- Knowledge of an author's background, and the historical and cultural context of a piece of literature lead to a better understanding of the work.
- Literary interpretation must be substantiated by evidence in the work itself.
Background
Modernism and the Modernist Novel
Though there is no exact date when the Modernist period in English literature began, it is generally accepted that the seeds of its inception began to be seen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its emphasis on the inner self and consciousness, its view of society in decay or decline, and the sense of loss, alienation, and disillusionment, is often described as a reaction to world events that called into question Victorian ideals and sensibilities and to the Romantic world-view in which the focus was on nature and the individual. It eschewed the conventional characteristics of literature; the omniscient third-person narrator was replaced by the first-person or multiple narrators, and stream-of-consciousness style narration made its appearance. Heart of Darkness fits this description.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born writer who did not begin learning English, his third language, until he was in his 20s. He lost his mother when he was eight, his father when he was twelve, and was raised by his uncle thereafter. From a very young age, he was fascinated with the sea, recounting that when he was nine years old, he pointed to the blank part of a map of Africa and announced emphatically, "When I grow up I shall go there."(9) In 1874 at sixteen years of age, Conrad left Poland to Marseilles, France, to work with the French shipping company, C. Delestang et Fils. In 1878, he joined the British Merchant Service, in which he served fifteen years. He became a British citizen in 1886. He travelled the world as a seaman, sailing to places such as the Caribbean, the West Indies, South America, Bangkok, and Singapore, before signing with a Belgian company to command a steamboat in the Congo,(10) this experience being the basis of Heart of Darkness. He authored several books, including his first, Almayer's Folly in 1895, and Heart of Darkness, which was published in serial form in 1899.(11) He died in 1924 and is buried in Canterbury Cemetery.(12)
Belgium and the Congo Free State
In King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild recounts Belgium's King Leopold II's policies that resulted in "killing in the Congo [that] was of genocidal proportions, [but] was not, strictly speaking, genocide," in that "the Congo state was not deliberately trying to eliminate one particular ethnic group from the face of the Earth."(13) Rather, "Leopold's men were looking for labor."(14) The millions of lives lost in their search for and use of labor was "to them [ ] incidental."(15)
In 1885, after several years of negotiation with the United States and other European powers, King Leopold was granted sovereignty over the Congo Free State by the International Association of the Congo.(16) The guise under which he secured power over the Congo, that of a humanitarian mission, was vastly different from the reality of what occurred. Hochschild details the "four closely connected sources" that resulted in a tremendous population loss during 1885 and 1910, with the greatest loss of life in the 1890's: "1) murder; 2) starvation, exhaustion, and exposure; 3) disease; and 4) a plummeting birth rate."(17) The population from 1885 to 1919 was estimated to be "'reduced by half,'" according to a 1919 Belgian commission.(18) Based on a census conducted in 1924, the population during that year was estimated to be ten million, which means that "during Leopold's period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.(19)
Articles and Essays for Discussion
Students will read the following texts because all address the question of whether Conrad and, thus, the novella are racist. Because I want students to interpret Heart of Darkness and, individually and as a class, come to their own conclusions about it, they will read these articles after reading Heart of Darkness. I want these pieces to serve as a starting point for the less text-specific inquiries of the Essential Questions above. These essays will encourage them to consider other interpretations, to analyze how those interpretations differ from their own, and to evaluate not only the validity of the conclusions and the evidence used for others' interpretations but also to re-examine the evidence they use to support their own interpretations and conclusions.
Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness"
Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), the Nigerian-born poet, novelist, and professor at Brown University, details several instances in the novella that he believes prove that "Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist."(20) His essay is a revised lecture he originally delivered at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975. In it, he writes that from a Western perspective, Africa is viewed as "a foil to Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest."(21) He seems to argue that the novella warns that "[t]ragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place."(22) He disputes the argument that "the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad's but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism"(23) and contends instead that if Conrad had meant to distinguish Marlow from himself, he failed miserably. To Achebe, it was an effort "totally wasted" because Conrad provided no "alternative frame of reference by which [readers] may judge the actions and opinions of his characters."(24) He concludes by conceding that Conrad did indeed "condemn[ ] the evil of imperial exploitation"(25); nevertheless, Conrad was "strangely unaware"(26) of the racism on which such practices were predicated and that inability to see or recognize it is why he believed Conrad was a racist.
Hunt Hawkins, "Heart of Darkness and Racism"
In his essay, Heart of Darkness and Racism, Hunt Hawkins, professor of English at University of South Florida, takes issue with Achebe's reading of the novella. Although he agrees with Achebe that "much of Heart of Darkness dehumanizes Africans" and that "the image Conrad projects of African life can hardly be called flattering,"(27) Hawkins asserts that Conrad's depiction of the Congo cannot and should not be read as representative of "all the cultures and situations" in Africa.(28) Moreover, he claims that Conrad was a critic of imperialism:
Conrad became a staunch, if complicated opponent of European Expansion. Heart of Darkness offers a powerful indictment of imperialism, both explicitly for the case of King Leopold and implicitly (despite Marlow's comments on the patches of red) for all other European powers.(29)
He believes that Conrad's "comparative reduction and neglect of Africans" in the novella was intentional.(30) He seems to argue that Achebe's observation that Africans are rarely seen in the novella is an intentional omission on Conrad's part. He interprets the passage in which Marlow journey's up the Congo, describing it as "traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world"(31) not as evidence that Conrad supported imperialism because of an inherent sense of superiority of European culture but rather as a way to focus readers on the idea on European hypocrisy, that those who purported to desire bringing civilization to Africa "[did not] live up to their own ideals as civilizers"(32) and in fact may have called into question the "validity" of those very ideals. Conrad's marginalization of Africans in the novella was a deliberate decision to have the narrative structure mimic societal structure.
He ends by saying that the value of Heart of Darkness is clearly evident in the fact that the title has become synonymous with the atrocities perpetrated in cases of human rights abuse and that "[f]ar from condoning genocide, Conrad clearly saw humanity's horrific capacity and gave it a name."(33)
Paul B. Armstrong, "[Reading, Race, and Representing Others]"
Of the critical essays to accompany our study of Heart of Darkness, the most difficult and most likely in need of scaffolding is Armstrong's.
Armstrong acknowledges the different ways in which Heart of Darkness has been interpreted, on the one had as a text perpetuating racist stereotypes (as advocated by Achebe) and on the other as "a model of…the most promising practices in representing other peoples and cultures."(34) He then posits that it is neither. Rather, "Heart of Darkness is a calculated failure to depict achieved cross-cultural understanding."(35) In other words, Marlow fails to participate in "truly reciprocal"(36) dialogue with the Africans that is required for a true appreciation and respect and understanding of cultures and people different from our own. Though he has many opportunities to engage in such "[ ]dialogical encounters," he does not take advantage of them but rather remains an aloof observer of the people and the landscape and activities going on around him,
... a tourist who sees the passing landscape through a window which separates him from it, and he consequently commits the crimes of touristic misappropriation of otherness even as he is aware of and points out the limitations of that position.(37)
Marlow's inability to bridge the power gap that separates him from the native Africans becomes representative of the text's inability to engage in the type of dialogue necessary to begin understanding. Armstrong sees Achebe's accusations similarly, as a failure to recognize Heart of Darkness as an opening salvo exploring the possibility of connecting with the "Other"; yet the charges Achebe makes in his response are valuable because "they break the aura of the text and reestablish reciprocity between it and its interpreters by putting them on equal terms" and that acknowledging "how unsettlingly ambiguous this text is about the ideals of reciprocity and mutual understanding" allows us to begin to "engage in the sort of dialogue with it which Marlow never achieves with Africans or anyone else."(38)
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