In the early nineteen-nineties, I attended a series of tumultuous classes at Columbia devoted to Joseph Conrad’s great novella, “Heart of Darkness.” The book was “problematic” then and is even more so now. Would classes like these still be possible? Born in 1857 in tsarist-dominated Ukraine to Polish parents, Joseph Conrad escaped to the sea and became an officer in the British merchant service, travelling on one ship or another all through Southeast Asia. In 1890, unable to get a seagoing command, he took a job as a river-steamboat first mate with a vicious Belgian trading company operating in Africa. For six months, he participated in King Leopold II’s plunder of the Congo. A few years later, in his third language, English, Conrad began publishing stories and novels. “Heart of Darkness,” his only novel set in Africa, published in 1899, is narrated by his philosophical alter ego, the British sea captain Marlow, who describes a voyage similar to the one the author himself had taken—upriver on the Congo, in this case in pursuit of the fictional European Mr. Kurtz, the company’s most successful ivory “trader.” The brilliant Kurtz has gone mad in the jungle, it seems, imposing himself as some sort of God over the Africans he steals from. Conrad created an incomparable portrait of colonialism’s moral squalor, in prose that is at once sensationally tactile and metaphorically intricate. The incandescent little novel (thirty-eight thousand words), with its structural complications, its pride and perversity, has long been regarded as a fountainhead of literary modernism. But Conrad also offered a nineteenth-century European’s view of African men and women as primitives, depicting them as exhausted from forced labor, waiting to die, or standing on the banks of the river, dancing, shouting, or living in various states of frenzy and despair. Conrad himself, some critics insist, was a racist caught up in imperialism, even as he contemptuously re-created and savaged it in the novel. In a much reprinted 1975 lecture, the distinguished Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe demanded that the book be removed from the curriculum. In anarticle forThe New Yorker, I quoted the accusations against “Heart of Darkness” but expressed doubt that the tale would be removed from reading lists. I may have been wrong. Conrad is still read in schools, but, according to Open Syllabus Explorer, which keeps track of reading lists posted online, “Heart of Darkness,” in 2018, was assigned seventy-five per cent fewer times than it was in 2001. When it is assigned now, it is often paired with Achebe’s 1958 novel, “Things Fall Apart,” a kind of counter-text chronicling colonial invasion from the point of view of a Nigerian village. This makes literary and moral sense, but it suggests that, increasingly, teachers of literature feel that the book cannot stand alone. The flood of Conrad scholarship and criticism that began after the Second World War, with the retreat of Europe’s overseas empires, has never ceased. Nowadays, academic writers venturing a fresh analysis often absolve themselves of any connection to Conrad’s improper attitudes, as if the scholar’s humanity would be compromised without such a disavowal. An absurd paradox has developed: scholars may debate Conrad endlessly, but undergraduates, many of them innocent of literature, are less and less likely to study his masterpiece. My article, from a generation ago, is about first-year students who passionately engaged with it. —David Denby | 
