Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary

by Joseph Conrad

  Unsigned Review from the Manchester Guardian (10 December 1902): 3.

  Mr. Joseph Conrad’s latest volume, Youth, contains three stories, of which the one that gives the title is the shortest. This and the second one may be regarded as a kind of sequence. The third and longest, ‘The End of the Tether,’ is admirable, but in comparison with the others the tension is relaxed. It is in a manner more deliberate, less closely packed; this is Conrad, but not Conrad in his fine frenzy; it gives an engaging picture of a noble old man, pathetic, imaginative, deserving a whole array of eulogistic adjectives, but it is not of the amazing quality of Mr. Conrad at his best. The other two, though not of such scope and design, are of the quality of Lord Jim—that is to say, they touch the high-water mark of English fiction and continue a great expression of adventure and romance. Both stories follow Mr. Conrad’s particular convention; they are the outpourings of Marlow’s experiences. It would be useless to pretend that they can be very widely read. Even to those who are most impressed an excitement so sustained and prolonged, in which we are braced to encounter so much that menaces and appals, must be something of a strain. ‘Youth,’ in this conception of Mr. Conrad’s, is not the time of freedom and delight, but ‘the test, the trial of life.’ No labour is too great, no danger is too close for this great adventure of the spirit.

  ‘Heart of Darkness’ is, again, the adventure of youth, an adventure more significant than the mere knockabout of the world. It is youth in the toils, a struggle with phantoms worse than the elements, ‘a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares,’ a destructive experience.

  It must not be supposed that Mr. Conrad makes attack upon colonisation, expansion, even upon Imperialism. In no one is the essence of the adventurous spirit more instinctive. But cheap ideals, platitudes of civilisation are shrivelled up in the heat of such experiences. The end of this story brings us back to the familiar, reassuring region of common emotions, to the grief and constancy of the woman who had loved Kurtz and idealises his memory. It shows us how far we have travelled.

  Those who can read these two stories in sympathy with Mr. Conrad’s temperament will find in them a great expression of the world’s mystery and romance. They show the impact upon an undaunted spirit of what is terrible and obscure; they are adventure in terms of experience; they represent the sapping of life that cannot be lived on easy terms. Mr. Conrad’s style is his own—concentrated, tenacious, thoughtful, crammed with imaginative detail, breathless, yet missing nothing. Its grim earnestness bends to excursions of irony, to a casual humour, dry, subdued to its surroundings. Phrases strike the mind like lines of verse; we weary under a tension that is never slackened. He is one of the greatest of sea-writers and the most subjective of them. His storms are not the picturesque descriptions of the great phenomena, we see them in the ‘weary, serious faces,’ in the dreadful concentration of the actors. Mr. Conrad is intensely human and, we may add with some pride of fellowship, intensely modern. By those who seek for the finest expositions of the modern spirit ‘Youth’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’ cannot be neglected.

  Unsigned Review from the Times Literary Supplement (12 December 1902): 372.

  Telling tales, just spinning yarns, has gone out of fashion since the novel has become an epitome of everything a man has to say about anything. The three stories in Youth by Joseph Conrad are in this reference a return to an earlier taste. The yarns are of the sea, told with an astonishing zest; and given with vivid accumulation of detail and iterative persistency of emphasis of the quality of character and scenery. The method is exactly the opposite of Mr. Kipling’s. It is a little precious; one notes a tasting of the quality of phrases and an occasional indulgence in poetic rhetoric. But the effect is not unlike Mr. Kipling’s. In the first story, ‘Youth,’ the colour, the atmosphere of the East is brought out as in a picture. The concluding scene of the ‘Heart of Darkness’ is crisp and brief enough for Flaubert, but the effect—a woman’s ecstatic belief in a villain’s heroism—is reached by an indulgence in the picturesque horror of the villain, his work and his surroundings, which is pitiless in its insistence, and quite extravagant according to the canons of art. But the power, the success in conveying the impression vividly, without loss of energy is undoubted and is refreshing. ‘The End of the Tether,’ the last of the three, is the longest and best. Captain Whalley is racy of the sea, and an embodiment of its finest traditions; and the pathos of his long-drawn wrestle with the anger of circumstance is poignant to the end. Mr. Conrad should have put him in the forefront of the book. There are many readers who would not get beyond the barren and not very pretty philosophy of ‘Youth’; more who might feel they had had enough horror at the end of ‘The Heart of Darkness.’ But they would miss a great deal if they did not reach ‘The End of the Tether.’ It has this further advantage over the other two tales, that it is much less clever, much less precious.

  Unsigned Review from the Athenaeum (20 December 1902): 824.

  The art of Mr. Conrad is exquisite and very subtle. He uses the tools of his craft with the fine, thoughtful delicacy of a mediaeval clockmaker. […] Putting aside all considerations of mere taste, one may say at once that Mr. Conrad’s methods command and deserve the highest respect, if only by reason of their scholarly thoroughness. One feels that nothing is too minute, no process too laborious for this author. He considers not material rewards, but the dignity of his work, of all work. […]

  A critical writer has said that all fiction may roughly be divided into two classes: that dealing with movement and adventure, and the other dealing with characterization, the analysis of the human mind. In the present, as in every one of his previous books, Mr. Conrad has stepped outside these boundaries, and made his own class of work as he has made his own methods. All his stories have movement and incident, most of them have adventure, and the motive in all has apparently been the careful analysis, the philosophic presentation, of phases of human character. His studious and minute drawing of the action of men’s minds, passions, and principles forms fascinating reading. But he has another gift of which he himself may be less conscious, by means of which his other more incisive and purely intellectual message is translated for the proper understanding of simpler minds and plainer men. That gift is the power of conveying atmosphere, and in the exercise of this talent Mr. Conrad has few equals among our living writers of fiction. He presents the atmosphere in which his characters move and act with singular fidelity, by means of watchful and careful building in which the craftsman’s methods are never obtrusive, and after turning the last page of one of his books we rise saturated by the very air they breathed. This is a great power, but, more or less, it is possessed by other talented writers of fiction. The rarity of it in Mr. Conrad lies in this, that he can surround both his characters and his readers with the distinctive atmosphere of a particular story within the limits of a few pages. This is an exceptional gift, and the more to be prized in Mr. Conrad for the reason that he shows some signs of growing over-subtle in his analysis of moods, temperaments, and mental idiosyncrasies. It is an extreme into which all artists whose methods are delicate, minute and searching are apt to be led. We have at least one other analyst of temperament and mood in fiction whose minute subtlety, scrupulous restraint, and allusive economy of words resemble Mr. Conrad’s. And, becoming an obsession, these characteristics tend to weary the most appreciative reader. With Mr. Conrad, however, these rather dangerous intellectual refinements are illumined always by a vivid wealth of atmosphere, and translated simply by action, incident, strong light and shade, and distinctive colouring. […]

  The reviewer deliberately abstains both from quotation and from any attempt at analysis of a story like ‘The Heart of Darkness.’ Any such attempt in a limited space would be a painful injustice where work of this character is concerned. Further, the reader is warned that this book cannot be read understandingly—as evening newspapers and railway novels are perused—with one mental eye closed and the other roving. Mr. Conrad himself
spares no pains, and from his readers he demands thoughtful attention. He demands so much, and, where the intelligent are concerned, we think he will command it.

  Further Reading

  Critical Studies

  Adams, David, Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

  Caminero-Santangelo, Byron, African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

  Carabine, Keith and Max Saunders, eds., Inter-Relations: Conrad, James, Ford and Others (Boulder: Social Science Monographs; Lublin: Maria Curie-Skłodowska University; New York: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2003).

  Cooper, Brenda, Weary Sons of Conrad: White Fiction Against the Grain of Africa’s Dark Heart (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).

  de Lange, Attie, Gail Fincham, and Wiesław Krajka, eds., Conrad in Africa: New Essays on “Heart of Darkness” (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

  Donovan, Stephen, Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

  Henricksen, Bruce, Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

  Kaplan, Carola M., Peter Mallios, and Andrea White, eds., Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2005).

  Sherry, Norman, Conrad: A Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).

  White, Andrea, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

  Nineteenth-Century Accounts of Africa

  Hobson, J. A., Imperialism: A Study (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).

  Kingsley, Mary, Travels in West Africa (London: The Folio Society, 1976).

  Morel, E. D., Great Britain and the Congo: The Pillage of the Congo Basin (New York: H. Fertig, 1969).

  Park, Mungo, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).

  Stanley, Henry Morton, How I Found Livingstone (Vercelli: White Star, 2006).

  Conrad’s Contemporaries

  Ford, Ford Madox, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2007).

  Haggard, H. Rider, She (London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2001).

  Haggard, H. Rider, King Solomon’s Mines (London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2007).

  Kipling, Rudyard, Kim (New York: Penguin, 1987).

  Kucich, John, ed., Fictions of Empire (includes Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Beach of Falesá) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

  Conrad’s Influence

  Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).

  Achebe, Chinua, Arrow of God (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969).

  Achebe, Chinua, No Longer at Ease (Oxford: Heinemann, 1987).

  Aidoo, Ama Ata, Our Sister Killjoy (London: Longman, 1977).

  Boyd, William, A Good Man in Africa (London: H. Hamilton, 1981).

  Boyd, William, An Ice-Cream War (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).

  Boyle, T. C., Water Music (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981).

  Coetzee, J. M., Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin, 1999).

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2000).

  Foden, Giles, The Last King of Scotland (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

  Forster, E. M., A Passage to India (New York: Penguin, 2005).

  Garland, Alex, The Beach (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997).

  Golding, William, Lord of the Flies (New York: Penguin, 1999).

  Gordimer, Nadine, July’s People (New York: Penguin Books, 1982).

  Kerouac, Jack, On the Road (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).

  Naipaul, V. S., A Bend in the River (New York: Vintage International, 1989).

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London: J. Currey; Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993).

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann Educational, 1986).

  Orwell, George, Burmese Days (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962).

  Silverberg, Robert, Downward to the Earth (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970).

  Warren, Robert Penn, All the King’s Men (New York: Harcourt, 2001).

  Related Historical Books

  Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

  Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998).

  Butcher, Tim, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007) (retraces Conrad’s journey up the Congo).

  Easterly, William, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).

  Edgerton, Robert, The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

  French, Howard W., A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (New York: Knopf, 2004).

  Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

  Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen, and Volker Reiss, eds., The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (New York: Free Press, 1991).

  Mealer, Bryan, All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo (New York: Bloomsbury: Distributed in the trade by Macmillan, 2008).

  Otis, Laura, ed., Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  Pakenham, Thomas, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876–1912 (New York: Random House, 1991).

  Reader, John, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

  Wrong, Michela, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001).

  Character Sketches

  Heart of Darkness features a substantial number of unnamed characters, many of whom also share a number of characteristics, adding to the potential confusion. In fact, only two characters of significance are named—the story’s most important figures, Kurtz and Charlie Marlow (also named are Fresleven, the deceased captain whom Marlow replaces aboard the Congo steamer he pilots; Towson/Towser, the author of the sailor’s manual that Marlow discovers shortly before arriving at the Inner Station; and Van Shuyten, a Dutch trader on the Congo coast who equips the harlequin for his journey into the Congo). What follows are primarily brief descriptions of the various unnamed individuals whom Marlow meets on his voyage up the Congo River.

  Marlow’s audience: Marlow tells his tale to a group of his friends aboard a boat floating below London on the Thames River. The group includes the unnamed first narrator, the Director of Companies, the Lawyer, and the Accountant. The latter three, in addition to being closely related to individuals whom Conrad often spent time with, were all involved daily with the British economy, including its connections with imperial activity in places like Africa and India. And, in this way, they very much reflect the people who would have been reading Heart of Darkness in Blackwood’s Magazine, English businessmen of the middle and upper classes. Once Marlow begins his tale, however, they are barely referenced, aside from a few brief moments in which Marlow responds to their objections or doubts about his tale.

  The accountant: This is the first of a series of workers for the Company whom Marlow encounters and describes in extensive and often withering detail. The accountant works at the Outer Station (corresponding to Matadi in real life). There, he maintains an astonishingly formal level of dress, with starched shirts, a jacket, and a necktie among his attire (which he owes to the “native women” whom he has taught to launder his clothes). His method of coping with t
he uncertainties of the Congo is to focus his attention almost solely on the proper accounting of the Company’s funds, which leads to his brutal complaint about a dying man’s groans interrupting his all-important calculations. Marlow is both impressed and disgusted by “this miracle,” as he describes him.

  The manager: This is the man in charge of the Central Station (corresponding to Kinchasa). During an initial interview as well as his time at the Central Station and later during the journey up the Congo to recover Kurtz, Marlow learns a fair amount of information about the manager, little of which he likes. The manager, who is “commonplace” in virtually every respect and who does not inspire respect but instead “uneasiness,” apparently blames Kurtz for taking his place in the pecking order of the Company. Immensely proud of his ability to survive while many other Europeans are killed by “various tropical diseases,” he famously announces, “Men who come out here should have no entrails.” Indeed, the manager and his uncle both believe that the manager can ultimately gain the promotion he wishes if he simply stays alive. But they may also be helping Kurtz to die by wrecking the steamboat that Marlow is to command (the evidence in the text is not conclusive but certainly hints at this possibility) and denying him supplies. Once Kurtz has been recovered and shortly before his death, the manager cannot resist expressing how he knew that Kurtz would come to this kind of end. On the whole, Marlow finds the manager’s hypocritical and self-interested behavior to be nauseating and extremely troubling, yet also representative of the kinds of “workers” that the Company ultimately creates.