Kurtz's Night Table

Abstract

The question posed by one contributor to the recent MLA volume, Approaches to Teaching “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Sharer”—“Why should and how can one teach a novella that is considered racist?”—anticipates one a student asked me this spring: “Why are we reading Heart of Darkness if it's racist?”1 To be sure, the questions are not exactly the same. The English professor's question is more cautious than my student's. By asserting that Heart of Darkness is “considered racist,” she either begs the question of the novella's imputed racism or shifts its ground from judgment to a simple acknowledgement of how Heart of Darkness has been read and felt, especially by postcolonial readers and, increasingly, by students who have studied postcolonial literature and theory. Chinua Achebe was the first to propose that we remove Heart of Darkness from the curriculum. That was 1975. Last spring, a candidate for a postcolonial job in my department also proposed it, while at the same time including it on a syllabus he presented to us: he seemed to believe that he shouldn't teach Heart of Darkness, but he couldn't help himself. I cite this experience not to ridicule the job candidate but to flag the dangers that bedevil those of us who teach Western literature these days, and especially colonial literature. “It does not go without saying that it is a good thing nowadays to read Conrad, to teach his works, or to write about them,” J. Hillis Miller (who has written often and well about Conrad) now writes in a foreword to a recent book, Conrad in the Twenty-First Century. “If Conrad really is a ‘bloody racist,’ or an unequivocal admirer of imperialism, or a sexist fearful and disdainful of women,” Hillis Miller tells us, “then one might argue plausibly that his works should be dropped from the curriculum.”2