Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary

by Joseph Conrad

  The brickmaker: Perhaps the shrewdest of the Company employees whom Marlow meets, the brickmaker is a substantial source of information about Kurtz and the ongoing intrigues among the Company men. He doesn’t actually make bricks, but he does give Marlow a more complete understanding of who Kurtz is, at least in terms of the Company. At the same time, the brickmaker also reveals a pettiness and a paranoia that certainly echo the manager’s beliefs. Marlow is hardly impressed, calling him a “papier-mâché Mephistopheles”—essentially a troublemaker whose words are no more meaningful than any others he has heard from other imperialists. Told that he and Kurtz are members of the “new gang of virtue,” Marlow decides to have a bit of fun with the brickmaker, allowing him to believe that Marlow is closely allied with Kurtz and that he will make the brickmaker’s life hard should Kurtz’s ascendancy through the Company continue. The brickmaker who doesn’t make bricks but who did apparently hope to be Assistant Manager under the General Manager of the Central Station is perhaps the novel’s best example of what T. S. Eliot would later call “the hollow men.”

  The fireman: One of only two Africans aboard the steamboat whom Marlow specifically describes, the fireman maintains the boiler on the craft. Marlow’s description of him is an uneven mix of appreciation and condescension, as he speaks of the fireman as “an improved specimen” who was often “hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.” At the same time, though, Marlow brutally explains (perhaps trying to cater to racist views among his audience), “to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs.” Ultimately, while Marlow cannot quite move beyond the racist views of his time, he does seem to appreciate the fireman’s devotion to the work that must be done aboard the steamboat.

  The helmsman: Unlike the fireman, whom Marlow only briefly describes, Marlow ultimately points to a more substantial and real bond between himself and the helmsman of the Congo steamer he captains. At first, though, Marlow paints the helmsman as an inconsistent and attention-hungry fool. Once the attack commences, the helmsman reacts by stamping his feet in an animalistic way. Frustrated by the noise and commotion that the helmsman makes, Marlow expresses a growing frustration with him. But everything changes as Marlow slowly realizes (much like his discovery of the arrows) that the helmsman has been mortally wounded by a spear (he sees the look on his face, he feels the warm liquid around his feet, and then he finally sees the mortal wound). Forced to watch this young African die and to witness the haunting look on his face, Marlow reassesses his relationship with the helmsman, ultimately telling his audience, “I am not prepared to affirm the fellow [Kurtz] was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him.” Despite his bigoted response to the helmsman’s outward behavior, Marlow’s posthumous appreciation of him seems more akin to a captain personally mourning the loss of one of his crew, no matter what his race.

  The harlequin/Russian: This man who is called a number of things—the harlequin, the Russian, Kurtz’s disciple—has been Kurtz’s closest companion during his months of violent pillaging of the local villages near the station. He greets Marlow as the steamer arrives at the Inner Station (near Stanley Falls) shortly after the attack. Marlow also discovers that the writing that he took to be ciphers in the seamanship manual that he found near Kurtz’s station was in fact Russian penned by the harlequin himself. The harlequin wears a large coat that has been patched many times with different colors of cloth, thus appearing similar to the multicolored map of Africa that Marlow glimpsed much earlier in the story. Above all, the harlequin is an unrepentant and fully devoted disciple of Kurtz, ready to defend any of his actions. In this way, he deeply unnerves Marlow, who only partially realizes that, by retelling the story of Kurtz and refusing to condemn him, he may be more like the Russian than he realizes—maybe even Kurtz’s last disciple himself.

  Diagram of a Typical Congo Steamer ca. 1890

  Images of the Congo

  i1: This map demonstrates how, less than a century before Conrad’s journey to the Congo, virtually no exploration or colonization of Africa had occurred. In fact, Africa would have actually appeared largely white (unexplored) on this map until roughly 1885. [“Regions connues” indicates explored or known regions; “Regions inexplorées” are unexplored regions.]

  i2: This second map shows the enormous expansion of colonization in Africa between 1800 and 1900, particularly after the Berlin Conference of 1885, during which European countries essentially divided up the continent among themselves.

  i3: This image shows a large, oceangoing steamer similar to the one both Conrad and Marlow would have taken from Europe to the Congo. It lies in the Congo River near Matadi, the site of the “Company’s station” where Marlow observes the “grove of death” and meets the accountant.

  i4: This is an image of Boma, the “seat of the government,” from afar. It reveals a fairly substantial city in the Congo, with a number of large buildings.

  i5: A closer view of two buildings in Boma, one of which contains four stories.

  i6: A view of a lonely bridge and a simple path through an impressive amount of overgrown forest.

  i7: Another view of the desolate land across which Marlow and Conrad marched for days on end.

  i8: A picture of an African man who served as fireman on an actual Congo steamer. Notice the distinctive tattooing on his face and chest.

  i9: This steamboat closely approximates the actual structure of the Roi des Belges, the actual Congo steamer that Conrad briefly commanded during his time in the Congo, as well as the steamboat that Marlow describes in Heart of Darkness. It includes a pilot-house on top of the roof, a funnel located in the middle of the ship, and a paddlewheel at the rear. This particular vessel, however, seems to be of a much higher quality than Conrad’s boat, with a much more sturdy and polished appearance than the somewhat crude look of the Roi des Belges.

  i10: Though it does not match up well with the structure of Conrad’s steamer, the general appearance of this steamboat, the Ville de Gand, with its rougher wood and thin supports, matches more closely both Conrad’s steamboat and the one that Marlow describes here in the text.

  i11: While this image portrays a vessel without a paddlewheel (and thus not a steamboat), this photograph captures very well how Marlow’s steamer would have appeared to the Africans as well as the Russian as they looked from the forest out onto the river. It is a fascinating glimpse.

  Enriched eBook Notes

  HEART OF DARKNESS

  Part I

  e1. In 1890, London was the largest city in the world (and would continue to be until about 1925), with approximately five million inhabitants. It was also the world’s busiest port throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with numerous docks lining the Thames River for miles.

  e2. With only a few notable exceptions (particularly Marlow and Kurtz), Conrad avoids assigning proper names to his characters in Heart of Darkness. In the case of Marlow’s immediate audience aboard the ship, this was likely to increase any identification Conrad’s readers would have had with the men of business and industry aboard. For the company men in Africa, Conrad may have wanted to avoid identifying them too closely with real individuals he encountered during his time in the Congo, or he may have simply sought to emphasize how little Marlow knows and understands of these individuals. The Nobel Prize–winning author J. M. Coetzee uses a similar approach in his novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), naming neither his protagonist nor the empire for which he works.

  e3. Descriptions of nature like these occur throughout many of Conrad’s works and show a significant connection to Impressionist works of art by famous painters, including Claude Monet. This impressionistic technique in fiction is also a hallmark of several well-known modernist writers, including Virginia Woolf.

  e4. Unlike Marlow’s skeptical approach, the first narrator displays an unchecked enthusiasm for British imperial endeavors. In this way, he reflects the at
titudes of most professional Englishmen of the time, many of whom read Blackwood’s Magazine, the journal in which Heart of Darkness was first published. It is also quite ironic that the first of three installments of Heart of Darkness was the first and most prominent piece in the magazine’s special issue of its thousandth edition, which was specifically devoted to celebrating British imperialism.

  e5. Most critics credit Conrad’s invention of Charlie Marlow as a pivotal device that allowed the author to finally “find his voice.” After several awkward attempts at omniscient or shifting perspectives in his first few novels, using Marlow as his narrator allowed Conrad to speak with a single and clear voice. Marlow’s first appearance actually occurs in Lord Jim, a novel that Conrad began writing before Heart of Darkness (though it wasn’t published serially until after Heart of Darkness). Conrad also used Marlow as his narrator in two other works, Youth (1902) and Chance (1913).

  e6. In this crucial early paragraph in his narrative, Marlow offers up two “Roman” figures that point directly to two central characters of the African tale he is about to tell. The military officer who endures the harsh climate in the hopes of gaining promotion and a glorious return to Rome seems to match quite well with the manager who travels with Marlow to reclaim Kurtz. And the “decent young citizen” who has squandered his money and hopes to redeem himself suggests the man at the heart of Marlow’s tale, Kurtz himself.

  e7. This passage points directly to a term later coined by Sigmund Freud: the “narcissism of minor differences.” In essence, Freud argued that humans release their greatest violence against those more similar to them than different, because that very similarity represents a greater threat to identity (see “The Taboo of Virginity” [1917] and Civilization and Its Discontents [1930]). Hauntingly, this notion remains all too real in Africa, as was especially apparent during the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (the minute difference between the Hutus and the Tutsis, the two warring ethnic groups, is made especially clear in a memorable scene from the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda).

  e8. Though it had been engaged in imperial activity for a number of decades (particularly in India), Britain and its European rivals did not aggressively pursue expansions of their imperial claims until roughly the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the famous Berlin Conference (see note 29 of Part I). Because of the increased competition, “imperialism” took on a more nationalistic and jingoistic importance and often became “Imperialism” instead. Also note Marlow’s ellipses here; they appear fairly frequently throughout his narrative and remind us that often what he doesn’t say is at least as significant as what he does.

  e9. Conrad’s time as a seaman brought him a fairly substantial “dose of the East.” Ships that he served aboard made regular stops in the Australian ports of Adelaide, Sydney, and Melbourne, while his travels also brought him to places like Singapore, Bangkok, Calcutta (now Kolkata), and the comparatively small and exotic port of Berau on the east coast of Borneo. This small port is particularly important, however, because it was here that he met Charles William Olmeijer, the inspiration for his first novel, Almayer’s Folly.

  e10. Fleet Street was long the home of Britain’s most important and influential newspapers. Today, the newspapers have largely moved elsewhere and the numerous law offices along Fleet Street make it important to London’s legal community.

  e11. Phrenology, a now disproven science that claimed to be able to predict mental characteristics based on the shape of the skull, was a popular idea that helped support a number of racist beliefs in the Victorian era (and fostered some of the thinking behind eugenics as well). Interestingly, and more positively, it also served as an early precursor of modern cognitive sciences that pursue explanations for certain behaviors by examining brain activity.

  e12. Though still in its relative infancy, the field of anthropology, led by the work of Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski around the turn of the twentieth century, increasingly came to favor the idea of extended experiences and observations in the field as the best means to understand the full context of the cultures or groups being studied.

  e13. In his popular novel The Alienist (1994), Caleb Carr resurrects this nineteenth-century term and concept by telling a story that anticipates television’s CSI series but that is set in 1896 New York City.

  e14. Conrad here makes an obvious connection to one of Jules Verne’s most famous works. Verne wrote about environments even more alien than the Congo of Heart of Darkness, but he also contributed greatly to the success of adventure fiction as a genre. The endurance of Verne’s tale continues, as is made apparent by the film version of the story starring Brendan Fraser that was released in the summer of 2008.

  e15. There are a number of moments like this in Heart of Darkness that seem to point directly (even deliberately) to the writings of Charles Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species (1859) and especially The Descent of Man (1871) popularized ideas about evolution and the survival of the fittest that were already “in the air” during the 1840s and ’50s. The “tails” that Marlow mentions here offer a brief but nonetheless racist hint that these Africans are less evolved beings.

  e16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the eighteenth century’s most significant philosophers, often posited the idea that those who were most removed from “civilization” were best able to live in a purely happy state. He also believed that there was a purity to such lives and also spoke of “noble” savages that lived beyond the corrupt and ignoble “civilized” world.

  e17. J. A. Hobson argued in his 1902 work Imperialism that Britain’s imperial actions were largely driven by a relatively small group of businessmen who were also in large part the beneficiaries of the British Empire. At the same time, one of the reasons for the fall of that empire was the tremendous costs involved in policing and protecting any held lands, particularly India but also numerous other colonial holdings around the world. Thus, the economic stakes of imperialism cut both ways.

  e18. While reporting on the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil,” which posits that many of the greatest evils in the world originate in humans who are otherwise “normal” (that is, not sociopaths or madmen). This phrase also seems to apply to many imperialists in the Belgian Congo. Another interesting study of something like this phenomenon is Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, which chronicles the lives of similarly “commonplace” men from Poland who were pressed into duty by the Nazis and essentially did as they were told, becoming proficient executioners in the process.

  e19. In The Great Gatsby (1925), a novel that its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, acknowledged was heavily influenced by Heart of Darkness, the narrator, Nick Carraway, describes Gatsby in intriguingly similar terms. In chapter 3, Nick relates, “He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care” (53–54).

  e20. The manager’s unique interpretation of the famous round table that, in Arthurian legend, symbolized that all knights were of equal worth leads instead to each “knight” believing that his is the most important place at the table. It shows the manager to be cunning enough to be a leader at least of these men but driven by egotistical and selfish aims that are far from what the mythical Camelot wo
uld have endorsed. (For a more traditional rendering/explanation of the round table, see, among other films, First Knight [1995].)

  e21. Early in the nineteenth century, during what we now call the Romantic era (roughly 1790–1830), poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote often of a benevolent nature that could offer comfort, pleasure, and inspiration to humans. By the turn of the twentieth century, though, when Heart of Darkness appeared, literary movements like naturalism, along with evolving scientific developments, had combined to alter views of nature substantially, either displaying it as completely indifferent to humans or even in open opposition to humans’ desires. In our own time, the view has evolved even further, with the environmental and green movements now suggesting that nature is ours to take care of and, in a sense, dependent upon us for its survival.

  e22. This idea of believing without seeing has many important connections with literature and the movies. It is a central tenet of the Christian faith as expressed in the New Testament of the Bible. But we also find it in a number of films, perhaps most memorably (and startlingly) in the mysterious figure of Keyser Soze in Bryan Singer’s 1995 film The Usual Suspects. In the immediate context of the story, however, this “notion” has more to do with Marlow choosing the devil he can’t see over the devils he can.

  e23. Endlessly frustrated by the inefficiency he sees around him in the Congo, Marlow transfers his whole desire for order and efficiency onto the rivets that are so basic and plentiful in Europe and even at the previous station that he visited—and yet nearly impossible to find at this particular spot.