Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary (26 page)

Critical Studies

Adams, David,
Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

Caminero-Santangelo, Byron,
African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

Carabine, Keith and Max Saunders, eds.,
Inter-Relations: Conrad, James, Ford and Others
(Boulder: Social Science Monographs; Lublin: Maria Curie-Skłodowska University; New York: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2003).

Cooper, Brenda,
Weary Sons of Conrad: White Fiction Against the Grain of Africa's Dark Heart
(New York: Peter Lang, 2002).

de Lange, Attie, Gail Fincham, and Wiesław Krajka, eds.,
Conrad in Africa: New Essays on “Heart of Darkness”
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

Donovan, Stephen,
Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture
(Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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

Kaplan, Carola M., Peter Mallios, and Andrea White, eds.,
Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives
(New York: Routledge, 2005).

Sherry, Norman,
Conrad: A Critical Heritage
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).

White, Andrea,
Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Nineteenth-Century Accounts of Africa

Hobson, J. A.,
Imperialism: A Study
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).

Kingsley, Mary,
Travels in West Africa
(London: The Folio Society, 1976).

Morel, E. D.,
Great Britain and the Congo: The Pillage of the Congo Basin
(New York: H. Fertig, 1969).

Park, Mungo,
Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).

Stanley, Henry Morton,
How I Found Livingstone
(Vercelli: White Star, 2006).

Conrad's Contemporaries

Ford, Ford Madox,
The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion
(London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2007).

Haggard, H. Rider,
She
(London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2001).

Haggard, H. Rider,
King Solomon's Mines
(London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2007).

Kipling, Rudyard,
Kim
(New York: Penguin, 1987).

Kucich, John, ed.,
Fictions of Empire
(includes Kipling's “The Man Who Would Be King” and Robert Louis Stevenson's
The Beach of Falesá
) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

Conrad's Influence

Achebe, Chinua,
Things Fall Apart
(New York: Anchor Books, 1994).

Achebe, Chinua,
Arrow of God
(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969).

Achebe, Chinua,
No Longer at Ease
(Oxford: Heinemann, 1987).

Aidoo, Ama Ata,
Our Sister Killjoy
(London: Longman, 1977).

Boyd, William,
A Good Man in Africa
(London: H. Hamilton, 1981).

Boyd, William,
An Ice-Cream War
(New York: Vintage Books, 1982).

Boyle, T. C.,
Water Music
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1981).

Coetzee, J. M.,
Waiting for the Barbarians
(New York: Penguin, 1999).

Fitzgerald, F. Scott,
The Great Gatsby
(New York: Scribner, 2000).

Foden, Giles,
The Last King of Scotland
(New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

Forster, E. M.,
A Passage to India
(New York: Penguin, 2005).

Garland, Alex,
The Beach
(New York: Riverhead Books, 1997).

Golding, William,
Lord of the Flies
(New York: Penguin, 1999).

Gordimer, Nadine,
July's People
(New York: Penguin Books, 1982).

Kerouac, Jack,
On the Road
(New York: Penguin Books, 2005).

Naipaul, V. S.,
A Bend in the River
(New York: Vintage International, 1989).

Ngugi wa Thiong'o,
Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms
(London: J. Currey; Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993).

Ngugi wa Thiong'o,
A Grain of Wheat
(London: Heinemann Educational, 1986).

Orwell, George,
Burmese Days
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962).

Silverberg, Robert,
Downward to the Earth
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970).

Warren, Robert Penn,
All the King's Men
(New York: Harcourt, 2001).

Related Historical Books

Arendt, Hannah,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

Browning, Christopher R.,
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1998).

Butcher, Tim,
Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
(London: Chatto & Windus, 2007) (retraces Conrad's journey up the Congo).

Easterly, William,
The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
(New York: Penguin Press, 2006).

Edgerton, Robert,
The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002).

French, Howard W.,
A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
(New York: Knopf, 2004).

Hochschild, Adam,
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen, and Volker Reiss, eds.,
The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders
(New York: Free Press, 1991).

Mealer, Bryan,
All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo
(New York: Bloomsbury: Distributed in the trade by Macmillan, 2008).

Otis, Laura, ed.,
Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Pakenham, Thomas,
The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876–1912
(New York: Random House, 1991).

Reader, John,
Africa: A Biography of the Continent
(New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

Wrong, Michela,
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001).

Heart of Darkness
features a substantial number of unnamed characters, many of whom also share a number of characteristics, adding to the potential confusion. In fact, only two characters of significance are named—the story's most important figures, Kurtz and Charlie Marlow (also named are Fresleven, the deceased captain whom Marlow replaces aboard the Congo steamer he pilots; Towson/Towser, the author of the sailor's manual that Marlow discovers shortly before arriving at the Inner Station; and Van Shuyten, a Dutch trader on the Congo coast who equips the harlequin for his journey into the Congo). What follows are primarily brief descriptions of the various unnamed individuals whom Marlow meets on his voyage up the Congo River.

 

Marlow's audience:
Marlow tells his tale to a group of his friends aboard a boat floating below London on the Thames River. The group includes the unnamed first narrator, the Director of Companies, the Lawyer, and the Accountant. The latter three, in addition to being closely related to individuals whom Conrad often spent time with, were all involved daily with the British economy, including its connections with imperial activity in places like Africa and India. And, in this way, they very much reflect the people who would have been reading
Heart of Darkness
in
Blackwood's Magazine
, English businessmen of the middle and upper classes. Once Marlow begins his tale, however, they are barely referenced, aside from a few brief moments in which Marlow responds to their objections or doubts about his tale.

 

The accountant:
This is the first of a series of workers for the Company whom Marlow encounters and describes in extensive and often withering detail. The accountant works at the Outer Station (corresponding to Matadi in real life). There, he maintains an astonishingly formal level of dress, with starched shirts, a jacket, and a necktie among his attire (which he owes to the “native women” whom he has taught to launder his clothes). His method of coping with the uncertainties of the Congo is to focus his attention almost solely on the proper accounting of the Company's funds, which leads to his brutal complaint about a dying man's groans interrupting his all-important calculations. Marlow is both impressed and disgusted by “this miracle,” as he describes him.

 

The manager:
This is the man in charge of the Central Station (corresponding to Kinchasa). During an initial interview as well as his time at the Central Station and later during the journey up the Congo to recover Kurtz, Marlow learns a fair amount of information about the manager, little of which he likes. The manager, who is “commonplace” in virtually every respect and who does not inspire respect but instead “uneasiness,” apparently blames Kurtz for taking his place in the pecking order of the Company. Immensely proud of his ability to survive while many other Europeans are killed by “various tropical diseases,” he famously announces, “Men who come out here should have no entrails.” Indeed, the manager and his uncle both believe that the manager can ultimately gain the promotion he wishes if he simply stays alive. But they may also be helping Kurtz to die by wrecking the steamboat that Marlow is to command (the evidence in the text is not conclusive but certainly hints at this possibility) and denying him supplies. Once Kurtz has been recovered and shortly before his death, the manager cannot resist expressing how he
knew
that Kurtz would come to this kind of end. On the whole, Marlow finds the manager's hypocritical and self-interested behavior to be nauseating and extremely troubling, yet also representative of the kinds of “workers” that the Company ultimately creates.

 

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.