LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Midterm 2003

Ashley Salter
LITR 5734
Summer 2003

Intertextuality of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature:

Conrad, Achebe, and Walcott

When I signed up for this course, I was aware of its structure pairing colonial texts with postcolonial texts and reading the two in dialogue.  However, I was completely unfamiliar with the area of postcolonial studies, and I failed to realize how interconnected those pairs of texts could be.  Certainly I expected Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart to offer different perspectives on Africa which could then be compared.  I didn’t anticipate the actual relatedness of the texts, the intertextuality.  After this term was introduced in class discussion, I looked it up in a literary encyclopedia.  I learned that it was introduced in the 1960s “to express the idea that every new literary text is an intersection of texts – that it has absorbed and transformed previous works and that it will be absorbed and transformed by future texts.” 

In terms of the course, intertextuality occurs when Achebe and Walcott reference, react to, or exhibit familiarity with the works of Conrad and other European authors.  Intertextuality, as evidenced in Things Fall Apart and Walcott’s poetry, can take at least two forms – deliberate, specific references to previous texts and similarity of themes and subject matter.  Analysis of these connections reveals some reasons for studying colonial and postcolonial texts in tandem.  First, I’ll point out some examples of intertextuality in works by Conrad, Achebe, and Walcott.  Then I’ll offer two reasons for studying these connections.

One deliberate intertextual reference is prominently displayed on the title page of Achebe’s novel.  Things fall apart in Okonkwo’s life, and the life of his village is disrupted by the arrival of missionaries and other colonists.  But Achebe’s title expresses what befalls the people of Umuofia using a line from the “The Second Coming” by British poet W. B. Yeats:

            “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

            Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

Walcott also weaves references to colonial works into his writing.  “Koenig of the River” contains two passages which invoke Heart of Darkness.  Walcott compares Koenig first to a character from Conrad’s novel then to the novel itself.  Poling down the river, trying to remember the Biblical directive which brought him to this land he’s in, Koenig feels

“ . . . like a man stumbling

from the pages of a novel, not a forest,

written a hundred years ago.  .  .

If I am a character named Koenig, then I

shall dominate my future like a fiction

in which there is a real river and real sky.” 

In his semi-delirious state, Koenig seems to decide he resembles Marlow.  Later, describing the native man’s reaction to Koenig’s irrational questions about the Kaiser and Queen, the narrator compares him to the novel:

“Koenig felt that he himself was being read

like the newspaper or a hundred-year-old novel.”

“Koenig” comes from a collection of Walcott’s poetry published in 1979.  Heart of Darkness was first published in 1899.  The dates are not a perfect fit, But I believe Koenig’s “hundred-year-old novel” is indeed Heart of Darkness.  One hundred years simply sounds more poetic, more mythic, than eighty.  Another of Walcott’s poems, “Jean Rhys,” refers to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as well as the 1966 postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea.  The above are examples of intertextual references found in postcolonial poetry and fiction.  The course also includes another type of postcolonial response to imperialism.

Achebe pursues intertextuality through critical discourse as well as creative.  In his article “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” he argues that Heart of Darkness is a platform for Conrad’s racism and should not be accepted as a staple of the literary canon.  Achebe’s stance illustrates the description of postcolonial cultural studies given in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.  Postcolonial, according to this volume’s editors, describes writing and reading that occurs outside of Europe but is rooted in the colonial experience and is “a consequence of European expansion and exploitation of ‘other’ worlds.”  Postcolonial writing responds to – and challenges – colonial writing, as Achebe challenges Heart of Darkness in his article.  Postcolonial texts “write back to correct or undo Western hegemony.”  They strive to alter the dominance of European thinking about and representations of colonization.  The “Racism” article specifically strives to undo the “reflex action” among Western readers of dismissing or explaining away the racism Achebe finds to be inherent in Conrad’s portrayal of Africans. 

Achebe’s article is a good example of what I chose to call deliberate intertextuality – of an author consciously, intentionally, specifically responding to an earlier text.  Many of the connections between colonial and postcolonial works, however, are located on a different plane of analysis.  Students of postcolonial texts find connections embedded in recurrences of subject matter and theme.  Both colonial and postcolonial texts endeavor to record, comment on, and make sense of the experience of colonization, of imperialism.  Writers such as Achebe and Walcott grapple with some of the same questions that Conrad did.  They may challenge or vary the colonial approach, but they explore the same ideas. 

One intertextual theme concerns colonial introduction of mechanical or industrial items into natural, almost paradisiacal, worlds.  Conrad subtly develops the thematic conflict between nature and industry.  The ravine where Marlow sees the dying Africans is “a scar in the hillside.”  When he relates the trip upriver, Marlow describes the steamboat as a grimy, sluggish beetle creeping among massive trees.  Walcott is far more direct with his depiction of industry intruding on the natural environment.  In a poem from the collection Midsummer, “an early pelican coasts, with its engine off” and the sea becomes corrugated sheets of zinc soldered by the sun.

Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart exhibit intertextuality when they draw from common subject matter.  For example, both Conrad and Achebe explore the roles of Christianity and capitalism in colonization.  Conrad focuses his narrative on these twin motivations for imperialism through a conversation between Marlow and his aunt.  The aunt envisions Marlow on his trip to Africa as “one of the Workers, with a capital you know.  Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle.”  Marlow, in contrast, reminds her “the company [is] run for profit.”  For Achebe, religion and profit are also linked.  When Okonkwo returns to Umuofia, he finds the presence of missionaries has changed his village.  The narrator explains that not everyone objects to the changes as strongly as Okonkwo does:

“The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuofia.

“And even in the matter of religion there was a growing feeling that there might be something vaguely akin to method in the overwhelming madness.”

When read in conjunction, Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart suggest the topics of Christianity and capitalism are intertwined and inevitable material for colonial and postcolonial authors.

The intertextual insights I’ve summarized hint at two more encompassing reasons for reading such texts in dialogue.  First, creating a dialogue – studying the intertextuality – demands that readers reevaluate commonplace interpretations of colonial masterworks.  In his article about Conrad, Achebe mentions a standard critical interpretation of Heart of Darkness that explains away what he considers the author’s racism.  This reading contends “that Conrad is not so much concerned with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness . . . [he uses] Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as a human factor.”  Postcolonial texts, including Achebe’s novel and article, put Africans back in the African story and make us question Conrad’s intentions.  Highly esteemed works like Heart of Darkness benefit from being scrutinized and interrogated occasionally.  It sharpens critical thinking and interpretation of the texts.

Second, we become acquainted with the lesser known voices of world literature when we read the postcolonial as well as the colonial texts.  It’s no accident of academia that I’ve been asked to read Heart of Darkness three times, but I had never heard of Chinua Achebe until three months ago.  I’m not sure I can adequately explain why this is so, but I’m fairly certain it involves a discussion of the literary canon.  Scholars and educators rely (with good reason) on a body of masterworks generally acknowledged as the best literature has to offer.  Unfortunately, minority and third-world voices aren’t fully represented in the canon.  When Achebe alludes to Yeats and responds to Conrad he is placing himself in the midst of canonical discussions.  By dialoguing with established texts, he’s asserting the literary value of his own work.  He’s actively practicing intertextuality – absorbing and transforming previous works while aligning himself for future absorption and transformation.  When we read colonial and postcolonial texts in tandem, we help move deserving postcolonial authors along in this intertextual loop.