Burns ADMEnglish 452 15 September 1992

A Truth Universally Acknowledged:Singh and Conrad

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that Heart of Darkness is one of the most powerful

indictments of colonialism ever written,” asserts Frances Singh in the first sentence of her

critical interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, and in this assertion she

overtly opens herself to the scorn of logicians and theorists alike, both of whom could

easily notice two ill-conceived leaps from the particular to the universal. First, Singh

offers as a self-evident truth that Heart of Darkness indicts all colonial endeavors, not just

the specific late 19th-century British attempt to exploit the human and natural resources

of the Congo, and she follows this with the claim that not only does Conrad’s text attack

colonialism, but that the passive, anonymous acknowledging party is “universal” and

therefore includes every rational person who has read the book. Her opening sentence

reads as though it were preceded by a lengthy argument pointing out various excerpts

from the text in which Conrad decries Europe’s conquest and other passages from

important essays that without exception conclude Heart of Darkness is a “powerful

indictment” of all colonialism. But Singh’s first word is not “therefore,” and this curious

approach should alert the reader that he stands at the doorstep of an extraordinary

argument. Watch as Singh continues an argument she knows is bogus through the first

paragraph and beyond, as she discusses Conrad’s personal background, as in the closing

sentence of the opening paragraph she begins, “Ironically,” and notice the contre-rejet

when she doesn’t follow with a thesis statement, or even a shade of a thesis statement that

reveals where her argument is going. Then disguising exposition as the main point of her

discussion, she quotes liberally from the text and introduces the notion of three levels of

metaphor. And it is not until the end of this digression, some three pages 16 into the essay

16 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, (Norton, 1988)

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— a quarter of the way through — that Singh gives the reader a morsel of her forbidden

fruit. With her opening sentence, she baits the reader, she tempts him, and now deep into

the essay, she uncovers her intention. Singh defies the universal acknowledgment. She

doubts it. She questions it. And like Marlowe with the third-degree metaphor, she

“pushes it to its limit”. “The question is,” Singh proposes. “Did Marlowe push it too far?

For the story also carries suggestions that the evil...is to be associated with the Africans.”17

Thus Singh introduces the ambiguous nature of Conrad’s indictment, and thus she begins

her essay’s true argument, that Conrad “historically...would have us feel the Africans are

the innocent victims of the white man’s heart of darkness; psychologically and

metaphysically he would have us believe that they have the power to turn the white man’s

heart black” and that Conrad confuses the “physical blackness of Africans with a spiritual

darkness.” Importantly, Singh notes “one cannot have it both ways.”18

In so saying, she suggests that Conrad argues on behalf of or against some idea in

the novel, and that ambiguity is an illegitimate, or at least faulty, method of approaching

his task, and she wants Conrad to write this argument as with the authority of God and to

declare that colonialism indisputably is wholly evil and never excusable. She assumes that

Conrad wanted to be didactic and pedantic and wrote Heart of Darkness as an “attempt to

indict colonialism”.19 It follows that Singh believes Joseph Conrad lacked the skill to write

a story that unambiguously attacked European imperialism, and that Singh herself is

sagacious enough to point out where Conrad erred. But in her re-interpretation of long-

dead Conrad’s intentions, Singh fails to consider that it is all too easy to be a pedant, and

that real skill is presenting life as it is, and not as a black or white, dark or light episode

free of hazy ambiguities and uncertainties. Singh wants so earnestly to believe that the

17 Frances Singh, “Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness”. (Norton, 1988), 271.

18 Singh, 271.

19 Singh, 280.

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world, or Conrad’s world, comes prepackaged and dichotomized that she misses the

novel’s nuances and she misinterpret’s whatever “colonialistic bias” Conrad might have

felt while writing the work. His bias does not concern race or ethnicity; it concerns his love

of order. Whatever facilitates the rise of order, Conrad favors, and whatever destroys it,

he despises. This is the principle that governs his treatment of race, and it is the one

dichotomy Singh fails to notice.

The excerpts Singh employs to support her argument do not contain even a trace of

racism, and if anything they come down in favor of the victimized race. Conrad

understands how the Europeans — historically, physically, psychologically — brutalized

the Africans, and he notes the comparison between conquering Romans and the modern

British.

They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind...The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses that ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.20

By depicting the modern British as analogs to the antique Romans, Conrad also connects

ancient Britain to present-day Africa. He does not suggest that the conquest is eternally

insuperable, that the Africans will never rise above their conquerors and become one day

as sovereign as the British. If Conrad believed, as Singh suggests, that Africans are little

more than “a species of superior hyena,”21 he would not have drawn the relation between

the Congo and his adopted land of England. Further, as important as what Singh includes

in her excerpt is what she leaves out. Marlowe continues, crucially,

20 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 10.

21 Singh, 273.

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What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to...22

Conrad paints colonialism as something founded on an idea, and on an obtainable

ideal. There is a correct way to colonize, but the British were misguided in this

instance, just as pagan religions could be off the mark in their interpretations of the

divine. Conrad’s religious tone is not accidental. Religion is order, visible, palpable

order, with a head figure and intermediaries and lay people who do the grunt work

and obey. It is not unlike the hegemony of a ship. Both must be “unselfish,” both

demand a near Buddhist self-negation to achieve a mission, both require strict

obedience to maintain the efficiency and the order, and both will inflict and undergo

pain tirelessly to obtain the idea. Colonialism is the new religion, the new order, of

Conrad’s Europe, and he worships at its altar because it is, like nearly all late-

Victorian developments, structured, scientific, and prepared for the modern age of

the twentieth century. Conrad as a self-conscious harbinger of the modern era had

to reject the ritualistic, chaotic behavior of the tribes, and he had to support the

scientific progress of his time. But at the same time, he was intelligent and

foresighted enough to reject brutal and “blind conquest” in the name of progress.

Singh’s argument that Conrad “believes [the blacks] should be suppressed” and

that his “sympathy for the oppressed blacks is only superficial”23 is nearly ludicrous

in light of Conrad’s obvious rejection of brutal, “selfish” tactics in dealing with the

Africans. He saw the opportunity to lift Africa from its darkness, to bring it to a

higher level of knowledge and culture. The spirit of rationalism that pervaded

Conrad’s era sought knowledge through rational discourse, not through eating a

22 Conrad, 10.

23 Singh, 272.

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wise man’s entrails, and when confronted with the horror and seeming chaos of

shrunken heads and cannibalism, no Westerner could at first feel anything but

disgust. But after the disgust subsides, and rationality returns, the Westerner

could determine a way to improve both the English and the African cultures. This is

the idea, the idea of mutual progress, that Conrad refers to through Marlowe. It is

by definition chaotic and inefficient to manipulate the order against itself and to be

“reckless...greedy...and cruel...with no moral purpose”24 like the Eldorado Exploring

Expedition and, implies Conrad, like Kurtz.

Kurtz, quite apparently, is selfish. He has used the

power the Order, the administration, gave him to seek his own

ends, to own his own ivory, to own everything. Conrad

describes Kurtz’s love of himself and his possessions.

You should have heard him say, “My ivory.” Oh yes, I heard him. “My intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my...” Everything belonged to him...Everything belonged to him. But that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, and how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.25

Having “taken a high seat with the devils of the land,” Kurtz rejected the order of the

trade organization and reduced himself by regressing to the primordial habits of natives,

and in so doing hurt himself and the Africans, whom he should have helped towards the

enlightenment of the twentieth century. The religion of efficiency and order has its

antithesis in men like Kurtz and the Eldorado people, not in the culture of the natives who

had no opportunity to learn the ways of European order. Conrad makes this clear in his

characterization of Kurtz who initially undergoes a near apotheosis in the minds of the

organization until he subverts it to his own selfish ends, whereupon Conrad relegates him

24 Conrad, 33.

25 Conrad, 49.

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to “a seat with the devils.” This judgment has nothing to do with race, as Singh would

have us believe; Conrad vilifies Kurtz because Kurtz embraces chaos and denies the Idea

behind it all, the Idea that redeems the process of colonizing, that keeps men from

behaving as brutes, that speeds and eases the coming of the modern era, and the Idea that

Kurtz, not the Africans, corrupts in Heart of Darkness.

Singh’s conclusion that Conrad’s “limitations” prevented him from writing “a story

that was meant to be a clear-cut attack on a vicious system” shows her to be guilty of the

same kind of inferred generalization with which she opens her essay. Conrad had no

reason to introduce a redeeming element of colonialism if he believed there were no

redeeming element, and had he felt the Africans were weak or lacking in spirit, the story

would not have ended with Kurtz surrendering to and dying under the weight of his

misinterpretation of the white man’s burden. There is little difference between Singh’s

assumption of what Conrad intended and the assumption that all readers will gain the

same idea from the fruit of that intention, yet she rests her argument on this notion,

despite sufficient textual evidence to the contrary.

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