Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (2 page)

(Kurtz's real-life model was a man named Georges Antoine Klein, an employee of the Brussels-based trading company Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, whom Conrad met shortly before Klein's death. His body was buried at Tchumbiri on the Congo.)

Through the prism of shimmering, musical language that is the essence of Conrad's achievement in ‘‘Heart of Darkness,'' the author has hoped to elevate Kurtz, a white racist murderer whose actions have parodied the idealism of his speech, to the stature of tragedy; he is one whose degradation at the end of his life can't be the sole measure of his moral worth.

Like Herman Melville, who also went to sea as a very young man, Joseph Conrad acquired in his early, impressionistic years a rich store of material to be transformed into tales and novels of exoticism, danger, and rites of passage. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski at Berdyczow in Podolia, Poland, on December 3, 1857, Conrad lost his parents at a young age, attended school in Cracow, and first went to sea, on a French merchant marine vessel, at the age of seventeen. He is said to have attempted suicide at the age of twenty-one, but recovered quickly and signed on with the British merchant navy for whom he would serve, at various ranks, for the next sixteen years. He became a naturalized British subject in 1886 and changed his name to Joseph Conrad; in that year he wrote his first short story, ‘‘The Black Mate.'' His numerous voyages took him virtually everywhere—to the West Indies, to Constantinople, to Sumatra, India, Java, Australia, Singapore; most famously, and almost fatally, to the Belgian Congo in 1890. Though desperate to earn a living, the youthful Conrad was clearly a romantic for whom sailing was an emotional, perhaps even a spiritual vocation. Surely this is Conrad speaking in the voice of Marlow, confiding in his fellow seafarers at the outset of ‘‘Heart of Darkness'':

By the time Marlow had grown up, however, Africa had ‘‘ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery. . . . It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially . . . resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land.'' This great river, the Congo, fascinates Marlow ‘‘as a snake would a bird.''

In June 1890, Conrad was appointed captain of a river steamer on the Congo; ominously, his predecessor had been butchered by native Africans and his body left to rot unburied in the jungle. Conrad's difficult four-mouth adventure, recorded more or less faithfully in ‘‘Heart of Darkness,'' left him near death, devastated with dysentery and fever; his health was broken for the remainder of his life. Conrad's predilection for extreme pessimism, depression, and anxiety would seem to have been exacerbated by his physical condition. In May 1891, for instance, following his return in Europe, he confided in a letter to a friend, ‘‘I am still plunged in deepest night, and my dreams are only nightmares.'' (See
Conrad
by Norman Sherry, Thames & Hudson, 1972.)

Yet the experience was transforming to Conrad, comparable to the experience of writers who have seen armed combat firsthand or have been wounded in battle, for Conrad would one day claim that ‘‘before the Congo, I was just an animal.'' By the end of 1894, Conrad had retired from seafaring; his first novel,
Almayer's Folly,
was published and well received in 1895. His remarkable career had begun.

Though always a controversial figure, criticized in some quarters for his intensely poetic, frequently rhetorical prose and for the unremitting pessimism of certain of his works, Conrad is generally acclaimed as one of the progenitors, along with his mentors Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, of the Modernist novel; he has been called a master of the psychological novel, the political novel, and the ‘‘intellectual mystery'' novel; the fastidiously rendered prose of such works as
The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus,''
‘‘Heart of Darkness'' and
Nostromo,
among others, identifies him as a writer for whom language is a kind of music, rendered with a poet's ear. Following Henry James's example in his essay ‘‘The Art of Fiction'' (1888), Conrad set out, in his Preface to
The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus''
(1897), to establish his belief in the alliance in prose fiction of the moral and the aesthetic; his elevation of the writing life is extreme, suggesting almost a religious, or mystical, vocation; the artist is one who snatches ‘‘in a moment of courage . . . a passing phase of life'' in the effort of showing life's ‘‘vibration, its color, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its color, reveal[s] the substance of its truth.''

By the time of Conrad's death in 1924, in Canterbury, England, this Polish-born emigrant for whom English was not his first or even his second language, would be celebrated as one of the greatest of English novelists, revered as a classic in his own time.

Since its initial publication in 1902, in the volume
Youth,
Conrad's most meticulously poetic work of fiction, ‘‘Heart of Darkness,'' has acquired an extraordinary reputation. Nine decades after its publication it remains one of the most read, and debated, of English works of fiction; it was the model, in spirit, of the flawed but enormously ambitious film by Francis Ford Coppola,
Apocalypse Now
¹
(1979); it has easily become the surpassing masterwork of Conrad's distinguished career, displacing even
The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus,'' Lord Jim
(1900),
Nostromo
(1904),
The Secret Agent
(1907),
Victory
(1915), and such brilliantly realized tales as ‘‘The Secret Sharer'' and ‘‘An Outpost of Progress.'' Part of this is due, of course, to the novella's brevity; like Henry James's
The Turn of the Screw,
it is a feat of dramatic compression in which virtually every passage, if not every sentence, moves us ineluctably toward our moment of revelation: the unmasking of Kurtz, and his twin, terrible pronouncements, ‘‘Exterminate all the brutes!'' and ‘‘The horror! The horror!'' (The latter has achieved a kind of transcultural autonomy, very like Edvard Munch's 1895 woodcut ‘‘The Scream''—a bleakly comic shorthand for twentieth-century angst.)

Unlike other, longer works of Conrad's that provide the reader with imbricated layers of exposition, history, psychology, and description, ‘‘Heart of Darkness'' moves swiftly forward as Marlow's journey moves him, by starts and stops, forward; this is an adventure/mystery story set in the most exotic of locales and fueled by a nightmare logic. The reader is meant to replicate Marlow's voyage as he journeys up the Congo in a snakelike passage into the depths of a formerly blank, unmapped territory: the human soul.

In recent years, Joseph Conrad's work, or more specifically, ideas of gender, race, class, and hegemony implicit in his work, have been severely criticized. The assumptions of Caucasian male privilege are no longer taken for granted among many readers. It should be acknowledged by Conrad's admirers that the audience for whom he imagined his work was almost exclusively male, and assuredly Caucasian. To readers not in this category, the occasionally dogmatic and even derisive nature of certain of Marlow's remarks will strike a discordant note:

Leaving aside for the moment the improbability of an entire sex, and that the child-bearing sex, being permanently ‘‘out of touch with truth,'' we might assume, for argument's sake, that Marlow is speaking critically of a financially well-off, minimally educated class of women who, being denied the possibility of careers and any measure of autonomy apart from fathers, husbands, brothers, or sons, were kept in a perpetual state of childish dependence upon men—the ‘‘fact''-bearing sex. In the gothic-melodramatic final scene of Marlow's tale, in which he visits Kurtz's fiancée, the very emblem of Victorian moral hypocrisy and delusion, Conrad's misogyny is disguised by an air of pity and condescension; a full year after Kurtz's ignoble death, his intended is still in mourning, a neurasthenic apparition in black, with ‘‘a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. . . . She carried her sorrowful head as if she were proud of that sorrow.'' The valiant Marlow, who detests lies, for lies are ‘‘tainted with death,'' nonetheless ‘‘laid the ghosts of [Kurtz's] gifts at last with a lie'' by telling Kurtz's intended that, at the end of Kurtz's life, it was her name he uttered. (In fact, ironically, Kurtz's last words were ‘‘The horror! The horror!'') Men must lie to women, Conrad argues, to preserve women's childlike state of delusion. In Conrad's ranked moral universe, men of a certain class are custodians of truth, facts, ideas, and the respect for tradition outlined in the British Navy handbook
An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship
; women are associated with lies, subterfuge, hypocrisy. (Caucasian women, that is. For a portrait of a black woman, consider Marlow's description of Kurtz's native mistress, of whom Marlow speaks awkwardly as ‘‘barbarous''— ‘‘savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent''—with a face that communicates a ‘‘tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve''—‘‘like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.'' Words piled upon words, suggesting a generalized allegorical figure, a carved wooden sculpture symbolizing African Woman, and not a living, breathing individual woman who is supposed to be passionately in love with the dying Kurtz.)

Conrad has been criticized more sharply for his presentations of men and women of color. Consider Marlow's astonishment and amusement when a black African emulates ‘‘white'' behavior:

Elsewhere, African natives are ‘‘dusty niggers,'' ‘‘surly niggers,'' ‘‘cannibals.'' Conrad, the moralist, the artist for whom prose fiction is a vocation like the priesthood,painfully reveals himself in such passages, and numerous others, as an unquestioning heir of centuries of Caucasian bigotry. Yet it might be argued that Marlow, for all his condescension, represents a degree of humanity not found in the other Caucasian Europeans who are intent upon wresting from black Africa all they can get. Marlow isn't in the Congo for ivory, or money, or to advance his career; he takes on the captaincy of the steamboat for adventure's sake, and becomes fascinated with the demonic figure of Kurtz, the very embodiment of European civilization. Marlow's sharp, cinematic eye brings alive for us these suffering black men, whose plight is meant to move the hearts of Conrad's educated, well-to-do English readers:

Other black men, enslaved and driven like animals until they are of no further use, are allowed to crawl off and die. Marlow is horrified by these ‘‘moribund shapes''—‘‘phantoms''—dying of exhaustion and malnutrition ‘‘as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence. '' Yet we wait in vain for Marlow to protest to anyone, though he soon encounters the chief accountant of the station, an impeccably dressed and groomed Englishman. There is the suggestion in ‘‘Heart of Darkness, '' as elsewhere in Conrad's work, of a pessimism so deeply entrenched as to be identical with a self-serving political conservatism that conveniently renders any form of activism, even protest, ineffective.

For if all men harbor darkness in their hearts, why try to save them? Why even pity them?

The famous tale ‘‘The Secret Sharer,'' from Conrad's collection
'Twixt Land and Sea
(1912), similarly reflects the narrowness of its creator's perspective. Here it is class, not sex or race, that determines a man's worth: an immature young captain, uneasy in his responsibility, mysteriously protects a fugitive named Leggatt, who has fled another ship after having killed a man; the young captain goes to extraordinary, foolhardy risks to allow Leggatt to escape being brought back to England to be tried; by the end of the suspense story, with the flight of Leggatt, the equation between the two men, forged out of their similar backgrounds and temperaments, has been many times reiterated: Leggatt swims clear of the ship ‘‘as though he were my second self . . . a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.''