Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
The Work
Heart of Darkness originally appeared serially in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899.
The novella was eventually published as a whole in 1902, as the third work in a volume
Conrad titled Youth. Since its publication in Youth, the novel has fascinated numerous
readers and critics, almost all of whom regarded the novel as an important one because of
the ways it uses ambiguity and (in Conrad's own words), "foggishness" to dramatize
Marlow's perceptions of the horrors he encounters. Critics have regarded Heart of
Darkness as a work that in several important ways broke many narrative conventions and
brought the English novel into the twentieth century. It is widely regarded as a significant
work of English literature and part of the Western canon (one of few books most
influential in shaping Western culture.)
This highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame narrative.
(Found in works such as Wuthering Heights.) It follows Marlow as he recounts, from
dusk through to late night, his adventure into the Congo to a group of men aboard a ship
anchored in the Thames Estuary.
Imperialism and The Congo
1. Action: Imperialism is the practice of extending the power, control or rule by one
country over areas outside its borders. The areas so controlled or ruled may be
called that country's empire. Imperialism is a branch of Colonialism in which the
controlled areas are formally declared to be its "colonies" or "protectorates".
Imperialism is also used to refer to situations where the mode of control is less
formal ; for instance where the dominant country's influence or control in the
subordinate areas is economic, not involving overt territorial conquest. (18151914)
2. Attitude: Imperialism is the attitude of superiority, subordination and domination
over foreign peoples.
Imperialism is often autocratic, and also sometimes monolithic in character.
The end of the nineteenth-century brought about one of the most notable
examples of imperialism and genocide in modern memory. King Leopold II of Belgium
(ruled 1865–1909) possessed an insatiable greed for money, land, and power — and
looked to Africa to find them.
The area Conrad refers to as the Company Station was an actual location called
Matadi, a location two-hundred miles up river from the mouth of the Congo. The Central
Station was a location called Kinshasa, and both these locations marked a stretch of river
impassable by steamboat, upon which Marlow takes a "two-hundred mile tramp." The
Company was in reality the Anglo-Belgian India-Rubber Company formed by King
Leopold II of Belgium charged with running the country of the Congo Free State in 1885.
The Congo Free State was voted into existence by the Berlin Conference (1884), which
Conrad refers to sarcastically in his novella as "the International Society for the
Suppression of Savage Customs." Leopold II declared the Congo Free State his personal
property in 1892, legally permitting the Belgians to take what rubber they wished from
the area without having to trade with the African natives. This caused a rise in atrocities
perpetrated by the Belgian traders. The Congo Free State was taken out of the personal
property of the king and made a regular colony of Belgium, called Belgian Congo, in
1908, after the extent of atrocities committed there became generally known in the West,
partially through Conrad's novel.
The Congo was a perfect colony for Leopold II for several reasons. First, ivory
and rubber were plentiful and could be systematically gathered and shipped to Europe.
Second, the only law there was Leopold's: Although he constantly presented himself to
his European contemporaries as a philanthropist and humanitarian, Leopold ran the
Congo (without ever visiting it) from a distance with an iron hand. Third, labor was
plentiful and, more important to Leopold, free, because his agents routinely forced the
Congolese into slave labor by means of torture or intimidation: Women, for example,
were often kidnapped and held until their husbands and sons gathered sufficient
quantities of rubber. Forth, there were few operating expenses: Huts and mess-halls were
constructed for the agents, and the construction of a railroad system running through the
Congo guaranteed that supplies could reach different stations quickly. Finally, the colony
was thousands of miles away from sheltered European skies. People could not condemn
what they could not see.
Criticisms
In more recent years, Heart of Darkness has come under fire for the blatantly racist
attitudes it portrays. Some critics have taken issue with the matter-of-fact tone in which
Marlow describes Africans as "savages" and "niggers" and portrays African life as
mysterious and inhuman.
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad did not begin to learn English until he was twenty-one years old.
He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish
Ukraine. When Conrad was quite young, his father was exiled to Siberia on suspicion of
plotting against the Russian government. After the death of the boy's mother, Conrad's
father sent him to his mother's brother in Kraków to be educated, and Conrad never again
saw his father. He traveled to Marseilles when he was seventeen and spent the next
twenty years as a sailor. He signed on to an English ship in 1878, and eight years later he
became a British subject. In 1889, he began his first novel, Almayer's Folly, and began
actively searching for a way to fulfill his boyhood dream of traveling to the Congo. He
took command of a steamship in the Belgian Congo in 1890, and his experiences in the
Congo came to provide the outline for Heart of Darkness. Conrad's time in Africa
wreaked havoc on his health, however, and he returned to England to recover. He
returned to sea twice before finishing Almayer's Folly in 1894 and wrote several other
books, including one about Marlow called Youth: A Narrative before beginning Heart of
Darkness in 1898. He wrote most of his other major works—including Lord Jim, which
also features Marlow, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent, as well as several collaborations
with Ford Madox Ford—during the following two decades. Conrad died in 1924.
It has been said that Conrad’s work imitated life. Conrad voyaged to the Congo in
1890, when he sailed a steamboat up the Congo River just as Marlow does in the novel.
As Conrad writes of the novel in his 1917 Introduction, "Heart of Darkness . . . is
experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."
Numerous biographical facts find their way into the novel. For example, like Marlow,
Conrad had always longed to "follow the sea," the wife of a distant relative (like
Marlow's aunt) helped him secure a job with a trading company, the captain who
preceded him had been killed by natives in a quarrel (like Fresleven in the novel), and
Conrad encountered several men who showed barbaric tendencies similar to the ones
exhibited by Kurtz.
The Roi des Belges, the ship Conrad used to travel up the Congo.
Works Cited (Don’t sue us!)
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/Heart-of-Darkness-About-Heart-ofDarkness.id-4,pageNum-10.html
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/heart/context.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Darkness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/Heart-of-Darkness-About-Heart-ofDarkness.id-4,pageNum-11.html