THE PLACE OF CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

Abstract

Abstract: his paper deals with the reception of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. The novella gains in importance in two respects: one, it introduces a path-breaking modern narrative trend; two, it creates a stir in the postcolonial literary domain. It succeeds in attracting notice both in terms of form and content; the former, by experimenting a novel mode of metanarrative in modern stylistics; and the latter, by prompting a controversy in the postcolonial literary arena. This paper zeroes in on the latter - the postcolonial dispute the novella has spawned. It highlights the controversy triggered off by Chinua Achebe’s seminal rebuke of Conrad as a ‘thoroughgoing racist’ in the wake of the wide acclaim the novella has supposedly received from the Euro-centric world. Achebe comes up with the critique upfront to question and denigrate the supposedly famous work in the eyes of the West. Cedric Watts has his own reasons to put checks on Achebe, and attempts to make the pungent comment blunt by showing the remarkable side of the novella. This paper limits its area of focus to Conrad, Achebe and Cedric Watts given the fact of the enormity of criticisms the work has so far attracted from a gamut of critics of various range around the world. The single intent that governs the article is to assess the increasingly significant reception of the novella in the backdrop of the criticisms the two aforementioned major critics of Conrad have come up with. The chief objective, in that sense, is to see whose argument outweighs the other in the evaluation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in furthering the reception. Achebe famously points up the schema supposedly laid out in the novella which makes use of tricky language that potentially generates pitfalls in the process of meaning-making to ultimately signify the reversal of what Conrad purports to build on. Cedric Watts comes to explain what Conrad is in fact doing. Thus, this paper succinctly provides a balance sheet based on the arguments each of them carry forward and what each has really contributed to the domain of Postcolonial knowledge production It will also endeavor to elucidate the significance of the novel over the course of the argument.