Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary

by Joseph Conrad

  The fashioning of such glimpses into a sequential narrative has the constant effect of deferring any promise of full insight. So, at one point, Marlow with typical indirection peers through binoculars to catch sight of what appear to be carved balls stuck on posts or discovers a book with a mysterious cipher pencilled on its margins. Only later does it transpire, with an accompanying shock and need for readjustment on the observer’s part, that the objects are shrunken heads and that the cipher is a form of annotation in Russian made by The Harlequin. In the case of the discovered heads on sticks, a further trap awaits the reader, since one puzzle is solved only to generate another–when, that is, Marlow goes on to deem the heads to be ‘symbolic’ and adds that they were ‘expressive and puzzling…food for thought’ (71).

  The most extreme forms of expressive puzzle arrive with Marlow’s attempts to glimpse his own obscure motives. The causal logic of a narrative sequence usually depends upon the reader’s more or less clear perception of human motive. But Marlow the aspiring narrative-maker is sometimes defeated by an inability to fathom even his own governing motives. No explanation is given for his desire to confront Kurtz in isolation (‘to this day I don’t know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar blackness of that experience’ (80)) or why he wishes to visit the Intended (‘I had no clear perception of what it was I really wanted’ (91)) or whether he has acquired the correct papers of Kurtz to hand to her (‘I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle’ (94)). Such deferrals of meaning could not, it might be supposed, prolong indefinitely. Yet the tale’s ending tends to do just this when it returns to the point at which it began–with the narrator sitting among his friends aboard a boat on the River Thames–and implies that the end is but a beginning to another telling.

  V

  ‘Come and find out’ (15). The African jungle’s teasing invitation to Marlow is also projected to the story’s readers with the implication that, even with a full command of the evidence it has to offer, they will need to read inferentially and conjecturally. The history of Heart of Darkness criticism vividly indicates how the invitation has been taken up by successive generations and how, in the process, the work has undergone constant renewal.

  The responses of late-Victorian readers bear little similarity to those of modern ones. Nor, among modern readers, is there a comfortable consensus, since Heart of Darkness has the power to divide opinion sharply, particularly in its treatment of race and imperialism. Yet the story continues to find a wide audience by virtue of the subliminal power at work in its treatment of collapse and breakdown. As T. S. Eliot seems to have recognized in 1925, the work’s path-finding significance lies in its use of a simulated nightmare-quest by which to dramatize the relationship between the self and the modern world, with its attendant feelings of moral and metaphysical panic: ‘I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold’ (93). Written in 1898–9, a dark sentiment of this kind helps to explain why Conrad’s ‘line’ in the twentieth century–from T. S. Eliot through Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul, William Golding and beyond–has been such a powerful one.

  Owen Knowles

  NOTES

  Works cited in the text of the Introduction can be found in Further Reading.

  1. Last Essays, in Dent’s Collected Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, 22 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1946–55), p. 17.

  2. Edward Garnett, ed., Letters from Conrad, 1895–1923 (London: Nonesuch, 1928), p. xii.

  3. Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership, ed. Barbara Drake and Margaret Isobel Cole (London: Longmans Green, 1948), p. 140.

  4. C. de Thierry, ‘Imperialism’, New Review 17 (1897), p. 318.

  5. Last Essays, in Works of Joseph Conrad, p. 17.

  6. The Times, 13 May 1897, p. 7.

  7. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948).

  8. This lecture was first delivered by Chinua Achebe in 1975, but not published until two years later: ‘An Image of Africa’, Massachusetts Review 17.4 (1977), pp. 782–94.

  9. Robert Kimbrough, ed., Joseph Conrad: ‘Heart of Darkness’, 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 79.

  10. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and On Heroes and Hero Workship, ed. W. H. Hudson (London: Dent, 1967), p. 289.

  11. Leavis, The Great Tradition, p. 180.

  12. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘How to Write a Blackwood’s Article’, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 341.

  Introduction to ‘The Congo Diary’

  ‘The Congo Diary’ is the title given to one or both of two small, leather-bound notebooks in which Conrad kept notes about his travels in the Congo in 1890. The first notebook contains the diary reproduced in this edition. Covering the opening stage of a twelve-week journey inland to Stanley Falls in the Upper Congo, the entries begin on 13 June (the day after Conrad had arrived in Africa), record daily events during a 230-mile (320-kilometre) overland trek from Matadi to Nselemba, where they end on 1 August. At Kinchasa (modern-day Kinshasa), the River Congo becomes navigable, and from here on 3 August Conrad continued his remaining 1000-mile (1600-kilometre) journey aboard the Roi des Belges and began his second notebook. This more specialized document, ‘The Up-river Book’, is not reproduced here. Devoted exclusively to navigational notes, maps and sketches made during the first sixteen days of the river journey, it was written with the purely practical purpose of assisting Conrad when he might be called upon to navigate the steamer on some future upriver trip.

  With only three of Conrad’s letters from the Congo having survived, the diary reproduced here has an obvious biographical importance. Although revealing little about Conrad’s responses, its jottings and sketches nevertheless show where he went, what he was doing, who he met and some of the things he saw and experienced during the first part of his six-month stay in Africa. Additionally, the diary furnishes an early example–albeit of limited range–of the Anglo-Polish author’s command of English (his third language), which, with its occasional strange word like ‘andulating’, indicates a Polish influence and, with some eccentric spellings like ‘ressemble’ or ‘mentionned’, also echoes French orthography.

  The question of the diary’s further importance may be broached by asking why Conrad should have chosen to keep it at all since, though some of its details are of a practical kind, the overall purpose is not an obviously practical one. In Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911), the narrator speaks of the variety of ‘inscrutable motives’ leading some individuals to keep diaries (Part First). In conditions of extreme loneliness and stress, the act of keeping a diary can be a form of consoling self-communication, as well as a way of establishing a familiar routine and of using written language to bring a modicum of structure to confusing and chaotic experiences. Some of these reasons may help to explain the existence of ‘The Congo Diary’. But the more intriguing likelihood is that Conrad may have felt that the diary would be of future use to him as a writer. In other words, its contents might later be used to reactivate his memories and serve as a creative catalyst–the diary becoming, in effect, part of what Conrad later described as the literary ‘spoil’ he brought back from Africa ( ‘Author’s Note’, 112).

  Whether or not Conrad consulted the diary eight years later when he started to compose Heart of Darkness remains an open question, although the presence of a handful of half-echoes in the story suggests that he may well have re-acquainted himself with some of its striking definite images: ‘[T]he dead body of a Backongo. Shot? Horrid smell’ (100); ‘Saw another dead body lying by the path in an attitude of meditative repose’ (102); ‘On the road today passed a skeleton tied-up to a post. Also white man’s grave–no name. Heap of stones in the form of a cross’ (106); ‘Chief came with a youth about 13 suffering from gunshot wound in the head. Bullet entered about an inch above th
e right eyebrow and came out a little inside the roots of the hair’ (108).

  Ultimately, however, an approach to Heart of Darkness by way of ‘The Congo Diary’ can be misleading if it encourages the view that Conrad’s story is merely a fuller autobiographical extension of the diary and its figures always dependent upon ‘real-life’ sources. Even Norman Sherry, the critic most associated with the study of the novella’s biographical and historical origins, is forced to admit: ‘For Conrad it [the overland journey to Kinshasa] must have been the most gruelling part of his Congo journey…yet the experience as passed on to Marlow is dealt with in one paragraph and is one of the least significant aspects of his experience.’1 In this instance, the fiction is neither constrained nor even determined by events of the corresponding period described in the diary. Forms of displacement and reinvention are at work in the way that the creative writer’s return in 1898 to earlier African experiences involves a significant act of self-withdrawal: Conrad the writer is not now overtly visible, his function being taken over by a dramatized actor-narrator, the English sea-captain, Charlie Marlow. In addition, the period covered by the diary is subject to a new proportioning, with the result that its events are severely compacted and remodelled: whereas Conrad’s original journey, as recorded in the ‘Diary’, is full of references to specific times, places and named people, the later story dissolves strict clock-time, occupies an unspecific geography (with the Congo only implicitly identified as its setting) and names most individuals according to their professional or symbolic functions.

  Such differences between factual source and fictional artefact should not occasion surprise, given Conrad’s wider belief that all creative literature of any lasting worth is, whatever its origins in the writer’s own life, essentially an imaginative re-entry into past experience in the quest for a more impersonal but human truth, whether of a moral, socio-political or philosophic kind. ‘All the great creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth and in beauty’ (Collected Letters, vol. VI, p. 211). Indeed, the symbolic geography and quests of some of those ‘great creations of literature’–the Bible, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno and the Faust legends–are themselves repeatedly echoed in the tale’s definite images and, collectively, have some claim to be regarded as one of the most important ‘sources’ of its complexity, power and depth.

  Owen Knowles

  NOTE

  1. Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 37.

  Further Reading

  LETTERS

  The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, with Owen Knowles (vol. VI), J. H. Stape (vol. VII) and Gene M. Moore (vol. VIII), 8 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983–).

  Conrad’s Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends, ed. Zdzisław Najder (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).

  A Portrait in Letters: Correspondence to and about Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape and Owen Knowles (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1996).

  BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES

  Batchelor, John, The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

  Knowles, Owen, A Conrad Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).

  Najder, Zdzisław, Joseph Conrad: A Life, trans. Halina Carroll-Najder (1983; revised edn London: Boydell, 2007).

  Najder, Zdzisław, ed., Conrad under Familial Eyes, trans. Halina Carroll-Najder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  Ray, Martin, ed., Joseph Conrad: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).

  Stape, J. H., The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (London: Heinemann; New York: Knopf, 2007).

  REFERENCE

  Knowles, Owen, An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Joseph Conrad (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1992).

  Knowles, Owen, and Gene M. Moore, Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  Sherry, Norman, ed., Conrad: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).

  CRITICAL STUDIES

  Berthoud, Jacques, Conrad: The Major Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

  Gordan, John D., Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941).

  Guerard, Albert J., Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).

  Lothe, Jakob, Conrad’s Narrative Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  Moser, Thomas C., Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

  Najder, Zdzisław, Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  Simmons, Allan H., Joseph Conrad (London: Palgrave, 2006).

  Stape, J. H., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  Watt, Ian, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980).

  Watts, Cedric, Preface to Conrad (London: Longman, 1990; 2nd edn 1993).

  JOURNALS

  The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK), published twice yearly by Rodopi of Amsterdam.

  Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies, published thrice yearly by Texas Tech University Press, Lubbock, Texas.

  L’Époque Conradienne, published once yearly by the Société Conradienne Française at Les Presses Universitaires Limoges, Limoges, France.

  ON HEART OF DARKNESS

  Bloom, Harold, ed., Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ (New York: Chelsea House, 1987).

  Firchow, Peter Edgerly, Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).

  Fothergill, Anthony, ‘Heart of Darkness’, Open Guides to Literature (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989).

  Moore, Gene M., ed., Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  Murfin, Ross C., ‘Heart of Darkness’: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism (Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1989; 2nd edn 1996).

  Tredell, Nicolas, ed., Joseph Conrad: ‘Heart of Darkness’, Icon Critical Guides (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998).

  Watts, Cedric, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’: A Critical and Contextual Discussion (Milan: Mursia International, 1977).

  A Note on the Texts

  The copy-text for Heart of Darkness is that of the first English edition of 13 November 1902; that for ‘The Congo Diary’ is the manuscript held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; and that for the ‘Author’s Note’ is the text first published in the second English edition of the Youth volume in September 1917 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons).

  Conrad composed Heart of Darkness during the period from mid-December 1898 to early February 1899 for the thousandth issue of Blackwood’s Magazine. A nearly complete manuscript is held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and a portion of revised typescript in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

  Under the title ‘The Heart of Darkness’, the story was serialized in Britain during February–April 1899, and appeared in the United States in The Living Age, June–August 1900. Along with two other stories, ‘Youth’ and ‘The End of the Tether’, it was first collected in Britain in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1902) and in the United States by McClure, Phillips of New York (1903). In both editions the story was renamed ‘Heart of Darkness’.

  Although this is not a critical edition, emendations to the Heart of Darkness copy-text have been made to correct outright errors, repair typographical flaws and rationalize minor inconsistencies. The first English edition has been compared with earlier stages of the text, including the manuscript (MS) and typescript fragment (TS), in order to take into account the complex circumstances of its early drafting, typing and printing, and thus to recti
fy a number of transmissional errors, mainly originating in the typescript prepared by Conrad’s wife, Jessie, and passing into all printed forms.

  Some features of Blackwood’s house-style have been silently modified. An occasional feature of Blackwood’s house-style, a comma and em-dash in combination (,—), has been replaced by an em-dash only. In the case of some spellings, Conrad’s habitual usage has been preferred to that in the first English edition: thus ‘further’, ‘by the bye’, ‘by and bye’ and ‘entrusted’ are preferred to ‘farther’, ‘by-the-by’, ‘by-and-by’ and ‘in-trusted’. Ambiguous hyphenation has been resolved on the basis of majority practice in the text, and, where no clear precedent exists, is determined by the spelling of the period.

  Written during his visit to the Congo in 1890, Conrad’s ‘Diary’ did not appear in print until after his death, when Richard Curle published an edited and annotated version in Blue Peter 5 (October 1925), pp. 319–25. This was later republished in his edition of Conrad’s Last Essays (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926).

  The manuscript bears the typical signs of an informal private diary not intended for publication, notably in its irregular or missing punctuation, abbreviated words and occasional unusual spellings. The present text remains faithful to these features. Conrad’s frequent use of dashes instead of full stops is preserved, and punctuation is supplied or emended sparingly and only at points of potential ambiguity or confusion (see the list below). Minor inconsistencies of spelling have not been standardized, and irregular spellings are signalled in the notes but not repaired. Likewise, the apparently random underlinings and superscript letters in the manuscript have been preserved in order to remain faithful to the form of the original document. In the case of abbreviations and shorthand symbols, letters missing from words are supplied in square brackets (as in ‘off[ic]er’ or ‘comp[an]y’).