Abstract
Just as Joseph Conrad had earlier supplied the dominant images of Africa in the European imagination, in the 1960s Graham Greene performed the same dubious service for Haiti in the Western imagination. The puritanical crusader immersed in sensual darkness; the unspeakable kingdom of the night; a static, timeless world of absence — these durable and influential images establish an imaginative quarantine around Africa and Haiti in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Greene’s The Comedians (1966). There is no American equivalent to Greene’s novel about Haiti, no work that has spawned so many different versions, rewritings or interpretations of itself. American attitudes to Haiti from the 1960s onwards are marked by the singular influence of The Comedians and its debt to Conrad’s earlier imaginative fixing of Africa. Christopher Miller’s comment on the significance of Heart of Darkness as the beginning of a special tradition of ‘Africanist discourse’ is pertinent.
We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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Notes
G. Greene, Journey Without Maps (London: Heinemann, 1953) p. 8.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) p. 196.
F. Huxley, The Invisibles (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1960) p. 9.
G. Greene, The Comedians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) pp. 5–6.
J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) p. 24.
D. Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) pp. 117–18.
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Diederich and Burt, Papa Doc (New York: Avon Books, 1970) p. 296.
Robert Heinl, Written in Blood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978) p. 456.
R. Rotberg, Haiti: the Politics of Squalor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971) p. 146.
A. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972) p. 40.
H. L. Gates, Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984) p. 305.
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Avon, 1978) p. 72.
M. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation (London: Tavistock, 1982) p. 78.
J.-C. Charles, de si jolies petites plages (Paris: Stock, 1982).
J.-C. Charles, Le Corps Noir (Paris: Hachette, 1980) p. 193.
J. Jonassaint, Le pouvoir des mots, les maux du pouvoir (Montreal: Arcantere et Derives, 1986) p. 258.
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M.-T. Colimon, Le Chant des Sirènes (Port-au-Prince: Ed. du Soleil, 1979) p. 34.
F. Etienne, Les Affres d’un Défi (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1979) pp. 1–2.
M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 24.
R. Depestre, Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1967) p. 11.
J.-C. Charles, Le corps noir (Paris: Hachette, 1980) pp. 32–3.
J.-C. Charles, Sainte dérive des cochons (Montreal: Nouvelle Optique, 1977) p. 20.
J.-C. Charles, De si jolies petites plages (Paris: Stock, 1982) p. 89.
Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) pp. 41–2.
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© 1997 J. Michael Dash
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Dash, J.M. (1997). The Art of Darkness: Writing in the Duvalier Years. In: Haiti and the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25219-0_5
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