Of course this is a very controversial and polemical article which is bound to raise temperatures where people are being hypersensitive. Of all the boOf course this is a very controversial and polemical article which is bound to raise temperatures where people are being hypersensitive. Of all the books he could have felt roused by, I can't help wondering why Achebe singled out this one. I realize old attitudes are hurtful, and epithets oft-used by ignorant and bigoted people have become hateful slurs. In this regard, Achebe raises one very good example of a passage that is so incredibly arrogantly insulting that I cringed upon reading (and I do remember I cringed at it when reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness- I will have no choice but to amend my review of the novella), and it refers to ... I blush even writing this.... a dog in britches. I concede that, even if only for that passage alone, the novella should be condemned.
This does not mean that I'd give this essay my unreserved approval. Achebe himself seems to have a bee in his bonnet and he throws a few sullen insults himself which I felt was rather undeserved (see, two of us can be highly sensitive). One of the gripes I have is with Achebe's characterization of Western art having "completely run out of strength" around the previous turn of the century. Wow, I can only conclude that Achebe never viewed Western art.
The second little gripe I'd like to point out is regarding Marco Polo and Achebe's problem with the fact that Polo didn't seem over-awed by the Great Wall of China. Mr Achebe obviously didn't know much about this great Chinese landmark, namely that it was not even fully complete by the time that Marco Polo visited China, and not all of it is spectacular and awe-inspiring. It is awe-inspiring in its totality, of course, but not every single section of it is so or would have been so at the time that Polo might have passed through it.
I almost forgot the third gripe that also has to do with Marco Polo. Achebe infers that the Chinese used a printing press 100 years before Gutenberg designed his press, and that Marco Polo thus failed to bring this technology to Europe, but in actual fact, woodblock printing was quite common in Europe for many years before that even, and besides that, hand stencils, made by blowing pigment over a hand held against a wall, have been found in Asia and Europe dating from over 35,000 years ago, and later prehistoric dates in other continents. In fact, since those historic times, stencilling has been used as a historic painting technique on all kinds of materials. What the Chinese were using in about the time that Marco Polo was there, was indeed a kind of movable type which was an improvement on woodblock printing, and was to some extent similar to the printing press and may have influenced its development. I'm just wondering why Mr Achebe picks so much on poor old Marco Polo. Perhaps what Achebe is trying to point out is that Chinese technology and culture pre-dated that of Europe, and he might be trying to bring Western pride down a notch or two; but I don't see why it should be an issue - it's an obvious fact that Asia does have an older "settled" civilization, and they did have quite a few technologies that the West could learn from, there's no denying that, and I don't think anybody ever tried to deny it.
In any case, why should one person be representative of an entire race or body of people? I am sure Achebe himself dislikes stereotypes, so why is he stereotyping the whole of Western society as if it were a single, solid monolith?
....and why is he treating African society as a single solid monolith? Africa and African peoples have been intertwined with that of the Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean worlds since antiquity, and they were most definitely not always reviled. Mr Achebe is not from the Congo, (Heart of Darkness plays out in the Congo) and from what I could ascertain, he had never been to the Congo during his lifetime, although I do stand to be corrected on that.
So yes, I can definitely see merit in this essay simply by some of the atrocious passages out of Conrad's novella that he points out, they're certainly not very complimentary and some of it really is downright disgusting (even though I think he is over-reacting re some of them), but really, when you then detract from your argument by starting to sling mud in a general direction, the unfortunate result can be that that very mud-slinging can sully your own argument and degrade it into seeming petty....more
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