Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary (28 page)

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 attitudes 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 would 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.

e24
. Conrad's language here echoes the fear of death at the hands of an all-powerful nature that is shared by the four men shipwrecked in Stephen Crane's short story “The Open Boat” (1897). Conrad and Crane became good friends late in Crane's all too brief life (he died in 1900 of tuberculosis at the age of only twenty-eight).

e25
. As countless historians have referenced, contact between “civilized” explorers and native peoples in lands throughout the world has often had fatal consequences for those peoples. This is because their immune systems have not had to fight off some of the germs carried by those from the outside world and are unable to adapt. This has not always been true, though, as many young imperialists who accepted positions in Africa and other colonial lands died at the hands of diseases for which their own, fairly delicate immune systems were not prepared.

Part II

e1
. Unlike Marlow, who at least seems to reference Darwin correctly (see note
e15
in Part I), the manager and his uncle rely on a slightly corrupted evolution of Darwinian concepts commonly known as social Darwinism, a belief that was particularly popular during late Victorian and early modernist times (roughly 1870 to World War I in the 1910s). Social Darwinism took the idea of “survival of the fittest” and tried to apply it among classes and even races of individuals both within and outside of “civilized” society. In the manager's case, his surprising longevity in the disease-ridden Congo creates in him what we might call a “Darwinian arrogance” that he will prove himself “fittest” simply by outliving all of his rivals, including Kurtz. At the same time, Marlow mocks the idea that either the manager or his uncle (with his “short flipper of an arm”) has any control over their survival, much less the mysterious and seemingly unknowable African jungle.