Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction

  Some of the most interesting interpretive possibilities for the story, in fact, are based on the assumption that the young captain’s intense identification with his alter ego may render his judgment, and perhaps even his veracity, suspect. Indeed, the confidence with which he claims that he understands the circumstances of the killing and how to interpret them (based solely on Leggatt’s own exculpatory version of the events) is remarkable for the uncritical frame of mind it discloses: “I knew well enough... that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more” (p. 161). And when the captain of the ship on which the killing has occurred comes aboard and tells his version of the story, the narrator dismisses it by asserting that “[i]t is not worth while to record that version” (p. 173). Thus, the sole opportunity we have to hear a potential counternarrative to Leggatt’s account is suppressed. At the beginning of the tale the narrator describes himself as having been both “a stranger to the ship [and] ... a stranger to myself” (p. 155), and the circumstances with which he is subsequently faced will resolve precisely into a conflict between his professional duties to his ship and his moral duties to his conscience. Yet even though he has violated his professional code by sheltering a fugitive from justice and willfully endangered his crew, the story nonetheless concludes with his idealized vision of himself as experiencing “the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command” and of Leggatt as “a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny” (p. 193). That is, he appears to believe he has reconciled the seemingly contradictory exigencies with which he has been faced. Whether we concur that this judgment is sound or believe his representation of the events to be, either consciously or unconsciously, self-serving is an open matter. Indeed, much of the story’s artistry inheres in its tantalizing capacity for generating interpretations that differ from that offered by the narrator-captain.

  Heart of Darkness

  Heart of Darkness (1899) is one of the most broadly influential works in the history of British literature. The novella’s diverse attributes—its rich symbolism, intricate plotting, evocative prose, penetrating psychological insights, broad allusiveness, moral significance, metaphysical suggestiveness—have earned for it the admiration of literary scholars and critics, high school and college teachers, and general readers alike. Further, its impact can be gauged not only by the frequency with which it is read, taught, and written about, but also by its cultural fertility. It has heavily influenced works ranging from T. S. Eliot’s landmark poem The Waste Land (1922), the manuscript of which has as its original epigraph a passage from the book that concludes with the last words of Conrad’s anti-hero Kurtz, to Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), which updates the tale to the years shortly before and after independence, when the Belgian Congo became the nation that is known today as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nor has its artistic influence been limited to literature; to cite only the most famous instance, it served as the basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), which transposes the story, in both place and time, to Vietnam and Cambodia during the American-Vietnamese War and recasts Kurtz as a renegade American colonel. Its various homages aside, in its original form Heart of Darkness has for several generations influenced the literary and moral outlook of innumerable readers. Yet while the text is widely recognized as an indictment of the greed, and ruthlessness that generally drove European imperialism in Africa, most readers are unfamiliar with the fact that the setting is the event in imperial history so uniquely horrific in its sheer scale of suffering and death that it has been termed the African Holocaust. As Conrad himself would characterize the situation in the Congo nearly a quarter of a century after his novella was published, it was “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience” (“Geography and Some Explorers,” p. 17).

  Set during the era of heightened competition for imperial territories that historians have termed the New Imperialism, Heart of Darkness is loosely based on Conrad’s experiences and observations during a six-month stint, in 1890, in the Congo as an employee of a Belgian company, the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. This was five years after the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, a meeting of representatives of the European powers to establish the terms according to which much of the continent of Africa would be divided among them. During this meeting, King Leopold II of Belgium, skillfully playing the jealousies and fears of rival powers off one another, astonishingly managed to secure as his own property over 900,000 square miles of central Africa—that is, a territory roughly seventy-five times the size of the diminutive country he ruled. Under humanitarian pretenses, Leopold’s agents, who had’ begun the process of conquest several years earlier, effectively turned the so-called Congo Free State into an enormous forced labor camp for the extraction of ivory and, later, after the world-wide rubber boom in the early 1890s following the popularization of the pneumatic tire, rubber. In addition to outright murders, the slave labor conditions led to many deaths from starvation and disease as well as a steeply declining birth rate. Even during an era in which most Europeans viewed imperialism as legitimate, the appalling circumstances of Leopold’s Congo (it would officially become a Belgian colony in 1908, and Leopold would die the following year never having so much as visited the territory) led to international outrage. Conservative demographic estimates place the region’s depopulation toll between 1880 and 1920 at ten million people—that is, half of the total population—with the worst of the carnage occurring between 1890 and 1910. Not much was known outside Africa about the conditions of Leopold’s rule when Conrad was there, but in the several years before he began writing Heart of Darkness, in 1898, it became an international scandal, and regular reports appeared in the British and European press denouncing the abuses. Even before the publicity and protests, however (which would peak several years after the novella’s publication), Conrad had seen enough on his own to be thoroughly disgusted.

  Yet it is important to recognize that while parts of Heart of Darkness are based on Conrad’s experiences and that it does register his sense of moral outrage, the book is neither a work of autobiography nor history, and (as we shall see, the controversy over how to read it demonstrates) it presents considerable interpretive difficulties. Although the fictional structure is the same as that of “Youth”—again, we have a frame-tale narrative with the Englishman Marlow recounting his experiences to the same quartet of middle-aged men—it is a much more complex work. The terms of that complexity are elucidated in the opening pages by the unnamed primary narrator, who precedes his recapitulation of Marlow’s tale with a figurative description of how this raconteur’s mode of storytelling differs from that of his less-sophisticated seafaring peers:

  The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine (p. 40).

  We are presented here with images that illustrate not only two different narrative methods but two distinct epistemologies. On the one hand, in the first sentence we have the typical seaman’s story depicted as presenting no, interpretive problems whatsoever: telling a tale is a straightforward process whose aim is to reveal an unambiguous and easily accessible kernel of truth for the listener’s edification. On the other hand, in the second, more elaborate sentence, Marlow’s stories are depicted (as the primary narrator will later term them) as utterly “inconclusive” (p. 42): telling a story in this manner is aimed not at providing definitive enlightenment, but rather, as Ian Watt puts it, to lead the listener to become aware of “a circumambient universe of meanings wh
ich are not normally visible, but which the story, the glow, dimly illuminates” (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 180). We are thus apprised from the outset that the tale we are about to hear will resist traditional interpretive techniques, will undermine our sense of how to read— indeed, will destabilize our very notion of “meaning” itself. This passage, in fact, is one of the classic statements of a modernist epistemology, and it thus serves as a useful primer for how to approach not only the story Marlow will proceed to tell but also Conrad’s text as a whole.

  The aspects of Marlow’s storytelling method that impede our efforts to arrive at an unambiguous understanding of his tale’s meaning also hinder us from gaining a clear apprehension of the events themselves, something attested to by many first-time readers of the text who have difficulties following the plot. Such complications are in keeping with the modernist inclination for making narrative increasingly a function of individual subjectivity—a process that writers of the subsequent generation, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, would take still further. With broad brush strokes, however, the plot of the story that Marlow dimly conveys through ruminations interspersed with bits and pieces of events runs as follows. Having secured a position with a Belgian ivory-trading company through the contacts of his Brussels-residing aunt, Marlow travels to Africa, where he is to captain a ship up the Congo River in order to recall a company agent named Kurtz who has cut himself off from all communications. Upon arriving in Africa, Marlow finds that the company conducts its business with terrible cruelty toward its Congolese employees. He also finds that the competition for power among the company agents is ruthless, and that Kurtz is widely resented by his colleagues for his alleged humanitarianism. When Marlow and his crew finally arrive at Kurtz’s compound several months later, however, they discover that the idealistic ivory trader has established himself as a virtual deity among the indigenous people, whom he has been ruling with bloodthirsty savagery. Mad and gravely ill, Kurtz is forcibly retrieved by Marlow and then dies on the return voyage. During their brief acquaintance Marlow finds himself drawn to Kurtz, despite his knowledge of the latter’s monstrous conduct, and Kurtz reciprocates by entrusting him with various personal effects. Soon after, a now ill and disoriented Marlow returns to Europe, where he recovers his physical health but remains profoundly disturbed by the memory of his experiences. Some months later, in an apparent effort to effect closure, he meets with Kurtz’s grief-stricken fiancee, but, rather than telling her the truth about the depraved conduct of her beloved, he perpetuates her belief that Kurtz was a benevolent humanitarian who was devoted to her. He does, however, disclose the truth some years later to a handful of friends in the form of the tale that is then transmitted to us by one of them.

  Marlow prefaces his account of his experiences in the Congo, which he narrates while on a yacht on the Thames, with some observations about imperialism in general. He begins by anticipating one of the central themes of his tale—the collapse of the distinction between civilization and barbarism—by recalling that Britain itself, the world’s foremost imperial power, was at one time a colony of a mighty empire: alluding to the Roman invasion and conquest of Britain more than 1,800 years earlier, his first words are “[a]nd this also... has been one of the dark places of the earth” (p. 39). Such a reminder would have been particularly bracing to an English readership that had recently been steeped in the self-congratulatory excesses of Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee, which primarily took the form of an ostentatious celebration of Britain’s imperial might. Marlow’s prologue thus provides a sobering historical frame of reference for his ensuing tale about the seedy, hypocritical side of empire. And what we come to recognize as the story unfolds is that this is merely the first in a series of such rhetorical moves. In fact, much of the tale’s energy is invested in systematically dismantling those binary oppositions (civilization/barbarism, Europe/Africa, Christian ity/heathenism, white men/black men) that provided the ideological foundation of Anglo-European society of the era.

  Noting the slim margin of difference that separates the vanquisher from the vanquished, Marlow remarks that the ability to subjugate another people is “nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.” And, he continues, “[t]he conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (p. 41). He does, however, qualify these assertions by upholding—that is, by exempting from the logic of his tale—one binary opposition: that between what he terms “colonists” and “conquerors.” The Romans in Britain, like King Leopold’s agents in the Congo, “were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force.... They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale” (p. 41). When he proceeds to the action of the narrative, he vividly illustrates this distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of imperialism in his recollection of “a large shining map [of Africa], marked with all the colours of a rainbow,” which he has seen in the Brussels office of his new employers prior to his journey to the Congo:

  There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow (p. 45).

  Maps during this era often represented imperial territories according to this color-coded system—red for British, blue for French, green for Italian, orange for Portuguese, purple for German, and yellow for Belgian. Further, they served not merely as geographical but also as ideological tools; as Marlow demonstrates by singling out the red (British) territories for praise and the purple (German) territories for disapprobation, they enabled one to distinguish between different types of imperialism and morally to evaluate them accordingly. He has earlier asserted that what “redeems” imperialism—and hence what separates the colonists from the conquerors—“is the idea only.... ; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea” (p. 41), and it now appears that he believes it is the British who uniquely possess such an ennobling idea and an ethical commitment to it. How we are to interpret Marlow’s careful exclusion of Britain from his ensuing assault on the hypocrisies of imperialism is an open question. We have already seen how, in “Youth,” Conrad’s English alter ego tends to be Anglophilic, and it bears noting that, like “Youth,” Heart of Darkness was written for the pro-imperialist British readership of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Yet the evidence as to whether Marlow’s assertions wholly reflect Conrad’s beliefs is ambiguous. An essay on the British arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling that Conrad wrote several months before beginning Heart of Darkness might have shed light on this question, but it was not published and the manuscript has not survived.

  Regardless of how we are to interpret Marlow’s exemption of Britain from his attack on imperialism, he is unambiguous in his denunciation of those forms of imperialism that he views as illegitimate. This fact becomes apparent in the contrast between his outlook and that of his naively idealistic aunt during their farewell meeting before he sets out for Africa. Complaining to his listeners that she viewed him as an “emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle,” he points out that “[t]here had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time” (p. 48). Conrad had given a taste of what Marlow means by “such rot” in his ironically titled short story “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), which, like Heart of Darkness, depicts the moral degradation of ivory traders in the Congo. In this story a Belgian newspaper “discussed what it was pleased to call ‘Our Colonial Expansion’ in high-flown language. It spoke
much of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth” (Tales of Unrest, p. 94). (It bears pointing out that some of the most egregiously insincere instances of such Belgian propaganda came from the pen of King Leopold himself. It should also be noted that Conrad signaled the importance of the nationality of the story’s Belgian pro tagonists when he emphatically corrected a reader who mistook them for Frenchmen [Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 93-94].) Significantly, however, whereas Marlow freely discloses to his male listeners his disgust for “the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern” (p. 61 ), to his aunt the most he has done is “ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit” (p.48). His recollection of this exchange leads him to reflect on the differences between men and women in a passage whose condescension is ringingly primitive: