Contrapuntal Histories

Abstract

In the opening pages of Joseph Conrad’s colonialist novella, Heart of Darkness , the notoriously unreliable Marlow raises the ghost of early Britain. In his musings, time converges on images of light and darkness: “we live in the flicker,” Marlow opines, in a moment when “light came out of the river” “a flash of lightening in the clouds.” In this collision of time and darkness, Britain flashes as an ancient island already colonized at its very heart. Marlow’s fantasy of dark and light is also a fantasy of the fragility of his putatively “civilized” present. An ancient, insular precivilized “savagery” beckons as, in the evocative words of Chinua Achebe, “an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of first beginnings” (252). 1 Roman Britain thus haunts Heart of Darkness , suspended throughout the story in the space bounded by two rivers, the Thames and the Congo. Achebe has read the collocation of these two rivers for Conrad’s anxiety about “a lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry” between Europe and Africa, interpreting the famous epistemological instability of Conrad’s story as itself an effort to disavow threatening commonalties. In Achebe’s reading, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness manages colonialist anxieties of savage sameness by ascribing the difference of Africa to Europe through a story about time. Displacing Britain’s “savage” days to the distant past before Rome, Conrad manages boundaries between a modern Europe as “home” and primitive Africa as “away.” These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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