Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

by Joseph Conrad

  The story resides in the end ‘‘at the heart of an impenetrable darkness.’’ The story is all of Europe at its most corrupt. The story is the ruination of a once-fine (though highly mistaken) European intellect; it is the absolute debasement of a self-serving high-mindedness. The story is brutality and madness on a scale and of a depth even greater than what a nineteenth-century Englishman would attribute to a shaman wearing antelope horns and dancing around a fire. The story is the savagery not of ‘‘the savages’’ but the savagery that Marlow discovers (and that Conrad himself discovered in the Congo, a life-altering experience that helped make him into writer) hidden in the darkness inside each of us, our original and most human inheritance. Most of all, for Conrad, the story is the moral achievement, amid all that debasement and violence and terror, residing in Kurtz’s peculiar ability to convey all of this, all of the madness and lust and savagery. By being able to speak it, to show it, he is somehow redeemed: he is ‘‘a remarkable man.’’

  That is the ‘‘story’’ of Heart of Darkness and you really don’t get to it until the very end. Indeed, we journey toward it in a structural way—from the Nellie to Marlow to Kurtz—that is almost miraculously mirrored in the structure of the story itself, which travels from Europe up the Congo River, stopping at the Outer Station, the Middle Station and the Inner Station, where we find Kurtz, and ivory in unimaginable quantities, and destruction, and speech.

  —Vince Passaro

  Selected Bibliography

  WORKS BY JOSEPH CONRAD

  Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River, 1895 Novel

  An Outcast of the Islands, 1896 Novel

  The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus’’: A Tale of the Sea, 1897 Novel

  Tales of Unrest (‘‘Karain: A Memory,’’ ‘‘The Idiots,’’ ‘‘An Outpost of Progress,’’ ‘‘The Return,’’ and ‘‘The Lagoon’’), 1898 Short Stories

  Lord Jim: A Tale, 1900 Novel

  The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (with Ford Madox Hueffer), 1901 Novel

  Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (‘‘Youth,’’ ‘‘Heart of Darkness,’’ and ‘‘The End of the Tether’’), 1902 Novel

  Typhoon and Other Stories (‘‘Typhoon,’’ ‘‘Amy Foster, ’’ ‘‘Falk,’’ and ‘‘To-morrow’’), 1903 Short Stories

  Romance: A Novel, 1903 Novel

  Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, 1904 Novel

  The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions, 1906 Travel Writings

  The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, 1907 Novel

  A Set of Six (‘‘Gaspar Ruiz,’’ ‘‘The Informer,’’ ‘‘The Brute,’’ ‘‘An Anarchist,’’ ‘‘The Duel,’’ and ‘‘Il Conde’’), 1908 Short Stories

  Under Western Eyes, 1911 Novel

  A Personal Record, 1912 Autobiography

  ’Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (‘‘A Smile of Fortune,’’ ‘‘The Secret Sharer,’’ and ‘‘Freya of the Seven Isles’’), 1912 Short Stories

  Chance: A Tale in Two Parts, 1913 Novel

  Within the Tides (‘‘The Planter of Malata,’’ ‘‘The Partner, ’’ ‘‘The Inn of the Two Witches,’’ and ‘‘Because of the Dollars’’), 1915 Short Stories

  Victory: An Island Tale, 1915 Novel

  The Shadow-Line, 1917 Novel

  The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes, 1919 Novel

  Notes on Life and Letters, 1921 Memoir

  The Rover, 1923 Novel

  The Nature of a Crime (with Ford Madox Ford [né Hueffer]), 1924 Novel

  Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel (incomplete), 1925 Novel

  Tales of Hearsay (‘‘The Warrior’s Soul,’’ ‘‘Prince Roman,’’ ‘‘The Tale,’’ and ‘‘The Black Mate’’), 1925 Short Stories

  Last Essays, 1926 Essays

  The Sisters (begun 1896, incomplete), 1928 Novel

  Three Plays: Laughing Anne, One Day More, and The Secret Agent, 1934 Plays

  Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, 1978 Travel Writings

  CRITICISM AND BIOGRAPHY

  Batchelor, John. The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

  Billy, Ted, ed. Critical Essays on Joseph Conrad. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

  Bloom, Harold, ed. Joseph Conrad: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

  Bode, Rita. ‘‘ ‘They . . . Should Be Out of It’: The Women of Heart of Darkness.’’ Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies 26:1 (1994), 20-34.

  Burden, Robert. Heart of Darkness. The Critics Debate Series. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991.

  Conroy, Mark. Modernism and Authority: Strategies of Legitimation in Flaubert and Conrad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

  Greaney, Michael. Conrad, Language, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

  Hamner, Robert D., ed. Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives. Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1990.

  Hawthorn, Jeremy. Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment. London: Edward Arnold, 1990.

  ———. Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. London: Continuum, 2007.

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

  Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.

  Knowles, Owen, and Gene M. Moore. The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Joseph Conrad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

  Moore, Gene, ed. Conrad’s Cities: Essays for Hans van Marle. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992.

  Myers, Jeffrey. Joseph Conrad: A Biography. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001.

  Najder, Zdzislaw. Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. Trans. Halina Carroll-Najder. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

  Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers. London: Macmillan: Topsfield, MA: Salem Academy/Merrimack, 1984.

  Said, Edward W. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.

  Stape, J. H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

  ———. The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad. New York: Pantheon, 2008.

  Watt, Ian. Essays on Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  Watts, Cedric. Joseph Conrad: A Literary Life. London: Macmillan, 1989.

  1 Coppola transformed ‘‘Heart of Darkness’’ into a grotesque melodrama set in Vietnam in the waning years of the Vietnam War. In the role of Marlow, an American army officer is sent to Cambodia to assassinate a renegade Green Beret colonel who has set himself up, like Kurtz, as a murderous madman-god. Imaginative in concept and vivid in execution, Apocalypse Now is undermined by the ludicrous overacting of Marlon Brando in the role of Kurtz, which neither he nor his director seems to have understood.

  2 Conrad had a friend who had a yawl (a two-sailed boat of yacht size similar to a sloop or cutter, but with a small third mast far aft, near the rudder) named Nellie, and thus came the name he used in his novella. However it is also worth noting, an irony of literary history, that the only other significant novel in English preceding Heart of Darkness with the same configuration of distancing narrators is Wuthering Heights, and the central narrating figure in that story, the equivalent of Marlow, is the maid, whose name is Nellie.