Abstract
We often take for granted that the creation of the other in literature is something negative and potentially harmful to readers, particularly when characters are otherized in terms of race, gender, or class. The othering of the African inhabitants in “Heart of Darkness” has led critics to raise the question whether the novella should still be read and taught. Othering is, however, a central and inevitable process in literature as in life and can have an ethical value if readers acknowledge their own complicity in this readerly process. This chapter suggests that “Heart of Darkness” should be essential reading in the twenty-first century precisely because it can give readers an image of themselves that they may be losing sight of: the human ability to otherize.
The ethical-didactic approach to literature developed here was first inspired by a classroom experience I had teaching Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands” at NCCU in Raleigh, North Carolina. I want to acknowledge the students and faculty in the Department of Mass Communication, College of Liberal Arts, for providing insights into life and the art of teaching that have been with me since.
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Notes
- 1.
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).
- 2.
Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 16.
- 3.
See Anna Lindhé, “The Paradox of Narrative Empathy and the Form of the Novel, or What George Eliot Knew,” Studies in the Novel 48, no. 1 (2016).
- 4.
Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 343.
- 5.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness ed. Owen Knowles and Allan H. Simmons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 75.
- 6.
Dorothy Hale, “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel,” Narrative 15, no. 2 (2007): 189.
- 7.
See, for example, Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1995) and Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
- 8.
Felski, Uses of Literature, 26–27.
- 9.
Still, this activity allows the alterity of the Other to emerge. In this respect for the otherness of the Other, Nussbaum has much in common with the poststructuralist ethical critics as “both ethical camps not only take for granted the achievement of alterity as the novel’s distinctive generic purpose but also understand it to be accomplished through novelistic form.” See Hale, “Fiction as Restriction,” Narrative, 200.
- 10.
Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 109.
- 11.
Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 109.
- 12.
Dorothy Hale, “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” Why Study Literature, eds. Jan Alber et al. (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011), 200.
- 13.
Felski, Uses of Literature, 26–27.
- 14.
Felski, The Limits of Critique, 29.
- 15.
Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 344–346.
- 16.
Frances B. Singh, “The Colonialist Bias of Heart of Darkness,” Conradiana 10, no. 1 (1978): 43.
- 17.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 30.
- 18.
J. Hillis Miller, Others (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 135.
- 19.
Hunt Hawkins, “Heart of Darkness and Racism,” in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 368 and 375.
- 20.
Paul, B. Armstrong, “Heart of Darkness and the Epistemology of Cultural Differences,” in Under Postcolonial Eyes: Joseph Conrad after Empire, eds. Gail Fincham and Myrtle Hooper (Rondebosch: University of Cape Town Press, 1996), 23.
- 21.
Allan H. Simmons, “Reading Heart of Darkness,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 16.
- 22.
Julia Kuehn, “One Colonialism, Two Colonialisms: Teaching Heart of Darkness in Hong Kong,” Victorian Review 38, no. 1 (2012): 21.
- 23.
Kuehn, “One Colonialism, Two Colonialisms,” Victorian Review, 22.
- 24.
Sulaxana Hippisley, “Occupying Self and Other: The Politics of Teaching Heart of Darkness as a Teacher of Color,” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 26, no. 2 (2019): 108.
- 25.
Quoted from Hippisley, “Occupying Self and Other,” Changing English, 105.
- 26.
Laura Green, Literary Identification: From Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi Dangarembga (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012), 9.
- 27.
Felski, Uses of Literature, 34.
- 28.
Felski, Uses of Literature, 34.
- 29.
Hippisley, “Occupying Self and Other,” Changing English, 114.
- 30.
Felski, Uses of Literature, 44.
- 31.
See, for example, Nussbaum, Poetic Justice.
- 32.
Simmons, “Reading Heart of Darkness,” 15.
- 33.
Simmons, “Reading Heart of Darkness,” 15.
- 34.
Simmons, “Reading Heart of Darkness,” 16.
- 35.
Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 60.
- 36.
Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, 59.
- 37.
For an interesting discussion of the way in which Heart of Darkness expresses “an imperialist anxiety” and “registers a latent but profound anxiety about resistance to imperialism enacted by the natives”; see Charlie Wesley, “Inscriptions of Resistance in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 3 (2015): 23.
- 38.
Kaoru Yamamoto, Rethinking Joseph Conrad’s Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 51.
- 39.
Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4–5.
- 40.
Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 38.
- 41.
Hawkins, “Heart of Darkness and Racism,” 366. Wesley suggests that “Marlow’s narrative regularly acknowledges the natives’ humanity while agonizing over their capacity to resist imperialist order.” The natives, he goes on to suggest, “are not powerless, even though they are depicted throughout the novella as savage, mindless, subhuman, subservient, and at times complicit with imperial power”; see “Inscriptions of Resistance,” Journal of Modern Literature, 27.
- 42.
Hawkins, “Heart of Darkness and Racism,” 366.
- 43.
Hawkins, “Heart of Darkness and Racism,” 370.
- 44.
Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 20–21.
- 45.
Annika, J. Lindskog, “‘It was very quiet there’: The Contaminating Soundscapes of ‘Heart of Darkness,’” Conradiana 39, no. 2 (2015): 47.
- 46.
Lindskog, “‘It was very quiet there,’” Conradiana, 56.
- 47.
Quoted from Lindskog, “‘It was very quiet there,’” Conradiana, 56.
- 48.
Peter Brooks, “An Unreadable Report: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 384.
- 49.
In fact, the mere stepping into Marlow’s position, using the language of Marlow, uttering his words, produces a sense of implication.
- 50.
Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 29.
- 51.
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “Heart of Darkness and the Ends of Man,” The Conradian 28, no. 1 (2003): 19–20.
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Singh, Frances B. “The Colonialist Bias of Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana 10, no. 1 (1978): 41–54.
Wesley, Charlie. “Inscriptions of Resistance in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 3 (2015): 20–37.
Yamamoto, Kaoru. Rethinking Joseph Conrad’s Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
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Lindhé, A. (2021). “Some Knowledge of Yourself”: “Heart of Darkness” in the Twenty-First-Century Literature Classroom—An Ethical Approach. In: Parker, J., Wexler, J. (eds) Joseph Conrad and Postcritique. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72499-3_10
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