Abstract
Barry Unsworth's Booker Prize-winning novel, Sacred Hunger (1992) deliberately recalls Joseph Conrad's famous novella, Heart of Darkness (1899). Speaking with interviewers, Unsworth has acknowledged that was certainly strong influence on novel (Podmore, see also Nicholl), which narrates journey into Africa at height of Britain's imperial age. To European eyes of Conrad's Marlow and Unsworth's Matthew Paris, African coast appears similarly deceitful, hiding its intentions behind mask of uniform green. In Unsworth's novel, Africa appears to be behind green wall, unbroken, giving immediate sense of subterfuge, of deceitful sameness (189). Marlow perceives Africa in similar terms: the uniform somberness of coast, seemed to keep me away from truth of things (13); the woods were unmoved, like mask.... [T]hey looked with their air of hidden knowledge, of patient expectation, of unapproachable silence (56). In Sacred Hunger, few crew members set off in yawl for station upriver, where Paris meets mercurial young European factor, described as very white in face, who talked with a febrile eagerness (251). In Heart of Darkness, Marlow sees harlequin as very fair with smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open countenance like sunshine and shadow (52-53). The central actions of two narratives are closely parallel, as one European man sets out to find another who has gone native in jungle, taking dark mistress and engaging in seemingly unholy relationships with community of Africans. The encounter leads to death of both latter figures, while two former men return to Europe with no clear answers about meaning of what they have seen. Even so brief and highly selective description will suggest that Heart of Darkness is important intertext in Unsworth's postcolonial novel about slave trade. Indeed, I will argue that Sacred Hunger rewrites Conrad's novella in order to probe similar human darknesses. Unsworth's novel is both tribute to and revision of Conrad, extending and complicating Marlow's narrative from postcolonial position. Sacred Hunger rewrites Heart of Darkness from different perspective on imperialism: not only anti-, and thus severely critical, like Conrad, of imperial abuses of power; not only after, and thus aware of lingering effects of colonialism on liberated African peoples, as Conrad could not be; but also simultaneously both inside and outside imperialism and thus able to illuminate authoritarian assumption of superior knowledge that emanates from imperial consciousness. Unsworth represents single-minded and self-vindicating habits of thought that enable insiders to rationalize abuses of power as part of divinely ordained design; he also shows traumatic effects of these abuses on subaltern outsiders. To establish importance of complex perspective in Unsworth's novel, it will help to revisit Conrad's through significant essay on his Two Visions by Edward W. Said. Analyzing Conrad's view of empire in Culture and Imperialism, Said remarks that Conrad, Polish expatriate, was an employee of imperial system; despite his criticism of great looting adventure, he could neither imagine nor represent what lay outside that system: Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist.... Conrad could probably never have used Marlow to present anything other than imperialist world-view, given what was available for either Conrad or Marlow to see of non-European at time. Independence was for whites and Europeans; lesser or subject peoples were to be ruled; science, learning, history emanated from West. (23-24) Since Western knowledge made alternatives to imperialism unthinkable, Conrad can bring only persistent residual sense of his own exilic marginality (24) to bear in maintaining an ironic distance (25). …
Published Version
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