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Adventures in Not Reading Heart of Darkness

Joseph Telegen

Author’s Note: Some things in this writing have been changed, though I am not concerned with protecting the innocent; after all, in three years as a graduate student in the humanities, I have been urged not to buy into concepts like guilt and innocence.

September 2007

I stopped reading Heart of Darkness. Again. I underlined in red ink the passage to which I would be offering a pithy, explicative response. With this passage, I would attempt to prove that Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” overstates the dehumanization of Africans in the book. I didn’t even stop to think about whether or not this analysis came from a place of conviction. I was once again zeroed in my principle concern, an A, and conviction had ceased to be factored in through force of habit.

I employed a bookmark. Not reading, instead reflecting on the essay to determine whether or not Conrad’s novel really was as racist as Achebe argues beckoned me for two reasons. Firstly, I knew the rewards of focusing on this essay, given its huge influence on the literary academic community. Such discussion would get me an A, acceptance into a doctoral program which, after graduating, would give me a solid 45% chance of landing a tenure-track job at age forty teaching the importance of Achebe’s essay to other students, continuing the cycle. Ironically, the capitalist in me knew the benefit of discussing an essay about dehumanization and exploitation. Oh, and at the time I believed this was the best way to get my father to approve of me.

I had to become something approvable to the legitimate scholarly world. Credible. I had to become a part of “The Conversation,” the only dialogue on Heart of Darkness that the academy would ever embrace me for joining. Also, Achebe’s essay, which made my Inner I-Like-the-Western-Cannon all kneejerky when I first read it, permanently altered the novel for me. I cannot, in fact, read the book without thinking of it. This essay looms over my experience of Heart of Darkness in the same way my father’s lack of approval haunts my life. Therefore Achebe’s comments became the sole concern of my writing. 

In the online scholarly forum, I sought the approval of others, trying my best to make them into temporary dad-substitutes. I granted partial acknowledgment of Achebe’s point, but then offered what I regarded as a clever contrary insight:  

 “I cannot accept the following: ‘The question is whether a novel which celebrates

 this, dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be

 called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.’ How many works of art

 would be ‘ungreated’ by this morality-based criterion?”

I commented cautiously, staying far away from arguing that one can judge a text’s greatness by more conventional means. “And whose morality?” I added, incorporating a “there is no universal truth” element which I thought would best impress those already in “The Conversation” reading (and grading) it. I wrote it all half-believing my own words, aware of the A they would bring if orchestrated well enough. I did not step on toes. I did not say anything I wanted to say.

I was moving farther and farther away from myself with every word. My professional life was not going the way I wanted it to. I was in no way a lover of the arts, but a phony embracer of past critiques. And I was doing it all because I was convinced I had no choice. Everything I wanted depended upon this compliance.

Where did I go wrong?

Fall Semester 2006

I have no trouble remembering when I first met the Achebe essay. I also have no difficulty recalling that it was during a semester when I never even bothered starting Heart of Darkness, even though it was required reading, this time for research methods.

I think every advanced student of English must survive the dreaded research methods course. That is to say that I think we all must take the course, and I think that if we all have a professor like Dr. Sheldon Pecker, we all dread it.

I thought of Pecker the same way I thought of my father, except he was my age. To explain, I’ve seen photos of my father from around the time I was born (few of which are of the two of us together) and Pecker looks just like him. His responses are foregone conclusions that turn your insights into useless pretense. A sampling of Pecker’s comments from the semester:

“You have to bear in mind that no one cares what you think at this point, and they won’t care until you know everything there is to know about guys like Foucault.”

“If you want to have any sort of success in this field, you have to pick a theoretical approach and stick with it. You have to know what everyone important in that field has said, and mention them every time you write. Experimentation is not a good idea in this type of writing.”

“You can be boring as a composition teacher and save your energy for your own work, that’s always an option.”

“Your paper idea isn’t very interesting, Joe. I don’t know what the payoff is.”

Like my father (as I knew him at the time), I wanted something from this guy that I knew damn well he would never give. It was not for him to like me or love me. I wanted him to be impressed by me. To think that I was someone whose insights were ultimately worth reading about at some point by someone like him. But I gave up pretty quickly. I learned the rules with which I would generate writing that he and my father would approve of:

Rule Number One: It is invalid to discuss what you think the author intended. The text, however, though inanimate, can intend something; you can write “the text intends…”

Rule Number Two: There is no objective, universal truth, even when it comes to something as basic as what may or may not be worth reading. It is, therefore, not a primary objective of literary scholarship to talk about what “makes a good book.” Any discussion of “quality” is ultimately a waste of time.

Rule Number Three: Define and qualify every literary term you employ in your writing. Mention every important scholar who has said anything about said literary term within the past twenty years (there are occasions, of course, when people who said something more than twenty years ago are also needed, but focus on the past twenty years, as most of the stuff said before that is now obsolete, outdated, and has nothing much to offer). It does not matter, by the way, if you actually read all or even most of the scholarship you discuss, as long as you are sure to mention it and avoid sounding ignorant. Ignorance is acceptable (and inevitable!), appearing ignorant is not.

Rule Number Four: For that matter, use as few literary terms as possible. That will allow you to avoid the definition and qualification process, which can sometimes take months.

The most important lesson, however, was my growing awareness of which writers were really important. (Pecker himself called them “The Gods”). Not Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Joyce, or whatever authors a reader might choose to enjoy the most. They are merely the canvass for intellectual play for Foucault, Althusser, Spivak, Derrida. I should add that my understanding of these figures is limited to what Pecker told me about them (and my recreational explorations, which often contradict what he said). I had no free time during the semester to read Heart of Darkness, let alone explore the work of Foucault in depth and try to understand it. I was too busy striving for an A: I spent a month trying to come up with a reliable definition of “Romanticism” and “The Unreliable Narrator,” only to have Pecker decide that no such definition existed, and that that should be the point of my paper: “There are no stable definitions of Romanticism and Unreliable Narration and Walter Scott’s Waverley demonstrates this nicely.” I went along with it, because, after all, that was where my A was. 

That class shredded me. I became convinced, briefly, that there was only one game I could play to get through to my father via professional success, the game of Becoming a Theoretically-Adept Scholar. Any hope of having anything of my own to offer was ludicrous. First of all, I was merely a product of my social environment, of pop culture, of lies my mother and history teachers told me. Second off, as I had “learned” from this scholar who so perfectly mirrored the way I saw my father, no one wanted to hear anything that I would say unless I connected it to the grand web of existing scholarship.

That my quest for paternal approval led me to a man I thought was so much like my father is odd enough; the odder belief that I could both be happy and get a pat on the back from dad at once as a literary academic stems from an earlier time, back when I still loved the arts without having to qualify every sentence I wrote about them. 

November 1999

My first encounter with Heart of Darkness, that is, the first time I failed to read it when I was supposed to, was back in my community college days. Before I worried obsessively about getting A’s because my father told me that focusing on school was a bad idea. He wanted me to get a full-time job to prove I could handle college, because, as we all know, the ability to work diligently at a video store is clearly connected to success in a university setting. I went to school then yearning nakedly for acknowledgment from dad. This was certainly not a time in my life where I read a whole lot. (As you can tell, I haven’t gotten over the version of my father that I had to deal with in those days).

Dr. Perry Cumbie, my Romantic-to-Modern British literature professor, changed a lot of that one day when he read aloud a passage from Heart of Darkness in class. I had not even looked at the novella; I was too busy trying to figure out how to put together a research paper, knowing nothing about how these things were done. My high school in Massachusetts had been a good one, but if you were in non-honors “College Prep” courses, you got out what you put in, especially in English. I got out that Julius Caesar is (unquestionably) a great play (not that it is the Shakespeare play they teach you because it is short and free of sexual content); that Death of a Salesman has something to do with being “well-liked;” and that Thoreau was into nature or something and that I was supposed to care that he was. And I learned that I could not write an essay. I was so bad at it, in fact, that my 12th grade English teacher took time out from explaining to the class that if women ran the world there would be no wars to pull me aside and tell me that I was getting a D- for the final semester, and even that was a gift.

Therefore, the paper for Cumbie was weighing heavily on my mind. I had read the Romantic poetry and liked it enough, but I was trying to put it together in my head when Cumbie read aloud. I cannot remember his choice of passage, nor can I find it when I dive back in for another selective non-read of Heart of Darkness to check, but I do remember the warmth pouring out of him. “Every man must choose his nightmare,” he began. “You, my students, have helped me find my way down the river, through my darkness.” Whether that really came from the virulently racist text of Heart of Darkness book by an author in the loathsomely-assembled Western Canon, I do not know. I cannot even remember what Dr. Cumbie looked like, let alone judge the validity of his textual analysis. All I remember is his smile, and his words, and his warmth. And that they all came from the book that “could not be great.”

That memory, as distant as it is for me, is why I started this whole thing. I wanted to use the world of literature to blaze my own path, to locate something I could believe in and help others believe in at the end of the day. From the damn book itself, not from a text that shows how that book proves how messed up the world is. That the most unbending version of my father I ever confronted would probably have to offer me a begrudging nod of respect or two was a big bonus on top of that. 

My first step was to write my paper for Cumbie. (Ironically, I decided to start there, rather than reading Heart of Darkness) In retrospect, the paper bordered upon incoherent. My argument was that the frequently institutionalized and impoverished Romantic poet John Clare was Bi-Polar and ADHD just like me. My evidence was little more than correspondences between the poet and his editor, who reminded me of my father, calling Clare’s work “little poems.” I added evidence that would doubtlessly be called “Pseudo-Evidence” by Dr. Pecker types, likening my own experiences to Clare’s, and discussing my own reactions to the poems.

There is a part of me that wants to regard the A I got on that paper from Dr. Cumbie as a gift, given that the paper was the work of a kid who had not fully shaken acute Bi-Polar disorder yet. Another part of me views that A as a curse, though. From then on, I was driven in school. A’s became a new form of emotional currency for me, another chance for dad to maybe care.

I cannot discuss my deterioration from the fresh and enthusiastic student of literature who wrote a paper on how John Clare was Bi-Polar to the cautious, calculating academic I am today without my ever-evolving perceptions of my father entering in. My newly found passion for literature was surpassed by the desire for an impossible pat-on-the-back from my father through finding the answers to questions about literature, only to learn that there are no answers anymore, because there is no truth.              

My Entire Childhood, 1977-1995:

I want to start discussing this section on my father by saying “he is not a bad man, I guess,” or “he was not a bad father…”  I recognize that I want to open this way because I am still scared of him, in spite of our improved recent relations. I am paranoid that when I show this essay to him, he will see this and point out (through lawyerly articulation and empirically correct analysis all) the various ways I’ve misjudged him over the years: He had integrity, he provided well for me, and he steered me down the path of right and wrong. He focused on that last one.

Once, after my mother and he had divorced, we were discussing my mother’s choice to attend a reform congregation. My father bemoaned the synagogue:

“Every time I sit in that congregation I feel a breeze on my head from where my

yarmulke should be! And the rabbi (the one who doesn’t play guitar like we’re in a

hippie commune) says ‘we now arise’ when he wants the congregation to stand!

You don’t ‘arise.’ You rise!”

(I’d pull up the words in a dictionary and disprove his argument, but I don’t believe in dictionaries anymore. Thanks Jacques).

He transferred the attack from one toward the Unworthy Temple to one about my mother’s lack of adherence to the world of propriety: “It’s just like your mother to like that place! She doesn’t care about what being Jewish really means! She always offers this stupid argument that ‘my way is just as good as your way’ whenever anyone points out to her that her way is just plain wrong!”

I tried my best to avoid being like my mother to him (he lamented our similarities constantly). Is it any wonder that I decided to try to find the “rights” and “wrongs” of literature as a means of proving my worth? That my quest for right and wrong has taken me to a place where I have to state my non-belief in a (universal) right and wrong in order to be validated with grades that prove that I am right about how there is no right and wrong is an epic irony.                       

October 2007

My father and I discussed modern developments in the literary academy when I came up to visit him. I told him about Achebe’s essay. His response was remarkable; he treated me as if I was Chinua Achebe. I never even had a chance to offer my criticisms of Achebe. To tell him I got an A for them. To make him proud.

And for once, it did not bother me. I have figured out that my problems with my father and with those I strive to please in my current academic situation have several things in common. My perspectives were never important to either of them; I could either spend the remainder of my life acquiring credentials and trying to prove myself to them both (and likely failing) or I could move on.

But I couldn’t. Not as long as I was a continuing embracer of the humanities. Facing the realities of the world, and my father, required my detachment.

My father and I have begun our reconciliation as I step back onto the field of the concrete. There’s a long way to go, a dark river yet to be forged.

With that, I am off to get another copy of Heart of Darkness. I will get one that does not include Achebe’s essay. My current copy has too many responses to other people’s responses to prior responses in the margins, too many red-inked attempts to be what I used to think my father wanted me to be.

Maybe I will finish it this time.        

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