Recent literary theory has had many harsh critics, and I was once one of the harshest. Perhaps in spite of myself, however, literary theory has profoundly changed the way I teach.
Since the mid-1960’s, I have frequently taught Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. When I first assigned the novella in 1966 or 1967, I taught it in much the way that it had been taught to me in college in the late 1950’s, as a profound meditation on a universal moral theme. I presented Conrad’s story of the destruction of the idealistic trader Mr. Kurtz as a universal parable of the precarious status of civilized reason in a world too confident it has outgrown the seductions of the primitive and the irrational.
Recent literary theory teaches us that what we don’t see enables and limits what we do see. My reading of Heart of Darkness as a universal parable of reason and unreason allowed me to see certain things in the novel that I still think are important. But it also depended on my not seeing certain things or not treating them as worth thinking about.
Of little interest to me, for example, was the fact that Conrad sets the novella in the Congo in the high period of European colonialism or that he chooses subjugated black Africans to represent the primitive, irrational forces that are Kurtz’s undoing. That Conrad chose black Africa to represent primitive impulse was, I thought, incidental to his main intention, which was to make a statement about the human condition that transcends mere matters of geography and race.
It did not occur to me that black readers of the work might not have the luxury of dismissing the question of race so easily, and the small number of black students in my classes at that time helped guarantee that the question never came up. Political issues like the subjugation of black Africans might interest historians, sociologists, and political scientists, but in teaching literature such issues were at best of ancillary interest.
Today I teach Heart of Darkness very differently. One critical work that caused me to change was an essay by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Mr. Achebe argues that Conrad’s presentation of black Africa is thoroughly racist. And he is able to accumulate an uncomfortable number of quotations from the novel and from Conrad’s letters and diaries that make it painfully clear how cruelly stereotyped Conrad’s thinking about the black African is.
Mr. Achebe argues that Conrad reduces Africa to a mere “setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor” and directs all our attention instead to the tragedy of the white imperialist Kurtz. As Mr. Achebe puts it, “Can no one see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind?”
The real issue, Mr. Achebe says, “is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans. ... And the question is whether a novel which celebrates that dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.”
After reading Mr. Achebe’s essay, I could not teach Heart of Darkness as I did before. It was not that he convinced me that Heart of Darkness is totally racist -- in fact, he didn’t. What he did convince me of was that Conrad’s assumptions about race are not simply an extraneous or non-literary element of the novel, but something that the novel’s literary and aesthetic effect depends upon. In this sense, Conrad’s novel is not a disinterested work of art but a text that has played an active role in constructing the Western image of black Africa and in justifying the West’s political and economic treatment of black Africa.
In short, Mr. Achebe’s essay forced me to rethink my theoretical assumptions about literature. First, I was forced to recognize that I had theoretical assumptions. I had previously thought I was simply teaching the truth about Heart of Darkness, “the text itself.” I now had to recognize that I had been teaching an interpretation of the text, and one that was shaped by a certain theory that told me what was and wasn’t worth noticing and emphasizing in my classroom. I had been unable to see this theory as a theory because I was living so comfortably inside it.
When I assign Heart of Darkness to undergraduates now, I also assign the Achebe essay. I don’t, however, simply teach his interpretation as correct; I ask my students to weigh it against competing interpretations. Nor do I simply discard my former reading of the novel as a contemplation of universal truths about the human soul. I assign another critical essay that advances that interpretation. I also assign essays by critics who take issue with Mr. Achebe, conceding that he is right about Conrad’s racism and colonialism but arguing -- and I agree with them -- that he overlooks the powerful critique of racism and colonialism that coexists in the novel with these more sinister attitudes.
After reading Conrad we read Mr. Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart. When you come to this novel after reading his essay on Conrad, it is hard to avoid reading it -- and the very different view of Africa it presents -- as an answer to Conrad. It is as if the Nigerian writer were attempting to wrest the power to represent Africa away from the great European, testifying again to the way aesthetic representations are involved in struggles for power.
Finally, I supplement those materials with several short essays presenting opposing sides in the debate over the place or non-place of politics in art. I also invite conservative colleagues into my class to debate the issues with me and my students. To make sure that my students enter the debate rather than watch passively from the sidelines, I usually assign a paper or ask them to present their own positions in class.
In short, I now teach Heart of Darkness as part of a critical debate about how to read it, which in turn is part of a larger theoretical debate about how politics and power affect the way we read literature. With such an approach I think I am following the dominant trend in contemporary theory, which is not to reduce literary works to transparent expressions of ideology. That is the impression that has been given by critics, whose hostility to current theory exceeds their willingness to read it.
The most influential recent theories say that literature is a scene of contradictions that cannot be subsumed under any “totalizing” system or ideology. The only critic of literary theory I know who gets this right is Frederick Crews, professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. In an essay called “The Strange Fate of William Faulkner,” in the March 7, 1991, issue of The New York Review of Books, Mr. Crews accurately summarizes recent theorists as saying “that literature is a site of struggle whose primary conflicts, both intrapsychic and social, deserve to be brought to light rather than homogenized into notions of fixed authorial `values.”’ Mr. Crews presents a model of what a scrupulous critique of current theory should look like: He shows how at its worst this kind of theory simply replaces the cliches and predictable readings of earlier critical schools with a new set of cliches and predictable readings, but how at its best it has revitalized fields such as the study of William Faulkner’s work.
What, then, has theory wrought for my own teaching of literature? Teaching Heart of Darkness as I now do does constitute a “politicized” way of teaching, for it puts ideological conflicts at the center of literary works and of the conflicts over interpretation. Yet contrary to the charge that such an approach lowers academic standards, introducing ideological conflicts seems to me to have made my course more challenging, not less. Theory seems to have raised the academic standards of my course considerably; my students now have to be more reflective about their assumptions than before, and they must take part in a set of complex debates that I previously hadn’t expected them to.
Students don’t seem to feel that the interpretive and theoretical debate distracts them from close reading of literature itself. On the contrary, I believe that the debate over the critiques of Mr. Achebe and others forces them to pay closer attention to the verbal and stylistic texture of Heart of Darkness than they would otherwise. Theory is not something added on, to talk about if there’s time left over after you’ve finished teaching the work itself; it is a reflection on what is being assumed while you teach the work.
Nor has any student complained that reading Conrad alongside a non-Western writer “dilutes” the Western tradition, as so many conservatives charge. On the contrary, students have told me they felt Mr. Achebe’s novel gave them a better grasp of Conrad’s “Westernness,” since they had something to compare it with.
I believe that all sides are being political in the dispute over literature, theory, and other educational issues today; the neo-conservatives’ pretense that it is only their opponents who are acting politically is pure hypocrisy. The real question we should be addressing is not who is being political but whose politics are better -- better grounded in truth and justice.
For it does not follow that once you say that a statement is “political” or “ideological,” you have undermined its truth. What I have been arguing here is deeply political but no less true for that fact. Nor does it follow that raising political issues and taking positions on them in class mean forcing my students to conform.
I believe the way to turn what is now an ugly scene of anger and recrimination into a useful and productive debate is to bring our present disagreements into our classrooms. The way to protect students from intimidation by dogmatists of the left, the right, and the center is to expose them to the debates among these factions. We are already implicitly teaching these conflicts every time a student goes from one course or department to another; we should start doing it in a way that enables students to experience and enter the debate.
I recognize how difficult this can be when there is so much hatred and acrimony in the air, but the hatred and acrimony seem to me all the more reason for channeling the debate into the orderly forums of the classroom.
Gerald Graff is professor of English at the University of Chicago. This article is adapted from a speech at a meeting of the National Association of Scholars.
