Achebe on Conrad

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> You began the current thread by saying that you hoped the publishers would
> omit Achebe's essay from the preface to the text of _HoD_. Are you still of
> this opinion?

Yes. Again I think that other essays that take on the
issues, questions, problems, Achebe addressed should be
included. The Achebe essay is the ground breaker, it will 
no doubt be the source for more essays on HoD. Would be nice
to see a student essay in that new critical edition. Can a
work be a masterpiece even if it reflects the racist views
of the artist or the racist views and attitudes of the
audience of the day? Should we continue to read the great
works, to teach them to our students even when we know that
they are racist? What about Conrad's Nostromo? It is perhaps
an even stronger, certainly a more political, condemnation
of colonialism than HoD, but is it anti-Semitic? 
Is Nostromo an anti-Semitic masterpiece? 



Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
is "an anti-Semitic masterpiece." A play is not a novel or a
short story, so although we read Shakespeare today as we
read novels, it was written by a playwright for the stage.
We know very little about Shakespeare. I simply don't
believe that we can assume that he was or was not
anti-Semitic because he lived at the time and in the place
that he lived. What other evidence is there that Shakespeare
was anti-Semitic?  One might say, isn't the play enough
evidence?  I think if we consider the audience, the YOU of
Shakespeare's plays, and if we consider that a player or an
actor is not a reader as a reader of a novel is a reader, 
and if we perform the play as written, w/o cutting or adding
a word, w/o playing it as the play has been played for the
last 50 odd years, as a tragicomedy, but as a comedy with a
comic villain, we might see that the anti-Semitic elements
of the play, the conversion of Shylock and his daughter, the
pound a flesh story and the judgments concerning the
christian quality of mercy, are problematic. While I agree
with Bloom that Shylock is not the supposed challenge to
Barabas, Barabas being the supposed reflection of English
Renaissance  anti-Semitism, Shylock's conversion, the
"Comic" ending of the play, the hypocrisy, the faithlessness
of the lovers, the symbolism (musical and astrological) does
not let the audience off the hook with a clear conscience.
Shakespeare created the psychological audience trap. The
audience wants the villain to be converted, to suffer, but
it's by no means clear that the play allows this "christian"
ambition to be carried out w/o accounting for the sins
committed in the process.