The Plurality of Interpretation, Reims, March 10-11, 2006
The subject of the conference is the interpretation of
literary texts.
Our starting point will be the realization that we will never reach the
final
meaning of a given text. Across centuries and cultures, all texts
produce a
plurality of readings. What (theoretical and/or pedagogical)
consequences can
we derive from this fact? If we admit that there is no truth in reading
and no
universal metalanguage, we can ask ourselves whether there are errors
in
interpretation. We can also ask ourselves why we choose one
interpretation
rather than another. Can we make explicit the procedures and values at
work
when we develop an interpretation? Is reading discovering or inventing
a
meaning or should we say that we produce models, grafts, possibilities
of life?
Papers (in French or in English) will analyze a minimum of two
interpretations
of a literary text belonging to literature written in English.
Constructing
and Deconstructing Racism in Conrad
***
Bent
Sørensen,
In 1975
Nigerian novelist and critic,
Chinua Achebe, launched a scathing attack on Joseph Conrad’s short
novel Heart of Darkness, and the practice of
teaching this work as part of the literary canon. Achebe’s attack was
motivated
by what he saw as the blatantly racist content of Conrad’s novel, and
the
extension of this racism into the classroom, mediated by non-critical
teaching
of the book as a great work of literature. Achebe’s interpretation of Heart of Darkness as racist sparked off
many responses, some of which defended Conrad’s novel, some of which
supported
Achebe’s viewpoint, and some which further situated it in a larger
postcolonial
framework
and a battle over the narrowness of the literary canon.
In retrospect it
is clear that Achebe’s interpretation was motivated by his own cultural
situation
as an expatriate academic, working in a prejudiced and narrow-minded
environment. This is made clear by the personal anecdote with which his
lecture
commenced, recounting a, one would suppose, typical patriarchally and
colonially patronising response to Achebe’s field of teaching and
research. The
desire for recognition of both his field of study, his own artistic
practice,
and his cultural heritage seems to have further fuelled the attack and
exacerbated its tone. Thus Achebe elects to construct Conrad’s novel as
a key
text in producing racist responses to African academics, authors and
human
beings in general.
This
interpretation may seem grossly exaggerated when the novel is read from
another
cultural perspective, such as that of a white European academic, where
Conrad
may in fact appear to be critical of colonial practices and condemning
of the
corruption which colonial exploitation has on the soul of even
well-meaning
colonial agents such as the characters Marlowe and Kurtz in Conrad’s
fiction.
Especially if one notices the distance between the implied author
stance of
Conrad and the ideologies of his narrators, Achebe’s attack seems
reductionist
in the extreme, and not based on sound textual analysis.
The case of
Achebe’s attack on Heart of Darkness,
thus highlights the issues of the colloquium on plurality of
interpretation,
offering to teach us lessons about the cultural situatedness of all
interpretation, but also of what we regard as sound interpretation practices in the
academic
profession. Is the political motivation behind
Achebe’s
programme of reading sufficient validation for a case of interpretative
malpractice? Should we indeed abandon all absolute standards of
interpretation,
if none of them are ultimately above political agendas? Consider this
argument:
The deconstruction of racism in Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness might never have commenced if Achebe had not
constructed the
case for racism in the book in the first place – thus his poor textual
analysis still sensitises us to otherwise hidden tensions of racial
representation in the book, and thus empowers us to address them in new
ways,
as early postcolonial readings of Conrad, such as those of Frances
Singh and
C.P.
Sarvan who both built new interpretations out of a strong criticism of
Achebe’s reading, show.