Real Racism

Read Conrad's short story Karain: A Memory yesterday after completing my quota of marking for the day. It's the first time I've read it, and I made three or four false starts in the course of the week as I just couldn't tune in to the first page. The problem lay in the initial deliberate generalising behind the frame story, a feature of Conrad that can be irritating and endearing in roughly equal measures and accounts for the fact that rereading him is such a pleasure: the second time round you get the point of all you missed the first.

The fact that there's quite a bit of generalising about Malay culture added to the piquancy of the tale for me and got me thinking about Conrad and race in general. No, that's a bit misleading. I've been thinking about this since reading Heart of Darkness again since it's no longer possible to read the novella in the relatively innocent way I managed when a teenager. After all, if someone of the stature of Chinua Achebe tells you Conrad is a racist and you need to have that at the forefront of your mind when reading him, you'd better listen.

I'm afraid I've not managed to come to any deep conclusions on the matter. Pretty clearly Conrad is a racist in terms of seeing the racial divisions of humanity in what might be clumsily termed an essentialist manner - I mean, he obviously think that race counts big-time (as would have been pretty much inevitable for any man, or woman, of his time.). But does this somehow compromise or invalidate his work?

What struck me on my most recent reading of that fateful journey into the Congo was the determination of Marlow (or Conrad? - it's a typically tricky one) to make himself see the suffering humanity of the Africans encountered though fully aware that he sees them in a kind of distanced 'otherly' manner. (That's dreadfully expressed, but it will have to do for now.) It's not very pleasant or edifying, but then I don't think it's supposed to be. But it is very real and disturbing, necessarily so.