Perpetrator Parables: Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Abstract

Perpetrator Parables:Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Adam M. Wassel (bio) In King Leopold’s Ghost, a 1999 historical account of the mass violence perpetrated in the Congo Free State, Adam Hochschild suggests that “European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its moorings” (143). Hochschild remarks specifically about the manner in which Heart of Darkness is taught, critiquing the array of theoretical lenses with which scholars and professors tend to approach the text. As a result, “We read [Heart of Darkness] as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place” (143). Several critics have noted, though, that Hochschild himself exhibits a similar tendency throughout King Leopold’s Ghost with regard not to a literary text but to events in European history: namely, the systematic annihilation of Europe’s Jews by the German Nazi regime. Hochschild presents quotations from Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, as well as from Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, as a means to offer insight into the minds and motivations of King Leopold’s murderous emissaries to Africa. As Sarah De Mul points out, “Although these two political catastrophes are set in different moments in history and dissimilar geographic locations, King Leopold’s Ghost brings them together and, in so doing, separates them considerably from their historically specific circumstances” (590–91). Thus, Holocaust history in King Leopold’s Ghost is, at least to some degree, cast loose from its moorings. I do not raise these points to fault Hochschild’s study (which is excellent) but to call attention to the complexities of approaching literary texts as historical documents and, conversely, treating history itself as we would treat a literary text. Just as Hochschild critiques literary approaches to Heart of Darkness that, in his view, evade a confrontation with the history that informs it, some of Hochschild’s critics hold that his comparison of the Congo Free State to Nazi extermination facilities manifest “an insult to the truth” (qtd. in De Mul 591). The comparison itself, however, does not originate with Hochschild; political theorist Hannah Arendt elucidated the analogues between imperial and totalitarian violence as early as 1951, in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Assessing the structure of imperial rule, which substitutes race for nation and bureaucracy for government, Arendt writes, “Lying under anybody’s nose were many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of [End Page 232] racism” (221). Though she takes care not to suggest a direct causal relationship, Arendt argues that imperialist ideologies of racial supremacy and limitless expansion would eventually crystallize on the European continent in an unprecedented political manifestation: totalitarianism, of which the German Nazi regime was an exemplar. To be sure, numerous commentators have highlighted the problems intrinsic not only to Arendt’s analysis of imperialism but to her reliance on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness throughout that analysis. Arendt’s treatment of the novella as an unadulterated representation of imperialism imbues the second book of Origins with an air of cultural chauvinism, depicting native Africans as “human beings … living without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment” (Arendt 190). Thus, we locate in Arendt some of the same problematic, Eurocentric tendencies Chinua Achebe famously located in Conrad: “the desire—one might say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (251–52). When Arendt writes about the trauma engendered by imperial encounters, she locates it exclusively in the minds of European imperialist perpetrators, whose humanity she can identify, rather than the native inhabitants of the areas they occupy, whose humanity she cannot. Recently, though, Michael Rothberg has returned to Arendt’s analysis of imperialism to help formulate his concept of “multidirectional memory,” a paradigm for considering the commonalities shared by disparate violent histories that resists placing those histories in competition with one another. Fully acknowledging...