Abstract
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. This motto from Pliny’s Natural History may be taken to mark the beginning of what, following the example of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’, Christopher L. Miller calls the ‘Africanist’ discourse of Europe. The word Africa, as Miller reminds us, was itself a European invention, acquired by the Romans from the Carthaginians, among whom it seems to have been merely an insignificant local place-name.1 With hindsight we can find a latent apocalypticism in the progression from Carthaginian place-name to the signifier of a Roman military triumph (Scipio Africanus) and then to Pliny’s proverb. It was not until 1899, however, that Conrad’s anthropological horror-comic brought into focus the apocalyptic geography inherent in the European idea of Africa. For our present purposes we might venture a rough translation of Ex Africa semper aliquid novi as, ‘There is always something new to be said about Heart of Darkness’ — or so it seems, since Heart of Darkness is by far the most over-interpreted literary text of the last hundred years.
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Notes
Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985) p. 5
Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (Oxford: Heinemann, 1988) pp. 1–13.
See Joseph Conrad, Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, ed. Zdzislaw Najder (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978).
Joseph Conrad, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’ in Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd edn (New York and London: Norton, 1988) pp. 143–7
Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) p. 51.
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (New York: Knopf, 1979) esp. pp. 10–21.
M. M. Mahood, The Colonial Encounter: A Reading of Six Novels (London: Collins, 1977) p. 14.
Rev. W. Holman Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo (London: Religious Tract Society, 1900) I, p. 396.
For this controversy see inter alia Craig Raine], ‘Conrad and Prejudice’, London Review of Books XI No. 12, 22 June 1989, pp. 16–18
Patrick Parrinder, London Review of Books XI no. 17, 14 September 1989, p. 4
W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Henryk Zins, Joseph Conrad and Africa (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1982) p. 109.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988) p. 173.
Tony Tanner, ‘“Gnawed Bones” and “Artless Tales” — Eating and Narrative in Conrad’, in Norman Sherry, ed., Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976) pp. 31–2.
See Colin Legum, Congo Disaster (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) p. 221.
Joseph Conrad, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, ed. Robert Kimbrough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 242.
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1889) p. 37.
For a reading of Morris’s News from Nowhere as a river romance, see Patrick Parrinder, ‘News from the Land of No News’, Foundation 51 (Spring 1991) pp. 29–37.
See Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980) p. 131.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965) p. 45.
Geoffrey Gorer, Africa Dances (London: Faber, 1935)
Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (London: Constable, 1923).
Frank Kermode surveys the ‘poet and dancer’ tradition in Chapter 4 of Romantic Image (London: Routledge, 1957).
Nadine Gordimer, ‘The Congo River’ in The Essential Gesture: Writing. Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (London: Penguin, 1989) p. 166.
On the relationship between anthropology and popular fiction at this period see Brian V. Street, The Savage in Literature: Representatiions of ‘Primitive’ Society in English Fiction 1858–1920, (London and Boston: Routledge, 1975).
Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches in the Development of Mythology. Philosophy. Religion, Language. Art, and Custom, 4th edn (London: Murray, 1903) I, pp. 501–2.
Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion abridged edn (London: Macmillan, 1957) II, p. 934.
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© 1992 Patrick Parrinder
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Parrinder, P. (1992). Heart of Darkness: Geography as Apocalypse. In: Fin de Siècle/Fin du Globe. Warwick Studies in the European Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22421-0_6
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