The White Spot

Abstract

AbstractThere are probably few literary texts about which so much research has been and continues to be done as Heart of Darkness. Hailed by contemporaries as “intensely modern”, “the high-water mark of English fiction” and a “psychological masterpiece” to rank alongside Dostoevsky and Flaubert, Joseph Conrad’s novel, written at the turn of the year 1898/99, has since been counted among the “half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language”, is considered “perhaps the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American universities”, and “probably the most widely reprinted short novel in English”. Accordingly, the scholarly literature on this short novel, especially from the fields of literary and postcolonial studies, but also from historical or psychological perspectives, has grown to an unmanageable size – and has itself become the subject of scholarly debate. Barely half a century after his death, two journals had already been dedicated to the author himself, whom Poles and British alike claim as their own: Conradiana, which has been devoted exclusively to the study of his œuvre since 1968, and The Conradian, the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society, published since 1976. Heart of Darkness also continues to be the most frequently discussed text in Conradiana, a fact self-deprecatingly reflected in the subtitle of a recent essay: “Oh No! Not Another Paper on ‘Heart of Darkness’!” Indeed, the novel seems to have been exhaustively interpreted in every conceivable way, following all methodological innovations and turns. At first it received attention as a commentary on the political debate surrounding Africa. Soon, canonization set in as a landmark of classical modernism, expressing the doubts of the individual in the face of eroded authorities and certainties at the turn of the century, as well as employing modern literary narrative techniques that suspend the measured, normalizing, and didactic gestures of nineteenth-century literature. In the context of the decolonization movements in the second half of the twentieth century, Heart of Darkness once again gained increased attention. Conrad’s novel became – in a spirit first of apologia, then of critique – the reference text of the postcolonialism debate. This circumstance was certainly helped by the fact that prominent protagonists of this debate – such as Edward W. Said, whose 1966 study Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography was a direct precursor to his famous book of 1978, Orientalism – dealt with it. The most recent biography of Conrad in German accordingly praises Heart of Darkness from two perspectives: From that of literary aesthetics as “a benchmark for literary modernism up to and including existentialism” and from that of colonial history as “the first devastating critique of European greed for Africa.” The example of the reception history of this concise text is a good way of observing the mechanisms that make it possible for a piece of literature to be accorded the status of world literature: The struggle for interpretive sovereignty between different disciplines, between different national philologies, and not least between controversial political paradigms keeps a debate going that ensures the ‘survival’ of the text in the sense of Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s postulate that the “existence of literature” and the “public conversation about literature” are one. Even criticism that attacks canonization – for example, the verdict of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe that the author of Heart of Darkness was “a bloody racist” – only serves to bolster its canonical status.