DescriptionYou will critically analyze Heart of Darkness using one of the schools of criticism. In this essay you will focus primarily on Marlow along with the school of criticism. Your thesis should be an arguable claim about Marlow’s character. Your claim will be related to the lens you are looking at the text, lens meaning the type of criticism. Depending on the thesis it might be necessary to explore the relationship between the author and Marlow, but if not then an exploration of the social climate in which conrad was writing. It might be possible that your argument is focused on just a center point of the novel and not the entire book, it depends on your thesis. Additionally you will use the second source which I have uploaded and you must take time to either support the source, refute it or qualify the claims made in the argument by that other source. Also use quotes from the book to support your own thesis. Please italicize the title for Heart of Darkness. Use MLA format.
Imperialism: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Author(s): Jonah Raskin
Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 2, No. 2, Literature and Society (Apr.,
1967), pp. 113-131
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
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Imperialism: Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
Jonah Raskin
Nearly forty years ago and long before the Heart of Darkness
‘craze’, Ford Madox Ford foretold the critical fate of Conrad’s
novella. He noted that it ‘gained when it was written a certain
vividness from its fierce lashings at the unspeakable crew that
exploited the natives in the Congo,’ and predicted that when
‘imperialism’ vanished, and by imperialism he meant ‘spoliation of
subject races’, the ‘masterpiece will then stand by its poetry.’l
Although imperialism remains, by Ford’s criteria if not by Lenin’s
and Hobson’s, literary critics have neglected imperialism and have
transformed the novella into a timeless myth about the exploration
of the human soul and the metaphysical power of evil. These are
only some of the more radical interpretations; there are others
which, if they shed some light, still distort the novella, which gives
us a concrete record of Belgian colonialism in the Congo and trans-
forms a personal experience into a myth about imperial decadence.
Despite D.H. Lawrence’s warning, ‘Never trust the artist. Trust
the tale’, Conrad’s own conception of his tale should not be over-
looked. The idea of the novella, he told his publisher in I899, was
the ‘criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling
the civilizing work in Africa’, and the ‘subject is of our time dis-
tinctly,’ though ‘not topically treated’. The story was intended as a
criticism of colonialists in Africa. Many of his friends agreed.
Hugh Clifford, writer and colonial administrator, called it a ‘study
of the Congo’, while Edward Garnett described it as ‘an impression
taken from life, of the conquest by the European whites of a
certain portion of Africa, an impression in particular of the
civilizing methods of a certain great European Trading Com-
1 Ford Madox Ford, in A Conrad Memorial Library: The Collection of George
T. Keating (Garden City, I929), p. 82.
II3 8
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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
pany’.2 Soon after Conrad’s death in 1924 writers and critics began
to interpret Heart of Darkness (I899) along different lines, focusing
on particular images and scenes and not the novella as a whole.
T.S. Eliot read it as a work about evil, life’s bleak hopelessness,
and moral emptiness, neglecting the ‘affirmation’ and ‘moral
victory’ and transforming the ‘horror’ which refers particularly to
the Belgian Congo to a horror of life in general. Somewhat later
Bertrand Russell claimed that Conrad’s point of view was ‘the
antithesis of Rousseau’s,’ and analysed Heart of Darkness as a tale
of ‘a rather weak idealist… driven mad by horror of the tropical
forest and loneliness among savages.’ The Conrad of Russell’s
making ‘thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a
dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any
moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’
Even Andre Gide, who read Heart of Darkness for the fourth time
while on his Congo trip, and felt that ‘This admirable book still
remains profoundly true … There is no exaggeration in his
picture; it is cruelly exact’, was more interested in Conrad’s de-
scriptions of primitive culture and the jungle than in his record of
Belgian colonialism.3 Eliot, Gide, and Russell, looking at Conrad’s
novella in the light of their own preoccupations and the concerns
of their own time, detected important threads in the narrative and
brought it new meaning, but they also transformed the tale and
distracted readers from the ‘heart of darkness’, which was colonial-
ism. As existentialism and Jungian archetypes have become critical
tools, the novella has been disfigured; Conrad would hardly
recognize his own hand.
Both the colonialism of the turn of the century and Conrad’s
image of it have been misread. Alberto Moravia, for instance,
does both, for he claims that Conrad defined the ‘old colonialism’
in its ‘picturesqueness’ and with ‘its decadent bungalows, its
Victorian hotels, its slave-like bars, its dusty shops’. Yet the old
colonialism was in its essentials never like this nor did Conrad
describe it in this fashion. Heart of Darkness is anything but
2 William Blackburn, ed., Joseph Conrad, Letters to William Blackwood and
David S. Meldrum (Durham, I958), pp. 36-7; Hugh Clifford, ‘The Art of
Joseph Conrad’, The Spectator, 29 November I902; Edward Gamett, ‘Mr
Conrad’s New Book’, The Academy and Literature, 6 December I902.
3 Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory (New York, I963), p. 87; Andre
Gide, Travels in the Congo (New York, I930), p. i and passim. The book was
dedicated ‘To the memory of Joseph Conrad’.
I14
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IMPERIALISM: CONRAD)’S HEART OF DARKNESS
picturesque and the world of colonialism Moravia imagines comes
straight from Pierre Loti’s Le Roman d’un Spahi (I88I), a story of
decadent French colonialism. Moravia claims that the colonialism
Conrad described is fundamentally different from the ‘neo-
colonialism’ of the world after I945, but Graham Greene, whose
novel The Heart of the Matter (I948) has affinities with Heart of
Darkness, wrote in I959 from West Africa that much ‘had not
changed since Conrad’s day’. Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien, relating
Congolese events of the I96os, finds it instructive to turn to King
Leopold’s Congo undertaking, recalling that it was ‘an exercise in
rapacity … presented to the public as a humanitarian enterprise’.
‘The real tragedy of the missionaries of Katanga’ he writes, ‘… is
not so very far from the tragedy of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness –
Kurtz who, towards the end, scrawled across his careful, high-
minded thesis on the eradication of barbaric customs the three
words: “Exterminate the brutes”.’ And finally it is important to
see the novella in the context of colonialism, for Conrad believed
that ‘Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing’, that a
‘novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of
human experience’.4
Accounting for the genesis of Heart of Darkness, as for most
masterpieces, is a complex affair. A number of influences were at
work – some personal, some social and political. What is parti-
cularly interesting is that Conrad transformed a personal experience
into a fiction of general historical and cultural significance. With
little sense of strain, he moved from self to society; it was one of his
eccentricities to mythologize an historical self, to place his own life
at the heart of historical conflicts. He was the ‘Polish Englishman’,
Easterner and Westerner; he saw himself at the centre of rival
European nationalisms, and claimed that his ‘was the only case of
a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a … standing
jump out of his racial surroundings and associations’. As a sailor
he made of himself’the last seaman of a sailing vessel’, and boasted
that if he lived long enough he would ‘become a bizarre relic of a
dead barbarism, a sort of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman
… who had never gone into steam’. In the Congo he stood in a
4 Alberto Moravia, ‘Images of Africa’, Partisan Review, Fall I963, p. 392;
Graham Greene, In Search of a Character (London, I96i), pp. I5, i8, 48, 51;
Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Mercy and Mercenaries’, The Observer (London), 6
December I964; and To Katanga and Back (London, I962), p. 164.
!I5
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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
border country which linked the primitive African world with the
moder European. Conrad placed himself at and was fascinated
by frontiers – mythical frontiers between Poland and England,
civilization and savagery, industrialism and pastoralism, and these
social and historical tensions were made the tensions of his novels.
He believed that ‘the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest
conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast
capable of feeling and passion’. For him the conflicts he witnessed
in the Belgian Congo illuminated the conflicts of the modem
world; he had only to give them shape and significance, set them
down on paper, to chronicle a phase of history. In writing out of
his self he was mythologizing the contemporary world.
The times, too, worked on Conrad’s imagination and the
memories of the Congo were recalled when the rapacity of Leo-
pold’s enterprise began to be suspected and when both jingoism
and anti-imperialism shocked England at the turn of the century.
He had written of the colonial scene in his first novels but they
convey little sense of its social framework. In I897, with ‘An Out-
post of Progress’, and then in I899, with Heart of Darkness, he
drew closer to the colonialism of his day. Beatrice Webb noted in
her diary, 25 June I897: ‘Imperialism in the air! – all classes
drunk with sight seeing and hysterical loyalty’, and it was this
atmosphere which bent Conrad’s art in the direction of colonialism
in Africa, and which somewhat later provoked him to attack the
‘idiotic’ Boer War and to regret that ‘All that’s art, thought, idea
will have to step back and hide its head before the intolerable war
inanities’. We know from his friends and from his letters that the
political issues of I897-I902 returned him to his own experience
with colonialism and impressed him with the belief that English
readers needed urgently to see colonialism in Africa.5 There was a
public interested in tales about the empire, about savages and
white traders, and Heart of Darkness, written for Blackwood’s
Magazine which specialized in ‘tales from the outposts’, answers
that curiosity and reads in parts like the popular magazine fiction
of the day. The descriptions of shouting and frantic blacks at-
tacking Marlow’s steamship and the whites firing back, and of the
beautiful Negro mistress of the white colonialist, satisfied readers
looking for romance and adventure. But Heart of Darkness
5 Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership (London, 1948), p. I40; G.J. Aubry, Life
and Letters of Joseph Conrad (London, I927), I, p. 284.
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IMPERIALISM: CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS
answers the romantic tales about Africa – like Rider Haggard’s
‘Black Heart and White Heart’ – with the actualities of colonialism.
It was born in part because there was a public which wanted avidly
to read of Africa but it gave them a Congo they knew little about.
Much of what happened to Conrad in the Congo is lost or
confused. He gave different versions of his voyage and it is sug-
gested that the actual journey was merged with accounts of other
African travellers – those of Mungo Park, Bruce, Burton, Speke,
and Livingstone-which Conrad had read and which lingered in his
memory. As a child he had read about African explorers and from
their stories constructed a romantic world of exploration, but when
he finally went to the Congo it put ‘an end to the idealized realities
of a boy’s daydreams!’ However, Conrad’s Diary, which he kept
from 13 June to i August I890, and his letters from the Congo
give us some hints. The Diary has few similarities with the
finished story, although both depict a journey up the Congo River,
and passages from it which would have depicted the Congo Conrad
encountered were omitted from the novella. Heart of Darkness
has no mention, as the Diary has, of Roger Casement, no de-
scription of the Hatton and Cookson English factory, no packing of
ivory in cases for shipment, no visits to African market towns,
plantations, or missions. The Congo Conrad saw in I890 with its
factories, plantations, missionaries, and commercial firms was a
more highly organized and ‘civilized’ region than the Congo of
Heart of Darkness, which is presented in the rudimentary stages of
development. Correspondingly, the Diary betrays no horror of the
jungle or fascination for the primitive on anything like the scale
of Heart of Darkness; nor is there the same degree of bitterness
and anguish, though occasionally Conrad expressed his hatred of
the Congo and the colonial enterprise. On 5 July he wrote,
‘Getting jolly well sick of this fun’, and on 24 June that the
‘Prominent characteristic of the social life here’ was ‘people
speaking ill of each other’. However, he was pleased with many of
the representatives of European colonialism and found the Mission
of Sutili ’eminently civilized’. Roger Casement, whose reports
exposed Belgian atrocities in the Congo and were used by Mark
Twain in his satire – King Leopold’s Soliloquy (I905) – was highly
praised. Nearly fifteen years later he changed his mind about
Casement and characterized him as ‘a limp personality’. Conrad
called him a ‘Protestant Irishman, pious too. But so was Pizarro’,
II7
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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
and suggested that ‘There is a touch of the Conquistador in him’,
and that ‘some particle of Las Casas’ soul had found refuge in his
indefatigable body’. Conrad interpreted history by drawing ana-
logies between the past and the present; hence the Casement-
Las Casas parallel. The empire builders of the twentieth century
were the ‘modem Conquistadores’; King Leopold was Pizarro and
Thys Cortez.6 He also believed there was an important analogy
between the Roman and modem European empires and the begin-
ning of Heart of Darkness, which is meant to put us in the approp-
riate historical and psychological setting, describes the civilized
Roman colonialist in England, his confrontation with British
savages, and his ‘disease, exile, and death’. One of the ironies of
Heart of Darkness is that the modern colonialist repeats the
historical experience of the Roman empire-builder, though his
exile and death is enacted in the Congo. The destruction of im-
perial societies, from the fall of Rome, and perhaps before, was
attributed to savage invaders, to the barbarian inroads on civiliza-
tion, and Conrad gave the myth modem coinage when he depicted
the modem imperium endangered by African savages. In the
Spanish conquest of the Americas, too, he saw parallels with the
Belgian conquest of the Congo, and while Conrad in I903 saw
Casement as the modem Las Casas, and suspected him of a ruth-
lessness camouflaged by piety, in I89o he thought him straight-
forward, intelligent, and sympathetic. The earlier Conrad believed
the rhetoric of colonialism, while the later suspected that greed
and thirst for power lay behind claims to progress and civilization.
The novella recreates Conrad’s bewildered feelings, his sense that
he is kept ‘away from the truth of things’, and that everything in
the Congo is ‘unreal’ – ‘the philanthropic pretence of the whole
concern’, its ‘talk’ and ‘government’. Belgian colonialism was
particularly noted for its outward show of philanthropy; Leopold
claimed in I897 that the task of State agents ‘in the Congo is noble
and elevated. It is incumbent upon them to carry on the work of
… civilization’. Many people, as Dr O’Brien reminds us, were
taken in until E.D. Morel, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Casement
revealed the true state of affairs. Conan Doyle believed that ‘the
most deadly of all the many evils which has arisen from Leopold’s
mission to Africa’, was that ‘the words of piety and philanthropy
… cloaked … dreadful deeds’. Conrad agreed, and in The
6 Ibid., vol. I, p. 325.
18
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IMPERIALISM: CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS
Inheritors (I90o), written in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford,
he presented a slightly veiled picture of colonialism in the Congo:
‘revolting to see without a mask was that falsehood which had been
hiding under the words that for ages had spurred men to noble
deeds, to self-sacrifice, to heroism. What was appalling was the
sudden perception that all the traditional ideals of honour, glory,
conscience, had been committed to the upholding of a gigantic
and atrocious fraud’. While most Europeans still believed those
words, Conrad revealed their hypocrisy in Heart of Darkness and
removed the ‘pretty fictions’ surrounding the Domaine Privd, well
before Casement and Morel.7
More enlightening than the Diary are Conrad’s letters, for most of
them were written later than the Diary and by that time he had
seen through the rhetoric and was disenchanted and depressed.
This experience, this discovery of exploitation, commercialism, and
inhumanity which lay behind the progressive claims of empire
builders, had a profound impact on his understanding of society.
He came to believe that the true nature of European society was
revealed in the colonies (and also in revolutions) and in his fiction
he focuses on men in the tropics and on revolutionaries. It is not
accidental but rather the outcome of his total outlook that his best
novel, Nostromo (I904), in which he presents an image of the
modem world, brings these two concerns into focus in its portrayal
of revolution in Latin America. The early Marx noted that ‘The
profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civiliza-
tion lies unveiled before our eyes’ in the ‘colonies, where it goes
naked’; more recently Sartre noted that ‘the strip-tease of our
humanism’ took place in the tropics, and that ‘In the colonies the
truth stood naked’. Conrad is a long way from Marx, Marxism, and
Sartre, but he shares the notion that in the colonies one saw the
truth about Western society. Many twentieth century writers
agreed with Conrad, and the notion that western society was
stripped naked in the colonies was expressed by English as well as
continental writers. E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, Joyce Cary,
and Doris Lessing focused on India and Africa for personal
reasons, certainly, but also because they felt that in the colonies the
7 Leopold is quoted in Roger Casement, The Black Diaries, ed., P. Singleton-
Gates and M. Girodias (London, I959), p. 83; Conan Doyle’s statement is in his
Introduction to E.D. Morel’s Great Britain and the Congo (London, I909).
II9
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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
important dramas of their culture were being enacted. Conrad –
and Kipling too – were the literary pathfinders. In a prefatory
essay to The African Witch Joyce Cary wrote that in Africa ‘power-
ful, often subconscious motives’, come to the surface. ‘Basic
obsessions which in Europe hide themselves under all sorts of
decorous scientific or theological or political uniforms, are there
seen naked in bold and dramatic action’. V. S. Prichett believes that
Conrad’s example is still valid and notes that ‘The great English
subject … which includes a picture of society, lies outside
England, simply because English life itself has for so long been
parasitic on life abroad and does not wish to recognize the fact’.8
From his Congo experience Conrad also came to believe that it was
his task as a novelist to unmask society, to look below its surface to
discern its essential character, and when we turn from the Diary
to the letters we see a Conrad who had discerned a rapacious
colonialism. By September 1890 he was sorry he had come to the
Congo. ‘Everything is repellent to me here’, he wrote, ‘Men and
things, but especially men’. He described the manager as a
‘common ivory-dealer with sordid instincts’, and thought of him-
self as one of the Congo’s ‘white slaves’. At first he grumbled about
the stupidity of packing ivory in crates, but gradually he came to
attack the colonial set-up as a whole, and sneered at that ‘big (or
fat ?) banker who rules the roost at home’.9 Some of his letters are
lost, but those from his uncle Bobrowski reveal Conrad’s own
dilemma. We can deduce what he wrote to his uncle from Bob-
rowski’s sense that his nephew was ‘on the frontier between
civilization and savagery’, and from his remark, ‘I see from your
last letter that you feel a deep resentment towards the Belgians for
exploiting you so mercilessly’.10
Although Heart of Darkness is rooted in autobiography it goes
beyond it. Conrad’s indignation at being a white slave and
exploited was channelled into an art which indicted Belgian
exploitation in the Congo, and his sense of being on the ‘frontier
8 Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, in On
Colonialism (Moscow), p. 88; J.P. Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched
of the Earth (New York, I963), pp. 7, 2I; V.S. Prichett, ‘Conrad’, in The
Working Novelist (London, 1965), p. I95.
9 J.A. Gee, Paul J. Sturm, eds., Letters of Joseph Conrad to AMarguerite
Poradowska I890o-920 (New Haven, I940), pp. I5-I7.
10 H. Jean-Aubry,Joseph Conrad in the Congo (Boston, I926), p. 45; Z. Najder,
ed., Conrad’s Polish Background (London, I964), p. I33.
120
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IMPERIALISM: CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS
between civilization and savagery’ was transformed into a myth
about the barbarism of colonialism. In turning experience into art
he ignored some of his experiences but focused on others to give
significance; a good example of this is the description of the drum
in Heart of Darkness. On 4 July I890 Conrad noted in his Diary:
‘At night when the moon rose I heard shouts and drumming in
distant villages. Passed a bad night’. The description of the drum-
ming takes on great import, for Marlow’s reaction to the drumming
indicates European man’s links with primitive man. ‘What
thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours –
the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate
uproar’. For Conrad’s audience the notion was still fairly revolu-
tionary, for Charles Kingsley had supported the colonial exploits
of Rajah Brooke – the extermination of the Dyaks – on the ground
that theirs was not human life but ‘beast-life’. ‘These Dyaks,’ he
wrote, ‘have put on the image of the beast, and they must take the
consequences’. Through similar glasses Thackeray looked at the
Negro and wrote, ‘They are not my men & brethren, these strange
people … Sambo is not my man & my brother’.11 Conrad’s
assertion – quite startling for most Victorians – that European man
was linked with African man had more than psychological impli-
cations. When Marlow responds to the African drums and acclaims
his kinship he asks us to remember that the Africans are human
beings and not criminals, enemies, or beasts. With this under-
standing Belgian exploitation would be seen for what it was, man’s
inhumanity to man, not, as many believed, to a sub-human species.
One of Conrad’s characters who acts as his spokesman tells us that
when you realize that dark-skinned peoples are ‘human beings …
you see the injustice and cruel folly of what before, appeared just
and wise’. It is a mark of the maturity of Conrad’s art that he
awakened his readers to the horrors of Belgian colonialism on the
basis of broad emotional feelings – portraying that colonialism as
inhumanity to man and as a quest for wealth which destroyed life.
The epigraph to the Heart of Darkness volume, ‘… but the Dwarf
answered: “No, something human is dearer to me than the wealth of
the world”,’ indicates the sentiment pervading Heart of Darkness.
The drum image demonstrates how parts of the Diary were
11 R.B. Martin, unpublished Oxford thesis, An Edition of the Correspondence
and Private Papers of Charles Kingsley 1819-1856, p. I89; Gordon N. Ray,
Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom (London, I958), p. 216.
121
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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
incorporated in the tale, and also how Conrad found concrete
images to express the important aspects of and provide a critique
of Belgian colonialism. Henry James affirmed in an essay which
Conrad admired and referred to, that ‘the air of reality (solidity of
specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel’, and
that ‘Art is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main
care is to be typical, to be inclusive’. The finest parts of Heart of
Darkness exemplify this, for Conrad creates ‘the air of reality’ with
images which are at once concrete and typical. ‘This art of vivid
essential record’, which offers a ‘whole wide context of parti-
cularities’, gives us a comprehensive picture of colonialism.12
We see the trading company’s European offices dominating the
city and imbuing the population with pride in ‘an over-sea empire’
which will ‘make no end of coin by trade’. Marlow’s aunt, infected
with the rhetoric of colonialism, tells him that he will be ‘weaning
those ignorant millions from their horrid ways’. In Europe, too,
there is the scientific and cultural apparatus which accompanied
colonialism, anthropologists riding the coat-tails of trading
companies, and the societies concerned with savage customs.
On his way to the Congo, Marlow sees a man-of-war shelling
the African coast. In earlier novels Conrad had used the image of
the gunboat firing into the jungle, but without the significance
that it achieves here. One Polish reader asked Conrad why the ship
was French and he replied: ‘If I say that the ship which bom-
barded the coast was French, it is simply because she was French.
I remember her name: le Seignelay. It happened during the war (!)
in Dahomey. What follows could refer just as well to a ship of a
different country’. The image is compelling because it is a parti-
cular ship and because, as Conrad understood, ‘it could refer just
as well to a ship of a different country’. Rimbaud, who spent
eleven years as an African trader and shared Conrad’s feelings
about the colonial world, spoke of the European governments
which ‘squandered millions on these infernal and desolate shores’,
of the ‘millions flung away’ which ‘brought nothing but wars and
disasters of all kinds’; it is the same attitude which informs Con-
rad’s image of the man-of-war.13 The conflict between man and
12 Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in The House of Fiction, Leon Edel,
ed. (London, I957), pp. 33, 38; F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York,
I963), pp. I74, I76.
13 Najder, op. cit., p. 242; Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud in Abyssinia (Oxford,
1937), P. I05.
122
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IMPERIALISM: CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS
nature to ‘tear treasure out of the bowels of the land’ is central to
the novella and the man-of-war incident gives it a specific
reference. On the shores of Africa the ‘French had one of their
wars going on’, and ‘In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and
water’, the ship is ‘incomprehensible, firing into a continent’.
Marlow tells us that ‘There was a touch of insanity in the pro-
ceeding’, and he feels the same as he watches the building of the
Congo railroad. Work on this railroad was in progress when Con-
rad was in the Congo but was not completed until I898, when he
began to write Heart of Darkness. It is likely that news of its com-
pletion awakened memories of its early stages. The Congo Diary
contains no mention of the railroad, which follows the route
Conrad took, and its prominent place in the novella indicates his
increased social and political understanding. Gide saw the rail-
road in the I920s and claimed that although it had cost much human
life it was a worthwhile and noble accomplishment. The mid- and
late Victorians did not seem to realize that human beings were
involved in building railroads; a writer for The Quarterly Review
claimed in I898 that ‘In Africa, as in all half-savage countries, the
railroad is the best instrument for the introduction of civilization’.
Earlier, Froude had claimed that ‘Civilization spreads with rail-
road speed’, and that notion was widely expressed and believed.
In I889, the year the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Congo was
founded, Thys asserted: ‘friends of humanity will find that the
Congo railway is the means par excellence of allowing civilization
to penetrate rapidly and surely into the unknown depths of
Africa’. In focusing on the building of the railroad, ‘the revolu-
tionary machine of the age’, Conrad depicted one of the most
important aspects of colonialism, for the railroad, as Roger Case-
ment noted, was central to exploitation of the Belgian Congo.14
To Froude, Thys, and the magazine writers who celebrated the
railroad as an instrument of progress and civilization, Conrad gave
a fierce reply. For Conrad the railroad was a destroyer of nature,
an instrument for exploitation and oppression, for the violent
destruction of primitive communities. Like the gunboat shelling
the African continent, the building of the railroad is depicted as a
14 Unsigned article, ‘England and the Soudan’, The Quarterly Review, I898,
p. 572; James A. Froude, ‘England and Her Colonies’, in Short Studies on Great
Subjects, vol. II (London, I87I). p. I60; Ruth Slade, King Leopold’s Congo
(London, I962), p. 75; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York, I964),
p. i80.
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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
struggle between the white man and nature which slowly destroys
the African. Conrad tells us of the black labourers: ‘brought from
all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost
in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they
sickened, became inefficient, and were allowed to crawl away and
rest’. We see the railroad chain-gang at close range: ‘Six black men
advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow,
balancing small baskets of full earth on their heads … I could see
every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each
had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with
a chain’.
It isn’t only gunboats and railroads that we see but the people
involved in Belgian colonialism, from the chain-gang to the
company manager. The Africans portrayed in this early section
are real individuals and not merely noble savages or devils. Marlow
meets an armed African in uniform watching over labourers, a
primitive rebel stubbornly resisting the white colonialists by
sabotaging their efforts, and a surly young African whose master
allows him to insult other whites. It is a world in which Belgians
and Africans are both victims and victimizers, corrupting and
corrupted. There is the company accountant in starched collar and
clean linen who tells Marlow: ‘When one has got to make correct
entries, one comes to hate those savages – hate them to the death’.
We follow the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, its grimy explorers,
Negro carriers and mangy donkeys going into the wilderness to
look for ivory on the pretext of exploration. The relationship
between scientific exploration and the quest for wealth fascinated
Conrad; he noted that ‘The voyages of the early explorers were
prompted by an acquisitive spirit, the idea of lucre in some form,
the desire of trade or the desire of loot, disguised in more or less
fine words’. And in fact he envisaged history as an interweaving of
the noble and ignoble, exploration linked with exploitation,
progress and civilization tied to reaction and savagery.
Having provided this wealth of detail, these concrete images which
generalize about Belgian colonialism, Conrad created Kurtz to
symbolize the fundamental conflicts and the decadence of colonial-
ism. ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’, who is, in
Professor Lionel Trilling’s words, ‘a progressive and a liberal …
at once the most idealistic and the most practically successful of all
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IMPERIALISM: CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS
the agents of the Belgian exploitation of the Congo’.15 Kurtz had
come to Africa as ‘an emissary of pity, and science, and progress’,
but in his quest for ivory he is corrupted, his humane values
abandoned. Furthermore, his depravity is described in terms of his
savage atrocities, his participation in primitive rituals, and his
deification in African society. With Kurtz we leave in large part the
actual world and enter the mythic world Conrad created about the
Belgian Congo.
Conrad’s myth about moribund colonialism rested on the notion
that there was, as in the case of Rome, an inescapable and critical
relationship between imperial decadence and savagery. The
colonial power confronted and infected by barbarism becomes
decivilized and disintegrated; this myth developed from Conrad’s
sense that he was in I890 on the frontier between civilization and
savagery, and from his scrutiny of the pervasive and endless
struggle between blacks and whites, on chain-gangs and in jungle
outposts. It is a moral myth, too, for it details the evils which befall
the civilized man when he transgresses against barbarism, when he
exploits primitive man and nature. Kurtz has robbed the wilderness
of ivory, has ‘kicked the very earth to pieces’, and in turn ‘the
wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a
terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion’. He has exploited and
exterminated primitive man (primitive in the sense of natural and
pre-social as well as specifically Congolese), and they avenge
themselves by working his corruption: the torturer becomes
victim.
Conrad’s father Apollo Korzeniowski wrote in his memoirs that
‘The history of mankind is a history of the struggle between
barbarism and civilization’, and Conrad interpreted history in
similar fashion. His father had used the concept with particular
reference to Poland and Russia, designating Russia, of course, as
the barbarian. Conrad himself first used it in reference to colonial-
ism, but in the twentieth century he saw European politics too as a
conflict between barbarism and civilization. He traced many
similarities between the Congo and Poland, for both the struggle
of Polish nationalists against Russians and Germans and the war
between Belgian colonialists and Congo blacks were seen as part
of the continual struggle between barbarism and civilization.
Conrad’s Polish nationalism, his hatred of Russian ‘imperialists’,
15 Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture (London, 1966), p. 20.
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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
shaped his hostility to colonialism, and his experience in the Congo
stiffened his belief in the need for Poland’s independence from the
Empires of Germany and Russia. He described Poland as a
distant outpost of western civilization placed in the midst of hostile
camps, whose historical role was ‘defender of civilization against
the dangers of barbarism’. The Germans were a ‘race planted in
the middle of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of
Europeans amongst effete Asiatics or barbarous niggers; and, with
a consciousness of superiority, freeing their hands from all moral
bonds’. Conrad’s anti-colonialism derived in large measure from
his nineteenth-century nationalism, from his feeling that Poland
was victimized by European empires; he sympathized with
‘barbarous niggers’ like the Congolese because of his experience as
a Pole. And he looked at continental political and economic issues
with the insight of a man who had seen colonialism in Africa.16
There were, as well, other elements in Conrad’s myth about
civilization and barbarism. He believed that ‘There are some
situations where the barbarian and the, so-called, civilized man
meet upon the same ground,’ and whether one lived in the tropics
or in Western Europe one saw ‘the same manifestations of love and
hate and sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar in all its multi-
farious and vanishing shapes’. In all cultures, social inequality was
maintained by physical force, and Conrad spoke of that ‘toleration
of strength, that exists, infamous and irremediable, at the bottom
of all hearts, in all societies; whenever men congregate’
Central to the analogies between barbarian, savage, and civilized
c:mmunities was the concept of fetishism. Anthropologists of the
time were concerned with ‘savage survivals’ and Conrad similarly
looked for the fetishes of moder society. Although be believed
that ‘there is no real religion without a little fetishism’, religion was
relatively unimportant for him as a fetish, for he believed that
Christianity was dying and that new secular religions were taking
its place. As the old gods died man made new ones and this process
was common to primitive and civilized men. In Nostromo the
Indians who work the San Tome mine ‘invested it with a protecting
and invincible virtue as though it were a fetish made by their own
hands’, and Conrad adds that the Indians in this respect ‘did not
16 Najder, op. cit., p. 8; Aubry, op. cit., vol. II, p. 237; Joseph Conrad, ‘The
Crime of Partition’, ‘A Note on the Polish Problem’, and ‘Poland Revisited’, in
Notes on Life and Letters (London, I949).
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IMPERIALISM: CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS
differ appreciably from the rest of mankind which puts infinite
trust in its own creations’. There is a wide variety of fetishes in this
book: an Italian revolutionary does not believe in saints or in
‘priest’s religion’, but ‘Liberty and Garibaldi were his divinities’;
an American financier ‘looks upon his own God as a sort of in-
fluential partner, who gets his share of the profits in the endowment
of churches’, and that too, Conrad says, is a ‘sort of idolatry’. And
most important is the ‘religion of silver and iron’, for in modem
society wealth was the ultimate fetish. The deification of wealth,
political power, and secular values was an indication that man’s
creations assumed power over him, that man was estranged from
the world around him. The notion is important in other novels and
is decisive in Heart of Darkness. Conrad focuses on the fetishes of
empire and on the deification of ‘efficiency’.
In Heart of Darkness there is the religion of ivory as well, the
ivory to which the white traders pray. In Kurtz the notion of
fetishism is transformed into a symbol, for having worshipped
ivory he is turned into ‘an animated image of death carved out of
old ivory’. Kurtz stands at the ‘heart of darkness’ for he has become
a god worshipped by the Africans and thus totally dehumanized.
This is a direct comment on the colonialist world, for many had
written, as Kurtz did, that whites must appear ‘in the nature of
supernatural beings … with the might as of a deity’, to ‘exert a
power for good’.
Kurtz is also a decadent colonialist because he takes part in the
rituals of savage society. Conrad attempts to distinguish Kurtz’s
savagery from that of the Africans, and feels that theirs ‘was a
positive relief’ and ‘had a right to exist’, while Kurtz’s is abomin-
able: savages have a right to be savage but not civilized men.
However, he fails to distinguish successfully between the two, and
the implication of the tale is that the colonialist becomes decadent
and corrupt because of contact with savages. Kurtz is decadent
literally because he becomes like the Africans, and figuratively
because ‘powers of darkness’ control him and his is the ‘heart of
darkness’. Conrad held this notion at the same time that he
sympathized with and identified with the Africans, and this con-
flict links up with a central ambiguity of the novella, for it describes
evil both in terms of society and in terms of racial and pre-social
forces. In fact, Conrad believed that blacks were a corrupting
force, and in his earlier novels he described savage women and
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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
Negroes demoralizing white men. He knew little about Negroes
and one unfortunate experience in particular framed his notion of
evil blacks, for he always remembered ‘an enormous buck nigger
encountered in Haiti’ who crystallized his ‘conception of blind,
furious, unreasoning rage, manifested in the human animal’. Such
notions were in part derived from books and probably from con-
ceptions widespread of the time. In 1898 he was reading Max
Nordau, who suggested in Degeneration (I895) that the degener-
ate ‘renews intellectually the type of the primitive man of the most
remote Stone Age’.17 Conrad did not agree with Nordau that
symbolist artists were decadent, but he did agree that savagery and
decadence in the modern world went together. Both writers
criticized evils by identifying them as barbaric. In The Secret
Agent (I907), where the concept of degenerates plays an impor-
tant part and the characters discuss Professor Lombroso, the Italian
criminologist to whom Degeneration was dedicated, Conrad
indicates the depravity of an anarchist by describing ‘the negro
type of his face’. And in Nostromo he used the suggestion of Negro
features to indicate the baseness of the revolutionaries, informing
us that their appearance argued ‘the presence of some negro blood’.
In these novels the fault is slight – in Heart of Darkness it is
critical. Contemporary reviewers saw the novella as a realistic
and not a mythic account of the fall of the colonialist, and praised
Conrad’s portrait of’demoralization’, ‘degeneracy’, and ‘deciviliza-
tion’. Very few quarrelled with his sociology of colonialism, his
notion that men’s very lives were ‘rendered possible through the
high organization of civilized crowds’, that society permitted men
‘to live on condition of being machines’, but that when man was
freed from society in the tropics and confronted ‘primitive man
and primitive nature’, his life was disrupted and demoralized.
Society was necessary to keep in check man’s barbarism – without
it, as in the presence of Africans in the tropics, his innate savagery
would be rekindled. G.P. Gooch in The Heart of the Empire (I9oI)
claimed that ‘Neo-Imperialism’ demonstrated that ‘when men are
far from civilized society and can do what they like, they tend to do
their worst rather than their best’, and he urged those who wanted
verification to read ‘Stevenson’s vivid stories of Samoan life’. Not
only did colonial man do his worst but he became a savage too;
Benjamin Kidd in The Control of the Tropics (I898) argued that
17 Max Nordau, Degeneration (London, 1895), p. 556.
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IMPERIALISM: CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS
when the white man was separated from society and placed in the
jungle ‘he tends to sink slowly to the level around him’. The
argument was used in disputes about colonial policy, about the
possibility of colonizing Central Africa. Those who predicted
man’s decivilization said ‘no’ to plans for settling the heart of
Africa, and there were frequent magazine articles with such titles
as ‘Is Central Africa Worth Having?’ Edward Dicey, arguing
against colonialism, wrote that since there was ‘no better evidence
than that to be found in Mr Rider Haggard’s romances for the
belief that Central Africa contains vestiges of any civilization’,
England should stay out.18 Political writers and economists relied
on novels and tales, like those of Haggard and Stevenson, for
political arguments. Edward Tylor noted that ‘In our time, West
Africa is still a world of fetishes … So strong is the pervading
influence, that the European in Africa is apt to catch it from the
Negro, and himself, as the saying is “become black”.’ The author
of the popular Thinking Black suggested that ‘the fearful fact must
be faced that all things European degenerate in Central Africa’,
and that ‘Africa invades you … the Dark Continent flooding your
insular English being at every pore’.19 Heart of Darkness could have
provided as strong a case as any against colonizing Central Africa.
The argument was not confined to Central Africa. In I899
Herbert Spencer indicted empire-building as a whole when he
claimed that ‘the white savages of Europe are overrunning the
dark savages everywhere … the European nations are vying with
one another in political burglaries’; and that Europe had ‘entered
upon an era of social cannibalism in which the stronger nations
are devouring the weaker’. Spencer expanded his ideas in an essay,
‘Re-Barbarization’, asserting that in the war atmosphere of the
late I89os the ‘partially dormant instincts of the savage’ were
aroused. He felt that ‘savage tribes’ and modern empires ‘show
that the cardinal trait of fighting peoples is the subjection of man to
man and group to group’. Spencer was particularly interested in
the function of culture in the savage imperial society and noted
that ‘Literature, journalism, and art, have all been aiding in this
process of re-barbarization’. Popular fiction appealed to ‘latent
savagery’ and the poet laureate and Rudyard Kipling were
18 Edward Dicey in The Nineteenth Century, September 189o, p. 494.
19 Primitive Culture, vol. II (London, I87I), p. I45; Daniel Crawford,
Thinking Black (London, I912), pp. xv, 94.
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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
especially guilty in his eyes for the ‘recrudescence of barbaric
ambitions, ideas and sentiments’. He concluded that ‘re-barbariza-
tion’ went hand in hand with ‘the movement towards Im-
perialism’.20 J.A. Hobson also singled out Kipling for attack,
claiming that his poetry ‘expresses honestly the savage passion of
the mob-spirit of this country’. In The Psychology of Jingoism
(19oI), Hobson examined the cultural climate in England at the
time of the Boer War: ‘Jingoism is a particular form of …
primitive passion’. The ‘Jingo spirit … disables a nation from
getting outside itself’, and this trait was the ‘quintessence of
savagery’. He distinguished jingoism from primitive lust, writing
that ‘Jingoism is essentially a product of “civilized” communities’,
but claimed that ‘For purposes of the present study … the hypo-
thesis of reversion to a savage type of nature is distinctly profitable’.
He noted a fetishism in English society, for there was a ‘reversion
to belief in England’s God, a barbarian tribal deity who fights with
and for our big battalions’. H. G. Wells saw a similar trait in figures
like ‘Britannia’ whom he called the English ‘tribal gods’ of the
nineteenth century.21
The notion that colonialism and imperialism were barbarisms
and jingoism a savage survival was not the property of social
theorists and sociologists alone. Like Spencer, the novelist George
Gissing believed that a time of re-barbarization was coming and he
noted in I900 that ‘A period of struggle for existence between the
nations seems to have begun’, and that it might ‘very well result
in a long period of semi-barbarism’. Earlier, in I885, he had written
that the ‘throat-cutting in Africa’ was ‘hateful’ and that the ‘way
in which it is written about, shows the completest barbarism still
existing under the surface … The masses of men are still living
in a state of partially varnished savagery’. In The Whirlpool (1897)
and In the Year of Jubilee (I894), he attacked the savagery of
jingoism and colonialism.22
Heart of Darkness was written when these ideas were wide-
20 H. Spencer, quoted in H. Ausubel, In Hard Times (London, I960), p. 255;
‘Re-Barbarization’, and ‘Barbaric Art’ in Spencer’s Facts and Comments (Lon-
don, I902), pp. 122-33, 187.
21 J.A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London, I90I), pp. 40, 2, 12, 20,
78, 79; H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, revised edition (London, 1961),
p. 978.
22 Arthur C. Young, ed., The Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz 1887-
1903 (London, I96I), p. 284; Algernon and Ellen Gissing, eds. Letters of George
Gissing to Members of his Family (London, I927), p. I52.
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IMPERIALISM: CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS
spread, and Conrad used them to show the decadence of Belgian
colonialism in the Congo. In portraying Kurtz worshipping ivory,
being worshipped as a god, taking part in savage rituals, and
controlled by Africans, he translated a body of commonly shared
knowledge into a myth. Like Hobson, who claimed that Jingoism
was a particular form of primitive passion, Conrad defined Belgian
colonialism as a savage force. At a time when Kipling, in the short
story ‘At the Tomb of his Ancestors’, for example, celebrated the
white man as a god before native populations, and believed that
tribal values were important for the modem empire, Conrad
revealed the bankruptcy of these notions. It is in this sense that
he takes his place beside anti-colonialists like Hobson and Spencer,
for although he did not share their sociology or economics, he too
saw jingoism and colonialism as re-barbarization. As a concrete
record of Belgian colonialism, Heart of Darkness takes its place
alongside the works of E.D. Morel and Roger Casement. As a myth
it rallies moral indignation against colonialism.
At times Conrad’s myth gets out of hand and he would have
done well to remember Hobson’s point that the colonialist was
not corrupted by the native, but by the colonial situation, through
contact with ‘merchants, planters, engineers, and overseers’. And
this, of course, is the sort of corruption we see in the early section
of the novella. As fiction, Conrad’s myth was harmless, but in the
political world, where many arguments rested on the notion that in
Africa the white man became savage, it could be dangerous.
Perhaps, too, Conrad was not careful enough with his analogies
between civilization and savagery and his myth had its distorting
effect. Edward Tylor spoke to this point when he wrote of com-
parisons between civilized and savage standards and criticized
those who claimed that the evils of civilization were savage. ‘But
it is not savagery’, he wrote, but rather ‘broken-down civilization’.23
If myth gets out of hand and if Conrad was at times unsure
about the nature of imperial decadence, he provided a detailed and
comprehensive picture of the Belgian Congo. Heart of Darkness
deserves, certainly, to be read for its poetry, but it demands to be
read for its images of Africa, its moral condemnation of a colonial-
ism which was, in Conrad’s own words, ‘the vilest scramble for
loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and
geographical exploration’.
23 Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. I (New York, I833), p. 42.
I3I
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