“Heart of Darkness: a moral and aesthetic issue”

In his essay “An image of Africa: Racism in Conrad´s Heart of Darkness” Chinua Achebe says that Heart of Darkness is a “novel which celebrates the dehumanization of Africa and Africans; which depersonalizes a portion of the human race we cannot call it a work of art.” I do not agree with this idea because I don’t think any work of art should be judged in moral terms. I think that if we judge a novel in moral terms would be like trying to judge a criminal using laws such as the gravity law. The aim of this paper is not to defend Conrad´s racist ideas, which undoubtedly appear in the novel. They appear in some passages; the novel indeed contains contemptuous descriptions of black people. Not only that, black people in the novel most of the times are simply reduced to “limbs”, “bundles”, “black shapes crouching”, “ a mass of hands clapping”, etc. Here is an example of one these descriptions:
“Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat ...