Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary (25 page)

While opinions differ about just how forward-looking
Heart of Darkness
was in its time—some critics and readers appreciate the work as a bold statement against imperialism, while others think Conrad did not go far enough—it has had a significant impact on portrayals of Africa in fiction and nonfiction alike for more than a century. In this brief essay, I will explore the connections between Conrad's portrayal of Africa in
Heart of Darkness
and a number of films released in just the past few years:
Hotel Rwanda
(2004),
The Constant Gardener
(2005),
Tsotsi
(2005),
The Last King of Scotland
(2006), and
Blood Diamond
(2006).

In three films featuring major Hollywood stars released within the last three years, the story of Africa has continued to be told through the viewpoint primarily of white characters from the “West.” Each offers a skeptical look at whether change can really occur, often exploring the possibility through distinct portrayals of gender. In
The Constant Gardener
, a tale primarily of corporate greed in Africa, Ralph Fiennes's diplomat Justin Quayle at first rejects and then ultimately embraces the forceful efforts of his activist wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz) to uncover the exploitation of Africans by a fictional European pharmaceutical company. In
The Last King of Scotland
, James McAvoy's Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is starstruck and largely oblivious to the violent tactics of his employer Idi Amin while his friend Sarah Merrit, a doctor's wife herself, works diligently and quietly to provide proper care to a small village. And in
Blood Diamond
, Leonardo DiCaprio's soldier-turned-diamond-smuggler Danny Archer struggles to overcome his self-interest, urged to more noble aspirations by the Western journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) and African father Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou). These are also each partially fictionalized accounts of Africa, much like
Heart of Darkness
, that explore and offer similarly ambiguous lessons about whether intervention in Africa—whether to exploit or to save—is a positive thing or not.

In contrast, two other films of the past few years tell stories that are more about Africa than the West.
Hotel Rwanda
(2004) recounts the tale of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel owner who successfully managed to protect more than a thousand Rwandans from the genocide of 1994. It exposes as absurd the minute differences upon which this genocide was based, pondering the ironies of Africa, but it certainly also aims to expose a Western audience to the fact that the West could have but did not intervene (the question of United Nations intervention in particular is a central feature of the story). But a film released only a year later,
Tsotsi
, based on a South African novel about an orphan-turned-thug who accidentally kidnaps a baby, offers a tale that could be told in virtually any language or country where classes are divided by wealth and opportunity.

More than a century after Conrad introduced a deeply troubled Africa to the Western world, modern films continue to explore similar questions in often complex ways. But unlike
Heart of Darkness
, women are now featured prominently and Africans speak for themselves. The answers may still be beyond us, but the countless voices of Africans and those who seek to help Africans can now be heard.

Edward Garnett

Unsigned Review from
Academy and Literature
(6 December 1902): 606.

The publication in volume form of Mr. Conrad's three stories, ‘Youth,' Heart of Darkness,' ‘The End of the Tether,' is one of the events of the literary year. These stories are an achievement in art which will materially advance his growing reputation. Of the stories, ‘Youth' may be styled a modern English epic of the Sea; ‘The End of the Tether' is a study of an old sea captain who, at the end of forty years' trade exploration of the Southern seas, finding himself dispossessed by the perfected routine of the British empire overseas he has helped to build, falls on evil times, and faces ruin calmly, fighting to the last. These two will be more popular than the third, ‘Heart of Darkness,' a study of ‘the white man in Africa' which is most amazing, a consummate piece of artistic
diablerie
. On reading ‘Heart of Darkness' on its appearance in
Blackwood's Magazine
our first impression was that Mr. Conrad had, here and there, lost his way. Now that the story can be read, not in parts, but from the first page to the last at a sitting, we retract this opinion and hold ‘Heart of Darkness' to be the high-water mark of the author's talent. It may be well to analyse this story a little so that the intelligent reader, reading it very deliberately, may see better for himself why Mr. Conrad's book enriches English literature.

‘Heart of Darkness,' to present its theme bluntly, is an impression, taken from life, of the conquest by the European whites of a certain portion of Africa, an impression in particular of the civilising methods of a certain great European Trading Company face to face with the ‘nigger.' We say this much because the English reader likes to know where he is going before he takes art seriously, and we add that he will find the human life, black and white, in ‘Heart of Darkness' an uncommonly and uncannily serious affair. If the ordinary reader, however, insists on taking the subject of a tale very seriously, the artist takes his method of presentation more seriously still, and rightly so. For the art of ‘Heart of Darkness'—as in every psychological masterpiece—lies in the relation of the things of the spirit to the things of the flesh, of the invisible life to the visible, of the sub-conscious life within us, our obscure motives and instincts, to our conscious actions, feelings and outlook. Just as landscape art implies the artist catching the exact relation of a tree to the earth from which it springs, and of the earth to the sky, so the art of ‘Heart of Darkness' implies the catching of infinite shades of the white man's uneasy, disconcerted, and fantastic relations with the exploited barbarism of Africa; it implies the acutest analysis of the deterioration of the white man's morale, when he is let loose from European restraint, and planted down in the tropics as an ‘emissary of light' armed to the teeth, to make trade profits out of the ‘subject races.' The weirdness, the brilliance, the psychological truth of this masterly analysis of two Continents in conflict, of the abysmal gulf between the white man's system and the black man's comprehension of its results, is conveyed in a rapidly rushing narrative which calls for close attention on the reader's part. But the attention once surrendered, the pages of the narrative are as enthralling as the pages of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The stillness of the sombre African forests, the glare of sunshine, the feeling of dawn, of noon, of night on the tropical rivers, the isolation of the unnerved, degenerating whites staring all day and every day at the Heart of Darkness which is alike meaningless and threatening to their own creed and conceptions of life, the helpless bewilderment of the unhappy savages in the grasp of their flabby and rapacious conquerors—all this is a page torn from the life of the Dark Continent—a page which has been hitherto carefully blurred and kept away from European eyes. There is no ‘intention' in the story, no parti pris, no prejudice one way or the other; it is simply a piece of art, fascinating and remorseless, and the artist is but intent on presenting his sensations in that sequence and arrangement whereby the meaning or the meaninglessness of the white man in uncivilised Africa can be felt in its really significant aspects. If the story is too strong meat for the ordinary reader, let him turn to ‘Youth,' wherein the song of every man's youth is indeed sung. […] Mr. Conrad is easily among the first writers of to-day. His special individual gift, as an artist, is of so placing a whole scene before the reader that the air, the landscape, the moving people, the houses on the quays, the ships in the harbour, the sounds, the scents, the voices in the air, all fuse in the perfect and dream-like illusion of an unforgettable reality.

Unsigned Review from the
Manchester Guardian
(10 December 1902): 3.

Mr. Joseph Conrad's latest volume,
Youth
, contains three stories, of which the one that gives the title is the shortest. This and the second one may be regarded as a kind of sequence. The third and longest, ‘The End of the Tether,' is admirable, but in comparison with the others the tension is relaxed. It is in a manner more deliberate, less closely packed; this is Conrad, but not Conrad in his fine frenzy; it gives an engaging picture of a noble old man, pathetic, imaginative, deserving a whole array of eulogistic adjectives, but it is not of the amazing quality of Mr. Conrad at his best. The other two, though not of such scope and design, are of the quality of
Lord Jim
—that is to say, they touch the high-water mark of English fiction and continue a great expression of adventure and romance. Both stories follow Mr. Conrad's particular convention; they are the outpourings of Marlow's experiences. It would be useless to pretend that they can be very widely read. Even to those who are most impressed an excitement so sustained and prolonged, in which we are braced to encounter so much that menaces and appals, must be something of a strain. ‘Youth,' in this conception of Mr. Conrad's, is not the time of freedom and delight, but ‘the test, the trial of life.' No labour is too great, no danger is too close for this great adventure of the spirit.

 

‘Heart of Darkness' is, again, the adventure of youth, an adventure more significant than the mere knockabout of the world. It is youth in the toils, a struggle with phantoms worse than the elements, ‘a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares,' a destructive experience.

 

It must not be supposed that Mr. Conrad makes attack upon colonisation, expansion, even upon Imperialism. In no one is the essence of the adventurous spirit more instinctive. But cheap ideals, platitudes of civilisation are shrivelled up in the heat of such experiences. The end of this story brings us back to the familiar, reassuring region of common emotions, to the grief and constancy of the woman who had loved Kurtz and idealises his memory. It shows us how far we have travelled.

Those who can read these two stories in sympathy with Mr. Conrad's temperament will find in them a great expression of the world's mystery and romance. They show the impact upon an undaunted spirit of what is terrible and obscure; they are adventure in terms of experience; they represent the sapping of life that cannot be lived on easy terms. Mr. Conrad's style is his own—concentrated, tenacious, thoughtful, crammed with imaginative detail, breathless, yet missing nothing. Its grim earnestness bends to excursions of irony, to a casual humour, dry, subdued to its surroundings. Phrases strike the mind like lines of verse; we weary under a tension that is never slackened. He is one of the greatest of sea-writers and the most subjective of them. His storms are not the picturesque descriptions of the great phenomena, we see them in the ‘weary, serious faces,' in the dreadful concentration of the actors. Mr. Conrad is intensely human and, we may add with some pride of fellowship, intensely modern. By those who seek for the finest expositions of the modern spirit ‘Youth' and ‘Heart of Darkness' cannot be neglected.

Unsigned Review from the
Times Literary Supplement
(12 December 1902): 372.

Telling tales, just spinning yarns, has gone out of fashion since the novel has become an epitome of everything a man has to say about anything. The three stories in
Youth
by Joseph Conrad are in this reference a return to an earlier taste. The yarns are of the sea, told with an astonishing zest; and given with vivid accumulation of detail and iterative persistency of emphasis of the quality of character and scenery. The method is exactly the opposite of Mr. Kipling's. It is a little precious; one notes a tasting of the quality of phrases and an occasional indulgence in poetic rhetoric. But the effect is not unlike Mr. Kipling's. In the first story, ‘Youth,' the colour, the atmosphere of the East is brought out as in a picture. The concluding scene of the ‘Heart of Darkness' is crisp and brief enough for Flaubert, but the effect—a woman's ecstatic belief in a villain's heroism—is reached by an indulgence in the picturesque horror of the villain, his work and his surroundings, which is pitiless in its insistence, and quite extravagant according to the canons of art. But the power, the success in conveying the impression vividly, without loss of energy is undoubted and is refreshing. ‘The End of the Tether,' the last of the three, is the longest and best. Captain Whalley is racy of the sea, and an embodiment of its finest traditions; and the pathos of his long-drawn wrestle with the anger of circumstance is poignant to the end. Mr. Conrad should have put him in the forefront of the book. There are many readers who would not get beyond the barren and not very pretty philosophy of ‘Youth'; more who might feel they had had enough horror at the end of ‘The Heart of Darkness.' But they would miss a great deal if they did not reach ‘The End of the Tether.' It has this further advantage over the other two tales, that it is much less clever, much less precious.

Unsigned Review from the
Athenaeum
(20 December 1902): 824.

The art of Mr. Conrad is exquisite and very subtle. He uses the tools of his craft with the fine, thoughtful delicacy of a mediaeval clockmaker. […] Putting aside all considerations of mere taste, one may say at once that Mr. Conrad's methods command and deserve the highest respect, if only by reason of their scholarly thoroughness. One feels that nothing is too minute, no process too laborious for this author. He considers not material rewards, but the dignity of his work, of all work. […]

A critical writer has said that all fiction may roughly be divided into two classes: that dealing with movement and adventure, and the other dealing with characterization, the analysis of the human mind. In the present, as in every one of his previous books, Mr. Conrad has stepped outside these boundaries, and made his own class of work as he has made his own methods. All his stories have movement and incident, most of them have adventure, and the motive in all has apparently been the careful analysis, the philosophic presentation, of phases of human character. His studious and minute drawing of the action of men's minds, passions, and principles forms fascinating reading. But he has another gift of which he himself may be less conscious, by means of which his other more incisive and purely intellectual message is translated for the proper understanding of simpler minds and plainer men. That gift is the power of conveying atmosphere, and in the exercise of this talent Mr. Conrad has few equals among our living writers of fiction. He presents the atmosphere in which his characters move and act with singular fidelity, by means of watchful and careful building in which the craftsman's methods are never obtrusive, and after turning the last page of one of his books we rise saturated by the very air they breathed. This is a great power, but, more or less, it is possessed by other talented writers of fiction. The rarity of it in Mr. Conrad lies in this, that he can surround both his characters and his readers with the distinctive atmosphere of a particular story within the limits of a few pages. This is an exceptional gift, and the more to be prized in Mr. Conrad for the reason that he shows some signs of growing over-subtle in his analysis of moods, temperaments, and mental idiosyncrasies. It is an extreme into which all artists whose methods are delicate, minute and searching are apt to be led. We have at least one other analyst of temperament and mood in fiction whose minute subtlety, scrupulous restraint, and allusive economy of words resemble Mr. Conrad's. And, becoming an obsession, these characteristics tend to weary the most appreciative reader. With Mr. Conrad, however, these rather dangerous intellectual refinements are illumined always by a vivid wealth of atmosphere, and translated simply by action, incident, strong light and shade, and distinctive colouring. […]

The reviewer deliberately abstains both from quotation and from any attempt at analysis of a story like ‘The Heart of Darkness.' Any such attempt in a limited space would be a painful injustice where work of this character is concerned. Further, the reader is warned that this book cannot be read understandingly—as evening newspapers and railway novels are perused—with one mental eye closed and the other roving. Mr. Conrad himself spares no pains, and from his readers he demands thoughtful attention. He demands so much, and, where the intelligent are concerned, we think he will command it.