Joseph Conrad

## Biography

CONRAD, Joseph (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) (1857-1924), **novelist and short story writer**, born of **Polish parents in the Russian-dominated Ukraine**. His father's political sympathies caused the family to be **exiled to Volagda in northern Russia**, where Conrad's mother died when he was 7. After their return to Poland his father also died and Conrad was taken under the wing of his uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, who was to be a continuing influence on his life. **From an early age he longed to go to sea and in 1874** he went to Marseilles, embarked on a French vessel, and **began the career as a sailor which was to supply so much material for his writing**. **In 1886 he became** a British subject and **a master mariner and in 1894, after 20 years at sea, he settled in England and devoted himself to writing**. He published his first novel at the age of 38, writing in English, his third language.

In July 1876 he again sailed to the West Indies, as a steward on the Saint-Antoine. On this voyage Conrad seems to have taken part in some unlawful enterprise, probably gunrunning, and to have sailed along the coast of Venezuela, memories of which were to find a place in *Nostromo* (1904). The first mate of the vessel, a Corsican named Dominic Cervoni, was the model for the hero of that novel and was to play a picturesque role in Conrad’s life and work. **In April 1881 he joined the Palestine, a bark of 425 tons. This move proved to be an important event in his life**; it took him to the Far East for the first time, and **it was also a continuously troubled voyage, which provided him with literary material that he would use later**. Beset by gales, accidentally rammed by a steamer, and deserted by a sizable portion of her crew, the Palestine nevertheless had made it as far as the East Indies when her cargo of coal caught fire and the crew had to take to the lifeboats; Conrad’s initial landing in the East, on an island off Sumatra, took place only after a 13 1/2-hour voyage in an open boat. **In 1898 Conrad published his account of his experiences on the Palestine, with only slight alterations, as the short story “Youth,” a remarkable tale of a young officer’s first command.**
He returned to London by passenger steamer, and **in September 1883 he shipped as mate on the Riversdale, leaving her at Madras to join the Narcissus at Bombay. This voyage gave him material for his novel *The Nigg\*r of the “Narcissus”* (1897)** the story of an egocentric black sailor’s deterioration and death aboard ship. At about this time Conrad began writing his earliest known letters in the English language. In between subsequent voyages Conrad studied for his first mate’s certificate, and in 1886 two notable events occurred: he became a British subject in August, and three months later he obtained his master mariner’s certificate.
In February 1887 he sailed as first mate on the Highland Forest, bound for Semarang, Java. Her captain was John McWhirr, whom he later immortalized under the same name as the heroic, unimaginative captain of the steamer Nan Shan in Typhoon. He then joined the Vidar, a locally owned steamship trading among the islands of the southeast Asian archipelago. **During the five or six voyages he made in four and a half months, Conrad was discovering and exploring the world he was to re-create in his first novels, *Almayer’s Folly* (1895), *An Outcast of the Islands* (1896), and *Lord Jim* (1900), as well as several short stories.**

As a child in Poland, **he had stuck his finger on the centre of the map of Africa and said, “When I grow up I shall go there.”** In **1889** the Congo Free State was four years old as a political entity and already notorious as a sphere of imperialistic exploitation. Conrad’s childhood dream took positive shape in the ambition to command a Congo River steamboat. Using what influence he could, **he went to Brussels and secured an appointment. What he saw, did, and felt in the Congo are largely recorded in *Heart of Darkness* (1899), his most famous, finest, and most enigmatic story, the title of which signifies not only the heart of Africa, the dark continent, but also the heart of evil—everything that is corrupt, nihilistic, malign—and perhaps the heart of man. The story is central to Conrad’s work and vision, and it is difficult not to think of his Congo experiences as traumatic.** He may have exaggerated when he said, “Before the Congo I was a mere animal,” but in a real sense the dying Kurtz’s cry, “The horror! The horror!” was Conrad’s. He suffered psychological, spiritual, even metaphysical shock in the Congo, and his physical health was also damaged; for the rest of his life, he was racked by recurrent fever and gout.

Conrad's work was generally ill received by critics and public alike, and he was plagued with money problems. Some of his stories were
serialized in *Blackwood's Magazine*, but it was **the novel *Chance* (1913)** that brought Conrad **his first popular and financial success**; it is the story of Flora de Barrai, lonely daughter of a crooked financier, and combines the attractions of a sea background with the theme of romantic love and more female interest than is usual with Conrad.

**By the time of his death, Conrad was well established in the literary world as one of the leading Modernists**; a decline of interest in the 1930s was followed by increasing scholarly and critical attention, **pioneered in part by a study in 1941 by M. C. Bradbrook, and by an essay in the same year by Leavis in *Scrutiny*** (later reprinted in *The Great Tradition*) in which Conrad is placed '**among the very great novelists in the language'**.

Joseph Conrad was another novelist who used the wider world beyond England as the setting for his explorations in character and motive. Conrad’s novels have a variety of locations which reflect his own extensive travels, mainly as a merchant seaman. Like several of the important writers of the time, he came to Britain as an exile from elsewhere. He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski of Polish parents and did not learn English until his early twenties. He joined the British merchant navy, and became a naturalised British subject in 1896. He brought to his novels experiences and attitudes which were unusual for a writer of his time. He shared with both Kipling and Maugham a fascination with different cultures, especially the Far East and Africa, but he has more wide-ranging and explicit political insights than these writers normally express.

Conrad’s gentlemanly Polish background, and his diverse professional and intellectual interests, made for ambiguities which run through his life and work. Having been born an unwilling subject of the Russian Tsar, and having accepted exile from nationalist politics and his native language, he steadily explores and interrelates themes of guilt and dislocation.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### The New Imperialism

The closing years of the nineteenth century were marked by the European grab for Africa and by European rivalries as to which power could manage to grab most territory. Given its existing footholds, Britain did pretty well out of the enterprise.

After industrialization, Europeans wanted more resources to fuel their production. Many countries saw Africa as a source of raw materials and a market for industrial products. During the 19th and 20th centuries, colonial power seized vast areas of Africa.

**Factors Promoting Imperialism in Africa:**

* Europeans’ technological superiority was a great advantage. The invention of the steam engine allowed Europeans to sail rivers easily and establish control. Railroads, cables and steamships allowed communications within the colony.
* Scientific advances help Europeans prevent diseases like malaria.
* Africans’ huge variety of languages and political organization made unity difficult; wars were fought between ethnic groups.

**The Congo Sparks Interest:** In 1871, reporter Henry Stanley set out to central Afirca in search of Scotish missionary David Livingstone, who had traveled deep into the continent in the late 1860s. Stanley set out to trace the course of the Congo River. His explorations sparked the interest of King Leopold II of Belgium, who commissioned Stanley to help him obtain land in the Congo. Between 18779 and 1882, Stanley signed the treaties with local chiefs of the Congo River valley. The treaties gave King Leopold II of Belgium control of these lands. Leopold claimed that his primary motive in establishing the colony was to abloish the slave trade and promote Christianity. However, he licensed companies that brutally exploited Africans by forcing them to collect sap from rubber plants. At least 10 million Congolese died due to abuses inflicted during Leopold's rule. The Belgian's seizure of the Congo alarmed France. Soon Britain, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were also claiming parts of Africa.

**Berlin conference:** it took place in 1884-85 to establish rules for the division of Africa. European countries could claim land in Africa by notifying other nations and proving that they could control the area. No African ruler was invited to attend these meetings, yet the conference sealed Africa's fate. By 1914, only Liberia and Ethiopia remained free from European control.

### The Novel

For many critics **the years 1900–1945 are the high point in the development of the English novel**, a time when not only the greatest twentieth-century novels but **the greatest novels in the English language were written**. Many commentators stress, in particular, the **technical and aesthetic advances which occurred during this period** and it was indeed a time of **extensive formal innovation and experimentation**. In this respect, developments in the novel parallel developments in poetry. **The novels of this era contrast markedly with most nineteenth century novels**. The English fiction of the early nineteenth century was written at a time of great confidence in the basic structure of society and the place of individuals within it. **Towards the end of the century**, however, **novelists realised that there was no longer a shared and agreed community of values; a general background of belief which united them with their readers no longer existed after Darwin; and the certainties that lay behind the progress and prosperity of the Victorian age were collapsing. Hence the challenging, questioning nature of many late Victorian novelists, who brought in the outsiders’ more critical viewpoint.**

Together with the increase in objectivity given by outsiders, which permitted a different view of English society – or, in Conrad, Kipling, and Forster, a clearer depiction of colonialism and its effects – there can also be found a greater degree of subjectivity in the novels of writers whose concern was more with the inner life of characters.

**Instead of drawing on an existing world of public values, writers felt they had to build up a world of private values**. The definite shape of a novel’s plot, which organises characters and events, gave way to less logical and sequential modes of organisation. **There was a stress on the individual’s sense of what is valid in experience, and techniques of subjectivity were evolved to represent this.**

### Modernism

The application of the term "modern," of course, varies with the passage of time, but it is frequently applied specifically to the literature written since the beginning of World War I in 1914.

The English novels of the nineteenth century were written at a time of great confidence in British society, culture and political organization (affecting not only Britain, but the Empire overseas), and although different novelists present groups of characters from different levels of society and explore different themes, there is a sense of confidence in the basic structure of society that underlies their work. The writers of the twentieth century could not share this confidence; the changes in beliefs and political ideas were influenced strongly by the events of the First World War and by the events across the world that led to the disappearance of the British Empire, but began even earlier.

## Bibliography

His other major works include:

*Almayer's Folly* (1895),

*An Outcast of the Islands* (1896),

*The Nigg\*r of the 'Narcissus'* (1897),

*Lord Jim* (1900),

*Youth* (1902),

*The Mirror of the Sea* (1906),

*Victory* (1915),

*The Shadow-Line* (1917),

*The Rescue* (1920), and

*The Rover* (1923).

Conrad's autobiography, *A Personal Record*, appeared in book form in 1912 and his unfinished novel *Suspense* was published in 1925, posthumously.

### Literary Style

During his lifetime Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. But his initial reputation as a masterful teller of colourful adventures of the sea masked his fascination with the individual when faced with nature’s invariable unconcern, man’s frequent malevolence, and his inner battles with good and evil. To Conrad, the sea meant above all the tragedy of loneliness. A writer of complex skill and striking insight, but above all of an intensely personal vision, he has been increasingly regarded as one of the greatest English novelists.
Conrad’s influence on later novelists has been profound both because of his **masterly technical innovations** and because of the **vision of humanity** expressed through them. **He is the novelist of man in extreme situations**. **“Those who read me,”** he wrote in his preface to A Personal Record, **“know my conviction that the world**, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It **rests, notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity.”** For Conrad fidelity is the barrier man erects against nothingness, against corruption, against the evil that is all about him, insidious, waiting to engulf him, and that in some sense is within him unacknowledged. But what happens when fidelity is submerged, the barrier broken down, and the evil without is acknowledged by the evil within? At his greatest, that is Conrad’s theme. Feminist and postcolonialist readings of Modernist works have focused on Conrad and have confirmed his centrality to Modernism and to the general understanding of it.

In his early novels, Conrad uses his sea experiences in remote places as a means of exploring human character and English codes of honour and loyalty in particular. His situations are often extreme and test human beings to their limits. *Lord Jim* (1900) is the story of a young Englishman who panics and deserts his ship. Lord Jim later dies an honourable death but not before his moral conflicts are explored in detail. Innocence and experience, and the resulting moral growth which the character undergoes, turn Jim into a Conradian hero. **Themes of trust and betrayal, ignorance and self-knowledge dominate Conrad’s works**. Conrad was indeed a profoundly moral novelist but he recognised the moral complexities of his age which stemmed in part from the absence of any clearly shared set of values between people. In order to present this world fictionally, Conrad develops techniques of multiple points of view. **He is a master of complex narrative techniques such as time-shifting and flashbacks, which prevent a reader from adopting too simplistic an interpretation of events.**

The critic F.R. Leavis places Conrad firmly in what he called ‘the great tradition’ of novelists whose moral affirmations make them stand out as major contributors to literature. Many other critics have questioned this ‘tradition’. Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James also gain Leavis’s approval, and few would deny that these are all highly significant writers. The importance of their writings goes beyond moral and aesthetic values, and they can be critically considered from several other viewpoints (for example, social, political, popular, cultural) without in any way diminishing their significance.

Throughout his fiction he depicts human isolation, the conflict between different parts of one’s personality and external fate as well as the difficulties of human communication. He writes with a deep pessimism reminiscent of Thomas Hardy and he appreciates E.M. Forster’s need to ‘only connect’. Formally and technically, however, Conrad is a more innovative and influential writer and closer to Modernists than Hardy or Forster. The word ‘Modern’ is again important here. It came into use in the nineteenth century in the context of art and architecture.

The sea continued to supply the setting for most of his novels and short stories. His narrative technique is characterized by a skilful use of
breaks in time-sequence and he uses a narrator, Marlow, who provides a commentary on the action not unlike that of a Greek chorus. Conrad has been called an Impressionist and the movement of the stories, of the images and emotions, is portrayed through each character's private vision of reality.

Conrad (was a different kind of outsider in search of integrity. Conrad, born in Poland the son of a prominent nationalist victim of Russian repression, was naturalized as a British citizen in 1886. If he did not in any truly treasonable sense betray his homeland, and if he rarely refers directly to the Poland he had left, a sense of betrayal nevertheless haunts his work. Conrad’s career as an exile had begun and developed as a merchant seaman and it was as a writer of sea-stories set in the East Indies and the Pacific that he first attracted public attention.

It was only with the appearance of his more obviously political fiction in the early years of the twentieth century that the true bent of his art became clear to a broad group of discriminating admirers. There is, however, no clear dividing line between his sea-stories and his land-stories, between tales set in European colonies and those set in an equally troubled and benighted Europe. Conrad’s themes merely develop, broaden, and open up in the larger world beyond the confined, masculine world of the ship.

Conrad’s tales are concerned with the nature and effects of European imperialism, both economic and colonial. Conrad deals with the intrusion and interference of Europeans in the Pacific, in the East Indies, in South America, and in Africa. His colonizers are drawn from a variety of national backgrounds; most are disreputable, incomprehending, intolerant, and exploitative. In Conrad’s work colonialism generally emerges as both brutal and brutalizing, alienating native and settler alike. Power is not simply corrupting, it is systematically open to abuse.

In *An Outpost of Progress* (1898) ‘progress’ is an obvious misnomer. A newspaper from ‘home’ brightly discusses ‘Our Colonial Expansion’ (though Conrad does not locate the ‘our’ in terms of ‘the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work’ and of ‘the merits of those who went about bringing light and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth’. **There is little light. The story indicates that the ‘darkness’ corrupts both internally and externally, an idea which reaches its apogee in *Heart of Darkness* (1899, 1902), a narrative which gradually unveils, layer by layer, an underlying horror.** Imperialism is initially expounded as a variety of brutish idealism: ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea.’ The tale as it unwinds, exposes the lack of such an ‘idea’ and the remoteness of any ideal from the colonial reality.

## *Heart of Darkness*

### Literary Overview

* **Genre:** Novella
* **Setting:** 19th-century Britain, Congo and Brussels
* **Narrator:** First-Person Narrator (Unnamed sailor and Marlow)
* **Narrative Method:** Frame story
* **Mood:** Dark and sombre
* **Themes:** Greed, Imperialism, Racism, Hypocrisy and Indifference

Conrad wrote long novels, short stories and novellas, with his most famous novella being *Heart of Darkness* (1899). In it, Conrad describes a long journey to a place deep inside the Belgian Congo, the heart of darkness of the title. The story is again told by the intermediate narrator Marlow, who retraces his first visit to colonial Africa and his growing awareness of the evils he encounters. The story contrasts Western civilisation in Europe with what that civilisation has done to Africa. Early in the novel, while on the River Thames near London, Marlow speaks:

*‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’. . . ‘I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago – the other day. . . . Light came out of this river since – you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.’*

The theme of darkness leads to the figure of Kurtz, the central character, a portrait of how the commercial and material exploitation of colonial lands can make men morally hollow, and create a permanent nightmare in the soul. The fears Conrad expresses find an echo in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in his poem "The Hollow Men" with the epigraph ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’ – a direct quotation from Conrad’s novella.

*His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines. . . . Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror – of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath – ‘The horror! The horror!’ I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt – ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead.’*

*Heart of Darkness* (1899) marks a key moment in colonial literature, Joseph Conrad questioning the certainties about racial superiority which underpinned white rule. Simple greed is what motivates empire, Conrad suggests, the quest for money making Europeans more barbarous than the supposed black cannibals they governed and worked to death.

### Plot

On board a boat anchored peacefully in the Thames the narrator, Marlow, tells the story of his journey on another river. Travelling in Africa to join a cargo boat, Marlow grows disgusted by what he sees of the greed of the ivory traders and their brutal exploitation of the natives. At a company station he hears of the remarkable Mr Kurtz who is stationed in the very heart of the ivory country and is the company's most successful agent. Leaving the river, Marlow makes a long and arduous cross-country trek to join the steamboat which he will command on an ivory collecting journey into the interior, but at the Central Station he finds that his boat has been mysteriously wrecked. He learns that Kurtz has dismissed his assistant and is seriously ill. The other agents, jealous of Kurtz's success and possible promotion, hope that he will not recover and it becomes clear that Marlow's arrival at the Inner Station is being deliberately delayed. With repairs finally completed Marlow sets off on the two-month journey towards Kurtz. The river passage through the heavy motionless forest fills Marlow with a growing sense of dread.

The journey is 'like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world'. Ominous drumming is heard and dark forms glimpsed among the trees. Nearing its destination the boat is attacked by tribesmen and a helmsman is killed. At the Inner Station Marlow is met by a naive young Russian sailor who tells Marlow of Kurtz's brilliance and the semidivine power he exercises over the natives. A row of severed heads on stakes round the hut give an intimation of the barbaric rites by which Kurtz has achieved his ascendancy. Ritual dancing has been followed with human sacrifice and, without the restraints imposed by his society, Kurtz, an educated and civilized man, has used his knowledge and his gun to reign over this dark kingdom. While Marlow attempts to get Kurtz back down the river Kurtz tries to justify his actions and his motives: he has seen into the very heart of things. But dying his last words are: 'The horror! The horror!'

Marlow is left with two packages to deliver, Kurtz's report for the Society for Suppression of Savage Customs, and some letters for his girlfriend. Faced with the girl's grief Marlow tells her simply that Kurtz died with her name on his lips.

### Characters

#### Main Characters

* **Marlow:** Interested in maps since childhood, specially the "unexplored" places of Africa. Marlow is hired by The Company to fetch Kurtz in the center of the Belgian Congo. Through this journey Marlow is exposed to the brutality and hypocrisy of imperialism. A key element of Marlow’s character includes his skeptical attitude towards European colonization and its capitalistic goals. However, Marlow is no shining light for the rights of indigenous people. He feels colonization is justified if it aims to ‘civilize,’ or assimilate, native peoples.
* **Kurtz:** The chief agent at the Inner Station. The Company wishes to relieve Kurtz from his duty, ostensibly because his unorthodox methods for obtaining more ivory than other agents have been questioned. Kurtz is a gifted and eloquent man. Some think he believes in the Company's stated goals of educating and enhancing the lives of the indigenous people. However, Kurtz has become as barbarous as any Company agent. Yet, he is still revered by the natives.

#### Secondary Characters

* **The General Manager:** The manager of the Central Station is a cold, calculating man who has enslaved a great many native people and is completely indifferent to their suffering. He forces them to help him extract ivory, keeps them chained up, fails to feed them, and works them to exhaustion and death. He is jealous of Kurtz because Kurtz sends down more ivory than he does, and he makes plans to get Kurtz relieved of his post. His only motivations are greed and power.
* **The Russian:** The Russian is a young man who, in the spirit of adventure and the "need to exist," journeys to Africa. Marlow calls him "gallantly, thoughtlessly alive." When he encounters Kurtz at the Inner Station, the Russian becomes devoted to him, sitting at his feet and absorbing Kurtz's words and ideas. The Russian dresses in a patchwork of colorful cloth, so that when Marlow first encounters him, he compares him to a harlequin, a traditional comic character from the Italian stage. The Russian serves as a foil to Marlow, perhaps representing his younger self, as he, too, is compelled to see and explore Africa. He carries a manual on seamanship, linking him to Marlow, the seaman. His hero worship of Kurtz contrasts with Marlow's more balanced view, as Marlow sees Kurtz as a man with eloquence but one who has lost his moral compass.

#### Other Characters

* **The Accountant:** A Company employee at the Outer Station who wins Marlow's admiration simply by keeping himself impeccably groomed.
* **The General Manager's Uncle:** The uncle of the General Manager, and the head of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition. Like his nephew, the uncle has come to Africa to make his fortune. He is generally untalented, and his expedition disappears in the jungle.
* **The Brickmaker:** The General Manager's most trusted agent. A sly, lazy, power-hungry fellow who despite his title seems to have never made a brick, the Brickmaker cares only about his own advancement and therefore sees Kurtz as a threat. He also thinks that Marlow and Kurtz are somehow allied within the company.
* **The Intended:** The woman in Europe to whom Kurtz is betrothed to be married. She is incredibly idealistic about both Kurtz and the colonization of Africa. She continues to mourn Kurtz as a great man even a year after he dies.
* **Marlow's Aunt:** A well-connected and idealistic woman, she helps Marlow get the job as a steamer pilot for the Company. She is extremely idealistic about the European colonization of Africa, seeing it as a beautiful effort to civilize the savages.

### Literary Analysis

#### Symbols

* **Darkness:** The dark is symbolized by the African jungle and is associated with the primitive, uncivilized, and savage. Marlow begins his tale by pointing out that England "has been one of the dark places of the earth” (Conrad 4), alluding to a time when the Romans first invaded and "civilized" the native Britons.
* **Whiteness:** Whiteness symbolizes the aspects valued by Marlow and the Europeans in the darkness of the jungle. Europeans treasure the ivory they can extract from the Congo. Also, Marlow admires the accountant when he sees him: "I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of getup that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear necktie, and varnished boots ... I respected the fellow" (Conrad 16).
* **Ivory:** A white element in the darkness of the jungle, Ivory symbolizes the greed of the Europeans. Ivory is also equated with darkness and corruption. When Kurtz is on the verge of dying, just before he says his last words, Marlow notes his "ivory face." Ivory no longer has value; it is a thing of evil, which is what Kurtz became: "I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair." (Conrad 65)
* **The River:** "There was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land ... The snake had charmed me." (Conrad 7)

#### Themes

* **Racism:** The story reflects the racism of the time. Marlow shows sympathy for the natives, he makes racist statements throughout the text. He does not see the natives as equals, even being perplexed by their humanity: "They were not inhuman ... that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman" (Conrad 33). He often calls the native people "savages" and points out their "redeeming qualities:" "And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler." (Conrad 33)
* **Greed and Imperialism:** While the stated goal of the Company is to civilize native people, its true goal is to exploit Africa's resources and convert them into European profits. While there is talk back in Belgium of the civilizing mission, and while Kurtz prepares his report for the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, the focus of the Europeans in Africa is on securing ivory. The Company Accountant approves of Kurtz because he sends back more ivory than other agents; he cares neither about Kurtz's methods nor any civilizing activity he may or may not undertake. Greed is not just a corporate trait; it is also personal. The manager of the Central Station worries that Kurtz's success threatens his own advancement and opportunity to make money. The manager's uncle leads the Eldorado Exploring Expedition into the jungle in hopes of gaining his riches for himself. Greed is not only for money. Kurtz has an insatiable greed for power, and, when his followers feed his ego by worshipping him as they would a god, he becomes corrupt. Marlow remembers Kurtz speaking of "my Intended, my ivory, my station, my river ... everything belonged to him" (Conrad 44). That is the essence of the imperialistic attitude: the native peoples of a place have no right to the land where they live or its resources. Everything belongs to the power who can take it. "They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got" (Conrad 6).
* **Hypocrisy and Indifference:** The Company is recalling Kurtz apparently because they find his methods, though they are never discussed or detailed, to be excessively brutal. Yet Company officials overlook their own ruthlessness and brutality in pursuit of ivory. Some in Europe, like Marlow's aunt, believe that the Company represents Christian moral values. In joining the Company, Marlow becomes, in her eyes, "something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle" (Conrad 11). Even before he goes to Africa, though, Marlow knows better and tries to correct his aunt: "I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit" (11). All of the Company agents Marlow encounters in Africa demonstrate that is the overwhelming motivation. They are indifferent to the suffering they impose on the people around them: "the beaten nigg\*r groaned somewhere. 'What a row the brute makes!'" (Conrad 23).
* **Civilization and Barbarism:** Believing that they come from a more civilized culture, the agents of the Company consistently behave in a barbaric manner. They believe they are more civilized than the Africans they encounter because they live in cities, travel in steam-powered trains and ships, wear Western clothes, and have proper manners. Yet these supposedly civilized Europeans can easily fall into savagery in uncivilized Africa.

### Quotes

From Project Gutemberg's edition.

"‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ (Conrad 4)

"Light came out of this river [...] but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the
clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But
darkness was here yesterday." (Conrad 5)

"They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others." (Conrad 6)

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." (Conrad 6)

"There was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. [...] The snake had charmed me." (Conrad 7)

"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps." (Conrad 31)

"At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell." (Conrad 32)

"We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet." (Conrad 32)

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar." (Conrad 33)

"They had been engaged for six months (I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time—had no inherited experience to teach them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a piece of paper written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the river, it didn't enter anybody's head to trouble how they would live." (Conrad 37)

"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines." (Conrad 64)

"He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, —he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—
"'The horror! The horror!'" (Conrad 65)

"Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt—
"'Mistah Kurtz—he dead.'" (Conrad 65)

"This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness." (Conrad 66)

"He had summed up—he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. [...] this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth— the strange commingling of desire and hate." (Conrad 66)

## Intro Paragraph

The end of the 19th century signified a turning point for Africa, as a new wave of imperialism led by European empires pillaged the continent in their quest for land and resources. The stated goal of the Europeans was to civilize the natives, who were considered brutes and savages. However, they were exiled, exploited, and even killed by the colonizers. Inspired by his own visit to the Congo in 1890, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) depicts the reality of imperialism in his 1902 novella *Heart of Darkness* (*HoD* from now onwards). Considered a work of early Modernism, the novella narrates the story of Marlow, a seaman hired by a trading company to travel to the center of the Congo to relieve one of the company's agents, Mr. Kurtz, from his duty. As Marlow embarks on this journey, he witnesses first-hand the brutallity of imperialism. Through *HoD*, Conrad reveals the truth behind Western colonization, exposing the inhuman treatment African peoples received and the corruption of Europeans.

### MLA citation

Conrad, Joseph. *Heart of Darkness*. 1902. Project Gutenberg, 2006.

## Sources

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Joseph Conrad". *Encyclopedia Britannica*, 29 Nov. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Conrad.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4  Drabble, Margaret. *The Oxford Companion to English Literature*. Oxford University Press, 2000.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3  Carter, Ronald, and John McRae. *The Routledge History of Literature in English*. Routledge, 2002.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2  Sanders, Andrew. *The Short Oxford History of English Literature*. Clarendon Press, 1994.
5. ↑ Beck, Roger. *World History: Patterns of Interaction*. McDougal Littell, 2009.
6. ↑  Thornley G.C., and Gwyneth Roberts. *An Outline of English Literature*. Longman, 2003.
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1  Conrad, Joseph. *Heart of Darkness*. 1902. Project Gutenberg, 2006.