american-holocaust

250 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTeration Barbarossa, the furious invasion of the Soviet Union that killedmore than three million Soviet troops during just the first three months offighting, while Conrad had condemned all European imperialism, and especiallythe exploitation of Africa, as "the vilest scramble for loot that everdisfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration."8 But just as Hitler had nothing but scorn and hatred for altruisticbehavior (brutality, he liked to say, was the sole basis for whatever advanceshumans had achieved), so Conrad was filled with a more genteelcontempt for human promise. Thus, the day after reading a life of SaintTeresa, he wrote to his close friend Cunninghame Graham:The mysteries of the universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do notconcern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perishfrom cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes anunendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for theattained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. 9It would be of small consequence what Joseph Conrad thought aboutsuch matters if he were not generally considered, in Albert J. Guerard'swords, "the most philosophical and, as a psychologist, the most complexof English novelists," and the author of two of "the half-dozen greatestshort novels in the English language." 10 One of those short novels, theone for which Conrad is most famous-and which "is today perhaps themost commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses inEnglish departments of American universities" as it is "read by practicallyevery freshman as an introduction to great fiction"-is Heart of Darkness.11There exist few, if any, superior fictional portrayals of the ChristianWest's obsession with the immersion of the self in its own alleged vileness,or of Christian culture's irresistible attraction to and simultaneous terrorin the face of savagery and wilderness and wildness and the dark. As inthe didactic stories of the early Christian hermits, who wandered in thebarren desert and tormented themselves with everyday reminders of thedisgusting filth that lurked within their bodies and their souls, Heart ofDarkness is an exploration of the bleak and ghastly horror that much ofWestern thought has long believed resides in the core of every person aswell as in the savage wilds beyond the far horizon. What has been remarkedupon too little by Western readers of this work, however, is howinfused it is with the malignancy of Conrad's own racist vision. Indeed, itis telling that after what shortly will be a century of critical praise forHeart of Darkness, it took Chinua Achebe-a distinguished Nigerian novelistand man of letters-to demonstrate most clearly that while "Conradsaw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation [he] was strangely