Joseph Conrad, racist or realist? The debate about Conrad and his most famous work, Heart of Darkness, continues to rage. Here’s a piece I wrote on the subject that became the introduction to a new edition of Heart of Darkness published by Vintage Classics.
By Tim Butcher
SELDOM can an author have achieved his aim for a novel more completely than Joseph Conrad with Heart of Darkness. In an author’s note written in 1917, Conrad described his hope to instil enough power in the sombre theme of the book that it would “hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck’’.
Few could argue this is what he did. It was first published in 1899 as a three part serial in the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine and in complete form three years later, alongside Youth in one volume, Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, but, more than a hundred years on, Heart of Darkness still resonates. Modern filmmakers and writers allude to it routinely and some of the book’s contents, like the `the Inner Station’, `Mr Kurtz’, `The horror! The horror!’’, have become key parts of literary iconography.
Where argument begins, however, is where it has always begun, ever since Conrad struck the “last note’’ in Heart of Darkness: the debate over what the book’s sombre theme actually is.
The debate is not just ongoing, it is yawning. A century after it was written diametrically opposed conclusions are still being drawn about Heart of Darkness. Some critics view it as deeply racist, while others see it as an attack on the racism of colonialism; some critics view the book as largely psychological, while others believe it to be mostly historical; some believe it is a critique of the corrupting power of wilderness, while others believe it a parable of humanity’s weakness no matter its setting.
In terms of narrative structure, Youth is very similar to Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s seafaring narrator, Charlie Marlow, appears first in Youth, telling an assembly of four unnamed characters – the narrator, a lawyer, an accountant and director of companies – a story from his time at away sea, and a near identical frame is used in Heart of Darkness. But between the first book and the second, there is a quantum leap in scope, ambition and sophistication. In literary terms Youth is an adolescent while Heart of Darkness is a fully-formed adult.
Both stories were based on Conrad’s own experiences as a merchant sailor and it is hard to overestimate the role and influence of his time away at sea. He was no junior deckhand who spent a few months as crew on a clipper round Cape Horn for the thrill of it. Conrad spent twenty years at sea between the ages of 16 and 36, and saw much more of the world than was normal for people in the late 19th Century.
The sea was his alma mater and he worked hard not just as crew member but at his studies, learning English (His mother tongue was Polish and he spoke French, Russian and German before tackling English) to a sufficiently high level that he could qualify as a Master Mariner in the British merchant navy, a significant seafaring achievement. Conrad is remembered as an accomplished writer who was also a mariner. His old shipmates might remember him better as an accomplished mariner who was also a writer.
His two decades as a sailor provided the seam of experience from which he mined his early fiction. In Youth, a novel that deals with the young’s perception of their own invincibility, Marlow describes a sea journey that ended in disaster with his boat catching fire and sinking off the East Indies, forcing the 20-year-old to put to sea in an open boat. It is a dramatic story of bravery and determination but this exact same thing happened to Conrad early in his career at sea.
Today a survival story like that would be turned instantaneously into newspaper features and film scripts but Conrad lived in a more thoughtful age. The story churned in his mind for years before finally emerging as a novel not as a swashbuckling story but as an observation on the untrammelled optimism of the young. In his 1917 author’s note, he wrote: “Youth is a feat of memory. It is a record of experience; but that experience, in its facts, in its inwardness and in its outward colouring, begins and ends in myself’’.
Even more profoundly dramatic were Conrad’s experiences in the Congo where his seafaring skills gave him personal exposure to one of the most dark and secretive projects of the 19th century; the staking of the Congo River basin as the private property of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. It is important to remember that when the
Congo Free State was founded in 1885 it was not a colony in the traditional sense of the word, claimed by an entire European nation. Instead the million square miles of rainforest, savannah, swamp and waterway were staked by a single man, King Leopold, the largest private estate in history.
But it was not just an exercise in vanity on an unimaginable scale. It also involved unfathomable cruelty. Publicly, the founding of the so-called Congo Free State was presented as an act of enlightenment, of taming wilderness and bringing civilisation, Christianity and commerce to a place of primitive savagery. In reality, much darker forces were at work, as the king’s colonial agents set tribe against tribe in pursuit of plunder; first ivory, later raw rubber.
Under King Leopold’s aegis the first genocide of the modern era was committed. Millions of Congolese were slaughtered to generate revenue for the king across the water. They died in the ethnic cleansing and battles of frontier wars fought between Leopold’s agents and Arab slavers who had been in the eastern Congo much longer than white outsiders and were not happy to be usurped. But once the Arab slavers had been defeated, Congolese tribes were persecuted brutally pour encourager les autres. Colonial agents invented a uniquely vile if apparently counterintuitive way of making Congolese villagers increase their production of goods – the agents would have the hands of prisoners hacked off to show what happens to the disobedient. The best estimate is that between three and ten million Congolese were killed in just over two decades starting in 1885.
What made the project all the more sinister was the way it was hidden from the outside world. Private companies in Belgium acted as fronts for King Leopold, carefully selecting those who would be employed in the Congo Free State and ensuring its true nature stayed hidden. Any European explorer or adventurer who ventured into the Congo Free State without signing up as an employee of one these companies was hounded out, persecuted, even murdered. And throughout, the illusion of a civilising act of philanthropy was maintained to the outside world.
For a short time Conrad became personally involved in this sinister project. He did not just witness what was going on in theCongo he became part of the whole colonial exercise. This made him complicit to one of the greatest ever crimes against humanity and a background of Conrad’s own personal guilt must be considered when trying to understand how Heart of Darkness came to be written.
Conrad’s involvement only lasted a few months but he became, essentially, a hired hand of King Leopold. It was in the early days of the Congo Free State when the king’s agents were crying out for people who knew about boats. The equatorial rainforest that covered much of the territory was almost impenetrable and it made good practical sense to make use of Africa’s mightiest waterway, the Congo River, and its web of tributaries that covered an area the size of the Indian sub-continent.
In 1890 Conrad passed an interview in Belgium with representatives of the Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo and was then hired to go to the Congo to work on the river’s longest navigable reach, the thousand mile section between the two modern cities of Kinshasa, at the top of the rapids that guard the mouth of the Congo River, and the port of Kisangani, built as far up river as you can travel by boat before cataracts once again make the river impassable.
Privately, Conrad wrote childhood curiosity was one his main reasons for going to the Congo. The western half of central Africa was one of the last parts of the continent to be penetrated by white outsiders and the region around the headwaters of the Congo River was, in his words, “the blankest of blank spaces on the earth’s figured surface’’. But what he found when he got there was that the opening up process had cast the region not into light but into darkness.
The six months he spent in the Congo Free State left him scarred, both physically and mentally. To reach the bottom of the navigable stretch in 1890, there was no option other than to trek through two hundred miles of disease-ridden, parched mountain savannah to circumnavigate the cataracts on the lower river. In the diary he kept on his five-week-long yomp, he described how his group wandered listlessly along a trail marked by the bodies of dead natives, white officials routinely beat natives with staves and his European companion, Prosper Harou, was reduced within days to a pale, febrile wreck vomiting bile in a hammock borne by native bearers.
When he reached the settlement built where Kinshasa stands today he found a tiny stockade, primitive, disorganized and staffed by colonial agents of dubious morals. The river journey was even more wretched for Conrad. The skipper of his boat fell sick and Conrad had to take over, nursing the tiny steamboat each of the thousand miles upstream until finally reaching his company’s outpost at the foot of the falls.The company agent there, Antoine Klein, was ill and Conrad tried to save him by taking him back downriver but the agent died en route.
By the time Conrad got back to the lower settlement, he too was so ill he barely made it out of the Congo alive at the end of 1890 less than six months after he arrived. For the rest of his life his health suffered from the after effects. More profound than the physical ailments was the scarring on his soul from what he had seen. The secretive efforts of King Leopold’s collaborators had successfully concealed the true nature of the Congo Free States to the outside world, making the reality of its brutal oppression and wanton pillage all the more shocking to an outsider like Conrad.
It would be eight years until he began writing Heart of Darkness and all the key details of his own Congo experience were included in the story told by Marlow. Marlow does not name the place as the Congo, or even the continent as Africa, but he describes how he was hired by European agents of a colonial company and sent to a river with a long, navigable reach through wild rainforest, that was only accessible by route march from the coast and which culminated in a remote “Inner Station’’ home to the most profitable of all the company’s ivory traders. In Conrad’s early drafts the agent had the same name as the dying man Conrad tried to rescue in 1890, Mr Klein. The name in the novel was only later changed to Mr Kurtz.
But while it was written around facts Conrad knew to be true from his own experience, the power of Heart of Darkness comes from what Conrad adds. In his 1917 author’s note, Conrad described how Heart of Darkness was more than the exercise of memory represented by Youth.
“ `Heart of Darkness’ is experience, too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only a little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre tone had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck’’.
It is in the character of Mr Kurtz – the mysterious figure whose moral compass has apparently gone haywire upriver deep in the jungle - that Conrad’s art reaches its highest form. People have tried to find the individual on whom Conrad based Mr Kurtz but the character is not a portrait of a single person. Instead, Mr Kurtz is a composite that includes elements of the acquisitive Belgian King, Leopold II, and Henry Morton Stanley, the chancer-turned-explorer, who was hired by the king to stake the Congo, and a number of other colonial pioneers.
But the most powerful feature of Mr Kurtz is that he includes elements of us all, characteristics of weakness, venality and arrogance that we can identify in ourselves. As a work of art, he is a masterpiece. Heart of Darkness was written at the dawn of the colonial era in Africa and part of its power clearly comes from its eloquent denunciation of the conceit behind colonialism.
But the real power of the book comes from its harrowing and often ambiguous account of humanity’s moral decay. The lack of integrity of outsiders’ values, guilt and complicity are all offered up by Marlow as he struggles to distinguish between memories of his time on the river and subsequent nightmares, and the reality that his struggle has no clear, unequivocal conclusion makes reading Heart of Darkness today as richly rewarding a journey as it was in the Edwardian era. To continue Conrad’s musical metaphor, Heart of Darkness is more score than manuscript and just as no two performances of the same musical score are alike, no two readings of Heart of Darkness prompt exactly the same reaction.
ENDIT
Ever since Stanley first charted its mighty river in the 1870s,the Congo has epitomised the dark and turbulent history of a failed continent - from colonial cruelty under the Belgians to the kleptocratic chaos of Mobutu Sese Seko and the current post-apocalyptic riot of robber-baron politicians. However, its troubles only served to increase the interest of Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher, who was sent to cover Africa in 2000. He remembered his mother’s stories of her own genteel river journey there in the 1950s and his connection deepened when he discovered that Stanley’s expedition was funded by the Telegraph. Before long he became obsessed with the idea of recreating Stanley’s original expedition – but travelling alone.
His extraordinary account describes a country with more past than present, where giant steamboats lie rotting in the advancing forest and children hear stories from their grandfathers of days when cars once drove by. Butcher’s journey was a remarkable feat. But the story of the Congo, told expertly and vividly in this book, is more remarkable still.
