Joseph Conrad e V.S.

Naipaul in the post-colonial context

Introduction

Conrad’s role in post-colonial studies has been discussed and become ambiguous after Chinua
Achebe’s analysis of Heart of Darkness; he accused Conrad of supporting cultural imperialism and
racist theories. Consequently, Conrad’s impact and reminiscence on contemporary writers has been
questioned. V.S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian-British writer and Nobel Prize winner in 2010, has himself
declared his affinity with Conrad. To many post-colonial critics, this relationship has negative effects
in that the reference to the past confirms the previous cultural stereotypes on the colonized areas. On
the contrary, many critics conceives it as an act of revisionism and a productive communication. The
aim of the present essay is to reconsider Conrad’s influence, showing how the artistic interaction has
contributed to the development of those hybrid personalities of writers born after colonization, and
to give an account of it in the English literary tradition.

Key-concepts in post-colonial studies

Post -colonial studies is a term that indicates an academic discipline, which has been officialised as a
school of critical thinking in the last thirty years. This field of study has a non-mainstream identity, it
is called International Relations theories (IR) and aims to gather all the theories that critic the existing
mainstream IR theories, regarded as ideological and canonical discourse to serve the world empires.
The challenge is to offer an alternative to the pervasive imperialist model through a work of
introspection; to pursue this subversive intend post-colonial studies extend to a great variety of
disciplines like literature, philosophy, anthropology and history and deal with issues like slavery,
discrimination, racism, gender, nationality and identity. The concept of post- colonial is not easy to be
defined and it is strictly related to his historical background. In 1960, even after the achievement of
political independence from the Empire’s ex colonies, the process of colonialism was still active; the
colonial system went on with practices of exploitation, importing raw materials and selling high-
technology in turns; therefore, the economic liberation has meant for the poor countries an inability
to undergo the international markets. In contrast, anti-globalization movements like the World Trade
Organization aimed to denounce the exploitation. Between 1950 and 1960 start a phase of emigration
from the motherland to the metropoles, people were leaving mostly in the UK and USA, looking for
‘better fortune’. Most of the Western Indian writers became expatriates and themes like physical
isolation, slavery, displacement, emancipation, decolonization became central in their works. Bhabha
suggest the words ‘not quiet’ and ‘in between’ to describe the psychological position of the migrant
writers; according to him, this undefined status is due to the linguistic and cultural translation and the
migrant perceives it as an unresolvable problem of cultural difference. (Bhabha, 33). The writers, born
from the overlapping of East and West, could not perceive a sense of belonging to a one of the two
cultures; this situation has given rise to a third new ‘ethnicity’, in which the words ‘creolization’,
‘hybridity’ are key concepts. Examples are literary figures like C. L. R James, Samuel Selvon, George
Lamming, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott e V.S. Naipaul. Bertens defines the post-colonial literature as
the process and effects of cultural displacement and the ways in which the displaced culturally defend
himself. (Bertens, 200). The most important Post-colonial studies due today their relevance to a group
of intellectuals that in 1990 gave credit to the challenging critical thought of the non-mainstream
literature. Frantz Fanton has helped to fix a post- colonial account, inspired by post structuralist
thinkers as Michael Foucualt. Because of his experience as a psychiatrist he could analysed the effect
of colonialism and racism on the psychology of the humans; in The Wretched of the Heart (1961) he
writes: “The settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and
intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s value”; to Fanton, both the physical than mental
colonization process produce a condition of weakness in the colonized that cause a status of
subordination his; this status is what has lead, with the means of violence, to the victory of white
values and their supremacy in the economic and social context, then to a perpetual latency of violence
in the psychology of the black man. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952) Fanton states: “There is a fact:
White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove
to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect.”; to him,
black man suffers a complex of inferiority a form of self-division and behave differently toward white
people. The work of Edward Said has a fundamental role in post-colonial discourse; in 1977 he
published Orientalism. In describing the concept, he refers to it as a ““Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Orientalism is seen as the western conception of
the East, an “attitude of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European colonialism” which
aims to justify the empire’s colonial aspirations and has reinforce the relationship of hegemony and
power between Orient and Occident. Another key concept is that of Spivak, who coined the term
Other intending it as a dialectical process in which “the colonizing Other is established at the same
time as its colonized others are produced as subjects” (Ashcroft et all, 1998, pp. 171-172); the Other,
so intended, cannot speak because the discourse about the subaltern creates the subaltern itself and
puts it in a condition of historical and narratological silence. In 1980, a group of criticists like Ranajit
Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Gyanendra Pandey and Dipesh Chakrabarty found the Subaltern Studies
Group (SSG); they use the term subaltern to refers to all those cultures dominated and repressed by
a hegemonic power. Not only stories about the colonized are to be intended like post-colonial but also
stories of workers, women, peasants and all exploited classes. Chakrabarty has analysed the discourse
of power and explains how the role of Europe as the dominant subject has influenced the history: “the
dominance of Europe as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical
condition under which historical knowledge is produced in the third world.” The conception of the
term ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ literature, instead, has played a role the collective work of Bill
Ashcroft, Gareth Griffi ths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (1989) and Elleke Boehmer’s
Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction (1995). For Boehmer the prefix post is not to be intended as a concept
of temporary succession after the development of a certain ‘colonial literature’, but as a group of texts
“those, like King Solomon’s Mines or Kipling’s poems, which exhibit a tinge of local colonial colour, or
feature colonial motifs — for example, the quest beyond the frontiers of civilisation.”; he suggests to
limits the field of study on the British Empire and his expansion in the last four or five centuries. The
writers of The Empire Writes Back, on the contrary, conceive the term ‘post-colonial’ as referred to all
those groups of people subject to imperial expansion from the beginnings to nowadays, in that it had
controlled and direct the historical process. However, what is common to most critics and scholars is
the idea of a new literature that does not come from a Eurocentric ideology and perspective but from
the history of the colonized.

Conrad’s status in post-colonial criticism

The role of Joseph Conrad in post-colonial literature had come to ambiguity; his works based on his
first-hand African experience in Congo, like An Outpost of Progress and Heart of Darkness, have been
subject to a constant criticism. The interpretations can be summarized as follows: those who, like
Lionel Trilling and some contemporary scholars, see Conrad as a postcolonial writer and a critic of the
colonial expansion of Europe, who, through the rhetoric of the Empire itself, reveal the violence not
only physical but also psychological during King Leopold’s reign; and those, who support Chinua
Achebe’s rejection to put Conrad from the list of oppositional modernist movement. Achebe, during
the lecture at the University of Massachusetts, has accused Conrad to be a ‘bloody racist’1 who has
joined the racist ideology of Imperialism at that time. Achebe’s objection come from the idea that
African literature has had no place in literature; on the contrary, the role of prominence of European
literature means “the desire— one might indeed say the need —in Western psychology to set Africa
up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations”. From this impetus, Achebe starts a critical analysis of
Conrad’s African works: first, Conrad is ambiguous because he does not give names, language, point
of view or characterisation to the Africans; furthermore, the metaphor of Heart of Darkness as a
descent to a primitive state, ruled by the forces of nature (Marlow’s digression on the Roman conquest
of Britain), and still awakened in our subconscious, is offensive in that is intended as a regression of
the European civilized man to the evil of the uncivilized world. The considered passage is this:
I tried to break the spell — the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness — that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the
awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced,
had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fi res, the throb of drums, the drone of weird
incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations. (Conrad:110)

The reaction of Marlow at the sight of the Congo’s habitant is that of ‘the horror’; to Achebe, the use
if the words ‘monster’ and ‘monstrous’ in describing the natives point out a racial stereotype that
paints the Other as a dangerous pre-human creature. Moreover, the methodological and
narratological justification is rejected by Achebe; he does not consider the use of a technic of distant
of the narrator. On the contrary, he affirms that “Conrad seems to approve of Marlow. Marlow seems
to me to enjoy Conrad’s complete confidence — a feeling reinforced by the close similarities between
their two careers.”. A different perspective come from Lionel Trilling, who conceives Conrad as a
precursor of the oppositional modernist movement together with Marx, Freud e Nietzsche. To Trilling,
Marlow’s gradual distancing from the European moral and the consequent fall of illusions on colonial
enterprises are showed up by his reaction to Kurtz’s attempt to escape the boat (and therefore the
civilization) and return to the natives. According to Trilling the account expresses a feeling of hostility
towards the culture, that is the primary element of the modernist attitude. This cultural separation is
seen as the result of a split in European consciousness between soul and mind. What is underlined is
the fact that Marlow, the more we get at the end of story, seems to critic positively the behaviour of
the natives, even to the point of hearing a signal of message in the native drums; Marlow feels to “to
have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated
savagery was a positive relief, being something that had a right to exist—obviously—in the sunshine.”.
Indeed, many contemporary scholars classify Heart of Darkness as the first post-colonial work and see
Conrad as one of the few European who travel to Congo in that time, making a first-hand experience
of civilization effects; to them, his description of the brutality and absurdity of colonizer’s actions
represent one of the first record and severe critic of colonialism in Africa. As Philips has noted Achebe
is in some way disparaging of Conrad’s vision because he does not consider that, in the account on
the encounter between European and African humanity, the disturbing effect is given by the trace of
humanity behind those ‘ugly’ people2:
The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there
you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you
know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and
leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the
thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man

1
Achebe used the expression “bloody racist” in the first version of the paper which he presented at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in February 1975 (“An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness”).
2
Trilling, Lionel, ed. “On The Teaching of Modern Literature” in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and
Learning, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of
that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — and you so remote from the night of first ages —
could comprehend. (Conrad:58)

Furthermore, he explains that the critics who defend Conrad see Marlow as a second figure who is
simply retelling a story; Achebe mistakes in considering Marlow as the point of view of Conrad because
he does not consider the impressionistic and narratological style of the book.

Conrad’s reminiscence in V.S. Naipaul

The influence of Conrad remains pervasive on contemporary world literature; many writers of the
“Third World” origin had been in a constant dialogue with Conrad’s reminiscence and consequently
with the dilemmas related to its interpretation. As Conrad, V.S. Naipaul is one the most controversial
and discussed contemporary writers also because of his deep relationship with the historical and social
context of the world after colonization; he has written about travelogues and fictions in the Caribbean,
India, Africa and Near East countries. Naipaul was born in 1932 and he belonged to an Asian Indian
minority located in black-dominated Trinidad, where he experienced the result of the imperial
domination. Because of the cultural and social conditions, he had to expatriate in Britain. The affinity
with Conrad comes at first from their sharing the same first-hand experience of being expatriate; then,
he became a central point also in his inner travel’s understanding. In 1970, in an essay entitled
Conrad’s Darkness he writes:
Conrad’s value to me is that he is someone who sixty or seventy years ago meditated on my world, a world I recognize even
today. I feel this about no other writer of the century. His achievement derives from the honesty which is part of his difficulty,
that “scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations.

By affirming that, Naipaul is doing a temporal annihilation. He identifies the post-colonial societies as
“the half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made” that Conrad has described in
Heart of Darkness or Nostromo. During his journey in 1975, Naipaul discovers that the landscapes “has
not changed since Conrad’s Days” and “the journey- one thousand miles between green, flat, almost
unchanging country- is still a journey through nothingness”. Moreover, he thinks that today, the
Africans and the African dictators have become copies of Kurtz, who once copied Africans. The
attitude, to represent always the same ‘Conradian landscape’, expands throughout all Naipaul’s
works. The book An Area of Darkness, written in 1962, is an account of his first arrival in India, land of
his grandparents; to him, India has always been “an area of imagination”, deeply connected to his
childhood. In India, he is not victim of racial discrimination like he used to be in Trinidad or London;
however, he starts to feel a sense of anxiety in being “sink without a trace into the Indian crowd”. The
story goes on with a sense of humiliation and frustration caused by the discovery that the India of his
imagination is filled with corruption, passivity and decay, in human manners first, because of the
process of imitation of American and European civilization that he calls ‘mimicry’. His feeling of being
“faceless” catches him in a need for a “recognition for the difference”. He tries to find it in assuming
the identity of a “traveller” rather than that of an ‘Indian’. In this way, he finds himself in a two-
perspective point: he can be both an outside observer and an internal to the society. This dual stance
position helps him to ‘learn to see’; what he could see was the lost of authentic culture in India’s
tradition. To a narratological level, he can move from the third-person objectivity to the subjective
and autobiographical “I”. To be a good observer, one must learn to turn back on a place and take
another flight; when he returns to London ho reveals: “it was only now, as my experience of India
defined itself more properly against my own homelessness, that I saw how close in the past year I had
been to the total Indian negation.” It has been noted, that Naipaul’s self-imposed detachment from
the society is a reverse image of Marlow’s recognition of a “remote kinship with this wild and
passionate uproar”; his attempt to find something familiar in the unfamiliar is in contrast with
Naipaul’s discovery of the unfamiliar in the familiar. 3 In Conrad’s Darkness Naipaul explores his literary
origin to the moment when he met Conrad as the first modernist writer, he interprets the scene from
Heart of Darkness in which Marlow discovers and old book, a manual for sea navigation. The
particularity of the book were the added notes at the extremity of the page, made by a Russian youth
who owned it. Naipaul is deeply touched, as Marlow, by the “singleness of intention” and his “honest
concern for the right way of going to work” of the book, because it reminds him of the way Conrad
has guided and inspired his work. Sara Suleri in Naipaul’s Arrival conceives this relationship as the
expression of a strategic act of revisionism. The Russian youth comes to be a mediator between
Marlow and Kurtz and emblem of the post-colonial writer who wants to give an alternative in
describing the darkness through a re-reading of the original text. In 1979 V.S. Naipaul published A
Bend in the River, inspired by his journeys to Zaire. The title is a quotation from Heart of Darkness and
the novel is modelled on it. It is an internal and physical journey into the heart of Africa, where
personal exile and political corruption take place; the protagonist, Salim, take on a journey through
an unnamed river in an undefined country, like Marlow. What he faces is a nation ruled by violence
and decadence. Annoyed with the passivity of the community of East Africa, to which he belongs, he
decides to open a store in a small town at a bend in the river. However, he soon realizes that there
are no possibilities to live in a country where the achievement of independence has reversed into
chaos and conflict:
It was outrageous. Prosper knew it was outrageous. In the old days five dollars was considered pretty good; and even during
the boom you could get many things done for twenty-five dollar. Things had changed since the insurrection, of course, and
had become very bad with the radicalization. Everyone had become money greedy and desperate. There was this feeling of
everything running down very fast, of great chaos coming; and some people could behave as though money had already lost
its value. But even so, officials like Prosper had only recently begun to talk in hundreds.

The country is under the demagogy of Big Man, who still spread dictatorship and violence under the
appearance of a liberation aim. He embodies the stereotypes of the recurring Kurtz that the ‘history’
has created. Naipaul’s narrative reminds of the Conrad’s attitude in the description of the hellish
darkness of African and of African people, who do not know how to live their life properly because of
their ‘lost’ history and the subsequently obliteration of their traditions after the colonization. Like in
Conrad, there is no a detailed characterisation of Africans. Anyway, despite the recurring allusions to
Heart of Darkness, there is a semantic difference; contrary to the black and white representation of
Conrad, Naipaul takes distance from the implications of the great chaos of the new world. In the last
chapter, Salim leaves the shop and take a flight to from the ‘impenetrable darkness’ to the ‘white
light’: “The steamer started up again and moved without lights down the river, away from the area of
battle. (..) The searchlight, while it was on, had shown thousands, white in the white lights.” The
Conradian movement, instead, moves to darkness, to ‘the horror’. Naipaul’s quest is toward the light,
the clarity, in such a way he can reveal the truth of a post-colonial country, where Eurocentric ideology
and the corrupted regime of the new Independent Congo dominate. He focuses on the responsibility
of European intellectuals to have misled the idea of African’s history to a standard portrait, but Naipaul
offers also an ambivalent vision; according to him, Africans tend to a failure of character which led
them to repeat the dynamics of the past and to be subject to anarchy.4 This, and the omission of
historical details in the text, like Western violent repression of independent movements, have resulted
in accuses of improving racist theories, as happened to Conrad. Critics as Rob Nixon has called it
“Conradian atavism’, that means a tendency of the writer to propose in the twentieth-century the
same narratives and themes of Conrad, producing a negative effect. However, as Said has pointed out

3
Cf. Asako Nakai, “Journey to the Heart of Darkness: Naipaul’s Conradian atavism reconsidered”, Joseph
Conrad Society UK, No.2, (Autumn 1998):9. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20874134?read-
now=1&seq=11#page_scan_tab_contents.
4
Dejan Andjelkovic, Darkness with a difference: Conrad and Naipaul’s Africa, Academia.eu, 12,
https://www.academia.edu/31579024/Darkness_with_a_difference_Conrad_and_Naipaul.
out, contemporary novelists, who have learned (Conrad’s) ironies so well, have done their work after
colonization and the deconstruction of Western representation of the non-western world:
Western imperialism and Third World nationalism feed off each other, but even at their worst they are neither monolithic
nor deterministic. Besides culture is not monolithic either, and is not the exclusive property of East or West, nor of some
groups of men or women. (Said: xxvii)

To many critics, that means that Naipaul is showing the struggle for identity in the post-colonial
situation; the result is a hybrid personality made up of the overlapping of West and Orient civilizations.
Naipaul’s view is that of an apolitical neutrality, which derives from a cosmopolitan conception of a
“universal civilization” and an objective sense of reality. They do not see the Naipaul-Conrad
relationship as a dangerous act of revisionism of the past, rather as an original communication
between past and present, in which colonial and post-colonial are not temporarily separated but
overlapped and still in a co-existence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Achebe, Chinua, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness., In P. B. Armstrong Joseph
Conrad: Heart of Darkness, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, New York and
London: Routledge, 1998.
Bertens, Hans, Literary Theory: The Basics, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013.
Bhabha, Homi K., The Location Of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995.
Caryl Phillips, “Out of Africa”. The Guardian, February 22, 2003. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, N.J:
Princeton University Press, 2000.
Conrad, Joseph, and D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Heart of Darkness, Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 1999.
Fanton, Frantz, The Wretched Of The Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Fanton, Frantz, and Charles Lam Markmann, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Naipaul, V.S., An Area of Darkness, London: Deutsch, 1964.
Naipaul, V.S., A Bend in the River, London: Deutsch, 1979.
Naipaul, V.S., A Congo Diary, Los Angeles: Sylvester & Orrphanos, 1980.
Naipaul, V.S., “Conrad’s darkness and mine” in Literary Occasions. Essays, New York: Vintage Books,
2003.
Nakai, Asako, “Journey to the Heart of Darkness: Naipaul’s Conradian atavism reconsidered”, Joseph
Conrad Society UK, No.2, (Autumn 1998):9. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20874134?read-
now=1&seq=11#page_scan_tab_contents.
Nixon, Rob, “Preparations for travel: Naipaul’s Conradian Atavism.” In London Calling: V.S. Naipaul
Post-colonial Mandarin, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Said, Edward W., Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House,1993.
Suleri, Sara, “Naipaul’s Arrival” in The Rhetoric of English India, India: Penguin Books, 2005.
Trilling, Lionel, ed. “On The Teaching of Modern Literature” in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature
and Learning, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.