An Introduction to Heart of Darkness

Chloe Cooper Jones admits that Heart of Darkness left her cold the first two times she was assigned it, and that it took a PhD and a good teacher before it opened up. So she starts with the question she asks of any so-called classic: why should I still care?

Her answer runs on two tracks. Style first: a novel from the last year of the nineteenth century that reads like the modernism of twenty years later, built on ambiguity down to its title. Then politics: King Leopold's Congo, Conrad's own year on a Belgian steamboat, and a critique of empire written while empire was at its most popular.

She closes with the man himself, born in a Poland that did not exist on any map, writing in his third language, at home everywhere and nowhere, which is how he could see what others could not.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Chloe Cooper Jones, and I'm a writer, a journalist, and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. I'm really excited to get a chance to talk with you in depth about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I've now read this short novel many times since it was first assigned to me in a high school English class, and then again in a freshman college course. If I'm honest, those early encounters with this text left me a bit cold, and maybe you've had a similar experience, struggling alone with its pages, feeling even a sense of alienation, perhaps. If so, trust me, you're not alone. The depths of this text eluded me until I had a chance to study it while completing my PhD in literature. During that time, I was lucky enough to work with a brilliant professor who unlocked the nuances and complex gifts of Conrad's masterpiece for me, gifts I've done my best to share with my students as I've taught this text again and again as a professor now myself. Now I'm honored to share what I've learned through years of dedicated study here with you on Rebind.

At the heart of my journey deeper into this incredibly challenging book is the question: why is Heart of Darkness considered so important? I think this is a great question to ask of any book that's considered classic. Why is this text worth remembering and continuing to study? Why should I still care? Well, often a book is called a so-called classic when it changes our understanding of what a book can do, and Heart of Darkness exemplifies this by expanding our perception of literature's capabilities.

Now, on its surface, Heart of Darkness tells a simple story. Our protagonist is Charles Marlow, an Englishman and a sailor who's been hired by a Belgian company to captain a steamship up the Congo River in order to find the elusive ivory trader Kurtz. As Marlow journeys further into Africa, he becomes witness to cruel exploitation and colonization of the native inhabitants by European forces, justified as a mission to civilize the supposedly savage cultures. Upon reaching his destination, Marlow encounters Kurtz, who has succumbed to an intoxicating lust for power and dominance, prompting Marlow to contemplate the blurred boundary between notions of civilization and savagery. But this simple story becomes infinitely more complex when we consider how innovative and ahead of its time it was, stylistically and politically. We also ought to consider the extraordinary life of the man who wrote it.

Let's talk about style first. Published in 1899, Heart of Darkness is a pioneering and prescient piece of modernism, and it's often considered the first work of modernist fiction. Modernism was a movement in literature characterized by a radical departure from traditional literary conventions and a willingness to experiment with new narrative techniques. Literary modernism reflected the broader cultural shifts and uncertainties of the time, and often explored themes of individualism, alienation, and the complexities of modern life. Writers most notably associated with modernism, like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield, were mostly writing after World War I, 20 years after the publication of Heart of Darkness. And yet many of the themes and concerns of the modernist era are present in Conrad's writing, specifically the themes and style choices that reflect ambiguity, the dissolution of certainty, and an ever-growing skepticism with the established societal norms.

In fact, understanding how ambiguity functions, both conceptually and stylistically, in this book is crucial to understanding the book's layers, and it's an idea that we'll come back to again and again as we dive deeper into this text. Take, for example, the title of the book itself. Do we know exactly which heart and which darkness it refers to, or does it contain multiple possible meanings? First, it might seem to refer to Marlow's journey into the interior of the African Congo. Africa, during Conrad's time, was often referred to as the dark continent, and imperialism was justified as a humanitarian effort to bring the light of civilization to such a dark continent. Or it could be that Conrad is referring to Kurtz, who's described as having the darkness of his heart. Or perhaps it refers to a general warning about the darkness lurking in us all, a darkness that can, if given the right circumstances, cause us to descend, like Kurtz, into deeply corrupt practices of exploitation, domination, and other violent abuses of power.

Modernist writers often critique societal norms, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisies of their time. They challenge authoritative sociopolitical structures, institutions, and hierarchies. Heart of Darkness anticipates the major modernist concern as it presents, via its narrative, a major critique of imperialism, and does so while imperialism is at its height of popularity and acceptance in Europe. In 1876, King Leopold of Belgium declared the following: "To open to civilization the sole part of the globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which envelops the entire population, this, I venture to say, is a crusade worthy of this century of progress." King Leopold II of Belgium's involvement in the Congo is characterized by exploitation, brutality, and the quest for personal wealth and power under the guise of humanitarian and so-called civilizing efforts. Leopold's colonization of the Congo began in the 1880s, when he secured international recognition for his personal ownership of the territory. He exploited its vast resources, particularly ivory and rubber, through a network of brutal forced labor. The local population endured harsh labor conditions, abuse, and violence under Leopold's regime.

Joseph Conrad worked for 20 years as a sailor before becoming a published author. In June of 1890, Conrad signed a three-year contract to work as an officer on a Belgian steamboat on the Congo River. He did not last a year. The violence toward the native population by European colonizers overwhelmed him, and subsequently inspired much of his future anti-imperialist writing. Conrad wrote in a later essay that the Belgian presence in Africa was "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." Over time, reports of atrocities, including mutilation, forced labor, and widespread suffering, emerged from the Congo, ultimately leading to pressure on Leopold to cede control over the territory, which he did in 1908, nearly a decade after the publication of Heart of Darkness.

How is Joseph Conrad so ahead of his time? How is he able to predict the major stylistic and cultural concerns of the coming century? How was he able to see the hypocrisy of imperialism while it was still so popular? How could he see what others could not? Well, part of this answer might come from his childhood. There's a way in which we can understand Conrad as a man who is both from everywhere and nowhere. By nowhere, I mean this: Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in 1857 in Russian-ruled Poland. He was the son of two Polish nationalists who had seen Poland's sovereignty completely taken away and its territory split, in the late 1700s, between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Conrad's parents raised him to think of himself as profoundly and importantly Polish, but Poland at that time was nowhere to be found on a map. Conrad's parents fought tirelessly for Polish nationalist causes and were punished for their organizing efforts by the Russian government, exiled to remote and freezing provinces, where both parents developed serious health issues that contributed to their untimely deaths while Conrad was still a boy. Conrad would have had a lot of painful personal experience that would have instilled in him, from a very early age, a distrust of world powers exerting force and dominance over other nations. He also had a great hunger for adventure, and he became a sailor as a teenager, a profession that would take him across the globe for 20 years, allowing him to see the effects of imperialism on native populations firsthand.

In this way, Conrad lived everywhere, but also he was not of any place. He's often referred to as part of the canon of British literature, and he did become a British citizen in 1886 and anglicized his name, but the English he wrote in was his third language, after Polish and French. He was both of the European world and was always a bit outside of wherever he was. This allowed him a perspective few other writers in history could claim. Henry James sums this up perfectly, saying of Conrad: "No one has known, for intellectual use, the things you know, and you have, as an artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached." I hope you're as excited as I am to begin digging into Heart of Darkness. See you soon.