e24. Conrad’s language here echoes the fear of death at the hands of an all-powerful nature that is shared by the four men shipwrecked in Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” (1897). Conrad and Crane became good friends late in Crane’s all too brief life (he died in 1900 of tuberculosis at the age of only twenty-eight).
e25. As countless historians have referenced, contact between “civilized” explorers and native peoples in lands throughout the world has often had fatal consequences for those peoples. This is because their immune systems have not had to fight off some of the germs carried by those from the outside world and are unable to adapt. This has not always been true, though, as many young imperialists who accepted positions in Africa and other colonial lands died at the hands of diseases for which their own, fairly delicate immune systems were not prepared.
Part II
e1. Unlike Marlow, who at least seems to reference Darwin correctly (see note e15 in Part I), the manager and his uncle rely on a slightly corrupted evolution of Darwinian concepts commonly known as social Darwinism, a belief that was particularly popular during late Victorian and early modernist times (roughly 1870 to World War I in the 1910s). Social Darwinism took the idea of “survival of the fittest” and tried to apply it among classes and even races of individuals both within and outside of “civilized” society. In the manager’s case, his surprising longevity in the disease-ridden Congo creates in him what we might call a “Darwinian arrogance” that he will prove himself “fittest” simply by outliving all of his rivals, including Kurtz. At the same time, Marlow mocks the idea that either the manager or his uncle (with his “short flipper of an arm”) has any control over their survival, much less the mysterious and seemingly unknowable African jungle.
e2. The presence of “cannibals” in fiction had a long tradition well before Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. The protagonists of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Herman Melville’s Typee (1846), to name only two especially prominent examples, both live at least part of their exiled lives in fear of discovering cannibals.
e3. Developments in science and history moved so swiftly across the nineteenth century that the idea of the “primeval” for Victorians was a radically different one than ever before. Instead of a history of the world as brief as four thousand years based on some biblical accounts, the same history was considered to have covered countless millennia by the time Marlow described his travel in the “night of first ages.” This lengthening of what we know as “history” continues, as the age of the universe increases virtually every time a more powerful deep space telescope is created.
e4. Marlow’s fondness for the right kind of “work” ties his narrative to the mid-nineteenth-century works of Thomas Carlyle. This, along with some of his arguably racist and at least racially insensitive views, reminds us that Heart of Darkness, while often celebrated as a modernist text that points forward to the twentieth century, also is very much a product of the Victorian era that was ending just as it first appeared in 1899.
e5. Marlow’s keen sense of cynicism and disgust for hypocrisy lead to a harsh indictment of how the crew is paid in “currency” that is literally worthless. A number of economic theorists before Conrad’s time, including Adam Smith and Karl Marx, had considered the importance of what is known as the “use value” of a product. Given the right place and time, such wire might have such a value or even be prized as a commodity. But, in the isolation and danger of the Congo, such pay is less than worthless in Marlow’s eyes.
e6. Marlow’s curiosity about others echoes Ishmael’s fascination with his friend Queequeg and others from countries around the world in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
e7. In a surprising moment within such a dark tale, Marlow actually compares Kurtz to “an enchanted princess sleeping in a fabulous castle.” His point here mainly is to emphasize the number of dangers that he has to face in order to rescue the highly valued person of Kurtz. But it also serves as a gentle reminder that he has not yet even seen Kurtz, who remains as artificial at this point as the princesses in fairy tales that we often tell to children.
e8. Marlow’s slow-motion telling of the beginning of the attack, which Ian Watt famously described as “delayed decoding,” replicates the confusion and ignorance that mark Marlow’s initial response to the “sticks” he sees flying through the air. Though we might recognize these instantly for the arrows they are in one circumstance (say, if we saw video of such a battle), Conrad helps us to understand just how difficult it might be in the bewildering state of mind of Marlow to distinguish them during this astonishing and feverish attack.
e9. Though Marlow does not use the actual term, his words here point to a phenomenon known as the “fog of war.” The term is usually credited to the Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote: “The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently—like the effect of a fog or moonshine—gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance” (On War, Book 2, chapter 2, paragraph 24).
e10. Though it is delivered in language and imagery specific to his time in Africa, Marlow’s declaration here points to the ongoing universality of Marlow’s story and helps to explain why Heart of Darkness’s importance endures. Life is lived among diversity, including aspects that each individual dislikes, but life must be lived nevertheless, and each of us finds a way to adapt to our ever-changing world.
e11. This kind of language, promising that the West can and should “improve” places like Africa, was particularly prominent in some of the writings of Henry Morgan Stanley (of Stanley and Livingstone fame) and King Leopold II of Belgium, who personally owned the Belgian Congo (unlike most colonies, which were officially the possessions of nations, not persons). Though this belief often only served to hide less noble intentions (particularly the economic exploitation of colonies and their inhabitants), a longer view of history paints more of a mixed picture. Recent efforts by international organizations and a number of countries to fight diseases like AIDS and malaria have made at least some progress in a number of African nations within the last decade. At the same time, significant challenges and problems remain, some of which seem to require solutions by either individual African countries or by larger groups of African nations joining together in common effort (possibly including the current crisis in Darfur).
e12. This charismatic power to whip large crowds into a frenzy, to say and believe whatever is needed in order to take control of a village or country, has unfortunately lived on in a number of real-life figures in modern African history, including Idi Amin Dada of Uganda in the 1970s (memorably portrayed by Forest Whitaker in the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland).
Part III
e1. The harlequin tries to avoid speaking too directly here, but it is fairly clear that the phrase “thunder and lightning” refers to the guns that Kurtz has likely used in rampaging local villages. Using technology to achieve one’s aims also lies at the heart of two novels that were written about a decade before Heart of Darkness. In Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1888), two vagabonds briefly achieve power as kings over a fictional land near India by threatening the locals with guns (though they do, in true imperial fashion, eventually begin training their subjects how to use those same firearms as they form an army to protect them). In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), an American from the nineteenth century is transported into medieval times but gains their respect by using modern ideas and technology (including knowledge of a solar eclipse) as “magic.”
e2. This statement is typical of the way that Marlow, telling after Kurtz’s death of his encounter with the living Kurtz, still describes the enigmatic figure as a virtual skeleton or corpse. Perhaps in Marlow’s mind, Kurtz was already dead, or at least destined to die, before Marlow reached him (which may have been the manager’s plan all along, as noted ea
rlier).
e3. Even deep in the Congo, office politics still exist. Living up (or actually down) to the petty reputation that Marlow has established for him, the manager insists on claiming just how right he was to doubt Kurtz and his “methods” in the first place. And such behavior leads Marlow to have even greater disgust for the manager, as his “I told you so” about Kurtz is almost more than he can stand.
e4. This is a complex and surprising moment in Marlow’s narrative. Appalled by the naked hypocrisy of the Company men, especially the manager, Marlow embraces Kurtz and the violent methods that he has clearly employed to gain his bounty of ivory. But it is hard to imagine Marlow actually supporting the violence itself. Instead, he may simply accept Kurtz’s behavior as brutal but honest instead of the hypocrisy and pretense of individuals like the manager and the brickmaker.
e5. Marlow here imagines himself living the life of Robinson Crusoe in the midst of the African jungle rather than on a deserted isle. One of the most important works in the history of the novel, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe continues to inspire imitations to this day. In recent decades, Tim Severin’s book Seeking Robinson Crusoe (2002) has renewed the search for Defoe’s real-life model for Crusoe; J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) has fascinatingly retold the story from a woman’s point of view; and Michel Tournier’s Friday (1967) has offered Crusoe’s story from the point of view of the titular character, who willingly serves as Crusoe’s servant in Defoe’s original tale. In addition, films including Cast Away (2000) have updated the famous story of Crusoe, while television currently offers Lost as well. The universe of artistic works generated by Defoe’s enduring novel is well worth exploring and growing larger all the time.
e6. In a remarkable and unique moment in the narrative, Marlow describes the steamer as it would have appeared to the Africans rather than from his own perspective. Robert Louis Stevenson uses a similar technique with much greater regularity in his novella The Beach of Falesá (1893).
e7. The idea of a person being transformed by an obsession with a particular object, as Kurtz’s face comes to appear like “ivory” to Marlow, is also a key concept in another novel from the same time period, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde’s novel, however, features a fascinating twist: as he pursues his hedonistic ways, Dorian Gray’s physical appearance does not change—but a particular portrait of him grows ever uglier and more sinister as he continues to sin.
e8. This succinct and brutal line (delivered “in a tone of scathing contempt”) serves as one of two epigraphs to T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” (1925). Eliot’s title for this poem also serves as an appropriate term for many of the imperialists Marlow encounters—Marlow himself says of the brickmaker, “it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe” (31). Eliot’s poem is also well known for its closing lines:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Also, note how these lines match up quite well with Marlow’s ambivalent description of his struggle with death, which he calls “the most unexciting contest you can imagine” (87).
e9. This idea of members of society walking about in “the assurance of perfect safety” lies at the heart of Conrad’s urban spy novel set in Victorian London, The Secret Agent (1907). Though quite different from some of Conrad’s early efforts and focused instead on an English metropolis, The Secret Agent offers such a compelling vision of the mind-set behind terroristic behavior that it has received a great deal of attention in the wake of 9/11 and other attacks throughout the world.
e10. How Marlow feels upon his return to society again echoes Ishmael in his reasons for fleeing from society in the first place, as we see in the opening paragraph of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
e11. This type of rhetorical power can also be seen in a number of equally unforgettable figures in fiction and film, including 1930s Louisiana governor Huey Long and the character he inspired, Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946) (and in the Academy Award–winning 1949 film of the same name), as well as Charles Foster Kane as portrayed by Orson Welles in the film Citizen Kane (1941) and Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland (2006).
e12. While critics tend to view Marlow’s behavior in this scene as condescending toward the Intended and often women in general, it is interesting to note that the traits that Marlow attributes to her—fidelity, belief, suffering—were among those characteristics that Conrad often considered the most important, as he made clear in a number of letters during his career. In addition, Conrad made clear in a 1902 letter to the magazine editor William Blackwood that he considered this scene important because it makes Heart of Darkness more than just the story of a white man in Africa.
e13. This reference to the Intended’s “fair hair,” coupled with Marlow’s admission on the previous page that he cannot defend her from the “triumphant darkness,” carry an odd hint of the fairy tale, similar to Marlow’s earlier comparison of Kurtz to an “enchanted princess” similarly awaiting rescue (see note e7 of Part II).
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary (Penguin Classics)
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