One of the abominations of our day,

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1 Political Correctness and the Attack on Great Literature Hugh Mercer Curtler One of the abominations of our day, and there are many, is the beast of political correctness that has been turned loose on the world. Born of genuine humanitarian impulses, it now threatens to devour much of what is greatest in our literature and forever separate the children of our culture from what is essential to their humanity. Rather than fight the beast in its full fury for it has grown large and powerful indeed I shall snipe at it from the bushes and hope to wound it seriously, leaving the coup-de-grâce for another time and, perhaps, another writer. Thus I shall focus on Chinua Achebe s libel against Joseph Conrad s novella, Heart of Darkness, as set forth in an article entitled An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad s Heart of Darkness, which first appeared in Though weak and inconclusive, if not somewhat hysterical, Achebe s essay is widely anthologized and generally embraced by the initiated as Holy Writ. HUGH MERCER CURTLER is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Southwest Minnesota State University and recently published his eleventh book, Provoking Thought, with Florida Academic Press. Dr. Curtler is a frequent contributor to Modern Age. Hence it is important and a worthy place to target the beast of political correctness even after so many years have passed since the essay first appeared. I have examined Achebe s charges in detail elsewhere, so I will not repeat my arguments here. 2 I shall merely summarize Achebe s main point, show how he has blundered, and, using this as a case in point, move on to argue against the trend to sift brilliant literature through the narrow, constricting sieve of political correctness. Achebe does not know how to read a novel, to state the obvious. Of greater import is the consideration that he has a great deal of company in his determination to bring to the novel ideological preconceptions and a not-so-hidden political agenda. In contrast, Eliseo Vivas and other so-called New Critics have been displaced by structuralist, deconstructionist, feminist, black feminist, Marxist, Freudian, and New Historicist critics, all of whom seem, like Achebe, to have reached predetermined conclusions before they sit down to read a novel. The maxim of New Criticism was to open one s mind, to listen carefully to what the novelist has to say, and such a thing Achebe, among many others, seems constitutionally unable to do; 272

2 SUMMER/FALL 2009 like the tone-deaf listening to a symphony, they cannot hear the notes that are being played. Vivas revealed in his own writings on the subject a respect for what the author said that amounted to reverence: no one held the novelist in higher esteem or listened more closely to every subtle change of key or pitch. Such an approach seems imperative for a full appreciation of a great work of art, and a great piece of literature is, above all else, a work of art. In order to grasp what Joseph Conrad has to say, we must read the novella carefully and be certain at the outset (as Achebe is not) that we separate Conrad the man from Conrad the novelist. Vivas has shown in meticulous detail that this distinction must be made because the shadowy forms in the mind of the person who decides to write a novel are altered by the creative process and, as Conrad would have it, the apparitions change into living flesh, the shimmering mists take shape. 3 The author and the person who decided to write the novel in the first place (the poet and the man as Vivas calls them, respectively) are not to be confused with one another: the man who writes the novel may have a notion of what he wants the novel to be, but the poet takes over and the end product, in the case of works of art, comes as a surprise. Having separated the two, we must then be careful not to confuse Conrad the novelist, in this case, with his narrator, Charlie Marlow. Achebe makes none of these distinctions, and this is where he makes his first mistake. He begins his attack against Conrad (the man, not the novelist, and not Marlow) by calling him a bloody racist. He then goes on to say that the question is whether a novel which celebrates the dehumanization of Africans, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.... I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called into question. It seems to me totally inconceivable that great art or even good art could possibly reside in such unwholesome surroundings. 4 We are to infer, I take it, that such a book should be kept away from impressionable young readers, presumably condemning it to some sort of politically correct dust bin of progress, amongst all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of civilization, as Conrad would have said. And there s the rub! To begin with, it is impossible to say whether Conrad is or is not a racist, especially if we do not begin with the distinctions of persons mentioned above. Conrad s novella certainly does not promote racism or celebrate what Achebe calls the dehumanization of black people. It does not shout aloud in a crowded room or call us to arms against a race of our fellows, although Marlow (not Conrad) certainly uses the term nigger with reckless abandon. To be sure, the careless use of this term has become ugly to us of late, as well it should; but this was not so in Conrad s day, and it was even used by Conrad in the title of one of his more famous books, a book in which the whites are drawn to, not repelled by, the central character, who is black. However that may be, the usage of such an offensive term more than one hundred years ago does not make the user, much less the 273

3 MODERN AGE author who is merely trying to portray the user, racist. The key here is that neither Marlow nor Conrad the novelist is urging his listeners or readers to share a hatred of black people that Achebe would have us think Conrad the man exhibits in his tale. In fact, if one reads the novella with any discernment whatever, one sees that the black people tower over the whites, who are characterized throughout as mean and greedy phantoms who have invaded Africa with a fl abby, pretending, weakeyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. In the text, the word nigger appears un-self-consciously, as it would if used by a merchant seaman at the turn of the last century. It may indeed mark the speaker as a racist, as judged by today s standards, but that hardly warrants the broader conclusion that the speaker s creator is also a racist, much less the even broader conclusion that the novella itself is racist, whatever that might mean. The narrator (who may or may not be Marlow) also uses the term savage with great regularity, another term that is no longer permitted behind the forbidding walls of political correctness even though the characterization of certain human and not-so-human types, black and white, requires it. Additionally, he uses the term progress to describe what is going on in Africa at the time in such a way that the word takes on a pejorative meaning as the tale nears its end in much the way the phrase honorable men does as Mark Antony nears the end of his funeral oration for Julius Caesar. This is important because it gives us an insight into the character s true feelings about what he witnessed. In each case, readers must not simply note the words the author uses, loaded though they are with emotive meaning; they must also pay close attention to the way the author uses the words in the context of the work itself. Anyone who attentively reads a writer who chooses his words as carefully as Joseph Conrad must be sensitive to every subtle nuance of meaning, because only then can we determine what he has in fact said and not what we presume he has said. And what Conrad has to say is certainly of timely interest. Heart of Darkness presents us with an intriguing parallel. Just as Kurtz, who traveled to Africa with lofty ideas, as reflected in his report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs (seventeen pages of close writing), falls prey to sombre pride, ruthless power, [and to] craven terror and presides at certain midnight dances ending with unspoken rites... offered up to him, and in the end goes mad; so also, the idea of civilizing a continent, bringing Christianity and education to the native people, degenerates into a wild scramble for wealth and power as men go mad with greed. The novella presents this parallel in poetic terms for our consideration; I would suggest a further parallel, no less fascinating, and applicable to the topic at hand. Without question, we must respect the sensibilities of the victims of persecution and applaud the efforts of those who continue to draw our attention to the many who suffer. But a compelling moral idea, awakening our conscience to the plight of the disadvantaged, seems to have gone terribly wrong, degenerating into the bleak reality of censorship and hostile repression in an atmosphere choked with righteous indignation and a grotesque sense of moral superiority. In each instance, Conrad would have us locate the root of this decay in our lack of restraint in the case of the self-destructive Kurtz, Western Europe s attempts to colonize Africa, and, we might suppose, the efforts of the well-meaning adherents of political correctness to raise awareness. Clearly, in Joseph Conrad, we are dealing with a profound thinker who, as an art- 274

4 SUMMER/FALL 2009 ist, chooses to convey his thoughts to our imagination in a manner that both delights and disturbs. We must, therefore, be careful when we suggest that such a writer be disallowed the use of terms that most closely express ideas and images central to the tale he is telling. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the legitimate concerns of the purveyors of political correctness have run amok and threaten to replace the open and free discussion of ideas in the pursuit of truth with constricted dialogue and suffocating censorship. Imagine, if you can, a world ruled by the bullyboys of political correctness, a world that is denuded of any word that might possibly aggrieve, a world in which a passage such as the following, from one of Conrad s early novels, is disallowed because it might offend the blind a supposition which is not as far-fetched as it seems at first glance: The islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of their people are soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some protecting spell. Powerful and affective though this description may be, Achebe would have us scrutinize it carefully, looking for concealed offenses. Any number of times in his calumny, Achebe criticizes Conrad s descriptions when they, he frets, pretend to record scenes, incidents, and their impact [while] in reality [Conrad] is engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery. 5 While keeping one eye open for the possibility of a slippery slope in my argument, I must nonetheless wonder where the line is to be drawn in telling a great writer what he may or may not say. How is one to know if and when what he writes might offend someone? We must resist vehemently the temptation to dictate to a stylist of Conrad s caliber what tools he may or may not employ in his craft. That way lies a smothering silence and the abandonment of poetic inspiration altogether. And, in the end, we all pay the price. An artist of Conrad s stature knows much better than we which words will work and which will not. Words such as nigger and savage, together with unsettling descriptions of primitive customs and disturbing accounts of the land from which the very memory of motion had forever parted, are essential to the subtle nuances of this extraordinary tale, even if they upset a careless reader. Taken in context, they must be allowed. Alongside captivating descriptions such as these, buried meanings and unsuspected ironies abound in great literature which is, at its core, rife with ambiguities, open to any number of plausible interpretations. These ambiguities stamp the novel as a poem, a work of art. Indeed, as suggested above, in Conrad s novella the tensions between the idea behind the colonization of Africa, the civilizing of primitive peoples, and the reality that Marlow sees with his own eyes (and which Conrad himself saw and was repulsed by) are central to the fundamental tensions and uncertainties that lie at the heart of the story. Great literature does not preach though Achebe would have Conrad deliver sermons that have been given his blessing. Great literature is not necessarily nice; it provokes thought and destroys preconceptions. It stirs the mud of our prejudices and forces us to reconsider and reflect, and it does so in a language that stings and delights and exhibits for us the human imagination at full stretch. Certainly Joseph Conrad s 275

5 MODERN AGE novels do this as they rise to a level of art approaching music on nearly every page. At the same time, they force us to see ourselves as we really are, stripped of our pretense and self-importance. Marlow may well have been a racist. So are most of us. It is an ugly fact, but it is a fact nonetheless. And Conrad forces us to see that we, too, have a heart of darkness. Literature is not philosophy; it does not speak discursively in tightly wound arguments and cogent syllogisms. But there is profound truth in great literature, and we will lose sight of that truth if we insist that it be measured in the graduated cylinders of a philosophical essay or a sermon about man s inhumanity to man. Truth in literature comes in the form of insight and the sudden intuitions that take us deeper into the human soul and present us with a world previously unseen. And there is considerable truth in Heart of Darkness beginning with the uncertainty about whether the savages are black or white. It is truly sad that Achebe cannot see this. Politically correct critics such as Achebe would have us screen all literature to weed out offensive material. They would have us scrutinize Dostoevsky, Trollope, and Dickens for anti-semitic sentiments, despise Homer and Shakespeare because they are sexist, or Conrad because he is racist. This sort of censorship reveals a fascist mentality that is inadmissible in today s intellectual elite, and it would almost certainly, if carried out, result in the death of great literature, which may be fl awed by the presence of these elements, but which is great despite its fl aws. To see this more clearly, let us consider the possibility that Marlow not Conrad is not only, perhaps, a racist but also a sexist. What if this were true? What difference would it make to readers of the novel who take it seriously, and who read it with the respect it deserves? If the novel depicts a character who happens to be racist or sexist, but if it nonetheless maintains high standards of literary excellence, then as long as that novel is not promoting bias in some cunning way, I do not see how the novel itself can be pilloried as Achebe pillories Heart of Darkness. In fact, since great literature is fundamentally ambiguous at its core, it has no one message; it has many. As Conrad himself has said, as a work of art, the novel is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character.... All the greatest creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth, and in beauty. 6 Whether or not we take Conrad s word for it, a case cannot be made against Conrad s novella as anything less than great on the grounds that it exhibits racist elements. Let us consider the presumed charge of sexist elements in the work. Early in the novel, Marlow is telling his listeners aboard the Nellie about his aunt in Belgium. He muses about her and about women in general, saying, They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living confidently with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over. Now this comment certainly appears to be stereotypical, and the feminists among us are sure to object some louder than others. However, generalizations must not always be mistaken for stereotypes, though they may indeed suggest a stereotype. A ste- 276

6 SUMMER/FALL 2009 reotype is a careless or offhand remark that is deemed offensive or demeaning to the person or persons described; it is a generalization that seems to allow of no exceptions in the mind of the person putting it forward. In literature, such stereotypes may interfere with the reader s ability to engage the story aesthetically as determined from the nature of the remark itself, within the context of the novel, and not because of the extreme sensitivity of the reader. The Marlowe of Conrad s novel Chance seems, in this regard, to be making offensive, sexist remarks about women throughout the work. The narrator s comments are numerous, seeming to suggest a fixed mindset on the part of Marlowe; many of them would understandably be regarded as offensive by most women, and they suggest generalizations that allow of no exceptions in the mind of the speaker. We might, then, conclude that Marlowe, in that novel, is sexist and his prejudice fl aws the novel as a work of art. However, this point could be contested, even in the case of Chance, as Marlowe s remarks may simply be telling the reader something important from the perspective of the novelist about the main character. The point is moot, and in any case the argument for Marlowe s supposed sexism cannot be made in the case of Heart of Darkness. Consider: Marlow is saying that women, in his experience, are idealistic, and he suggests that such is a good thing. He returns to the notion later in the novella when he tells the group that we must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Given that Marlow has learned firsthand how awful the world of men can be, and given that this is the late Victorian period when women raised the children and, together with the Church, instilled in them whatever moral precepts might later mold their character, this seems to be a fairly innocuous comment, and not without historical interest if not altogether central to the novel. But, as it happens, the notion Marlow is developing is central to the novel, which ends with Marlow s visiting Kurtz s intended to return some letters that Kurtz had left in his keeping before he died. The intended is described as beautiful, but also characterized as delusional, lost in an idealized world filled with images of the Kurtz she thought she knew that stand in stark contrast to the Kurtz that Marlow has come to know close-up. The woman is somehow pathetic, and Marlow could be charged with patronizing her in lying about Kurtz, pretending that in the end he called out her name. But it is important to Marlow that she be allowed to hold on to that world, because, we recall, the idea of bringing civilization to the natives in Africa is the only thing that lends any coherence whatever to Marlow s tottering world; and one suspects that Marlow has come to see that this idea, too, is delusional. The world of ideas and moral precepts, represented by the intended, must somehow be protected against the erosion of a brutal and violent reality. Not only is this idea symbolized in the intended, but Marlow provides another, powerful image in the magnificent black woman who stands proud and majestic on the bank of the river as the men around her flee from the piercing sounds of the river boat s horn. Achebe completely misses the significance of this scene, as he criticizes Conrad for making the black woman a mere savage counterpart to the beautiful white woman at the end of the novella. She is anything but a mere device; she is powerful and grand, and, like the only other woman in the tale, she represents stability in a world of chaos. And she is black. That would appear to be an important point in a novel that has been dismissed as racist. Thus, even if we agree that there are racist or sexist elements in the work, it 277

7 MODERN AGE would nonetheless stand as a powerful expression of the poetic imagination. As great literature it does not promote any particular point of view, Achebe s claims to the contrary notwithstanding. It places before us a wild and confl icting array of viewpoints that amaze and confound. That is the strength of great literature novels, as Conrad would have it which the Muses should love and the reason that novels such as Heart of Darkness should be saved from the fires of derision set by the custodians of our sensibilities. In the end, the best defense against the censorious attempts of thinkers like Achebe is to let the authors speak for themselves. Teach the young to read and pay close attention to what great novelists have to say. Achebe claims that Conrad had a problem with niggers in his own account of his first encounter with black people. This is a personal attack against Conrad the man, as in his essay Achebe draws on a number of biographical anecdotes to prove his point playing the role of amateur psychiatrist in the process. But, as was said above, Conrad the man must not be confused with Conrad the novelist. The novelist s imagination reworks the material digested by the man and, in obedience to the rules of his craft and sensitive to the demands of poetic honesty, writes a novel that was only dimly projected by the man at the outset. Thus, contra Achebe, Conrad the novelist, speaking through Marlow, describes his first encounter with native people in rather glowing terms: Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see them from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies steamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, and wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was natural and true as the surf along the coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. To be sure, there are defamatory elements in this description such as the allusion to the glistening eyeballs and the grotesque masks but, bearing in mind that Conrad is a stickler for details, the passage exults in these energetic people and fosters positive emotions in the reader. The black fellows are not terrifying; they are a great comfort to look at. So also with many of the descriptions Marlow provides in his encounter with native people such as the extraordinary black mistress of Kurtz and most especially, as Marlow notes with approval, the cannibals, who show remarkable restraint in the face of extreme hunger, restraint being precisely the virtue lacking in Kurtz and Western Europe. If one reads what Conrad writes in this novella, then, it is impossible to defend the claim that the writer himself is racist. It is not even clear that Marlow is, though I have conceded that point because it does not make Achebe s case. It is certainly not possible to maintain the claim that this is a racist novel, although, again, one never quite knows what that might mean. Thus, despite its flaws, Heart of Darkness should still be read because it is beautifully written and because we have so much to learn from it. Some years ago I visited the office of a colleague of mine who taught undergraduate courses in psychology. On her bulletin board a portrait of Sigmund Freud was prominently displayed with a red circle and a line through it. I asked her, somewhat facetiously, what it meant and she explained to me, indignantly, that she detested Freud (the man?) and refused to 278

8 SUMMER/FALL 2009 assign Freud s writings to her students because they were demeaning to women. Imagine! Throwing out the entire body of works of one of the greatest minds of the last century because he said some things that are upsetting to women with no regard as to whether or not some of what he had to say might be true and enlightening. Here we have, on a grand scale, the commission of the fallacy of composition in a way that penalizes the students who major in that field of study, a field that might not even exist if it had not been for Sigmund Freud! This anecdote illustrates the danger of politically correct censorship. Writers and thinkers who do not toe the line are to be ignored and cast out. The criteria of acceptance are not to be aesthetic (it is denied that there are such), nor are they even to be considerations of historical importance; the criteria of acceptance are to be political and ideological. The claim is made that these criteria have always been employed, and the time has come to get them right. But that is a moot point, and, if I am correct in my view of the nature of great literature, at any rate that it does not promote any particular point of view but remains suspended among diverse and often confl icting points of view then, surely, postmodern theorists who insist upon diversity should promote and not reject works such as Heart of Darkness. Despite our technological prowess and it is phenomenal we have precious little 1 See An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad s Heart of Darkness, in Chants of Saints: A Gathering of Afro- American Literature, Art and Scholarship, ed. Michael S. Harper & Robert B. Stepto (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979), See Hugh Mercer Curtler, Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness, Conradiana 29, No. 1 (1997), A letter of Conrad to his aunt, April 1894, in The Portable Conrad, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York: Penguin Books, wisdom. The evidence suggests, further, that we live in an intellectually regressive age in which students in our colleges and universities try in vain to express themselves with hand gestures, repetitious sentence fragments, and shrunken vocabularies; they struggle with perfectly ordinary texts, unable to decipher what the words they read can possibly mean; upon graduating from college, an alarming number of them cannot calculate the tip in a restaurant or understand an editorial in their local newspaper. Since the inception of free schools in the middle of the nineteenth century, literacy in this country has declined alarmingly. 7 If the commissars of culture, who now seem to be in control, saddle these young people with the even heavier burden of lists of forbidden words and toss on the dung heap piles of literature that would certainly improve their minds, given the skill and the effort to read them carefully, we can look forward with certainty to future generations of mindless barbarians who will stare at their computers stupidly, waiting for the next command. These are not pleasant thoughts, but unpleasant thoughts must be entertained and somehow worked through if we are to reverse the present trend. And how better to do that than to have our young people read the greatest literature humankind has produced even if it should display elements deemed offensive to some among us? 1976), 730. See also Eliseo Vivas, Dostoevsky, Poet in Spite of Himself, The Southern Review 10 (1974), An Image of Africa, 319, Ibid., Conrad to Barrett H. Clark, May 4, 1918, in The Portable Conrad, See Richard Sheldon, Separating School and State (Fairfax, VA: Future of Freedom Foundation, 1994), 38. For compelling evidence that intelligence literacy is falling off generally in the United States, see Jane M. Healy, Endangered Minds (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). 279