Abstract
If the East stimulated Conrad, another undeveloped region of the world, Africa, shook him. He told Edward Garnett: ‘Before the Congo I was only a simple animal.’ 1 It is true that the physical disorders Conrad suffered during his Congo journey incapacitated him so that he was compelled to curtail his career as a seaman and, in part, confirmed him in his already emerging predilections to be a writer. But, obviously, the most important of the consequences, from a literary point of view, was the tremendous impact of the Congo on his imagination and, in particular, how it manifested itself in Heart of Darkness. It is a central text in any discussion of ‘Literature and Imperialism’ and the central text in regard to Africa. Conrad’s is ‘the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination’.2
Unseemly deeds are usually accompanied by high-sounding, even brilliant, justifications.
(Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘On the brink of a cataclysm’, in The Listener, 25 March 1976)
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Notes and References
G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad in the Congo (Boston, 1926) p. 73.
J. P. Clark, The Example of Shakespeare (1970), quoted from Michael Thorpe, ‘Conrad & Caliban’, in Encounter, Vol. LXVI, No. 3, 1986, p. 49.
David Carroll, Chinua Achebe (London: Macmillan, 1980) p. 3.
V. S. Naipaul, ‘A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa’ (1975), in The Return of Eva Peron with the Killings in Trinidad p. 179.
Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Western World (Cambridge University Press, 1971) p. 61.
Joseph Conrad, ‘Author’s Note’ (1917) p. xi, in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (London: Dent, 1923).
Conrad, ‘Author’s Note’ to Tales of Unrest, p. vii, in Almayer’s Folly and Tales of Unrest (London: Dent, 1923).
A. J. Guerard, Conrad The Novelist (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press and London: Oxford University Press, 1958) p. 45.
Robin McKie, ‘Out of Africa — Man’s route to rule the world’, in The Observer, 20 March 1988, p. 4.
See, for example, Sir Hugh Clifford, ‘The Quest of the Golden Fleece’, in ‘Blackwood’ Tales from the Outposts (Edinburgh and London, 1933 edn) Vol. 8; Lord Baden-Powell, ‘Jokilobovu’, ibid., Vol. 9; J. A. G. Elliot, ‘The Ngoloko’, ibid., Vol. 9.
Conrad, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, in Last Essays p. 17: Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays (London: Dent, 1928).
Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (1667), in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the 17th Century (Oxford, 1908) Vol. 2, pp. 112–13.
René Maunier, ‘The Sociology of Colonies’, in Robin W. Winks (ed.) British Imperialism, (New York, 1966) p. 69.
D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places, in Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places (London, 1956 ) p. 1.
Walter Allen, The English Novel, (London: Penguin, 1962 edn) p. 306.
William Knighton, Forest Life in Ceylon (London, 1854), Vol. 1, pp. 281–3.
T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1959) pp. 90–1;
George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936), in Collected Essays (London, 1968 edn) p. 16.
Roger Casement, ‘The Congo Report’ (11 December 1903), in P. Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias (eds), Roger Casement: The Black Diaries (London, n.d.) pp. 98–100.
Conrad, ‘The Congo Diary’, in Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays (London, 1955 edn) p. 162.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Joseph Conrad’ (1924), in Collected Essays (London, 1966), Vol. 1, p. 304.
Quoted from Michael Wood, ‘Up the Congo in the Wake of Conrad’, in The Listener 20 September 1984, p. 13.
See D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Images of the Raj (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) p. 52.
Douglas Hewitt, Conrad A Reassessment (Cambridge, 1952) p. 18;
Robert O. Evans, ‘Conrad’s Underworld’, in Robert Kimbrough (ed.), Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (New York: Norton, 1963) p. 190;
Stewart C. Wilcox, ‘Conrad’s “Complicated Presentations” of Symbolic Imagery’, in Kimbrough (ed.), Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1971 edn) p. 197.
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and other short fiction (New York: Bantam, 1981) p. 5.
Watts, The Deceptive Text p. 76; Lillian Feder, ‘Marlow’s Descent into Hell’ and Robert O. Evans, ’Conrad’s Underworld’, in Kimbrough (ed.), Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1963 edn) p. 187 and p. 190.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Baudelaire’, in Selected Essays (Faber, 1951 edn) p. 429.
Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture, quoted from C. B. Cox (ed.), Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1981) p. 64.
Above all when the whole of life is but a struggle in darkness. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura ed. Martin Ferguson (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, London: Heinemann, 1975 edn) p. 98, Book 2, line 54.
Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa’, in The Massachusetts Review Vol. 18, 1977, p. 788.
Felix Mnthali, ‘Continuity and Change in Conrad and Ngugi’, in Kunapipi Vol. 3, No. 1, 1981, p. 93.
Jeremy Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-consciousness (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1979) p. 31.
See Richard Curie’s notes to ‘The Congo Diary’ in Conrad’s Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays (Dent, 1955 edn).
Stephen A. Reid, ‘The “Unspeakable Rites” in Heart of Darkness’, in Marvin Mudrick (ed.), Conrad, A Collection of Critical Essays (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966) p. 45.
Conrad, letter to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, 26 December 1903, in C. T. Watts (ed.), Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham (Cambridge University Press, 1969) p. 149.
Arnold Kettle, ‘Consensus on Conrad?’, in The Literary Review Vol. 32, 1981, p. 14; Jeremy Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad pp. 33–5.
Solzhenitsyn, ‘On the brink of a cataclysm’, in The Listener, 25 March 1976, p. 359.
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© 1990 D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke
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Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A. (1990). Heart of Darkness: Passage to More Than Africa. In: Joseph Conrad. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21126-5_4
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