INTRODUCTION

While engaged in the mundane chore of packing ivory tusks into casks, in his second week in the Congo as an employee of a Belgian company, Joseph Conrad could hardly have dreamed that the events of the next six months would provide him with the basis for one of the most influential works of fiction of the modern era. In fact, at the time, in June 1890, he felt this task to be “idiotic employment” (Conrad, “The Congo Diary,” p. 161; see “For Further Reading”), an impression he recorded in a journal that is one of the earliest samples of his writing in the English language as well as a document that demonstrates how closely aspects of Heart of Darkness are based on his own experiences. Perhaps it was the unpleasant memory of his physical contact with the coveted substance for which the Congo region was being plundered that would lead him, twenty-seven years later, to make clear that he did not profit from the endeavor materially but only artistically: two stories, one of which was Heart of Darkness, he maintained, “are all the spoil I brought out from the centre of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business” (Author’s Note, p. 4). Conrad was not yet a writer in 1890, although he had a year earlier tentatively begun work on what would eventually become his first novel, based partly on his observations in the Malay Archipelago. His relatively late start, however, was essential to his success, for by the time he began he had amassed a wealth of experiences of the sort that most other writers could only imagine. In fact, while Heart of Darkness is the best-known instance of Conrad’s penchant for transforming personal experiences into fiction, it is only one of numerous such works by this prolific author. By presenting this novella along with several of Conrad’s finest short stories—“Youth,” “Amy Foster,” and “The Secret Sharer,” each of which also draws on his travels and observations from around the world—the current volume aims to facilitate an appreciation of the diverse fruits of his genius.

Life and Career

In an essay written shortly after Conrad’s death in 1924, Virginia Woolf copiously praised her fellow novelist’s artistry. Yet even though Conrad had been naturalized as a British subject nearly four decades earlier, the quintessentially English Woolf viewed this Polish émigré, who “spoke English with a strong foreign accent,” as a “guest” in Britain. She further described him as “compound of two men,” as one who was “at once inside and out,” and who was therefore possessed of a penetrating “double vision” (Woolf, Collected Essays, pp. 302, 304). Ever the penetrating observer herself, Woolf thus crystallized what is perhaps the most basic aspect of Conrad’s identity: the fact that it was structured according to a series of dichotomies. He was a Pole and a Briton as well as a seaman and a writer, a fact he alluded to in a 1903 letter in which he characterized himself as a “homo duplex” (double man) in multiple senses (The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 3, p. 89). As a result of his dual nationalities and careers, he had a plurality of experiences and insights on a wide range of issues. Indeed, he was a consummate example of what Salman Rushdie (himself a hybrid product of India, Pakistan, and Britain) has termed “translated men”—expatriate artists whose geographical, cultural, and linguistic border crossings have resulted in rich cross-fertilizations of identities and perspectives (Imaginary Homelands, p. 17). One salient example of Conrad’s variety of experiences is on the matter of imperialism. Having been born in Russian-occupied Poland to a family of ardently nationalistic Poles and subsequently naturalized as a subject of the world’s foremost imperial power, and, further, as a seaman who traveled around the world during the heyday of European imperialism, he had a diversity of viewpoints that enabled him to write illuminating fiction on this theme. Another such example is that of language. That he is one of the foremost English prose stylists is an especially remarkable achievement given that this was his third language (after Polish and French, the latter being the language of the writers he most admired) and that he did not begin to learn it until he was a young adult.

Conrad’s unique circumstances as an individual were complemented by the fact that he occupied a singularly opportune moment in the history of British literature. His period of artistic fertility occurred precisely on the cusp between a Victorianism that was rapidly becoming antiquated and a modernism that would not be fully developed until after World War I. Dramatic changes in the reading public and the publishing industry, along with technological and geopolitical developments that challenged the traditional insularity of British culture, made the era ripe for both formal and thematic literary innovations. Yet while the particulars both of Conrad’s individual life and his historical moment no doubt provided him with special opportunities and capabilities, it was a combination of raw talent and uncompromising dedication to his artistic vision that enabled him so fully to actualize their potential. It is through understanding the remarkable circumstances of his life that one may see how it paradoxically came to be the case that this Polish-born, Francophile mariner was uniquely equipped to exploit the aesthetic and ideological instabilities of his era and thereby become a vital force in the development of British literary modernism.

 

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who published under the Anglicized pseudonym Joseph Conrad, was born on December 3, 1857, in southeastern Russian-occupied Poland—specifically, in or near Berdichev, a Polish province in the Ukraine. His family were Catholic members of the Polish hereditary nobility, the szlachta, which Conrad unassumingly characterized as “the land-tilling gentry” in order to make clear that this group (which comprised about ten percent of the population and for whom there was no distinction between aristocracy and gentry) was not comparable to the small minority of superwealthy families that constituted the aristocracy of his adoptive country. A formidable power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Poland had gone into decline and then been systematically dismantled by its more powerful neighbors, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, in a series of partitions in the late eighteenth century. In 1795, in the last of these partitions, the remnants of Polish territory were taken, and the nation would not be reconstituted until after World War I. Poland’s subjugation was a profound influence on Poles of Conrad’s generation in general and for Conrad in particular, given that many members of his family were deeply committed to the cause of autonomy for their homeland. The extent to which his father, Apollo Korzeniowski, a prominent playwright, poet, and translator, embraced the nationalist cause is indicated in the title of a poem he composed that marked Conrad’s birth in relation to the first Polish partition of 1772: “To My Son Born in the 85th Year of Muscovite Oppression, a Song for the Day of His Christening.” For his political activism, Apollo was imprisoned by the Russian authorities in the fall of 1861 and then, upon his release the following spring, was exiled with his wife, Ewa, and their only child to Vologda, a cold city northeast of Moscow. The harsh circumstances of their exile took a toll on the health of both parents. Ewa died of tuberculosis in 1865, when Conrad was seven years old. In 1867 the ailing Apollo and his son were permitted to return to Poland, where Apollo died, also of tuberculosis, in 1869. His funeral procession, in Cracow, inspired a major nationalist demonstration.

As Conrad was thus orphaned at the age of eleven, his upbringing now fell to his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, who was to prove a formative influence. Whereas Conrad’s father had been a passionate idealist, his uncle was eminently practical and conservative, and the opposition between these influences may be viewed as yet another of the dichotomies that shaped the author’s life. As Zdzislaw Najder, Conrad’s finest biographer, observes, “Almost all Conrad’s inner tensions—the painful, uncomfortable, wearisome wealth of his mind—can be associated with this basic contrast between his [father‘s] and his uncle’s personalities” (Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, p. 166). In 1872, at the age of fourteen, Conrad declared his intention of becoming a sailor, a plan that was initially opposed by his uncle. The idealistic adolescent was fixed on the idea, though, and his aspiration actually served a practical necessity, since it was clear that emigration would be necessary: as a Russian subject and the son of a convict, he would have been liable for up to twenty-five years of compulsory duty in the Russian Army had he remained in Poland. So in October 1874, two months before his seventeenth birthday, he left Poland for the port city of Marseilles, where he entered the French merchant marine as a trainee seaman and a steward.

His budding career, however, was temporarily brought to a halt when, in December 1877, he was informed that, as a Russian subject, he could no longer serve on French vessels. Without a livelihood, he remained in Marseilles, where he lived beyond his means and then tried to recoup his losses by gambling. The ensuing financial crisis led him to attempt suicide. (Conrad himself always insisted that the scar on his left breast was from a gunshot wound received in a duel, a claim perpetuated in his pseudo-autobiographical novel The Arrow of Gold [1919], which consists of heavily embellished memories of his Marseilles period, including romantic stories of gun running for the Spanish Carlist cause and a torrid love affair. His uncle, who rushed to Marseilles, helped him recuperate, and paid off his debts, publicly affirmed this myth—presumably because suicide is a mortal sin for Catholics whereas dueling was viewed as honorable—but in a confidential letter he acknowledged the truth.) After his recovery, no longer eligible to serve on French ships, Conrad joined the British merchant marine and first arrived on British shores in June 1878. Over the next several years he rose through the ranks, passing his exams for second mate in 1880, first mate in 1884, and captain in 1886, the same year in which he was naturalized as a Briton.

Yet employment opportunities for captains were scarce during this era, for the demand for sea officers was steadily declining as steamships were supplanting smaller sailing vessels (a historical shift Conrad wistfully treated in his 1906 memoir The Mirror of the Sea, in which he makes clear his belief in the dignity of sail over steam). So over the next several years he accepted positions as first mate and second mate, and in January 1894 he completed his last voyage. His two-decade-long career as a seaman had taken him all over the world—to southeast Asia, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, India, and throughout Europe—and would provide him with much of the material for his second profession, as a writer. The year 1894, in fact, constitutes a watershed in Conrad’s life, as the end of his period as a seaman was followed rapidly by the death, the next month, of his beloved uncle Tadeusz and the completion of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, which he had begun writing five years earlier. The novel was published in 1895 under the name Joseph Conrad (the inaugural use of this pseudonym), and, although it did not sell well, it received generally good reviews. With this modest success, the thirty-seven-year-old Conrad embarked on a literary career that from this point on would be the consuming passion of his life.

Conrad settled permanently in England in 1896 and (to the surprise of some of his friends) after a brief courtship married Jessie George, an intellectually unimpressive lower-middle-class Englishwoman nearly sixteen years younger than he. They would remain married for the rest of his life, and she appears to have provided the domestic support and stability that the irascible, high-strung author found necessary in order to work. In the same year his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, was published, followed in 1897 by The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” whose preface may be viewed as his aesthetic manifesto: he defined “art” as “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect” (Kimbrough edition, p. 145). He was well aware that his rather elevated artistic vision of fiction was not typical of English assumptions of the period. On the contrary, as Ian Watt points out, “Conrad’s basic conception of the novel was not of English origin. Nor was it derived from Polish sources, if only because the novel developed rather late in Poland, compared to poetry and drama. For Conrad the exemplary novelists were French, and, in particular, Flaubert and Maupassant” (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 48). As Conrad forged ahead with his literary career, his domestic life continued to develop. In 1898 the first of his two children, Borys, was born, and his first volume of short stories, Tales of Unrest, was published. In the fall of that year the family moved into Pent Farm, a home near the Kentish coast that Conrad had subleased from a new friend of his, the writer Ford Madox Huef fer (later, Ford Madox Ford). The relationship with Ford would prove to be important, as the two would go on to collaborate on several projects, most notably the novels The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), before a quarrel would effectively end their friendship. It was also during this period that Conrad began to cultivate relationships with some of the most important writers of the era, several of whom—H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, and Henry James—were now his neighbors. His second son, John, born in 1906, would in fact be named after his friend, the future Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Galsworthy.

The family lived at Pent Farm until 1907, and it was here that Conrad wrote most of his finest and most enduring fiction, beginning with Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900). Although his output was prodigious during his years at Pent Farm—and he remained steadily prolific throughout his career as a writer, with not only novellas and novels but short stories and essays as well—he suffered chronically from delibi tating bouts of depression and writer’s block. In a letter to the literary critic Edward Garnett, written shortly before he began full-time work on Lord Jim, he dramatically conveyed his anguish and sense of paralysis:

The more I write the less substance do I see in my work. The scales are falling off my eyes. It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself—and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep. I am alone with it in a chasm with perpendicular sides of black basalt. Never were sides so perpendicular and smooth, and high (Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 177).

To make matters worse, as he was racked with escalating debts (and proudly refused to lower his fairly high standard of living) he often spent large advances on work that he had hardly begun, which led him to request still greater advances; he was, therefore, more or less constantly under pressure to produce. Further, his difficulties with writing were exacerbated by a deep metaphysical pessimism that presupposed the ultimate futility of all human endeavors. In a letter to the idealistic Scottish socialist politician Cunninghame Graham, he summed up his view of the human condition, which was extrapolated from popularized accounts of the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy):

The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men (Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 16-17).

What has been termed the Conradian ethic is based, paradoxically, on acknowledging this darkly existential condition while nonetheless remaining faithful to one’s human commitments.

Having spent much of his early career as a writer using his own experiences and observations as grist for his art (most of his early tales are set at sea or in parts of the world to which he had traveled during his years as a seaman), Conrad now, after completing Typhoon (1903), began to treat subjects that were remote from his own experiences. This was in part a strategic shift of gears: he did not like the idea of being thought of as a writer whose sole subject matter was seafaring. The great political novels Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) were his primary achievements during this period. His political interests found expression at this time in nonfiction writings as well, most notably the 1905 essay “Autocracy and War,” which he wrote on the occasion of the defeat of Russia in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. In this essay, Conrad astutely analyzes the increasingly bellicose climate of Europe generally, asserting that it has become “an armed and trading continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for life and death, and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions” and presciently warning of the growing danger of German militarism (The Works of Joseph Conrad: Notes on Life and Letters, p. 112). He also used the piece on behalf of his homeland with the assertion that “[t]he common guilt of the two [that is, German and Russian] Empires is defined precisely by their frontier line running through the Polish provinces” (p. 95). He would in later years take up this issue at greater length in the polemical essays “A Note on the Polish Problem” (1916) and “The Crime of Partition” (1919), in which he would represent the Poles as “Western” rather than “Slavonic” and would appeal to the “Western Powers” to protect Poland from the twin evils of “Russian Slavonism” and “Prussian Ger manism” based on “the moral and intellectual kinship of that distant outpost of their own type of civilisation” (pp. 131, 135).

Public affirmations of loyalty to Poland appear to have been very important for Conrad, particularly following a debate that had transpired at the turn of the century in the Polish press over the emigration of talent. During this debate he was publicly denounced by one of Poland’s most famous novelists for alleged disloyalty for having emigrated to Britain and chosen to write in the English language. So acutely sensitive was he to such charges that he contended in a 1901 letter to a fellow Pole (who happened to share the name Józef Korzeniowski), on the matter of his adoption of an Anglicized pseudonym,

I have in no way disavowed either my nationality or the name we share for the sake of success. It is widely known that I am a Pole and that Józef [and] Konrad are my two Christian names, the latter being used by me as a surname so that foreign mouths should not distort my real surname.... It does not seem to me that I have been unfaithful to my country by having proved to the English that a gentleman from the Ukraine can be as good a sailor as they, and has something to tell them in their own language (Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 322-323).

Although the claims of some critics that Conrad’s fiction may be viewed primarily as displaced expressions of his own sense of guilt over having abandoned Poland have been taken beyond plausibility, there is no doubt that this issue played a prominent role in his psychology and in the development of his fiction, which pursues with a relentlessness bordering on obsession the themes of conflicted loyalties and betrayal. In fact, his 1912 autobiography, A Personal Record, is particularly interesting as a rhetorical effort to represent himself as faithful to his native homeland yet nonetheless as a natural fit for his adoptive country. The latter tendency is epitomized in the author’s note he wrote for a new edition of the volume in 1919 that includes a rather mysterious account of his relationship to the English language, which, it bears recalling in this context, he always spoke with a thick Polish accent:

The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption—well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of the stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idioms I truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character (The Works of Joseph, Conrad: A Personal Record, p. vii).

He even went so far as to deny the formative influence on him of French writers in order, as Najder characterizes it, “to erase from his literary biography any elements which might detract from his reputation as a classic of the English literary tradition” (p. 433).

In addition to the conflict over his dual national allegiances, Conrad was faced with the dilemma of how to negotiate the conflicting exigencies of two distinct audiences for his fiction. Subsequent to the education reform movement of the 1870s (a series of acts passed by Parliament had made elementary education compulsory for all British children), the British reading public had increasingly divided into a new mass readership and a highbrow readership. Although Conrad’s loyalties were with the latter, he was financially dependent on the former, and, despite his begrudging efforts to appeal to a popular readership, his books simply would not sell well. Unsuccessful in attracting a popular readership, he attempted to make his writing more lucrative by adapting his fiction for the stage, but the results of this endeavor were disappointing as well. Although he blithely claimed of his 1905 adaptation of his short story “To-morrow” (under the title One Day More) that he was content to have “an exceptionally intelligent audience stare... it coldly off the boards” (“The Censor of Plays” in The Works of Joseph Conrad: Notes on Life and Letters, p. 77), privately he had made clear that he had been hoping it would make him solvent in a way that his fiction had not yet done for him: “my little play.... may lead to the end of all my financial troubles,” he had optimistically speculated (Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 237). The first substantial sign of a change in this situation was the 1912 publication of ‘Twixt Land and Sea (including the fine short story “The Secret Sharer”), which garnered unprecedentedly high sales for him. Yet it would not be until the publication of the novel Chance, in 1914, that he would have an actual best-seller and a measure of relief from his financial burdens. From this point on, Conrad was marketable.

In an irony of the sort that is characteristic of his own fiction, however, Conrad’s newfound popularity coincided with a dramatic and permanent diminution in his powers as a writer. Indeed, the fact that Henry James, whom Conrad viewed as the greatest authority on the art of the novel form, had been sharply critical of Chance made painfully clear to him that the work’s fame and its artistic quality were not proportional to each other. The decline that had begun with Chance steepened with his next novel, Victory (1915), and his subsequent fiction, with the notable exception of the novella The Shadow-Line (1917), is inferior still. Some critics identify this process as having begun with his nervous collapse in 1910 after completing Under Western Eyes. So torturous was the writing of this book that even for Conrad, for whom completion of a novel was often the occasion for physical and emotional breakdown, it was extreme: he collapsed with fever, raved, and spent three months in bed recuperating. Yet regardless of whether one can identify the deterioration in the quality of his fiction with a particular event, it is apparent that his mode of creativity was not sustainable either physically or psychologically.

Other circumstances no doubt contributed as well to his decline. The fact that he began writing at a relatively advanced age meant that the duration of his career would be correspondingly short, and his creative difficulties later in life were surely exacerbated by various burdens, such as the chronically poor health of his wife and the long-term effects of shell shock experienced by his son Borys in the trenches of World War I. It is also important to recognize that the tendency to dismiss Conrad’s later work may not altogether do justice to it, and critics have begun to reassess that work and to challenge the assumption that it is wholly substandard. Yet despite how one judges the quality of Conrad’s output during his last decade, what is clear is that the popularity of that work led to belated appreciation of his earlier books as well as numerous reprintings of them, most notably in the form of a pair of prematurely titled “collected editions” that were published in Britain and America in 1920 and 1921. Riding the crest of his popular success, in 1923 he embarked on a reading tour in the United States, where for the first time he found himself a center of public interest. In the following year, his mounting accolades in Britain culminated in the offer of a knighthood, although, in keeping with his propensity for turning down public honors, he declined to accept it. He died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, at the age of sixty-six, and was buried near his home in a Roman Catholic cemetery in Canterbury. Although his reputation ebbed slightly in the years after his death, by the 1940s he was generally acknowledged to be among a handful of the greatest writers of his era, an estimation that has never faltered since.

“Youth,” “Amy Foster,” and “The Secret Sharer”

For both practical and artistic reasons, the short story form was important to Conrad. On the practical side, before he became a popular success, it provided the chronically debt-ridden author with a more dependable source of income than did the novel form; both in Britain and America, magazines during this era tended to pay well for short fiction, whereas selling a novel was always a dicey proposition. Yet he was also deeply invested in the short story as an aesthetic form, as was the case with several of the authors whom he most admired, such as Guy de Maupassant. Unlike Maupassant’s compact, elliptical stories, however—and despite his own assertion that “[i]t takes a small-scale narrative (short story) to show the master’s hand” (Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 124)—Conrad’s stories tend to be long and richly detailed, and, as his creative imagination was constantly at work reshaping and augmenting his material, they invariably threatened to evolve into novellas and even full-scale novels. In fact, nearly all of his novels were initially envisioned as short stories. In his entire career, to the consternation of his publishers and his literary agent, he brought only one work of fiction in at the length he had projected (the 1897 short story “The Lagoon”), and he completed very few works by the times to which he had agreed. Writing either to a set length or to a deadline was anathema to this temperamental artist.

The three short stories included in this volume are generally recognized to be among Conrad’s finest examples of the genre. As is the case with much of his fiction, all three stories deal with the theme of the dangers of sea travel, a preoccupation that stems from his first career as a seaman. Further, all three stories demonstrate Conrad’s proclivity for transmitting information through the refracting lenses of specific subjectivities—in the case of “Youth” and “Amy Foster” (each of which is a frame-tale narrative, or a story within a story), multiple subjectivities. Yet despite these thematic and formal similarities, they also present Conrad in three different modes, and each displays different of his skills. While reading any one of these stories on its own is illuminating, for reasons that are detailed below, when read together they yield considerably more than the sum of their parts.

 

“Youth” (1898) consists of the reminiscences of the English seaman Charlie Marlow, Conrad’s most famous narrator, to a group of his friends, one of whom subsequently passes the story on to the reader. The outlook Marlow here recalls—in sharp contrast to that of the next of Conrad’s tales he will narrate, the broodingly pessimistic Heart of Darkness —is unencumbered by introspection and psychological conflict. Yet this is not to say that the story runs no deeper than the insights of its reckless, twenty-year-old protagonist (whose limited outlook the wistful, now forty-two-year-old Marlow scrupulously reproduces); on the contrary, “Youth” contains much more than its boy‘s-adventure-tale surface immediately discloses. The story Marlow recounts is of his ill-fated first voyage as second mate on an aged, poorly maintained ship that is supposed to deliver a load of coal from England to Siam (modern Thailand). After several months of false starts, crew changes, and long periods of waiting for repairs to be done, the barely seaworthy craft finally sets off. The comedy of errors that is the voyage culminates when, en route in the Indian Ocean, the cargo of coal catches fire. The crewmen make futile attempts to put out the fire and then are nearly killed in an explosion that compels them finally to abandon the now-sinking ship. Marlow is put in charge of one of the lifeboats with two other men, and, proud to assume his first “command,” he successfully leads his boat ashore, having had a memorable adventure and an initiation of sorts into manhood.

Although the story draws heavily on Conrad’s own experiences from 1881 to 1883 as second mate on the Palestine (here renamed the Judea), which would conclude with his first voyage to southeast Asia, his claims in the 1917 author’s note that the tale constitutes “a feat of memory” and “a record of experience” (p. 4) are decidedly inaccurate. For example, Marlow’s account of the acts of recklessness committed by those in charge is heavily embellished from the facts: Captain Beard’s decision to keep his crew on the clearly doomed Judea, Captain Nash’s decision to deliver mail rather than rescue Captain Beard and his crew, and Marlow’s own decision to place the lives of the two men in his lifeboat in jeopardy by remaining silent about a ship that could potentially rescue them simply so he can continue his romantic adventure—any of these actions would have been sufficient to lead to charges that would have stripped the perpetrator of his officer’s certificate. (A court of inquiry was convened in Singapore to investigate the loss of the Palestine, and no such findings were made.) Actually, the Palestine sank not far from shore, so even to the extent that those three decisions may correspond to the facts, the perils associated with them in the fictional version do not reflect the real circumstances. Rather attached to the myths he had created of his maritime career, as well as to his honor, Conrad was not pleased when, in 1922, this fact was unearthed and publicized.

What is perhaps the story’s most interesting departure from the facts, however, was hardly a secret: the recasting of the Polish Conrad as the Englishman Marlow. Further, it is not only the author who is reinvented as an Englishman. Whereas the group with whom Conrad actually served on the Palestine could hardly have been of more international composition—although the captain and several of the crew were English, there were also men from Australia, Norway, Ireland, and the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts—the courageous, dutiful seamen of the Judea are all English; they are Liverpool men who, Marlow affirms, have “the right stuff” (p. 24). In fact, the story’s chief thematic preoccupation is with what is represented, in highly traditional terms, as a uniquely English sort of virtue that seafaring provides the opportunity for actualizing. This tendency is epitomized in Marlow’s explanation for why the crew have conducted themselves with exemplary honor and steadfastness under the most trying of circumstances:

[I]t was something in them, something inborn and subtle and everlasting. I don’t say positively that the crew of a French or German merchantman wouldn’t have done it, but I doubt whether it would have been done in the same way. There was a completeness in it, something solid like a principle, and masterful like an instinct—a disclosure of something secret—of that hidden something, that gift of good or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations (p. 26).

In espousing the notion of the superiority of Anglo-Saxons over other imperial “races,” the story, which was written during the ascendancy of competition among imperial powers, participates in fairly common place rhetoric for the era. Yet given how skeptical Conrad tended to be about such matters, this apparent endorsement of a vision of Englishness that borders on jingoism is puzzling. To some extent we can make sense of such pronouncements by recognizing that he wrote the story for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, knowing that its readers were predominantly pro-imperial Tory-Conservatives. It is also possible that, as a naturalized Briton, he felt obliged to affirm publicly the chauvinistic assumptions of his compatriots—that is, to present himself, as the American-turned-Briton T. S. Eliot subsequently would do a generation later, as more English than the English.

These strategic considerations aside, Conrad’s idealistic depiction of English virtue in “Youth” appears to a limited extent to reflect his own convictions, and, insofar as this is the case, it represents only one side of a complex ambivalence toward his adoptive country, the other side of which would be displayed three years later in the poignant short story “Amy Foster” (1901). Actually, Conrad never wrote a more Anglophilic story than “Youth” or a more Anglophobic one than “Amy Foster.” On the one hand, “Youth” is a tale of imaginary belonging written by someone who acutely felt himself to be an outsider in the British merchant marine: as Najder observes, “there is no evidence to suggest that [a] sense of professional solidarity and comradeship in dangerous work was indeed part of Korzeniowski’s personal experience. It seems more probable that he felt lonely and alienated throughout his service” (p. 163). The fact that he was referred to by some of his shipmates, ironically, as “the Russian Count” reinforces this contention. On the other hand, in “Amy Foster” the experiences of the protagonist, an abused immigrant in Britain, clearly reflect Conrad’s own sentiments of being an unwelcome outsider.

The tale is narrated by Kennedy, a doctor whose thoughtful, cosmopolitan outlook sharply differs from that of the story’s provincial, rural Britons. Kennedy befriends the protagonist, Yanko, the sole survivor of a shipwreck off the Kentish coast, and gradually comes to learn the stranger’s story. Having washed ashore after the America-bound ship loaded with European émigrés on which he was a passenger has foundered, the long-haired Slavic stranger who speaks no English is immediately subjected by xenophobic Britons to both verbal and physical abuse. Mistaken for a madman or a criminal, he is treated in a manner comparable to that of the pathetically misunderstood monster in Mary Shel ley’s Frankenstein: he is lashed with a whip, stoned, and hit over the head with an umbrella before finally being locked up in a woodshed. During his imprisonment, Amy Foster, a plain-looking, unintelligent country girl, offers him bread, and they subsequently fall in love and marry. Yet as time progresses the cultural disparity between them becomes increasingly evident. Amy’s growing fear of her passionate, impulsive, and decidedly un-English husband’s strangeness reaches a climax when, during his bout of fever, what she mistakes for ravings (in fact, he is merely requesting water in his own language) frighten her to the point where she takes their infant son and flees their home. The abandoned Yanko dies the next day, Dr. Kennedy determines with evident symbolism, of “heart-failure” (p. 151), and the story concludes with the doctor reflecting on the irony that Yanko has been spared the fate of his drowned companions only to suffer and die for lack of human community in England: he has been “cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair” (p. 152).

Conrad was careful not to make the parallels between himself and his unfortunate protagonist excessively transparent. Unlike the devout Catholic peasant Yanko, Conrad was descended from Polish nobility and had long since lapsed from the faith. Yet while the tale is only obliquely autobiographical, its personal resonances are unmistakable. It is never explicitly stated that Yanko is Polish, but we are supplied with ample clues to make this determination. For example, we are informed that he has been a mountaineer, the term for which, “in the dialect of his country,” sounds “like Goorall” (p. 146), which bears a close resemblance to the Polish term for mountaineer, góral. And it is no coincidence that he washes up on the Kentish coast, the very part of southeast England where Conrad himself lived at the time he was writing the story. It is also important to recognize that Conrad believed himself to be an object of English xenophobia. For example, in an effort to account for the disappointing sales of his 1907 novel The Secret Agent, he wrote, “I suppose there is something in me that is unsympathetic to the general public.... Foreignness I suppose” (Collected Letters, vol. 4, pp. 9-10); and he consistently declined to give public readings of his work in Britain, explaining that “I am not very anxious to display my accent before a large gathering of people. It might affect them disagreeably” (Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, p. 283). Further, the story expresses Conrad’s sense of alienation not only from Britons generally, but from his English wife specifically. Notably, one of the titles he had considered before settling on “Amy Foster” was the distinctly autobiographical “A Husband,” and those aspects of the story that concern the incompatibility between Yanko and his provincial English wife are especially consonant with the circumstances of Conrad’s marriage. (The endnotes in this volume may be consulted for further information about the story’s autobiographical content.) Ultimately, of course, the tale cannot be reduced to mere veiled autobiography, but it does provide a revealing glimpse into the sentiments Conrad harbored toward his adoptive country that profoundly affected his fiction as a whole.

Like “Amy Foster,” “The Secret Sharer” (1910) makes an interesting companion piece to “Youth,” as it is also a tale of youthful initiation at sea recounted by an English seaman many years after the fact. Yet unlike in “Youth,” where passing the test is a fairly straightforward matter of keeping up one’s physical courage in the face of potentially deadly perils, in “The Secret Sharer” the emphasis is on the psychological tests of character that are associated with command. In the latter story, Conrad revisited the topic of seafaring after a long hiatus while writing political fiction, and the return to familiar subject matter appears to have made the writing process uncharacteristically smooth. The story, which draws on his own feelings and experiences as a first-time captain in 1888, was written in late 1909 with what was for him remarkable speed and ease, and he was quite pleased with it. As he affirmed in a rare self-congratulatory moment, “Every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note” (Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 128). Most critics have agreed with this assessment; it has long been the most widely admired of Conrad’s short stories.

The story begins with the narrator wondering at the outset of his first voyage as a captain whether he “should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly” (p. 155). As it happens, the ensuing circumstances will provide the opportunity for an investigation of that very question, although the terms of the investigation will be considerably more complex and ambiguous than he can anticipate. The plot that subsequently unfolds is loosely based on the circumstances surrounding a famous episode of violence at sea. In 1880, on a sailing vessel off the coast of South Africa, a white first mate racially taunted and then killed a black crewman during an altercation between them. Several days later the captain secretly allowed the mate to escape, leading the crew nearly to a state of mutiny. The anguished captain subsequently committed suicide, by drowning himself, and the mate was eventually caught and convicted of man-slaughter. In Conrad’s version of the story, which is set in the Gulf of Siam and elides the race issue, it is without the complicity of his captain that the mate (here named Leggatt) escapes imprisonment on his ship. He swims to a nearby vessel, where he is taken in by the narrator, and much of the story is occupied with detailing the uncomfortable, and often comic, circumstances surrounding the latter’s efforts to keep the presence of his stowaway secret. Having successfully hidden Leggatt not only from his own crew but also from the captain and crew of the ship from which the errant mate has escaped, the narrator concludes his tale by describing how he has taken his ship on a dangerous nighttime maneuver in order to bring it close to shore in an effort to enable Leggatt to swim to safety.

Although “The Secret Sharer” has inspired a wide variety of interpretations, including political, sociological, and historical ones, by far the greatest interest in the story has been in its rich suggestiveness as a psychological tale. It has, accordingly, been subjected to a barrage of psychoanalytic interpretations. While Conrad maintained that he had no interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, he was nonetheless intrigued by the complex duality of human consciousness, and this tale clearly reflects that interest. Throughout the story the narrator emphasizes his uncanny sense of identity with Leggatt—he characterizes the fugitive as his “other self,” his “double,” and his “secret sharer”; and he goes on to say of the duplicity necessitated by his efforts to keep Leggatt hidden, “the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity. I was constantly watching myself, my secret self.... It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it” (p. 170). In this respect the story, which Conrad had considered titling “The Second Self,” “The Secret Self,” and “The Other Self,” participates in the motifs of the Doppelgänger literary tradition, of which Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a particularly influential example.

Some of the most interesting interpretive possibilities for the story, in fact, are based on the assumption that the young captain’s intense identification with his alter ego may render his judgment, and perhaps even his veracity, suspect. Indeed, the confidence with which he claims that he understands the circumstances of the killing and how to interpret them (based solely on Leggatt’s own exculpatory version of the events) is remarkable for the uncritical frame of mind it discloses: “I knew well enough... that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more” (p. 161). And when the captain of the ship on which the killing has occurred comes aboard and tells his version of the story, the narrator dismisses it by asserting that “[i]t is not worth while to record that version” (p. 173). Thus, the sole opportunity we have to hear a potential counternarrative to Leggatt’s account is suppressed. At the beginning of the tale the narrator describes himself as having been both “a stranger to the ship [and] ... a stranger to myself” (p. 155), and the circumstances with which he is subsequently faced will resolve precisely into a conflict between his professional duties to his ship and his moral duties to his conscience. Yet even though he has violated his professional code by sheltering a fugitive from justice and willfully endangered his crew, the story nonetheless concludes with his idealized vision of himself as experiencing “the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command” and of Leggatt as “a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny” (p. 193). That is, he appears to believe he has reconciled the seemingly contradictory exigencies with which he has been faced. Whether we concur that this judgment is sound or believe his representation of the events to be, either consciously or unconsciously, self-serving is an open matter. Indeed, much of the story’s artistry inheres in its tantalizing capacity for generating interpretations that differ from that offered by the narrator-captain.

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness (1899) is one of the most broadly influential works in the history of British literature. The novella’s diverse attributes—its rich symbolism, intricate plotting, evocative prose, penetrating psychological insights, broad allusiveness, moral significance, metaphysical suggestiveness—have earned for it the admiration of literary scholars and critics, high school and college teachers, and general readers alike. Further, its impact can be gauged not only by the frequency with which it is read, taught, and written about, but also by its cultural fertility. It has heavily influenced works ranging from T. S. Eliot’s landmark poem The Waste Land (1922), the manuscript of which has as its original epigraph a passage from the book that concludes with the last words of Conrad’s anti-hero Kurtz, to Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), which updates the tale to the years shortly before and after independence, when the Belgian Congo became the nation that is known today as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nor has its artistic influence been limited to literature; to cite only the most famous instance, it served as the basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), which transposes the story, in both place and time, to Vietnam and Cambodia during the American-Vietnamese War and recasts Kurtz as a renegade American colonel. Its various homages aside, in its original form Heart of Darkness has for several generations influenced the literary and moral outlook of innumerable readers. Yet while the text is widely recognized as an indictment of the greed, and ruthlessness that generally drove European imperialism in Africa, most readers are unfamiliar with the fact that the setting is the event in imperial history so uniquely horrific in its sheer scale of suffering and death that it has been termed the African Holocaust. As Conrad himself would characterize the situation in the Congo nearly a quarter of a century after his novella was published, it was “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience” (“Geography and Some Explorers,” p. 17).

Set during the era of heightened competition for imperial territories that historians have termed the New Imperialism, Heart of Darkness is loosely based on Conrad’s experiences and observations during a six-month stint, in 1890, in the Congo as an employee of a Belgian company, the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. This was five years after the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, a meeting of representatives of the European powers to establish the terms according to which much of the continent of Africa would be divided among them. During this meeting, King Leopold II of Belgium, skillfully playing the jealousies and fears of rival powers off one another, astonishingly managed to secure as his own property over 900,000 square miles of central Africa—that is, a territory roughly seventy-five times the size of the diminutive country he ruled. Under humanitarian pretenses, Leopold’s agents, who had’ begun the process of conquest several years earlier, effectively turned the so-called Congo Free State into an enormous forced labor camp for the extraction of ivory and, later, after the world-wide rubber boom in the early 1890s following the popularization of the pneumatic tire, rubber. In addition to outright murders, the slave labor conditions led to many deaths from starvation and disease as well as a steeply declining birth rate. Even during an era in which most Europeans viewed imperialism as legitimate, the appalling circumstances of Leopold’s Congo (it would officially become a Belgian colony in 1908, and Leopold would die the following year never having so much as visited the territory) led to international outrage. Conservative demographic estimates place the region’s depopulation toll between 1880 and 1920 at ten million people—that is, half of the total population—with the worst of the carnage occurring between 1890 and 1910. Not much was known outside Africa about the conditions of Leopold’s rule when Conrad was there, but in the several years before he began writing Heart of Darkness, in 1898, it became an international scandal, and regular reports appeared in the British and European press denouncing the abuses. Even before the publicity and protests, however (which would peak several years after the novella’s publication), Conrad had seen enough on his own to be thoroughly disgusted.

Yet it is important to recognize that while parts of Heart of Darkness are based on Conrad’s experiences and that it does register his sense of moral outrage, the book is neither a work of autobiography nor history, and (as we shall see, the controversy over how to read it demonstrates) it presents considerable interpretive difficulties. Although the fictional structure is the same as that of “Youth”—again, we have a frame-tale narrative with the Englishman Marlow recounting his experiences to the same quartet of middle-aged men—it is a much more complex work. The terms of that complexity are elucidated in the opening pages by the unnamed primary narrator, who precedes his recapitulation of Marlow’s tale with a figurative description of how this raconteur’s mode of storytelling differs from that of his less-sophisticated seafaring peers:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine (p. 40).

We are presented here with images that illustrate not only two different narrative methods but two distinct epistemologies. On the one hand, in the first sentence we have the typical seaman’s story depicted as presenting no, interpretive problems whatsoever: telling a tale is a straightforward process whose aim is to reveal an unambiguous and easily accessible kernel of truth for the listener’s edification. On the other hand, in the second, more elaborate sentence, Marlow’s stories are depicted (as the primary narrator will later term them) as utterly “inconclusive” (p. 42): telling a story in this manner is aimed not at providing definitive enlightenment, but rather, as Ian Watt puts it, to lead the listener to become aware of “a circumambient universe of meanings which are not normally visible, but which the story, the glow, dimly illuminates” (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 180). We are thus apprised from the outset that the tale we are about to hear will resist traditional interpretive techniques, will undermine our sense of how to read— indeed, will destabilize our very notion of “meaning” itself. This passage, in fact, is one of the classic statements of a modernist epistemology, and it thus serves as a useful primer for how to approach not only the story Marlow will proceed to tell but also Conrad’s text as a whole.

The aspects of Marlow’s storytelling method that impede our efforts to arrive at an unambiguous understanding of his tale’s meaning also hinder us from gaining a clear apprehension of the events themselves, something attested to by many first-time readers of the text who have difficulties following the plot. Such complications are in keeping with the modernist inclination for making narrative increasingly a function of individual subjectivity—a process that writers of the subsequent generation, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, would take still further. With broad brush strokes, however, the plot of the story that Marlow dimly conveys through ruminations interspersed with bits and pieces of events runs as follows. Having secured a position with a Belgian ivory-trading company through the contacts of his Brussels-residing aunt, Marlow travels to Africa, where he is to captain a ship up the Congo River in order to recall a company agent named Kurtz who has cut himself off from all communications. Upon arriving in Africa, Marlow finds that the company conducts its business with terrible cruelty toward its Congolese employees. He also finds that the competition for power among the company agents is ruthless, and that Kurtz is widely resented by his colleagues for his alleged humanitarianism. When Marlow and his crew finally arrive at Kurtz’s compound several months later, however, they discover that the idealistic ivory trader has established himself as a virtual deity among the indigenous people, whom he has been ruling with bloodthirsty savagery. Mad and gravely ill, Kurtz is forcibly retrieved by Marlow and then dies on the return voyage. During their brief acquaintance Marlow finds himself drawn to Kurtz, despite his knowledge of the latter’s monstrous conduct, and Kurtz reciprocates by entrusting him with various personal effects. Soon after, a now ill and disoriented Marlow returns to Europe, where he recovers his physical health but remains profoundly disturbed by the memory of his experiences. Some months later, in an apparent effort to effect closure, he meets with Kurtz’s grief-stricken fiancee, but, rather than telling her the truth about the depraved conduct of her beloved, he perpetuates her belief that Kurtz was a benevolent humanitarian who was devoted to her. He does, however, disclose the truth some years later to a handful of friends in the form of the tale that is then transmitted to us by one of them.

Marlow prefaces his account of his experiences in the Congo, which he narrates while on a yacht on the Thames, with some observations about imperialism in general. He begins by anticipating one of the central themes of his tale—the collapse of the distinction between civilization and barbarism—by recalling that Britain itself, the world’s foremost imperial power, was at one time a colony of a mighty empire: alluding to the Roman invasion and conquest of Britain more than 1,800 years earlier, his first words are “[a]nd this also... has been one of the dark places of the earth” (p. 39). Such a reminder would have been particularly bracing to an English readership that had recently been steeped in the self-congratulatory excesses of Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee, which primarily took the form of an ostentatious celebration of Britain’s imperial might. Marlow’s prologue thus provides a sobering historical frame of reference for his ensuing tale about the seedy, hypocritical side of empire. And what we come to recognize as the story unfolds is that this is merely the first in a series of such rhetorical moves. In fact, much of the tale’s energy is invested in systematically dismantling those binary oppositions (civilization/barbarism, Europe/Africa, Christian ity/heathenism, white men/black men) that provided the ideological foundation of Anglo-European society of the era.

Noting the slim margin of difference that separates the vanquisher from the vanquished, Marlow remarks that the ability to subjugate another people is “nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.” And, he continues, “[t]he 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” (p. 41). He does, however, qualify these assertions by upholding—that is, by exempting from the logic of his tale—one binary opposition: that between what he terms “colonists” and “conquerors.” The Romans in Britain, like King Leopold’s agents in the Congo, “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.... They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale” (p. 41). When he proceeds to the action of the narrative, he vividly illustrates this distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of imperialism in his recollection of “a large shining map [of Africa], marked with all the colours of a rainbow,” which he has seen in the Brussels office of his new employers prior to his journey to the Congo:

There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow (p. 45).

Maps during this era often represented imperial territories according to this color-coded system—red for British, blue for French, green for Italian, orange for Portuguese, purple for German, and yellow for Belgian. Further, they served not merely as geographical but also as ideological tools; as Marlow demonstrates by singling out the red (British) territories for praise and the purple (German) territories for disapprobation, they enabled one to distinguish between different types of imperialism and morally to evaluate them accordingly. He has earlier asserted that what “redeems” imperialism—and hence what separates the colonists from the conquerors—“is the idea only.... ; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea” (p. 41), and it now appears that he believes it is the British who uniquely possess such an ennobling idea and an ethical commitment to it. How we are to interpret Marlow’s careful exclusion of Britain from his ensuing assault on the hypocrisies of imperialism is an open question. We have already seen how, in “Youth,” Conrad’s English alter ego tends to be Anglophilic, and it bears noting that, like “Youth,” Heart of Darkness was written for the pro-imperialist British readership of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Yet the evidence as to whether Marlow’s assertions wholly reflect Conrad’s beliefs is ambiguous. An essay on the British arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling that Conrad wrote several months before beginning Heart of Darkness might have shed light on this question, but it was not published and the manuscript has not survived.

Regardless of how we are to interpret Marlow’s exemption of Britain from his attack on imperialism, he is unambiguous in his denunciation of those forms of imperialism that he views as illegitimate. This fact becomes apparent in the contrast between his outlook and that of his naively idealistic aunt during their farewell meeting before he sets out for Africa. Complaining to his listeners that she viewed him as an “emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle,” he points out that “[t]here had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time” (p. 48). Conrad had given a taste of what Marlow means by “such rot” in his ironically titled short story “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), which, like Heart of Darkness, depicts the moral degradation of ivory traders in the Congo. In this story a Belgian newspaper “discussed what it was pleased to call ‘Our Colonial Expansion’ in high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth” (Tales of Unrest, p. 94). (It bears pointing out that some of the most egregiously insincere instances of such Belgian propaganda came from the pen of King Leopold himself. It should also be noted that Conrad signaled the importance of the nationality of the story’s Belgian pro tagonists when he emphatically corrected a reader who mistook them for Frenchmen [Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 93-94].) Significantly, however, whereas Marlow freely discloses to his male listeners his disgust for “the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern” (p. 61 ), to his aunt the most he has done is “ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit” (p.48). His recollection of this exchange leads him to reflect on the differences between men and women in a passage whose condescension is ringingly primitive:

It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over (p. 48).

Precisely the sorts of ugly truths that women are allegedly incapable of stomaching are what Marlow will be subjected to in the Congo. Upon his arrival he is struck by the perfidiousness of the white company agents, whom he terms “pilgrims” in order to underscore the hypocrisy of the quasi-religious rhetoric that masks their criminal conduct. They are ruthless schemers who view Marlow (as they do Kurtz) with mistrust, as he has been represented to them by his aunt’s friends as one of “the new gang—the gang of virtue” (p. 62); that is, they believe him to take seriously the civilizing propaganda associated with the company’s endeavors and thus worry that he may impede their ability to generate profits. Marlow is also appalled by the condition of the indigenous workers. In one episode a chain gang of Congolese laborers overseen by an African collaborator with a rifle passes by:

Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. 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... (p. 51 ).

In a spectacle that he likens to something out of Dante’s depiction of Hell in the Inferno, he subsequently sees what the fate of such men is when they become too exhausted and sick to work:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.... [T]his was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom (pp. 52-53).

During the several months that Marlow spends in the Central Station (modern Kinshasa, then named Leopoldville), he becomes intrigued by the reputation of the one company agent who appears to be a genuine humanitarian. The chief of the Inner Station (modern Kisangani, then Stanley Falls), Kurtz is, moreover, an accomplished painter, poet, musician, and essayist; in short, he is a consummate example of the best that European civilization has to offer. As Marlow sets out on his thousand-mile, two-month-long steamship journey upriver to retrieve Kurtz, the spectacle of rampant hypocrisy among his colleagues has led him to be curious to see how someone fortified with what appear to be genuine “moral ideas” (p. 69) has fared under these circumstances. Toward the end of the journey, when the ship comes under native attack, Marlow assumes the violent episode to indicate that Kurtz must be dead, but he subsequently finds that this is not the case. (Later, Kurtz’s young Russian worshiper will confide in him that it was actually the great man himself who ordered the attack on the ship.) By the time Marlow reaches the compound and sees human heads displayed on stakes, he realizes that Kurtz is not at all the enlightened altruist he had been hoping to meet. These impressions are confirmed later when Marlow learns of the appalling circumstances of Kurtz’s rule, which have included “midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites” (p. 92) over which he has presided.

Marlow becomes acquainted with Kurtz in person during the brief remainder of the emaciated ivory trader’s life (he presumably has dysentery, an illness that Conrad himself contracted while in Africa) and concludes that he has undergone a reversal of the instinctual renunciations upon which civilization is based: “the wilderness,” Marlow observes, “seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts” (p. 111). What Marlow finds particularly illuminating in documenting this reversal is the manuscript of an essay that Kurtz has entrusted to him. Before coming to Africa, Kurtz has been asked by “the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” to write up “a report, for its future guidance.” (Conrad appears to have drawn the title of this organization from L‘Association Internationale pour l’Exploration et la Civilisation en Afrique—the International Association for Exploration and Civilization in Africa—which was headed by King Leopold.) The essay, which he has evidently written before his breakdown, describes how Europeans, allegedly further along in the evolutionary process than members of other races, “can exert a power for good practically unbounded” by presenting themselves to non-Europeans as “supernatural beings.” It continues for seventeen pages that are “vibrating with eloquence” but ends startlingly with a phrase that has been “scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand... : ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’” (p. 92). By devolving from expansive, refined eloquence into terse, primal utterance, the document thus reflects the atavistic transformation of this paragon of European civilization that ironically renders him more savage than the so-called savages. A major theme of Conrad’s writings generally is the notion that the fallibility of human nature leads idealistic people to fall short of their aspirations—in fact, to fall a distance that is directly proportional to the loftiness of those aspirations. This principle is exemplified in the career of Kurtz, whose airy idealism is represented as equal and opposite to his bestial cruelty, a tension neatly captured in the disparity between his eloquent report and its barbaric postscript.

Marlow reflects on the significance of Kurtz’s career while recounting the moments preceding the latter’s death, which occurs as they are making their way back downriver:

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!” (p. 115).

Although Marlow himself does not offer a definitive interpretation of this deathbed scene, especially compelling among the broad range of readings this famous passage has received is the suggestion that it sums up Kurtz’s Conradian insight into the basic depravity of human nature as he briefly returns to lucidity before his death. Conrad’s friend the great mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell observed that Heart of Darkness “expresses... most completely [Conrad‘s] philosophy of life”: “he 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” (The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, p. 321). Kurtz has evidently fallen through that thin crust.

Yet as poignant as the collapse of Kurtz may be, and while in some respects he may rank with Oedipus or King Lear as a tragic figure, it is nonetheless reasonable to ask why Marlow (or we) should care about either the sufferings or the insights of an individual who has committed what might well be termed crimes against humanity. Indeed, in the single most influential critical essay on the novella, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (first delivered as a lecture in 1975), the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe takes issue precisely with the text’s uneven representation of Africa and Africans relative to Kurtz:

Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? (p. 12).

Imputing this emphasis to the fact that “Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist” (p. 11), Achebe adduces such scenes as the following, in which Marlow likens himself and the other white men to “wanderers on prehistoric earth” and the Africans to “prehistoric man”:

No, they [the Congolese] 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. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend (p. 76).

To some extent Achebe is right to identify Conrad’s outlook (which, it is true, is essentially in accord with Marlow’s when it comes to matters of race) as reproducing the prejudices characteristic of his historical era, and it is clear that this passage, in which Marlow affirms the “remote kinship” of his European listeners with Africans, is intended primarily as a spirited dare; that is, it is designed not to elevate the status of Africans but rather to lower that of Europeans. Yet while Achebe had intended his essay to relegate Heart of Darkness to the ash can of history by concluding that a text that thus “depersonalizes a portion of the human race” cannot constitute “a great work of art” (p. 12), it actually has had the opposite result by making readers all the more intrigued by Conrad’s book. Nonetheless, it served Achebe’s end in an important respect by transforming a work that had generally been viewed as progressively anti-imperialist and antiracist into one that now was suspected of being Eurocentric and racist. And the dispute over how to assess the novella has shown no signs of abating in the more than quarter of a century since the essay first appeared.

In addition to the controversy over how we are to understand the way Heart of Darkness represents race, an important related issue is that of how to view the way it represents history. All techniques of reading create specific sorts of attention as well as specific sorts of inattention, and many of those methods used on Heart of Darkness have obscured the historical setting to the point of virtual invisibility. At the far end of the spectrum the story can be read and taught—and often is read and taught—as abstractly and ahistorically as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), another famous tale of a seaman burdened by knowledge acquired on a perilous water journey that he feels compelled to impart to others in the form of a vivid narrative. This tendency, in fact, provided Adam Hochschild with an impetus for writing his historical account of the Congo Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998). As Hochschild observes,

High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and one place (p. 143).

It is no doubt the case that a Euro-American amnesia about the atrocities in the Congo working in combination with prevalent techniques of reading that are predisposed to filtering out historical information have contributed to making Heart of Darkness so readily detachable from its historical setting. Yet this is not the whole story. We must also recognize that the book has tended to be read in an ahistorical manner because, to some extent, that is how Conrad deliberately wrote it. The Congo is never named; Brussels is identified only as “the sepulchral city,” Leopoldville as “the Central Station,” and Stanley Falls as “the Inner Station”; and Kurtz cannot be identified with a single country: “His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (p. 92); as Conrad would affirm in a 1903 letter, “I took great care to give Kurtz a cosmopolitan origin” (Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 94). Conrad thus, while clearly indicating that the setting is Leopold’s Congo, also invites readers to view the events of the tale as a microcosmic reduction of European imperialism in Africa generally. It is consistent with this equivocating tendency that, in revising the manuscript, he excised a passage that clearly alluded to King Leopold (in the original version of the prologue Marlow refers to a “third rate king” who directs an allegedly philanthropic organization that furthers his own imperial ambitions), yet he nonetheless preserved the identity of his chief polemical target in the name of the steamship Marlow captains (the Roi des Belges-King of the Belgians), which was, in fact, the name of the ship on which Conrad served while in the Congo. Further, in describing the setting Conrad minimized the degree of colonial development along the Congo River (there were actually numerous factories, trading stations, and missionary outposts as well as a substantial quantity of river traffic, not only Belgian but also English, French, and Dutch), thereby intensifying what Marlow represents as the alienating, primordial aspect of the landscape. Such alterations enhance the literary attributes of the text but at the cost of historical accuracy and specificity.

To gain perspective on the artistic license Conrad took, it is useful to contrast his novella with the writings of two men who were in the Congo at the same time he was. The first, an African-American lawyer named George Washington Williams, appalled by what he had witnessed, responded by immediately writing at Stanley Falls (Kurtz’s fiefdom) an open letter to King Leopold, dated July 18, 1890, several weeks after Conrad’s arrival in the region. In this lengthy document Williams enumerated the crimes of Leopold’s agents and roundly criticized their hypocrisies. The second, an Irishman named Roger Casement, whom Conrad befriended shortly after arriving in Africa, would subsequently dedicate much of his life to publicizing the human rights abuses, most notably in the form of a widely circulated report he published in 1904 that detailed the atrocities. Conrad’s sentiments were largely the same as both of these activists. As he wrote to Casement in 1903, railing against the “ruthless, systematic cruelty towards the blacks” and offering his “warmest wishes” for the success of the Irishman’s campaign, “It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago... put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State to day. It is as if the moral clock has been put back many hours” (Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 95-97). Nonetheless, Conrad consistently declined to write political pamphlets or to become directly involved in the protest movement in any other manner. As he sheepishly wrote of Casement’s cause several days later to Cunninghame Graham, “I would help him but it is not in me. I am only a wretched novelist inventing wretched stories and not even up to that” (Collected Letters, vol. 3., p. 102). Indeed, although some of Conrad’s contemporaries viewed Heart of Darkness as an expose of Leopold’s Congo (E. D. Morel, founder of the Congo Reform Association, praised it as such in his 1903 pamphlet The Congo Slave State), its political usefulness was ambiguous at best. For whereas the goal of politically engaged writing is to galvanize conviction, what Heart of Darkness mainly tends to elicit is moral indecisiveness. To recur to the primary narrator’s opening characterization of Marlow’s storytelling method, as the tale merely casts a glow on a haze, it steadfastly resists providing the reader with a kernel of truth of the sort that can serve as a basis for resolute action.

Perhaps the best illustration of how the text functions to blunt potential political effect is in the representation of Marlow’s rather perplexing allegiance to Kurtz, whom, notably, he first alludes to with the chummy phrase “the poor chap” (p. 42). Explaining why he has “remained loyal to Kurtz to the last,” Marlow says that his deathbed epiphany was “a moral victory,” albeit one that was obtained at the price of “abominable terrors” (p. 117). What is disturbing here is the way that Marlow’s telling of the story subordinates the “abominable terrors” (the enslavement and murder of Africans) to the “moral victory” (Kurtz’s apparent insight into his own depravity). Further, the term “loyal” is a euphemism, for what he specifically means is that he has suppressed the truth about Kurtz’s savagely criminal conduct. A well-known example of this practice occurs in the melodramatic closing scene, in which Marlow meets with Kurtz’s fiancee and falsely reports that her lover’s final utterance was her name. By withholding from her the knowledge of Kurtz’s breakdown, he thus acts on his earlier assertion that women inhabit a world of beautiful illusions and that it is the duty of men to keep them there. Yet this relatively inconsequential effort to spare an individual’s feelings is not the only act of insincerity in which Marlow has engaged with respect to Kurtz’s memory. During this meeting he comforts the grieving woman by affirming her consoling thought that Kurtz’s “words, at least, have not died” (p. 123), an apparent allusion to his published writings. On this matter Marlow has previously sanitized Kurtz’s reputation in a much more significant fashion. Having been “repeatedly entreated” by Kurtz “to take good care of ‘my pamphlet’ (he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career” (p. 93), Marlow has acceded by tearing off the damning postscript (“Exterminate all the brutes!”) before offering up “the famous Report for publication” (p. 119). This action tends to be overlooked in interpretations of the novella because Marlow makes only passing mention of it. We are, however, given to believe that the essay has been published as the magnum opus of a man whom the public at large continues to view as a great humanitarian, and, as such, it would no doubt have been used to further legitimize the imperial ravaging of the Congo. Indeed, while the text strongly hints that this is the case, regardless of how we interpret the possible impact of Kurtz’s report, what is certain is that Marlow has been complicit in the conspiracy of silence about the crimes this eminent figure has perpetrated. We thus encounter the deep irony that in this story whose chief purpose is ostensibly to disclose dark truths, Marlow confesses how he has declined his greatest opportunity publicly to do just that.

We have a variety of alternatives for how to make sense of Marlow’s solicitousness toward the reputation of a man whose conduct he views as deplorable. For example, we may assume it to be a function of his conviction that Kurtz, as largely a victim of his own misguided idealism, is less condemnable than the other company agents who have no ideals to lose; or of his belief that the primary sort of knowledge he has to impart is less of a political than a metaphysical nature; or we may speculate that, through his complicity, he enacts Conrad’s own mixed feelings over having remained aloof from the growing protest movement and instead written an aestheticized account of what he had witnessed in the Congo. More broadly, however, Marlow’s paradoxical fidelity to Kurtz is emblematic of the complex dynamics of Heart of Darkness as a whole, and it thus helps to account for the diverse range of competing interpretations that the text has generated. Much of the controversy over how to read the novella, in fact, resolves into the rather unnuanced question of whether we are to view it primarily as a challenge to or an affirmation of the status quo. That is, it tends either to be celebrated for bearing witness to human rights atrocities and the evils of imperialism or excoriated for complacently reproducing the racist assumptions of its historical era. Indeed, few literary works have been so heavily freighted with cultural baggage or tugged in such different directions simultaneously. What tends to be disregarded in this polarized debate, however, is the fact that what makes this work of art enduring is precisely its complex oscillation between perpetuating and challenging the premises of its historical moment. The more we can recognize Heart of Darkness to be the creation of a writer who was neither a passive product of his own culture nor fully able to transcend the assumptions of that culture, the better we will be able to come to terms with this deeply troubling book.

 

A. Michael Matin is a professor in the English Department of Warren Wilson College, where he teaches late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century British and Anglophone postcolonial literature. His essays on Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Anita Desai, and David Lodge have appeared in Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Modem Literature, Scribners’ British Writers, Scribners’ World Poets, and the Norton Critical Edition of Kipling’s Kim. He has also written an introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Conrad’s Lord Jim. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, he is currently writing a book titled Securing Britain: Invasion-Scare Literature before the Great War. He lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina, with his wife and their two daughters.