This Collins Classroom Classics edition includes an introduction and glossary to support students, written by an experienced teacher.
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Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.
Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 22/12/2020 15:40
Introduction Inscrutable, incomprehensible, impenetrable: words that recur throughout Heart of Darkness and which, for many, are fitting adjectives to describe this novella. Conrad is a writer who revels in ambiguity, yet who claims his purpose in writing is ‘before all, to make you see’.1 For some, his writing is anachronistically modern, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, defying genre and destabilising narrative authority; for others, his attitudes are stubbornly, offensively born of his time – for Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, Conrad is a ‘thoroughgoing racist’.2 As readers of literature, how should we approach a text that is so full of contradictions? How can we make sense of a story that its own narrator admits is like ‘trying to tell you a dream’ (p.39)? Despite claiming this dreamlike narrative is ‘not extraordinary in any way – not very clear either’, it is a story that ‘seemed to throw a kind of light’ (pp.7–8). It is perhaps this ‘light’, this brief, flickering insight into the human mind and character, that explains the enduring relevance of the story. Writing at the end of the 19th century, Conrad would have been aware of a growing focus on the ‘unconscious’ mind – the idea that our thoughts, feelings and behaviour are influenced by deeper, hidden motivations. Freud’s theories based on psychoanalysis, first published in the 1890s, signalled a radical shift in society’s perception of the human mind.3 Conrad’s insistence on an ambiguous, dream-like quality to his writing is often interpreted as an exploration of
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this ‘unconscious’: the journey down the River Congo symbolic of an exploration of the ‘darkness’, the unacknowledged evil within the heart of man. Yet the novella is much more than a psychological study; it is a document of Conrad’s own experiences in the Congo, a chronicle of brutal exploitation, a colonial horror story, arguably an early attempt to bring the idolised figures of colonialism crashing down. For Adam Hochschild, Conrad was ‘so horrified by the greed and brutality among white men he saw in the Congo that his view of human nature was permanently changed’.4 Perhaps we need to consider to what extent the novel can shed ‘light’ on both colonialism and human psychology, and can lead us to question the relationship between the two. Heart of Darkness describes an expedition down the River Congo and into the subconscious, its setting in Africa’s ‘dark’ interior providing a backdrop for a White European male’s journey of self-discovery. In his autobiography Dreams from my Father, Barack Obama recalls discussing this idea with a university classmate: ‘the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European […] A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid.’5 Conrad encourages his reader to consider this idea of perspective through his use of the frame-narrator. As the men listen to Marlow’s story on the boat, we simultaneously reflect on ourselves as recipients of stories, how we should engage in them actively rather than passively accepting what we are told; how, as Obama suggests, we must pay as much attention to the ‘unsaid’ omissions, ambiguities and assumptions. Heart of Darkness is a book about how we tell stories, what we can learn from them, but also their limitations.
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HEART OF DARKNESS
For a Victorian readership, the experience of reading the text is described in an early review as ‘fascinating and remorseless’ in the way it reveals the realities of colonial rule in Africa, ‘hitherto carefully blurred and kept away from European eyes’.6 Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, first published in On the Origin of Species (1859), had been interpreted to provide ideological justification for the colonial endeavour on the grounds of ‘race’, reinforcing a perception of non-Europeans as being ‘childlike and primitive’.7 This dehumanisation of non-Europeans, prevalent in Victorian society and culture is evident in Marlow’s descriptions of Africans throughout the novella. While readers in the late 19th century would have been familiar with a colonial vocabulary that demonised and infantilised colonial subjects, to a modern-day audience this language is shocking and deeply problematic. Yet what makes Conrad’s tale radically different to other 19th-century depictions of colonialism is that from the outset he presents the coloniser as a ‘flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’ (p.21). As Marlow travels along the African coast, he foregrounds the way in which the African people, who ‘wanted no excuse for being there’ have been turned into ‘enemies’ by a cruel and hypocritical intruder (p.17 and p.18). The publication of Heart of Darkness coincided with and contributed to a growing focus on the brutality of Belgian colonial rule and the formation of the Congo Reform Movement.8 While for some Victorian readers the text would have been simply an exposé of Leopold II’s bloodthirsty regime, Conrad asks the reader to interrogate the concept of colonialism and its relationship to ideas about ‘race’ more generally; in Marlow’s words, ‘The
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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.7)9 Ultimately, Heart of Darkness offers no conclusions. Chinua Achebe warns that it ‘should be read carefully’; yet he insists, ‘far from wanting the novel banned, I teach it’.10 For Obama, it is the text that helped him ‘understand how people learn to hate’.11 Read ‘carefully’, few other texts enable us to examine and dismantle ideas about Western imperialism, attitudes towards ‘race’ and humanity’s capacity for evil to such a degree.
Concerns and contexts Conrad: A traveller between worlds Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, the man who we now know as Joseph Conrad, was born in Polish Ukraine in 1857. Belonging to a family who identified defiantly as Polish, his early years were dominated by the threatening shadow of Russian imperialism in a homeland that, according to Russia, no longer existed.12 Many have credited Conrad’s anti-imperialist agenda to his first-hand experiences of the horrors of Russian imperialism as a child. He escaped to work for different imperial powers, leaving Russia at the age of 17 to join the French and then the British merchant navy. This offered him an opportunity to explore colonial outposts, first in Australia and Asia, and then in Africa, including in 1890–91 his journey on a steamboat up the River Congo. Conrad acknowledges that Heart of Darkness is based on his own experiences in the Congo, ‘experience… pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the facts of the actual case’.13 It is the idea of the Congo, its
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CHAPTER 1
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished spirits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth. The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom.
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HEART OF DARKNESS
Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other’s yarns – and even convictions. The lawyer – the best of old fellows – had, because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug. The accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzenmast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol. The director, satisfied the anchor had good hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other we did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun. And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men. Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the
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Chapter 1
serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, ‘followed the sea’ with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled – the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests – and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith – the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ’Change; captains, admirals, the dark ‘interlopers’ of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned ‘generals’ of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an
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unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires. The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway – a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. ‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ He was the only man of us who still ‘followed the sea.’ The worse that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stayat-home order, and their home is always with them – the ship; and so is their country – the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. 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
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Glossary Chapter 1 1
yawl: the small, two-masted boat on which Marlow narrates his story while the crew (of four men) wait for the tide to go out. This type of boat would have been used for domestic (rather than overseas) trade.
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sea-reach: the section of a river that stretches out towards the sea
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offing: the distant part of the sea that is visible from the shore
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Gravesend: the largest port on the River Thames before it reaches the sea, in a strategic location between London and the Channel ports, and therefore the point from which many colonial traders and ‘explorers’ would have embarked on and returned from their journeys
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biggest, and the greatest, town on earth: refers to London, which, since the 1700s, had been the main centre of trade to and from Britain’s colonies. As the British Empire grew throughout the 19th century and rapid advancement in technology created opportunities to import and export goods on a much larger scale, London became increasingly powerful as an imperial capital, investing in docks, factories and warehouses to accommodate steamships and their cargo, and housing the headquarters of the shipping companies that dominated imperial trade (see company for trade, p.9).
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Director of Companies: ‘Companies’ in this context refers to shipping companies, the name given to businesses that transport goods and passengers by ship (see company for trade, p.9). Shipping companies played an important role in Britain establishing itself as a powerful trading nation. The ‘Director of Companies’ was once a sailor himself, and now worked on-shore, overseeing the business. The men on the boat seem representative of ‘respectable’ professions.
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Glossary
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yarns: from the phrase ‘to spin a yarn’, meaning to tell a story; the phrase referred originally to the habit of soldiers telling stories while twisting fibres (yarn) to form rope; a ‘yarn’ is generally a true story of significant length that may be embellished with details
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box of dominoes: a matching game. The dominoes would have been made from ivory, revealing the significant demand for ivory in the late 19th century to make luxury items, predominantly for entertainment, including piano keys and decorative ornaments (see also a precious trickle of ivory, p.25)
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right aft, leaning against the mizzenmast: towards the right side of the back of the boat, leaning on the sail
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an idol: Marlow is described as an idol – a statue or object that is worshipped like a god, specifically a ‘heathen’ deity (as opposed to the Christian God). The description implies the way in which Marlow is revered by the other men, the wisdom he has acquired, but also perhaps that there is something ‘unchristian’ about him.
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Sir Francis Drake…Golden Hind: Drake (c.1540–96) has been a celebrated figure in British history, associated with the start of British imperialism under Elizabeth I. He was the first Englishman to sail around the world on The Golden Hind; however, he was also one of Britain’s first slave-traders, kidnapping Africans in Guinea and then trading them in the Caribbean.
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Sir John Franklin…Erebus and Terror: Franklin (1786–1847) was an English admiral and explorer who commanded an expedition in search of the Northwest Passage in the ships Erebus and Terror and never returned.
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bearing the sword, and often the torch,…the sacred fire: At the start of the novella, the frame-narrator seems to view all those who have sailed out from the Thames as ‘knights’, admiring their bravery as men of the sea, whether their motives be ‘gold’ or ‘fame’. There is an acknowledgement that while their motives are ‘often’ to bring light to what are perceived in Victorian England as the ‘dark places of the earth’, whether through the civilising ‘torch’ or religion as ‘a spark from the sacred fire’, they are all
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