Heart of Darkness

Overview

Heart of Darkness is a hundred and ten pages, published as a magazine serial in 1899 and as a book in 1902, and it is told at two removes. An unnamed narrator on a boat anchored in the Thames reports what Charlie Marlow said one evening while they waited for the tide. So every judgement in the book is Marlow’s, and Marlow is a character, which matters enormously for the arguments about it. Conrad never speaks in his own voice.

The material is autobiography. In 1890 Conrad, then a Polish-born British merchant officer, took a job with a Belgian company and commanded a steamboat on the Congo River. The Congo Free State was at that point the personal property of Leopold II, run as an extraction operation for ivory and later rubber, under a regime of hostage-taking, forced labour and mutilation that killed on a scale historians still argue about. Conrad came back with dysentery and gout and, he said, a permanently changed view of human beings. Some editions print his Congo Diary, and the overlap with the novel is exact enough to be unsettling.

The style is the other thing to prepare for. Conrad’s English was his third language and he writes it with an outsider’s deliberateness: long sentences, heavy adjectives, and a persistent reaching for things he then says cannot be described. Readers either find this the sound of a man telling the truth about something that will not go into words, or find it fog. F. R. Leavis, who admired the book, complained about the adjectival insistence.

What happens

Marlow, bored of England, uses a family connection to get a job with a Belgian trading company and is sent to Africa to captain a river steamer. In the company office two women knit black wool in an anteroom and a doctor measures his skull and asks whether there is madness in the family.

He travels down the coast on a French steamer and watches a warship shelling the bush, firing into a continent at nothing, with a tiny popping sound. At the Company’s first station he finds a scene of pure waste: machinery rusting in the grass, a hole dug for no purpose, a chain gang of prisoners, and a shaded grove where men worked to exhaustion have crawled away to die. Amid it walks the Company’s chief accountant, starched collar, clean cuffs, hair parted, books in apple-pie order, who remarks that the groans of a dying man distract him.

Marlow walks two hundred miles inland to the Central Station, and finds his boat sunk. While he waits months for rivets he begins to hear about Kurtz: a first-class agent who sends down more ivory than everyone else combined, a universal genius, a musician, a painter, a writer, a man the Company’s better sort consider the future. The manager, a man whose only distinction is that he never gets ill, is plainly hoping Kurtz will die.

The journey upriver occupies the middle of the book, and very little happens on it. Fog. An attack with arrows from the bank in which Marlow’s African helmsman is killed by a spear. A cannibal crew who are not fed and do not eat anyone, which Marlow finds genuinely puzzling and which is one of the few places the book credits Africans with restraint.

At the Inner Station a Russian in patchwork clothes, half deranged with hero-worship, explains that Kurtz has been raiding the country for ivory with the help of a local people who treat him as a god. Through a telescope Marlow sees that the posts around the house are topped with human heads, turned inward. Kurtz had written an eloquent seventeen-page report for an international society on the suppression of savage customs, all high-minded, and had scrawled across the end of it, later, a single line ordering the extermination of every one of them.

Kurtz himself is almost dead, carried out on a stretcher, a voice and very little else. He has to be prevented from crawling back to the forest at night. On the way downriver he dies, and his last words are two repeated syllables that Marlow takes to be a verdict on everything.

Back in Europe, Marlow visits Kurtz’s fiancee, who has spent a year in mourning and believes everything she was told about him. She asks what his last words were. Marlow tells her they were her name.

How to read it

Read it twice. It is short and the first reading is mostly weather; the second is when the structure and the ironies become visible.

Keep asking who is speaking. Marlow’s opinions are not the book’s. He is sceptical of the imperial mission and complicit in it, contemptuous of the Company and still working for it, and he ends by lying to protect a woman’s illusions after a whole book of insisting that he hates a lie.

Read Achebe’s lecture, An Image of Africa, alongside it. His charge is not that Conrad is unkind to Africans but that he uses Africa as a setting for a European breakdown, denies its people language, and reduces a continent to a metaphysical condition. It is a serious argument, it has never been fully answered, and reading the novel without it is now reading half the conversation.

Notice the women. There are four, and all of them are kept outside knowledge, most obviously in Marlow’s remark that women are out of touch with truth and had better stay that way, made by a man who then acts to keep one there.

Watch the phrases that refuse to specify. Unspeakable rites, inconceivable mystery, impenetrable darkness. Ask in each case whether something is being pointed at that could not be said in 1899, or whether the gesture is doing the work a description would have had to do honestly.

Questions it raises

• Is the novel an attack on imperialism, or does it use imperialism’s victims as scenery for a story about a European soul?
• Marlow says he hates lies and ends the book with one. Is that mercy, cowardice, or the last piece of evidence about what the system requires of its participants?
• What does the horror refer to? Kurtz’s own life, the Company, colonialism, human nature, or nothing in particular?
• Kurtz is presented as exceptional and also as inevitable. Which does the book believe?
• Achebe says the book denies Africans speech. There are perhaps two lines of African dialogue in it. Can any defence get round that?
• The story is told on a boat in the Thames, and Marlow begins by saying that England too was once one of the dark places of the earth. What is that framing doing?