Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

A Routledge Study Guide

D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134246717
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness, has fascinated critics and readers alike, engaging them in highly controversial debate as it deals with fundamental issues of good and evil, civilisation, race, love and heroism. This classic tale transcends the boundaries of time and place and has inspired famous film and television adaptations emphasising the cultural significance and continued relevance of the book.

This guide to Conrad's captivating novel offers:

• an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Heart of Darkness
• a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present
• a selection of new essays and reprinted critical essays on Heart of Darkness, by Ian Watt, Linda Dryden, Ruth Nadelhaft, J. Hillis Miller and Peter Brooks, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Heart of Darkness and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Conrad's text.

1
Text and contexts

The author

The traditional image of Joseph Conrad, partly encouraged by Conrad himself, was of a ‘homo duplex’, of dual Polish and English affinities. Later critics have argued for a tri-lingual and tri-cultural identity, stressing the French influences on Conrad. Some of his formative years (1874–78) were spent in Marseilles. France bulked particularly large in Conrad’s lifetime as a fount of the arts, whether of painting or letters, and its influence would naturally be felt by a writer such as Conrad with his continental links and knowledge of French. It has long been recognized, for instance, that Conrad’s rigorously economical and highly wrought style and his tight and complex construction have antecedents in Flaubert and Maupassant. Detachment or ‘objectivity’, the essence of Conrad’s technique, became important to novelists after Flaubert. However, too strong an emphasis has now been placed on the French influence, while the dual identity and triple identity theses are neat but inadequate. A richer understanding would result if attention is called to the importance of Conrad’s sea-going experiences from 1874 to 1893, almost the whole of his working life, which, taking off from France, brought him into contact with the Caribbean, South-East Asia, Australia and Africa, and instilled a sense of respect for other cultures and an awareness that ways of life other than the European were as right as the European. In his 1895 ‘Author’s Note’ to Almayer’s Folly (the manuscript he was working on during his Congo journey), he countered the censure that his tales were ‘decivilized’ because of their portrayal of ‘strange people’ and ‘far-off countries’. In an ironic, comic tone, making no apology for depicting ‘honest cannibals’, Conrad concludes:

I am content to sympathize with common mortals, no matter where they live; in houses or in tents, in the streets under a fog, or in the forests behind the dark line of dismal mangroves that fringe the vast solitude of the sea.¹

These non-European cultures too exerted a strong influence on him and contributed significantly to fashioning his sensibility. I would suggest that Conrad possesses a multiple identity that is the result of the influence of all the cultures he encountered. Indeed, his is a more complex version of the ‘identity at once partial and plural’² which Salman Rushdie saw as characteristic of the immigrant. Such a personality, in the ‘real world’ – in society as well as in personal and even domestic relations – may experience alienation, self-consciousness and strains, as Conrad did in his adopted country, England, where he married an English wife, Jessie George. But it is also an artistically enabling experience, which permits access to many worlds. While he was from one perspective déraciné, rootless or uprooted, from another Conrad was many-rooted, drawing sustenance from several cultures. He was a migrant writer long before the term became fashionable, and arguably one of the first of that kind.

Conrad’s life has been, roughly, divided into three phases – as a Pole (1857–73), as a seaman (1874–93) and as a writer (1894–1924). In 1795, Poland was partitioned among three neighbouring powers, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Prussia (Germany), and disappeared as a nation till 1918, a period of 123 years that included almost the whole of Conrad’s life. He was born in the Ukraine, a part of Poland annexed by Russia, said to be the worst of the oppressors. He was the only child of Ewa (née Bobrowska) and Apollo Korzeniowski. Nationalism was a prominent part of Conrad’s class (the gentry, the most important section of Polish society, which, with the landed nobility, formed the sole ruling class, the szlachta) and family tradition. The Korzeniowskis were ‘Reds’ or ‘activists’, while the Bobrowskis were generally ‘Whites’ or ‘appeasers’. In 1861, Apollo was arrested for anti-Russian activity and exiled, with Ewa and Conrad, to Vologda, 300 miles north-east of Moscow. The parents suffered hardship, illness and finally death because of their political ideals. Conrad’s uncle, Stefan Bobrowski, one of the leaders of the January 1863 uprising, also sacrificed his life. His uncle and guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski, was also dedicated to duty, but favoured compromise. The roots of Conrad’s extraordinarily humane and critical responses to various imperial systems and realities can be traced, in part, to his Polish origins. It was not only his political heritage that is important; his paternal literary heritage, like V.S. Naipaul’s, is equally so. Apollo knew four languages, English, French, German and Russian, in addition to his mother tongue, and was a poet, playwright and translator (he translated Shakespeare and Dickens). That he was a translator is important because this exposure of Conrad as a child to his father’s habit of seeking for precise words and making fine adjustments between cultures, may have sensitized him to the possibilities and limits of language. Conrad’s reading of Shakespeare and the great Polish Romantic poets, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), Julius Slowacki (1809–49) and Sygmunt Krasinski (1812–59), the most powerful of his Polish literary influences, would have seeped into him and contributed to the sonority of his prose and the poetic side of his novelistic talent. Almost certainly, it would have sharpened his sense of the moral and public function of art. The mythical significance of his father’s name – Apollo was the Greek god of poetry – would have not been lost on the son.

The link between the restless literary mind and the sea, first celebrated in England by the Romantics, and the role of books (by the age of thirteen, Conrad recalls, he was ‘addicted’ to ‘map-gazing’), probably motivated Conrad to go to sea in 1874 – his chosen avenue of escape from service in the Russian army. He sailed on French imperial business in the French Mercantile Service out of Marseilles, where he also engaged in conspiratorial conversations – and, perhaps, activities – in support of the Carlists in Spain. In 1878 he joined the British Merchant Service. The British Service gave the feckless orphan abroad a sort of niche, inculcated a work ethic and provided valuable experiences which he later transmuted into fiction. But as ‘a Polish nobleman, cased in British tar’,³ there was a wide gulf between him and his fellow seamen. But while the Service could not satisfy his cultural needs, his choice of Marlow as a narrator is a tribute to the Service. These formative years, then, gave Conrad knowledge of a variety of imperial systems and sea adventures at first-hand.

During this period, when Conrad was in search of employment, the possibility arose of working in Africa. He may have accepted the job in the absence of a better alternative, though it was more remunerative than a command at sea. Moreover, his boyhood enthusiasm for Africa (as an instance of the ‘faraway’) is likely to have been rekindled by the current interest (and greed) excited by Africa, and fanned by Henry Morton Stanley’s sensational exploits in discovering, in 1871, David Livingstone and, then, in February 1889, Emin Pasha (see G:HD, pp. 182–208). Recommended by various shipping agents, Conrad met Albert Thys, the director of the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo (SAB), but Thys was dilatory in offering him a post. Marguerite (whom Conrad addressed as ‘aunt’), the well-connected widow of his recently deceased distant relative, Aleksander Poradowski, intervened on his behalf (see Text and contexts, p. 18). But it was the killing by local tribesmen of Johannes Freiesleben, the Danish master of the steamship Florida, which precipitated Conrad’s appointment as his successor. On 10 May 1890, he left Brussels for the Congo.

Conrad reached Matadi on 13 June. Like Marlow, he started off his journey with high expectations, not ideal, but reasonable. Yet setbacks soon led to a process of disillusionment. He had understood that he was to command a river steamer for the duration of his three-year contract. In Kinshasa on 2 August, he found that the steamer he was to command was disabled and he was assigned as second-in-command to a Captain L.R. Koch. The commercial agent at the Stanley Falls station, Georges Antoine Klein (see Text and contexts, p. 35), was suffering from dysentery. The Roi des Belges arrived on 1 September, by which time Koch had also taken ill. Camille Delcommune, the Acting Manager of the Company, appointed Conrad to take over the command of the steamer until Koch had recovered. When the steamer arrived in Bangala on 15 September, Koch was back at the helm. So much for Conrad’s later claim of having commanded a steamer. Klein died on board on 21 September. Conrad was at Kinshasa when the exploratory exped- ition of Alexander Delcommune (brother of Camille) started on board the Ville de Bruxelles. We know hardly anything of Conrad’s life during the last months of 1890. Towards the end of January the following year he appeared in Brussels, then on 1 February in London.

Conrad wrote ‘The Congo Diary’⁴ during his trek from Matadi to Kinshasha between 13 June and 1 August, the first two months of his six-month stay in the Congo. The diary is sketchy but the parallels between the diary and the earlier phases of the novella document the factual basis that Conrad usually needed to trigger off his imagination. Conrad’s ‘Up-river Book’, which consists almost exclusively of navigational notes from the bridge of the Roi des Belges from 3 to 19 August, is of much less interest to the reader.

Relations between Conrad and Camille Delcommune and other employees of the SAB were marked by mutual antipathy. His thinking was incompatible with theirs: he expected some basic decencies and found none. His attitude of moral superiority may have been irksome to the others. His aloofness, deriving from his aristocratic origins, was not conducive to popularity. But the decisive reason for Conrad’s premature departure from the Congo was probably grave illness. Suffering from dysentery and fever, his plight is illustrated by an incident from his Congo experience that he later related to Edward Garnett but did not include in his fictionalized version:

lying sick to death in a native hut tended by an old negress who brought him water from day to day, when he had been abandoned by all the Belgians. ‘She saved my life,’ Conrad said, ‘the white men never came near me.’⁵

Conrad was a physical wreck and convalescence seems to have been a slow process, especially under the conditions of his existence in the Congo. The hiatus in evidence for Conrad’s last months in Africa seems to me no ‘mystery’,⁶ but merely the physical consequences of an illness from which he never recovered, which curtailed his career as a seaman and, in part, confirmed him in his already emerging vocation as a writer (he took the opening chapters of Almayer’s Folly with him to the Congo). Like Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations, this period of illness was for Conrad, as for Marlow in Heart of Darkness, also a period of mental awakening and not totally negative. Edward Garnett reports of Conrad:

in his early years at sea he had ‘not a thought in his head.’ ‘I was a perfect animal,’ he reiterated, meaning of course that he had reasoned and reflected hardly at all over the varieties of life he had encountered.⁷

Judging by the promise of Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands and the complexities of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Lord Jim (Heart of Darkness was composed while Conrad was engaged in writing Lord Jim), Conrad’s Malayan and sea experiences stimulated him and contributed to his maturation. He was hardly ‘a perfect animal’ before the Congo; the Congo nevertheless shook him to the core ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Guides to Literature
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes and references
• Introduction
• 1 Text and contexts
• 2 Critical history
• 3 Critical readings
• 4 ADAPTATIONS
• 5 Further reading and web resources
• Index