Heart of Darkness

• 1. Introduction

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  "The horror! The horror!" Those are the dying words of Kurtz, an ivory trader at the center of Heart of Darkness, the 1899 novella by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad. The book follows a sailor named Charles Marlow. He takes a job as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior. His mission is to travel far up a river and find Kurtz, an agent who has, in the book's phrase, "gone native." The river is never named in the story. But Conrad wrote at a time when the Congo Free State, home to the large Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. From that single voyage upriver come a tangle of questions. Why did a slim, once-overlooked story become the most analyzed work studied in universities? Why does one Nigerian novelist call it "an offensive and deplorable book"? And how did a tale set on an African river end up reborn as a film about the Vietnam War, a video game in Dubai, and a journey to the edge of the Solar System? The answers begin with a man who actually made the trip himself.

• 2. Conrad's Own Voyage

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  In 1890, at the age of 32, Conrad was appointed by a Belgian trading company to serve on one of its steamers. While sailing up the Congo River from one station to another, the ship's captain became ill. Conrad took command. He guided the vessel up the tributary Lualaba River to the company's innermost post, Kindu, in the Eastern Congo Free State. Marlow, his fictional narrator, lives through similar experiences. Conrad waited eight years after returning from Africa before he began to write the novella. When he did, he drew on his own travel journals. He described the book as "a wild story" of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the African interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of natives. That gap between lived experience and finished fiction matters. The historian Adam Hochschild, in his 1998 book King Leopold's Ghost, argued that scholars dwell too much on the psychology of the tale. He felt they pay too little attention to Conrad's accurate recounting of the horror produced by colonial methods in the Congo Free State. As Hochschild put it, the novella is "experience... pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case." That tension between fact and invention would shape every reading that followed.

• 3. The Riddle Of Kurtz

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  Researchers have suggested more than twenty prototypes for the character of Kurtz. One is Georges-Antoine Klein, an agent who became ill and died aboard Conrad's own steamer. Literary critics propose him as a possible basis. Others point to the principal figures of the disastrous "rear column" of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. These include the column leader Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, his Scottish colleague James Sligo Jameson, the slave trader Tippu Tip, and the Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who led the expedition. Conrad's biographer Norman Sherry judged that a Belgian trader, solitary but successful, who spoke three Congolese languages and was venerated to the point of deification, served as the main model. Later scholars have refuted that idea. Molly Mahood and others suggested the Belgian soldier Léon Rom influenced the character. Peter Firchow raises another possibility entirely. He suggests Kurtz is a composite, modeled on various figures present in the Congo Free State and on Conrad's imagining of what they might have shared. Kurtz's own words deepen the menace. Marlow discovers his writings during the journey. In them, Kurtz rants on behalf of the so-called "International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs." He claims altruistic, sentimental reasons to civilize the "savages." One document ends with a dark proclamation: "Exterminate all the brutes!" That society is read as a sarcastic reference to a real participant at the Berlin Conference, the International Association of the Congo.

• 4. Upriver To The Horror

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  "When the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago," Marlow tells his friends on the deck of a boat on the Thames. They too, he says, would have felt "the savagery, the utter savagery" all around them. From that opening, Marlow recalls his fascination as a child for "the blank spaces" on maps, especially the image of a river. In flashback, he travels 30 miles up the river to his company's station, where a railway is under construction. He stumbles into a narrow ravine and is horrified to find critically ill Africans who labored on the railroad, now left to die. The chief accountant first speaks the name Kurtz, calling him a respected first-class agent who will go far. Marlow departs with 60 men for the Central Station, only to learn his steamboat has been wrecked. He spends months fishing it from the river and repairing it, frustrated by missing tools and parts. The voyage to Kurtz's station then takes two months. About 8 miles below the Inner Station, the boat is wrapped in thick fog. Then a barrage of arrows strikes, and the helmsman is killed. Marlow sounds the steam whistle again and again until the attackers flee. At Kurtz's station, a Russian wanderer boards and speaks of how Kurtz opened his mind. Marlow soon sees a row of posts topped with the severed heads of natives. Kurtz appears, carried on a stretcher like a ghost. He is dying. On the trip back down the river, he whispers his final words, "The horror! The horror!" Later, the manager's boy announces, "Mistah Kurtz - he dead."

• 5. Achebe And The Charge Of Racism

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  "An offensive and deplorable book." That is how the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe described Heart of Darkness in his 1975 public lecture, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Achebe argued that Conrad dehumanized Africans. He said Conrad, "blinkered... with xenophobia," wrongly cast Africa as the antithesis of Europe and civilization. In doing so, Achebe wrote, Conrad ignored the artistic accomplishments of the Fang people, who lived in the Congo River basin when the book appeared. The novella, he concluded, "depersonalises a portion of the human race" and should not be considered a great work of art. Achebe's critics push back. They argue he fails to separate Marlow's view from Conrad's, leading to clumsy interpretations. In their reading, Conrad portrays Africans sympathetically and refers sarcastically to the supposedly noble aims of European colonists. Marlow, describing chained and emaciated slaves, even confesses: "After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings." Jeffrey Meyers notes that Conrad, like his acquaintance Roger Casement, was among the first to attack the hypocritical justification of colonialism. E.D. Morel, who led international opposition to King Leopold II's rule, called the novella "the most powerful thing written on the subject." Peter Firchow observes that nowhere does Conrad claim European superiority on grounds of genetic or biological difference. The debate kept widening. In 2003, the Motswana scholar Peter Mwikisa called the book "the great lost opportunity to depict dialogue between Africa and Europe."

• 6. From Minor Work To Classroom Staple

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  Heart of Darkness was not a big success during Conrad's life. When it appeared as a single volume in 1902, bound with "Youth" and "The End of the Tether," it drew the least commentary from critics. The book had been intended as a Marlow trilogy, joining Youth, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim. The story first ran as a three-part serial in February, March, and April 1899 in Blackwood's Magazine. The February issue was the magazine's 1000th, a special edition. The full book, Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, was published on the 13th of November 1902 by William Blackwood. The critic F. R. Leavis dismissed the novella as a "minor work" and faulted its "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery." Conrad himself did not consider it particularly notable. Yet by the 1960s it had become a standard assignment in many college and high school English courses. Harold Bloom wrote that it had been analyzed more than any other work of literature studied in universities and colleges. He attributed this to Conrad's "unique propensity for ambiguity." The French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe went further, calling it "one of the greatest texts of Western literature." In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Heart of Darkness 67th on its list of the 100 best novels in English of the 20th century. In a letter to William Blackwood on the 31st of May 1902, Conrad explained his own ambition for the closing pages, which he said locked "the whole 30000 words of narrative description into one suggestive view of a whole phase of life."

• 7. A Story Reborn Again

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  "You aren't going to see this picture - this picture is going to happen to you." That line was written for a film prologue by Orson Welles, who first adapted Heart of Darkness for a CBS Radio broadcast on the 6th of November 1938. In 1939, Welles planned it as his first film for RKO Pictures, with a screenplay co-written by John Houseman. The story was reshaped around the rise of a fascist dictator and was to be filmed entirely from Marlow's point of view. The project was never realized. One reason given was the loss of European markets after the outbreak of World War II. The best known adaptation came later. Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, from a screenplay by John Milius, moved the story from the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia. Martin Sheen starred as Captain Benjamin L. Willard, sent to "terminate the command" of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. A 1991 documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, chronicled the troubled production, several of whose difficulties mirrored the novella's themes. The tale kept changing shape. James Gray's 2019 science fiction film Ad Astra, with Brad Pitt, sends an astronaut to the edge of the Solar System to confront his rogue father, played by Tommy Lee Jones. The video game Spec Ops: The Line, released on the 26th of June 2012, is a direct modernized adaptation set in Dubai. Its character John Konrad, who replaces Kurtz, nods to Joseph Conrad. Even the climax echoes elsewhere: T. S. Eliot took the line "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" as the first epigraph of his 1925 poem "The Hollow Men."