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Conrad, "The Times", and Some Explorers Conrad, "The Times", and Some Explorers
Aaron Eastley
Brigham Young University - Provo
, aaron_eastley@byu.edu
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Original Publication Citation Original Publication Citation
Eastley, Aaron. “Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers.” Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph
Conrad Studies 44.2-3 (2012): 91-125. Print.
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Eastley, Aaron, "Conrad, "The Times", and Some Explorers" (2012).
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Conrad, "The Times", and Some Explorers
Author(s): AARON EASTLEY
Source:
Conradiana
, Fall/Winter 2012, Vol. 44, No. 2/3 (Fall/Winter 2012), pp. 91-125
Published by: Daniel Lees; Janet Leake (on behalf of the estate of Edmund Bojarski,
copyright holder); Texas Tech University Press
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Conradiana
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Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers
AARON EASTLEY
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
Even in a day when historicism in literary studies is ubiquitous, the pitch and
duration of historicist fervor that has surrounded Conrad's Heart of Darkness is
extraordinary. Since its original publication over a century ago, the text has
flourished amid a swarm of meta-textual narratives variously critical, political,
philosophical, and historical. As Benita Parry attests, Heart of Darkness has en
joyed a "singular afterlife" (41), one that Allan Simmons aptly captures in the
metaphor of "a pendulum swinging back and forth between aesthetics and his
tory" (104). First appearing serially as "The Heart of Darkness" in three monthly
installments of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine running from February to
April of 1899 (Simmons 91), the narrative has interested those with an interest
in Africa from the start. The initial February installment garnered Conrad an
invitation to address a British pacifist's rally in March (Najder 288). He declined.
The narrative, as he saw it, was not primarily political, nor was he inclined to be.
Yet for friendship's sake he attended the rally and, as he later put it, "revolted a
little" (qtd. in Najder 288). The mixed aspect of this literary beginning echoes
the larger historical, political, aesthetic, and deeply personal ambiguities of the
novel—a book that won't hold still.
Whatever the ambiguities of text and context, however, it would certainly
seem that readers today, as the beneficiaries of more than a century of research
focused on the novel must be, better positioned than Conrad's original readers
to appreciate Heart of Darkness's African resonances. Kurtz and Marlow are
today no more familiar household names than Leopold and Stanley, Emin
Pasha, Casement, Klein, and Rom. And arguably as notorious as Conrad him
self is Achebe, whose famous denunciation of Conrad as "a bloody racist" has
re-inscribed the centrality of the work in a post-colonial world (Achebe 788).
Study after study of Conrad's novel, though it clearly presents itself as art, has
treated with remarkable earnestness the task of identifying possible real-world
Conradiana, vol. 44, no. 2-3,2012 © Texas Tech University Press
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92 CONRADIANA
counterparts for events and characters depicted in the text. "Finding" Kurtz in
the historical narrative has become tantamount to Stanley's notorious nine
teenth-century "finding" of Livingstone, and a curious sort of academic scram
ble for Africa may be seen in recent intensive efforts to continue to discover
sources that may have inspired Conrad's tale.1
But these are historical echoes with a difference. Whereas a late nineteenth
century explorer-journalist of the likes of Henry Stanley could grandiloquently
profess an aim "to flash a torch of light across the western half of the Dark Conti
nent" (Through the Dark Continent 1:127), illumination remains the current
aim, but in a reciprocal arc. Today the torch of inquiry is often flashed back on
late nineteenth-century travel narratives themselves, including Heart of Dark
ness and Stanley's own voluminous works. Quite often the current aim is to
descry instances in which ignorance or prejudice appears to have engendered
toxic misrepresentations of Africa, even in the works of the well meaning. That
Heart of Darkness should come under special scrutiny in this regard is hardly
surprising; so striking and enduring a narrative merits analysis commensurate
with its influence.
One ironic effect of the scholarly concentration on the novel, however, has
been a tendency to spotlight a few historical figures without necessarily illumi
nating the larger historical landscape. The larger view would necessarily include
gaining both a broader view of events in Africa and a clearer awareness of the
degree to which those events were familiar to Conrad's contemporary readers.
The central search for Kurtz is a case in point. Thanks to the work of such excel
lent scholars as Norman Sherry, Ian Watt, and Patrick Brantlinger, we know of
several striking Kurtz-types, most prominently: Georges Antoine Klein, Emin
Pasha, Major Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, Arthur Eugene Constant Hodister,
Charles Henry Stokes, Captain Hubert Lothaire, and Captain Leon Rom (Sherry
92-118, Watt 140-145, Brantlinger 261,267-8). The Kurtz-like characteristics of
these historical figures have been described in considerable detail, as have the
ways in which Conrad might have become aware of each man. I have observed a
resulting inclination, especially among those relatively new to Conrad studies, to
view such figures almost as if they constituted a police line-up. The assumption
is that one of them is the "real" Kurtz, the key inspiration for Conrad's character.
Such a view naturally begs the question of which general information source
Conrad relied on most heavily. Was his personal experience paramount, and
Kurtz perhaps merely an enhanced version of Klein? Or were books like Stan
ley's In Darkest Africa more influential, suggesting the centrality of Stanley him
self, or Emin Pasha, or perhaps Barttelot? Were newspaper accounts or public
lectures the major spark, pointing to men like Hodister, Stokes, Lothaire, and
Rom: victims of murder or perpetrators of murderous crimes that received in
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 93
tense media coverage? Or was Conrad most inspired by sources more anecdotal,
perhaps stories friends like Roger Casement might have told him of Europeans
indulging in barbarity in the enabling seclusion of the Congo's forests?
Careful reading of any of the scholars I have mentioned leads to a valuable
perception: Kurtz is most likely a deliberate composite. In Conrad's creative
practice "all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz" (Heart of Darkness 49).
Watt convincingly shows Kurtz to be a "distillation" of the twin phenomena of
(1) "going native," and (2) European imperialists taking their unchecked local
powers as an "open invitation to every kind of cruelty and abuse" (144-5).
Brantlinger similarly demonstrates that a Kurtz-like turn to barbarism was actu
ally "a quite common pattern of behavior" (268). Yet for all this historical evi
dence it is not surprising that readers not possessed of Brantlinger and Watt's
intimate knowledge of late-nineteenth-century world affairs should still gravi
tate toward some singular Kurtz. Such readers will still wonder how clearly Con
rad and his contemporaries might have perceived the abundantly non-fictional
nature of the character—the same sort of historical uncertainty that overshad
ows the novel as a whole.
What I will attempt to show here is that, contrary to what many present-day
readers might guess, almost nothing in Conrad's representation of the Congo
would have startled a British reader in 1899 who followed the news of Africa
even in as widely circulated and broadly focused a journalistic organ as The
Times. Nor would even the most lurid and sensational aspects of Heart of Dark
ness have been shocking in themselves to readers acquainted with Africa
through the popular accounts of explorers such as Henry Stanley and his protégé
Edward Glave.2 Conrad's novel deals in the contemporaneously familiar—as, I
believe, he intended that it should. Yet his aim was not activism. On the contrary,
the appearance of verisimilitude facilitated his artistic aim of creating a "sinister
resonance" in the book ("Author's Note" xi). Conrad's triumph in Heart of Dark
ness is that he made sensational once again what through repetition had become
mundane. His vulnerability is that he failed to make allowance for the parallel
artistry of other writers. Purporting to be objective, his journalistic predecessors
had already gravitated in their African news coverage and book-length travel
sagas toward the savage and arcane, producing caricatures of African life that, to
borrow Marlows words from Heart of Darkness, were "too dark altogether" (77).
By invoking the readymade setting of "the Dark Continent," and in his turn se
lecting for savagery, Conrad ironically replicated and even concentrated key ele
ments of the poisonous propaganda of his day.
The irony of this is that Conrad almost certainly meant well. The same may
even be true of the much maligned Stanley. As recent biographies have shown,
both men were first and foremost professional writers with a good sense of what
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94 CONRADIANA
would sell. Both were also moralists, Conrad melding his art to the mission of
unmasking the mutual destruction so common in colonial encounters, Stanley
both in writing and in numerous fiery speeches earnestly attempting to convince
Europeans of the need to dedicate more resources to the civilizing mission in
Africa. Though these moralistic aims work at cross purposes, each in its own
way is supported by a sensationally "dark" vision of Africa. It is this vision Con
rad opted to embrace. Rather than revising prevailing notions of African back
wardness and barbarity (as no one would properly do in a fictional narrative
until Achebe produced Things Fall Apart in 1958), Conrad, like Stanley before
him, did precisely what Marlow shudders to do in the final passages of Fleart of
Darkness. Despite his own values and misgivings, he ultimately let a horribly
false perception stand.
I. THE TIMES
As is well known, Conrad first pursued the prospect of employment as a steam
boat captain in Africa in September 1889 (Najder 138). He eventually got the job,
sailing from Europe in early May 1890 (Najder 144). He arrived in the Congo in
June 1890, but illness limited his stay to only six or seven months (Najder 148,
161-2). By the end of January 1891, he was back in Europe (Najder 166). Upon
his return he made the monumental career shift to become a writer (Najder
194-6). He began writing Heart of Darkness roughly nine years later, in Decem
ber 1898 (Najder 286). The manuscript was completed in February 1899, and
part one of three appeared in Blackwood's that very month (Najder 288). It seems
logical to assume that whatever prior interest Conrad may have had in Africa
was heightened by his specific interest in working there and his continuing in
terest, following his visit, in the place he had come to know firsthand.
Thanks to the digitization of historical documents it is now possible to get a
fairly clear sense of what Conrad and his contemporaries would have encoun
tered in their daily papers with regard to Africa. Specifically, a search of The
Times Digital Archive for the period spanning September 1, 1889, to February
28,1899, turns up 257 direct matches in which the word Congo appears in an ar
ticle title or byline (Times). If the search is expanded to include articles that men
tion the Congo anywhere in their content the total number approaches 3,000.
Most of these, as might be expected, are relatively short news and opinion pieces.
But several in each year are more extensive, featuring personal accounts and se
rious investigative journalism with detailed descriptions of places and events.
The Times itself, of course, is only one of many papers and magazines with sig
nificant readership in England in the 1890s, but as England's leading paper it
serves as a useful repository of the news in general. What its coverage demon
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 95
strates is that the Congo may indeed have been a faraway place vis-à-vis Europe,
but it was not a place seldom mentioned. And while it was not unusual for a
considerable degree of uncertainty to be present in Congo reports, many key
events and especially attitudinal trends were confirmed by multiple independent
articles. Both the big picture and intriguing specifics of the Congo news cover
age in The Times from 1889-1899 can be showcased by a sequential outline, fol
lowed by a more detailed look at key subjects relating to Heart of Darkness.
News of the Congo in the decade preceding Heart of Darkness falls into a se
quence of roughly half a dozen major topics: tariffs, exploration, the Congo Free
State's ongoing war with the Arabs, African brutality and cannibalism, European
atrocities committed against Africans, and the building of the Congo railroad. In
the months leading up to Conrad's departure and during the entire time he was
in Africa, news of the Congo in Europe was dominated by a discussion of tariffs
the Congo Free State proposed to levy on non-Belgian imports and exports, es
pecially liquor and ivory. Free trade was, of course, a founding principle of the
State, but it was argued that some tariffs were necessary to cover the rising costs
of local government administration. Among the more vocal defenders of this
policy was Stanley, just back from the Emin Pasha expedition ( Jeal 384-8). Quick
to insert a moral aspect to the debate, he emphasized in an October 1890 letter
to The Times that duties collected by the State contributed directly to the fight
against slavery and ongoing efforts to end the oppression of Africans (Stanley,
"Congo State"). This was not the sort of news likely to be of much interest to
Conrad, even if he had been around to read it. However, less mundane reports
were soon to come, just after he returned to England.
About midyear in 1891 the tariff talk transitioned into coverage decrying the
supposedly rampant brutality and cannibalism of native Africans. The lurid
news focused on reports of an Arab uprising and the related murder of British
trader Arthur Hodister ("Arab Rising"). Norman Sherry is probably quite right
in supposing that Hodister's trading career and violent death may have added
key components to Conrad's eventual rendering of Kurtz. So too might the lu
crative life and violent death of British ex-missionary Charles Stokes a couple of
years later. Less dramatic but perhaps equally formative in terms of public per
ceptions of Africa was the steady stream of articles that came out between those
reports. Early in 1892 several articles highlighted ongoing European exploration
efforts in central Africa. Then the focus returned in the latter part of 1892 (in a
long series of articles continuing through early 1894) to the ebb and flow of the
Congo Free State's war with the Arabs. More exploration coverage followed in
mid-1894; then in January 1895 the tide of news turned back again to Europe,
where Belgium was caught up in a debate about whether the government should
buy the Congo from Leopold. In the summer of 1895 the flow of relatively
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96 CONRADIANA
routine headlines was superseded by the news of the audacious hanging of
Stokes, allegedly for treason, by the Belgian Captain Lothaire ("An Englishman
Hanged"). This story pitting ex-missionary against Congo Free State officer fore
shadowed the melee that was about to ensue in the British press.
Hard upon the coverage of Stokes's execution came a torrent of articles enu
merating widespread atrocities allegedly committed in the Congo by Europeans
(mostly Belgians). Missionaries who had lived in the Congo were the primary
accusers, and officials of the Congo Free State the emphatic defenders of their
countrymen, disputing every report. Three major missionary reports in particu
lar painted an ugly picture of Belgian abuses in the Congo. The first, apparently
gleaned from a recently returned British missionary who remained anonymous,
came out in October 1895 ("Congo Free State" 14 Oct. 1895). The second, attrib
uted to American Baptist missionary John B. Murphy, came out a month later, in
November 1895 ("The Congo Free State" 18 Nov. 1895). The third, attributed to
Danish missionary E. V. Sjöblom, came out in May 1897 ("Affairs on the Upper
Congo"). The fierce exchanges prompted by each of these exposé pieces raged in
The Times until about the summer of 1897, with approximately 40 articles ap
pearing in all. If Conrad had any awareness of the news of Africa in the public
press, the issues and events headlined at this time likely made a significant im
pression on him.
As these debates subsided a series of relatively bland articles once again fol
lowed, reporting on such things as a new Congo outdoor museum exhibit cre
ated in Brussels ("The Congo Natives"), and the opening (at long last) of the
Congo railroad from Matadi to Stanley Pool ("The Congo Railway"). This
calmer topical trend continued up until the time Conrad began Heart of Dark
ness about a year and a half later, in December 1898.
Looking at the broad sweep of this decade of news, it becomes clear that by
the late 1890s the Congo was anything but a land of utter mystery to Europeans.
As early as 1893 mail was crossing central Africa from the Congo to Lake Tan
ganyika ("The Arabs and the Congo State"), and it was not uncommon as the
decade progressed for articles in The Times to include detailed geographic
descriptions of a sort that only readers well acquainted with the Congo would
have been able to appreciate (see, for instance, "France and the Congo Free
State"). Along these lines, a February 1895 article points out the clear contrast in
"the maps of the Congo State of 1890 compared with those published in 1894,"
showing how rapidly European knowledge of the region had expanded in those
years ("Belgium and the Congo State"). This article, which refers to a sort of in
ternal report made by the Congo Free State to the government of Belgium in
connection with the annexation effort, points out that "up to 1889 ... the Congo
State had only occupied a very limited portion of its territories. Outside the
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 97
zones contiguous to the steamer traffic, the Lower Congo was not known. In the
Upper Congo occupation was confined to the banks of the rivers." By 1894 the
situation had changed dramatically. This leads to the illuminating insight that
Conrad did not set his novel in the historical moment in which it was actually
composed in 1899, but in the earlier moment of his own African experience in
1889. Even so, much that came later, in the 1890s, augmented the backdrop for
Conrad's book.
Not only was Congo geography well known in Europe by the late 1890s, the
very language readers today associate with Heart of Darkness was featured in the
press, as were accounts of sensational river battles and cannibalism. A range of
articles invokes a rhetoric of novelty vis-à-vis Africa, recounting exploration in
areas "no white traveler has seen" ("An Expedition), or venturing into "an un
known region where no European had penetrated before" ("The Congo State" 28
Nov. 1894). Words like "exterminated" and "pacification" also appear ("The
Congo Free State" 25 Oct. 1893; "The Congo Free State" 27 Mar. 1894). One arti
cle reports explorers going upriver being attacked "persistently" by natives ("Ex
ploration of the Upper Congo"), while another recounts a day-long river battle
in which the African antagonists were "urged on by their sorcerers" ("Cannibal
ism on the Congo"). The same article claims that "the Bakuma tribe in the neigh
bourhood of Stanley Falls have for some time past given themselves up to
cannibalism, cases of which are a daily occurrence, the victims being supplied by
murders and raids on neighbouring tribes." Captured Europeans were report
edly eaten as well, as in the case of a M. de Poumayrac, who was wounded in a
river skirmish and then taken by members of the Bubu tribe "alive into their vil
lage and there murdered" ("The Congo State" 16 Sept. 1892). "All the captives"
taken on this occasion were reportedly "eaten by the Bubus, who indulged in or
gies extending over several days." Still another report tells of a Mr. Walker, an
Englishman, killed "for 'chop'" on the Upper Congo in 1895 ("The Congo Free
State" 16 Sept. 1895), and just two days later a similar report describes a Captain
Burrows being "speared to death and then eaten" ("The Situation in the Congo
Free State"). The collecting of heads for trophy purposes is also noted in The
Times: "the heads of Hodister and of his three companions, [... ] together with
the heads of the horse and the three mules which the white men were riding"
were displayed by their murderers ("The Congo State" 19Sept. 1892).
In view of such articles, it seems clear that Conrad would hardly have needed
a Congo insider like Casement to open his eyes to the contemporary African sit
uation, or to provide details to bolster his narrative. He could have turned to his
daily paper for that. In fact, The Times could have provided, in a sense, both the
beginning and ending of his narrative: Fresleven and Kurtz. As Sherry has long
since pointed out, the death of Freiesleben/Fresleven was an actual event (15).
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98 CONRADIANA
Moreover, contrary to Sherry's conclusion that "we can be reasonably certain
that when Conrad accepted the command he knew only the bare fact of Freiesle
ben's death" (16), he may actually have read about it in some detail before he ever
left England in early May of 1890. Two weeks earlier, on April 16th, The Times
published a report of the incident, including an account of how the captain's
body was abandoned by his fleeing crew, and a notation that the whole incident
had apparently arisen out of a botched palaver with natives over some hens
("Collision with Natives"; Conrad, Heart of Darkness 9). Other aspects of the
story, such as the role played by the chief's son, may indeed, as Sherry concludes,
have come from verbal accounts Conrad heard in the Congo. However, the tell
ing detail of Freiesleben's death and the retaliatory desertion/destruction of an
entire village resulting from something as insignificant as a disagreement over
the price of chickens need not necessarily have come from Conrad's acquain
tance with Captain Duhst (Sherry 17,21-22).
More importantly, even an occasional reader of The Times could hardly have
failed to pick up on the persistent motif of the enlightened European officer,
posted far from any central administration, losing his moral bearings and "going
native" in the depths of Africa. Echoing Kurtz's takeover of villages around an
inland lake (Heart o/Darkness 56), Arthur Hodister's onetime travelling com
panion Delcommune was celebrated in The Times for his explorations among
the lakes of the Upper Congo, where he reportedly "brought into peaceful sub
jection all the negro chiefs near Lakes Moero, Bangala, and the banks of the Lu
alaba" ("Exploration on the Congo"). Hodister himself, whose Congo career has
been carefully charted by Sherry (95-111), and whose death, as already men
tioned, caused a flurry in the British press at a time when Conrad would likely
have been paying attention, was specifically hailed in The Times as a man of
"ideas," and "one of the very best Europeans who could have been chosen for
the task assigned to him of opening up trade in the heart of Africa" ("The Arab
Rising"). Like Kurtz, Hodister was noted for the unusual closeness of his
friendships with African followers, and he apparently even fathered a child
with an African mistress ("The Congo State" 22 Aug. 1892; "The Congo State"
17 Oct. 1892).
Still more provocatively informing were the missionary reports of 1895-7, in
which Captain Lothaire was singled out as a man "held in special awe by the na
tives" ("The Congo Free State" 14 Oct. 1895). It was related that "the people on
the Lulanga river call him 'Lofembe,' meaning 'mist,' by reason of the uncertainty
of his movements." Clearly the rash execution of Stokes showed even those as far
away as England the unpredictable and violent behavior this man was capable of
in his worst moments. The missionary being quoted further opines that "the real
difficulty in the Congo is the fact that young and inexperienced officers are far
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 99
from the Central Administration." The general tenor of these observations was
corroborated in The Times by another Englishman recently returned from "some
years residence on the Congo," who confirmed "the general charges of ineffi
ciency and brutality made against the State officials," for whom he says "the chief
object" was "to get rubber and ivory at any price rather than to civilize" ("The
Congo Free State" 14 Oct. 1895). "They make no scruples," he went on to say, "in
setting one tribe against another, using the stronger as a catspaw to obtain the
ivory from the weaker"—real world actions directly prefiguring those of fic
tional Kurtz."
Taken together, The Times coverage provides a telling glimpse of just how
much an author like Conrad might reasonably have assumed his untraveled
English readers would already have known about the Congo in the late 1890s.
The point here is not, however, that The Times should be recognized as some sort
of unacknowledged but clearly essential source for Heart of Darkness. Conrad
may well have read some of the articles I have noted; he may alternately have
read reports of the same events in other papers or magazines. There is really very
little to go on apart from the circumstantial evidence of intriguing topical simi
larities. But these topical similarities are precisely the point. Much more ger
mane than fervent source-sleuthing is the recognition that a venue like The
Times is a repository of commonly held late-Victorian news and views of the
Congo, and the attendant realization of just how closely Heart of Darkness
meshes with that metanarrative. Ideologically, The Times presents a classic Ori
entalist outlook, not flagrantly biased but clearly working from a Eurocentric
perspective that both relishes and looks down on Africa for "its sensuality, its
tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its back
wardness" (Said 205). Editors at The Times and other contemporary periodicals
could be sure of their readers' interest in wars, tariffs, exploration, cannibalism,
Belgian barbarism, and railways through Africa. Conrad could likewise assume
that his readers—the same readers—would readily accept a place like Africa as a
natural setting for a Kurtz-like devolution into savagery.
Such ideological perceptions had been introduced and then reinforced
through literally thousands of representations in the public press. Both prior to
and parallel with such media, however, these attitudes were developed through
the wildly popular African exploration and colonization narratives of men like
Stanley and Glave. Their texts do so much more than just share a common vo
cabulary and catalogue of events with Heart of Darkness. They operate from the
perspective of the individual psyche, just as Heart of Darkness does, offering
depth and detail of an entirely different magnitude. Thanks to such books many
of Conrad's contemporary readers would already have possessed a deep sense of
the twin fascination and alienation of strange African lands, would already have
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100 CONRAD1ANA
shuddered and thrilled at myriad descriptions of native barbarism, and would
already have known through dozens of blow by blow accounts something of the
ethereal chaos of a river battle. These are the representations Heart of Darkness
most closely and fully parallels, and which formed a shared, intimate metanar
rative of African experience in Conrad's day—though not necessarily a vera
cious one.
II. SOME EXPLORERS
In a way directly prefiguring Heart of Darkness, Henry Stanley (and Edward
Glave after him) presented in his work numerous contrasting descriptions of
what may bluntly be termed good and bad Africans, wild and tamed Africans.
These contrasts create an overall impression that admits certain instances in
which the everyday sub-Saharan African was found to be "a cleanly, decent crea
ture" (Stanley, Through the Dark Continent 1:382), only to conclude that African
people were "crafty, fraudful, deceiving, lying, thievish knaves taken as a whole,
and seem to be born with an uncontrollable love of gaining wealth by robbery,
violence, and murder" ( 1:408). This dismal portrait, Stanley attests, was the real
ity of "most—nearly all African tribes" (1:409). In short, the natural African in
Stanley's representation is inscrutable, amoral, and prone to sudden violence.
Not only are these negative appraisals stated explicitly, they are abundantly sub
stantiated by the broad sweep of Stanley's published record, especially in
Through the Dark Continent, which is punctuated by vivid descriptions of a
grand total of thirty-two "desperate combats ... with the insensate furies of
savage-land" (2:277, 324). The tone of Heart of Darkness is not, of course, as ex
treme as this, but the net effect is similar, and several particulars are strikingly
so. In Conrad's novel, as in Stanley's writings, Marlows initial perception of Af
rica as an inscrutable netherworld gradually gives way to a clear comprehension
of mercurial ferocity lurking in the African interior. An undercurrent of violent
indulgence has sucked Kurtz into its depths, and the textual elements that ini
tially signal this devolvement—most potently the ambush of the steamboat
and the heads on posts around the Inner Station—echo the work of Stanley
and Glave.
Stanley is, of course, a major historical figure who needs little introduction.
He was the driving force behind several cross-continental explorations, and
went on to work directly for Leopold. Glave is less well known. In Conrad stud
ies Glave is recognized as the author of personal journals that may well have pro
vided the spark that reignited Conrad's interest in writing about the Congo.3
These journals, published posthumously in the American Century Magazine in
1897, contained in their pages one particularly incendiary report: how in 1895
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EASTLEY— Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 101
the Belgian Captain Léon Rom had "ornamented his flower-beds" around the
Stanley Falls station "with the heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive
expedition" (Glave 706, Hochschild 144-7, Firchow 128-32). This incident was
further referenced in a December 17, 1898, article appearing in Conrad's be
loved Saturday Review—placing the date of publication very near the time that
Conrad began writing Heart of Darkness {Saturday Review 802, Najder 286).4
It was under Stanleys direct command that Glave got his start in Africa, and
his near-hero worship of his legendary precursor apparently extended back to
Glave's youth in "old England," where "books of travel and adventure formed the
whole of [his] schoolboy library," and he read with special, indeed "breathless
attention the narrative of [Stanleys] thrilling journey, 'Through the Dark Conti
nent'" (15). Glave was captivated first by the "vivid narratives," and later on by
the actual "graphic words" of Stanley, and loyally attested in his own work that
Stanley had produced "truthful pictures of African scenes" {In Savage Africa 38
9). Stanley, in return, provided a glowing introduction to Glave's In Savage Af
rica: Or, Six Years of Adventure in Congo-Land (New York, 1892, and London,
1893), a text whose very title declares its kinship to Stanley's narratives.
The notion that exploration and colonization have their genesis in childhood
longings for adventure is embodied in Marlow's boyhood fascination with maps.
That is a motif Conrad claims as autobiographical, but one which also features
prominently in the works of Stanley and Glave. Marlow, of course, ties his ro
mantic fascination with Africa to the mysterious blank spaces on maps, espe
cially "the biggest—the most blank" space of all: the center of Africa (7-8). This
notion provides a bridge in Heart of Darkness from the early frame story into the
main narrative, and is all the more notable in the eyes of scholars because Con
rad later made it personal. He claims in a well-known piece written late in life for
National Geographic Magazine, the 1924 essay "Geography and Some Explor
ers," that he had felt such longings as a boy (271).
But though the experience may indeed have been personal, as a narrative
motif it was far from original. Some two decades earlier in the opening pages of
Through the Dark Continent Stanley had stated that his motivation for embark
ing on his arduous and likely perilous cross-continental trek was that "the west
ern half of the African continent is still a white blank" (1:8). Glave, in his turn,
would recall in even more perfect harmony with Heart of Darkness how as a boy
he had developed "a peculiar fascination" with Africa owing to the mysterious
allure of the "vast unnamed blank spaces" on "a great map of the 'Dark Conti
nent' [that] hung on the walls of [his] classroom" (Glave, Savage 16; Firchow
132). Again in this case, as in the case of the confluence of Heart of Darkness
and The Times, the repeated map motif works simultaneously in two ways. It
lends a certain authenticity to Conrad's narrative. Heart of Darkness seems from
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102 CONRADIANA
the outset to be operating according to set codes of the African travel book
genre, almost like invoking the muse at the outset of an epic. But it also betrays a
Eurocentric and solipsistic perspective. For the lure of the unknown is innocent
enough in itself, but as Edward Said has rightly noted, the notion of blank spaces
on maps clearly ignores the reality that places so represented are in fact well
known to the people already living there (216). These "natives" have as much
right to pursue their lives without intrusion as do the British schoolboys who as
sume their island home to be the ordinary center of the world.
A similarly one-sided perspective connects Heart of Darkness back to Stan
leys early books through the perceived strangeness of Africa on first arrival. For
although Glave, extraordinarily, seemed relatively inclined to embrace the new
ness of Africa without feeling threatened by it, it is not Glave's openness and ap
parent enthusiasm for African travel that Conrad echoes in his tale.5 Rather it is
Stanley's sense of alienation and impending doom in the face of the blank un
known. In Conrad, as in Stanley before him, Africa is "dark" in the Hegelian
sense of being unknown and ultimately unknowable.6 Stanley muses in Through
the Dark Continent on the alienation he felt as his mental fabrication of Africa
began to give way to concrete reality. "What a forbidding aspect had the Dark
Unknown which confronted us!" he writes. "I could not comprehend in the least
what lay before us" (2: 126). "Even the few names which I had heard from the
Arabs conveyed no definite impression to my understanding," he goes on to say.
"What were Tata, Meginna, Uregga, Usongora Meno, and such uncouth names
to me? They conveyed no idea; and signified no object; they were barren names
of either countries, villages, or peoples, involved in darkness, savagery, igno
rance, and fable" (2; 126-127). In like manner, though with less melodrama,
Conrad's Marlow chronicles the progress of his approach to Africa, noting "we
called at some more places with farcical names" (79).
The notion that an outsider might lose his moral bearings in such an envi
ronment is also predicted by the work of Stanley. In Darkest Africa specifically
calls attention to the problem of leaving a European in charge of the relatively
remote outpost at Stanley Falls. Chronicling the early stages of the Emin Pasha
expedition, Stanley brings up the topic in connection with his efforts to elicit aid
from the disgruntled local Arab leader Tippu-Tib, who was upset that his camps
near the Falls had been attacked by the Belgian officer in charge there. Stanley
records reasoning thus with Tippu-Tib: "Do you know that that station has
given us a great deal of trouble. We sent Amelot, you remember. Well, he just left
the station without orders, and died somewhere near Nyangwé; then the next,
Gleerup, a Swede, followed suit, and travelled across Africa instead; then we sent
Deane, and for a change he would have war with the Arabs It is difficult to
get men who are always wise, and understand thoroughly what their orders are"
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 103
(1:70). No mention is made of Rom; this was before his time at the station. But
he would certainly continue the trend. As would, ironically, Tippu-Tib himself.
For Stanley proceeds to offer him the job, which he accepts, but then proves to
be a renegade in his own right, continually promising and never delivering aid to
the ill-fated Rear Column of Stanleys expedition. What seems clear in all of
these accounts is the effectual isolation of the officer in charge. Maverick behav
ior grew out of the situation itself, a situation characterized by a mix of power
and infrequent communication with external authority, just as Watt suggests
(144-5). Given this background, Conrad's placement of Kurtz in a parallel set
ting can hardly be deemed accidental. Such settings were notorious—thanks es
pecially to Stanley's works—as the settings of real, recurring perplexities.
In a narrative move that is emblematic of Conrad's genius he both invokes
these familiar preconceptions about the heart of Africa and accentuates their ap
plicability by locating Kurtz's Inner Station not merely at Stanley Falls, but in the
far more isolated headwaters of the Kasai River, a tributary of the Congo. As
White and Finston have cogently demonstrated, the longstanding notion that
the Inner Station is based on the outpost at Stanley Falls where Conrad's own
up-river journey ended is contradicted both by precise references in Heart of
Darkness to distances travelled, and by the novel's description of the station's en
virons (. Both the set distances and the details of the river itself—a shallow, nar
row waterway with forests hemming it in closely on both sides—attest that
"Conrad located Kurtz's Inner Station on the west bank of the Kasai, 300 miles
upriver from a military post and just over 800 miles from the Central Station sit
uated at Kwamouth where the Kwa (a.k.a. Kasai) and the Congo rivers converge"
(White and Finston 15). As White and Finston point out, indeed Conrad "had to
know" that owing to "fairly numerous public records" his more astute contem
porary readers would quickly recognize that the Inner Station was not located
on the vast and easily navigable Congo (5). "A lonely station on the Kasai," how
ever, fits the bill perfectly as it is a place well beyond even Belgian military con
trol (White and Finston 15-16). Vis-à-vis Europe and those areas of central
Africa that were under regular Congo Free State direction, Conrad places Kurtz
in a place of extreme uncertainty for a European, a sort of geographical abyss.
Furthermore, in Stanley's works and later in Glave's the aura of uncertainty
inherent in the setting of Kurtz's downfall is given a particularly lurid aspect
through the insistent repetition of a particular symbolic image: human skulls
used for symbolic decoration. This arresting image, which casual readers might
easily assume to be unique to Heart of Darkness, comes up not once or twice but
many times in previous texts. In Heart of Darkness, of course, Marlow attests that
"the first result" of his sudden apprehension that it was human heads rather than
merely "round carved balls" on the "half a dozen slim posts" in front of Kurtz's
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104 CONRADIANA
house "was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow" (52, 57). Yet
both Stanley and Glave had made it abundantly clear that the display of skulls on
posts was a commonplace in central Africa. For example, Stanley, in one notable
description of a community of several villages he raided in retaliation for an at
tack on his company, conveys in Through the Dark Continent that "evidences of
cannibalism were numerous in the human and 'soko' skulls that grinned on
many poles, and the bones that were freely scattered in the neighborhood, near
the village garbage heaps and the river banks" (2: 274). In another instance he
casually mentions that "human skulls ornamented the village streets of the is
land" (2: 237-8), and in still another passage he notes the display of some thirty
bleached skulls in front of a village chief's house, commenting: "It is the same
story throughout Africa" (2:27). The commonality of the practice is further dra
matized when Stanley makes it clear that the fear of having their own heads
taken was never far from the thoughts of his company: "every man felt that he
must either fight or resign himself to the only other alternative, that of being
heaved a headless corpse into the river" (2:184).
In Glave's plainly derivative work the practice of taking and displaying skulls
is if anything even more clearly placed in the foreground. As Firchow attests,
even if the Rom account in Glave's 1895 diary provided the immediate impetus
for Conrad's creation of Kurtz, Glave's most substantive influence probably came
through his 1892 book, In Savage Africa. In this book Glave describes his own
discovery of an abandoned village, where "placed on sticks in front of [the
houses] were several whitening skulls" (qtd. in Firchow 135-6). This, however, is
only the beginning. Glave's treatment of the topic is much more extensive than
Firchow has maintained.
Glave refers to the practice of decorating with skulls no fewer than seven
times in In Savage Africa, often at considerable length (51,71, 73,122-6,194-5,
204-6,220). He tells, for instance, how in one of the first villages he visited near
his new station in Lukolela he found that "nearly every hut was decorated with
the whitening skull of some slave or victim," affirming the "characteristic barba
rism" of the local people (51). In the following chapter this barbarism acquires a
personal flair as Glave recounts how an "old chief" in an adjacent settlement de
clared "that he was 'Mokunjé Monéné (the big chief) of this part of the country)'
and warned the interloping Glave "that his vengeance would not be complete
until my head decorated the roof of his house" (71). Glave subsequently discov
ered that such "ghastly ornaments" did indeed abound in front of this chief's
house (73). In fact Glave went on to attest that the ritual murder of slaves espe
cially was something of a local pastime, which at irregular but not infrequent in
tervals introduced a sort of festival atmosphere into the community, as "old and
young of both sexes give themselves up to the indulgence of the ghastly specta
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EASTLEY— Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 105
cle" of violent executions (122-6). Glave's neighbors apparently went so far as to
tempt him with the prospect of taking some trophy heads of his own by assisting
them in a raid. The instance testifies to the suggested ordinariness of the prac
tice: "it was strange to these savage beings," he explains, "that I should express
abhorrence of their scheme" (220). In fact, "the only attempt at ornamenting
their village huts is by hanging up bunches of skulls in conspicuous places"
(220). His squeamishness made little sense to them, though in deference to his
wishes and authority they apparently ceased to perform their ceremonies in his
presence or with his knowledge (126,204).
Glave, despite sometimes being counted a friend of Africa,7 cannot stop talk
ing about heads on posts. And consequently, as in the writing of Stanley before
him, this practice comes to imply an entire culture that delights in the shedding
of blood. For Stanley and Glave, as also for Kurtz and Marlow, heads on stakes
are a threat, symbolizing the twin danger of violence being done to one's person,
and the temptation of being seduced by the blood lust of the alien culture. Mar
low, significantly, finds the "round knobs ... not ornamental but symbolic;...
expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing" (Heart of Darkness 57). In ac
tuality skulls displayed on posts were ornamental (as well as symbolic), but in
Conrad's novel, as in the works of his predecessors, the inherently sensational
nature of the image viewed from a European perspective makes it dominant, the
thing that readers cannot stop thinking about, even long after their direct engage
ment with the text is over. Thus Africa becomes for readers predominantly a place
where human heads get jammed on posts to give a house a little decoration—a
place inhabited by beings capable of and even eager to enact such atrocities.
The imagery is powerful in itself. Yet in Heart of Darkness, even more than in
the works of Stanley and Glave, it becomes extraordinarily potent owing to
Conrad's better understanding of, or perhaps simply truer instinct in rendering,
sensational narration. As recent scholarship on literary sensationalism distin
guishes, there is "material that is made sensational by its manner of display and
material that is inherently sensational" (Stevens 78). Conrad's selection of this
particular image displays a good instinct for the inherently sensational, and his
ironic achievement is that even more successfully than the explorer-journalists
who preceded him he displays this material in a manner that makes it memorable.
Whereas both Glave and Stanley tend to multiply examples and details, Conrad
invites the reader into a gripping experience of progressive apprehension.
As Warren Francke attests, speaking specifically of the emerging sensation
alism in journalistic work of the late nineteenth century, "the core of sensational
news is sensory detail" (81)—the inclusion of "not only sights and smells, but
sounds," details that help to fully create a vicarious experience (84). As Francke
stresses above all else, effective sensationalism requires "involving readers in the
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106 CO NR ADIANA
sensory experience,... particularly in its application to 'how the other half
lives,' i.e., to low life and the dark side" (84). This Conrad does to perfection in
the moment when Marlow sees the human heads displayed around the Inner
Station. Apprehending all things through Marlow, as the narration solely allows,
we as readers also perceive at first only a knob-topped picket fence. This is the
image that the second installment of the tale leaves us to ponder. Only several
pages later, in the third and final installment of the book, are we given a glimpse
of the true nature of these knobs, as seen through Marlows spy glass. Seeing the
heads clearly at last, we too are struck back, as by a blow. No dozen or even hun
dred carefully catalogued instances of such ornamentation can match the effect
of this singular realization. Nor are all the passages in Glave and Stanley together
any more memorable in their symbolism and detail than the subtle notation that
all but one of Kurtz's trophy heads are "turned to the house," and the subsequent
description of the one out-turned head: "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids—
a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry
lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (Heart of Darkness 57).
Similarly, though reconstructing a river battle was Stanley's forte, Conrad's
appropriation of this sensational spectacle in Heart of Darkness may well exceed
in its potency even the cumulative impact of all thirty-two "desperate combats"
recorded in Through the Dark Continent (2: 277, 324). For whereas here again
exploration narratives like those of Stanley and Glave tend to create emphasis
through repetition and dramatic description, the net effect is arguably to over
whelm the reader and blunt the impact of each individual account. In contrast,
the ambush of the steamboat in Heart of Darkness turns the familiar event of a
river battle with natives into a key plot element dramatizing the uncertainty and
danger of the densely forested riverbank environment. Heads on posts, it might
be suggested, are only the quiescent evidence of savagery. Behind such symbols
are vivid events: raids, rituals—murder. Unlike Stanley, Conrad manages to
channel the dread of such horrors without making their practitioners accessible
to our full apprehension.
In Stanley's books a river battle is most often a wide-open conflict fought
with rifles and spears and occasionally hand-to-hand by men in canoes or on
shore in villages. The excitement of these spectacles derives from the staggering
numbers of African assailants and their incredible strength, extraordinarily col
orful dress, and implacable ferocity. In the second volume of Through the Dark
Continent, for instance, a typical river battle account begins with local warriors
in canoes approaching suddenly "from both banks at once, in fierce concert" (2:
200). Aided by interpreters Stanley tries unsuccessfully to reason with his assail
ants, but is told in response: "This is our river ... We don't want you for our
friends; we will eat you" (2: 200-01). The African warriors proceed to paddle
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 107
rapidly forward, crying out: '"Meat! meat! Ah! ha! We shall have plenty of meat!
Bo-bo-bo-bo, Bo-bo-bo-bo-o-o!'" Conrad, of course, picks up on the cannibal
istic notion presented here and in so many other accounts, even mimicking
Stanley's pragmatic rumination: "It seemed to me absurd to be angry with peo
ple who looked upon one only as an epicure would regard a fat capon" ( Through
the Dark Continent 2:201). Conrad has the "head-man" of his cannibal crew ask
for a captive to be given to them so they can "Eat 'im!" (40), in response to which
Marlow thinks to himself that he "would no doubt have been properly horrified
had it not occurred to me that he and his chaps must be very hungry" (Heart of
Darkness 40).
Always central, however, is the spectacle of the attack itself. Recent Stanley
biographer Tim Jeal admires the ensuing "exciting set piece about an encoun
ter with between fifty and sixty canoes—manned by members of the Bangala
(Ngala) tribe—that extended from the morning of the 14th to the late afternoon
of 15 February" in 1877 (201). Near the confluence of the Aruwimi and the
Congo rivers, Stanley records, his party was attacked by a veritable armada of
fifty-four "gigantic" war canoes led by a "monster canoe" and all manned by
"prime young warriors, their heads gay with feathers of the parrot crimson and
grey)' some ten of whom were "dancing up and down from stem to stern ... who
appear to be the chiefs" (Through the Dark Continent 2: 270-1). He goes on to
describe "the crashing sound of large drums, a hundred blasts from ivory horns,
and a thrilling chant from two thousand human throats" (2: 271). Conrad, of
course, in what seems a striking coincidence, would later describe Kurtz's fol
lowers as "two thousand" "naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies" (Heart of
Darkness 66). Stanley goes on to describe how the two sides quickly engaged one
another in a furious, extended river battle: arrows and spears against repeating
rifles. The African warriors "let fly their spears," were answered by "ripping,
cracking musketry)' and in a horror of carnage were finally put to flight. This is
the sort of ostensibly historical narrative that Stanley is known for: a prototypi
cal encounter with hostile African natives in which the "insensate ferocity" of
his attackers is vividly evident (2:59-60).
It is another sort of attack that coincides most closely with Heart of Darkness,
however: the ambush. The ambush of the steamer in Heart of Darkness mirrors
in particular an account given a bit earlier in volume two of Through the Dark
Continent. In both Stanley's ostensibly journalistic text and Conrad's more
clearly fictional one, the struggle begins before the Europeans on the river real
ize it. Quite abruptly in Heart of Darkness "sticks, little sticks, were flying about
thick: they were whizzing before my nose, dropping below me, striking behind
me against my pilot-house" (44). And "all this time," Marlow recounts, "the river,
the shore, the woods, were very quiet—perfectly quiet" (44). Similarly in
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108 CONRADIANA
Through the Dark Continent, Stanley recounts being "suddenly surprised by
hearing a cry from one of the guards," and "turning round" only to see "an arrow
fixed in his chest" (2:178). The silence had not been broken, save for this man's
cry, but following the trajectory of the arrow, "the next instant," Stanley records,
"looking toward the bank, we saw the forms of men in the jungle, and several ar
rows flew past my head in extremely unpleasant proximity."
A sudden vision of attackers in the bush is an equally memorable moment in
Conrad's narrative. Marlow discerns first a single "face amongst the leaves on the
level with my own, looking at me very fierce and steady; and then suddenly, as
though a veil had been removed from my eyes, I made out, deep in the tangled
gloom, naked breasts, arms, legs, glaring eyes—the bush was swarming with hu
man limbs in movement, glistening, of bronze colour" (45). At this point in both
narratives the silence is broken by a host of guns firing, with answering screams
of pain from those struck on shore. Marlow recites that "a fusillade burst out un
der my feet," and "the bush began to howl." In Stanley the cause-effect sequence
is even more striking, as "the sharp crack of the scouts' Sniders" is "responded to
by an infernal din of war-horns and yells, while arrows flew past in all direc
tions" (2: 179). Interestingly, in Stanley there is no equivalent to the curious
frightening of the African attackers by a steam whistle; this detail appears to
have been appropriated from Glave (Savage 189,236; Firchow 135). Without the
benefit of steamboat or whistle, Stanley's men are able to repulse their attackers
only after two hours of "desperate conflict," at the end of which the Africans re
treated back into "the gloomy obscurities of the jungle, where they maintained,
with indomitable spirit, horn-blowing and a terrific 'bo-bo-boing' " (2:183).
Solidifying the familiarity of the scene is an additional parallel account from
In Darkest Africa. Stanley describes a scouting party detached from his main
group crossing a creek when "a body of natives had suddenly issued on the other
side and shot their arrows into them" (177). The silence noted by Conrad reflects
accounts of this event—one of Stanley's lieutenants, Arthur Jephson, wrote: "It is
a curious sensation, being shot at by arrows, one sees & hears nothing but the
'pit, pit, pit' of the arrows as they strike the brushwood around" (qtd. in Jeal 338—
9). Stanley himself recorded that after his men had ceased firing their attackers
persisted in deadly silence, until some "two minutes later the arrows had ceased
their patter among the leaves" (In Darkest Africa 177). The wording here is
clearly reminiscent of Marlow's description of hearing nothing initially but "the
patter of these things," and the concluding detail that finally "the shower of ar
rows stopped; a few dropping shots rang out sharply—then silence" (44, 46).
Also curiously familiar in this later Stanley account is the image of gun-wielding
men "firing in the most senseless fashion at some suspicious bushes across the
creek" (177). This matches precisely with the description of Conrad's pilgrims
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 109
"simply squirting lead into that bush" (45). The arrows, too, are described in a
similar way, Stanley noting that they were only about two feet long, very thin,
and smeared at their tips with poison (179-80), while in Conrad's version Mar
low succinctly comments that the arrows "might have been poisoned but they
looked as though they wouldn't kill a cat" (45). In Heart of Darkness, of course,
the attack culminates in much the same way that Stanley's account began, as
Marlows helmsman is transfixed with a spear and in an instant falls dead at his
side (46).
In this narrative segment that is uncharacteristically concrete in the midst of
a predominantly impressionistic narrative (Brantlinger, Watt), Conrad echoes
the sensationalism of Stanley. He improves on it by magnifying the intensely
personal quality of the experience, and the sense of mystery and uncertainty that
surrounds the African assailants. It is a mark of Conrad's carefully calculated
artistry that the vast documented history of perceived African barbarism in the
works of Stanley, Glave, and so many others, is cagily condensed in Heart of
Darkness into the singular event of the ambush of the steamboat. Perhaps more
than any other textual element this event connotes African savagery and Kurtz's
degeneration into it—Kurtz may well have ordered the attack, and the event is
presented as something thoroughly in the nature of his followers (Heart of
Darkness 63-5).
III. "BACKED BY A TRAVELER'S TALE"
Conrad's dovetailing of his narrative with established news reports, and more
especially the published narratives of famous African explorers, is hardly sur
prising. He was, in the first place, an author who cared about facts. In the second
place, he was an eager reader of travel books. In fact, if Heart of Darkness has of
ten been taken rather literally, much of the responsibility for this must be di
rected back to Conrad himself, who in a well-known statement categorized the
narrative as "experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual
facts of the case" ("Author's Note" xi). What makes this claim intriguing is not
what it establishes in terms of the veracity of the novel or the mode of its compo
sition. The mere assertion in itself proves nothing along these lines. The real sig
nificance is what it intimates about Conrad's perspectives on literary realism and
how he wished for the novel to be read. This becomes clearer when his state
ment, so often quoted in isolation by historicist critics of the text, is read in its
larger context.
Along these lines, it is a literary curiosity that Heart of Darkness, now so fa
mous, was initially and for many years published in book form merely as the
middle story in a collection that opened with and took its primary title from
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110 CONRADIANA
Conrad's Youth: A Narrative, and included also The End of the Tether. The three
works together first came out in 1902, and it was some fifteen years later, in an
"Authors Note" prefacing the 1917 edition, that Conrad's famous statement re
garding the veracity of Heart of Darkness first appeared. In the "Author's Note"
Conrad posits that Youth is "a feat of memory," a straightforward "record of ex
perience" which "in its facts, in its inwardness and in its outward coloring, be
gins and ends in myself" (xi). Heart of Darkness, he goes on to say, is "experience,
too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual
facts of the case" (xi). This statement taken in its entirety is curious in that it
seems to authorize historical readings of Heart of Darkness while simultaneously
acknowledging an artful alteration or augmentation of his personal experience
by the inclusion of extra-experiential (imagined or borrowed) ideas and events.
Heart of Darkness is positioned as inferior to Youth because it is at least partially
formed from details that have been appropriated or embellished. Yet Conrad
seems to wish not to discredit his text by describing it as essentially a work of fic
tion. On the contrary, he seems eager to aver the fundamental verisimilitude of
his storyline, even as apparent candor compels him to confess the artful altera
tion (or perhaps merely augmentation) of his own knowledge and experience.
A further distinction that develops these inclinations is drawn in the "Au
thor's Note" between Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether. Conrad char
acterizes the third and final piece in the set as "a story of sea-life" composed not
from personal experience but from a general knowledge gained by "having lived
that life fully" (xi). As for the extraneous details of that story, Conrad admits
"one had to pick up one's facts here and there," and "more skill would have made
them more real and the whole composition more interesting" (xii). Thus Heart
of Darkness is situated by its author in the middle of a spectrum, a spectrum
which emerges as a sort of hierarchy of literary realism, ranging from the
avowedly all real narrative of Youth to The End of the Tether, a work which al
though wholly invented was nevertheless strategically cobbled together from ac
cumulated "facts" so as to be as "realistic" as possible (xii).
That Conrad cared about "facts" not only in retrospect but at the time he
wrote Heart of Darkness is confirmed by his private correspondence. Najder
places the date on which Conrad began writing Heart of Darkness around De
cember 15,1898 (286). A letter to his publisher, William Blackwood, written just
two days before this, finds Conrad complaining about a recent review of his
early Malayan novels, Almayer's Folly and The Nigger of the Narcissus, alleging
that the reviewer is "extremely laudatory but in fact telling me I don't know any
thing about it" (CL 2:129-130). In response to this perceived criticism Conrad
protests: "Well I never did set up as an authority on Malaysia. I looked for a me
dium in which to express myself. I am inexact and ignorant no doubt (most of us
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 111
are) but I don't think I sinned so recklessly." He proceeds to attest that "curiously
enough all the details about the little characteristic acts and customs which they
hold up as proof [of ignorance or inaccuracy] I have taken out (to be safe) from
undoubted sources—dull, wise books." He even goes so far as to maintain
"there's not a single action of my man (and a good many of his expressions) that
cannot be backed by a traveler's tale—I mean a serious traveler's." These protes
tations are revealing. Paired with his subsequent implied hierarchy of realism,
they suggest an artist who took great care in observing human nature and local
culture—mentally hoarding his own experiences—and when these proved in
sufficient, drew from outside sources that he considered reliable.
In the case of Heart of Darkness, there can be little doubt that Conrad's per
sonal experience did serve as a fundamental starting point and constant com
pass in his composition of the novel. In a 1903 letter to Roger Casement, whose
acquaintance he had first made in Africa, Conrad states that during his "sojourn
in the interior, keeping [his] eyes and ears well open too," he had made "definite
inquiries as to the tribal customs," and that his "informants were numerous, of
all sorts—and many of them possessed of abundant knowledge" (CL 3:95). Con
rad was a natural observer, and moreover he was already engaged in the drafting
of his first novel, Almayer's Folly, while in Africa, and was therefore in a writerly
frame of mind (Najder, Congo Diary 3-4). The "Congo Diary" may even have
been kept for a specifically literary purpose. In Najder's view, "as a beginning au
thor and realizing well the thematic possibilities offered by his African journey,
[Conrad] apparently wished to put down some distinct and concrete impres
sions—in order to be able later to bolster his memories with hard data" (4).
Yet the need for supplementary factual material in the drafting of Heart of
Darkness is apparent. Certainly the "Congo Diary," "Up-river Book," and Con
rad's letters to family and friends penned during his roughly six-month sojourn
in Africa would seem to indicate that he did not personally experience many of
the things described in Heart of Darkness. And where his personal experience
ended, Conrad seems to have been predisposed to filling in with knowledge
taken from trusted sources. Conrad was a voracious, if selective, reader, and
travel books were his particular passion (Firchow 132). The publication of a new
travel book could evoke tremendous enthusiasm from him. On December 1,
1898, for instance, just a few weeks before he began writing Heart of Darkness,
Conrad exultantly addressed a letter to his friend Cunninghame Graham, who
had just come out with a book of impressions on travel and daily life in northern
Africa. In his letter Conrad relates how upon receiving the package containing
Graham's new book, "I dropped everything—as you may imagine and rushed at
it paper knife in hand" (CL 2: 124). He goes on to provide an almost comically
dramatic sketch of himself reading the book with a house guest hunched over
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112 CON RADIANA
his shoulder ("for we share our best with the stranger within our tent"), recount
ing that "no thirsty men drank water as we have been drinking in, swallowing,
tasting, blessing, enjoying, gurgling, choking over, absorbing, your thought,
your phrases, your irony, the spirit of your wisdom and of Your expression."
Such extraordinary enthusiasm was not merely reserved for the work of friends.
It is echoed in other letters written around the same time (e.g. CL 2: 125), and
again in a February 1899 letter to his cousin by marriage Aniela Zagorska, in
which he lauds Mary Kingsley's recently published account of her African trav
els: "I will send you soon a note on Miss Kingsley's book on Africa. C'est un
voyageur et un écrivain très remarquable" (CL 2:156). Although by his own ad
mission he was "awfully busy" during this period trying to satisfy the demands
of "these wretched editors" with the final installment of Heart of Darkness, Con
rad still found time for travel literature.
What makes this passion for travel books all the more interesting is the fact
that Conrad apparently possessed "a phenomenal memory... both of texts and
of remembered details." But it was "not a memory strictly categorized according
to sources, marshaled into homogenous entities; it was, rather, an enormous re
ceptacle of images and pieces from which he would draw" (Najder 457). Instead,
as Najder affirms, Conrad "treated the texts of eminent writers, and also texts of
documents, as a raw material of the same kind as the content of his own mem
ory" (457). In fact, as reflected in the tenor of his statements to Blackwood, in
some instances he did so deliberately and unabashedly—to be "safe," as he put it
(CL 2:129-130). And when he did pirate material he made little effort to cover
his tracks, as he "very rarely borrowed from forgotten, little-known, or second
rank books" (Najder 457). The travel books of men like Stanley and Glave were
hardly "forgotten, little-known, or second-rank books," and they are precisely
the sort of books that Conrad seems to have been mad after. They are also books
that Conrad could safely have assumed many of his readers would have been fa
miliar with, thus providing a ready context for his own spin on things.
By the time Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, his plot details would have
been perceived by contemporaries to echo similar accounts in works of ostensi
bly much greater gravity, most prominently the works of Stanley and Glave.
Though Conrad has emerged today as a singularly conspicuous voice represent
ing Africa in the late nineteenth century, in his day he was merely a fictional
chronicler of occurrences in the heart of Africa that were perceived to be solidly
factual. His narrative, from the initial notion of the allure of blank spaces on
maps to the spectacle of heads on posts and the experience of a river ambush in
the heart of Africa, was hardly novel. It re-invoked prior discourses, building on
and craftily enhancing their sensationalism. Verisimilitude was an artistic ideal
that Conrad pursued for rhetorical reasons.
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 113
IV. A NARRATIVE "IN THE MANNER OF YOUTH"
Considering Conrad's adaptation of his own experiences, including his own
reading, the possibility must be acknowledged that Through the Dark Continent,
In Darkest Africa, and In Savage Africa were key intertexts for Heart of Darkness.
Conrad surely knew of Stanley's work,8 and there is good reason to further sup
pose that this work resided in his memory as that of a "serious" traveler. Indeed
Stanley's ethos was such that even his critics tended to accept his accounts, casti
gating his more egregious recorded actions, but in doing so essentially accepting
their veracity. Jeal notes, for instance, that the initial reviews of In Darkest Africa,
in which Stanley (to his own later detriment) covered for the inhumane behav
ior of his lieutenants, were "mostly favorable," as "even the partisan Spectator
pronounced: 'the writing is always clear and rises into passages of high literary
merit'" (402). The "equally demanding Athenaeum and the Edinburgh Review
also praised the book, with only minor cavils, and unquestioningly accepted
Stanley's account of the disaster that had overtaken the Rear Column" (402).
Even more grandly, Whitehall's Review surmised that "the book must always
live ... a history which, hundreds of years hence, will tell of the babyhood of
Africa" (qtd. in Jeal 402). The Leeds Mercury enthusiastically proclaimed that
"the voice of criticism becomes dumb in the presence of the simple record" of
Stanley's accomplishment (qtd. in Jeal 403). Stanley's books were received as
"history," as a "simple record" beyond factual reproach.
Furthermore, Stanley's success must have appealed on some level to Conrad.
Though disdainful of the machinations and compromises of authors who made
themselves popular (CL 2: 137), and genuinely averse to political activism (as
reflected in his refusal to address the pacifists), he was nevertheless desperately
in need of a literary success at the time he wrote Heart of Darkness. In a letter to
critic-friend Edward Garnett dated December 18,1898—quite likely the first re
corded reference to Heart of Darkness—Conrad confesses, "I am now at a short
story for B'wood which I must get out for the sake of shekels" (CL 2: 132). In
subsequent letters to colleagues and friends he likewise complains bitterly about
his "infernal tale," which "grows like the genii from the bottle" but is "a rotten
thing," and one which circumstances dictate must be produced "in a frightful
hurry" (CL 2:146,150,151). Stanley's books presented an artistically bankrupt
but financially resplendent conversion of adventures abroad into royalties at home.
The reality behind Stanley's accepted objectivity and material success is
highly suspect, however. For although Stanley's books were marvelously de
tailed, authoritative, and generally trusted in their day and for many years after
by the British press and readers generally, their contents have repeatedly been
revealed in recent years to be unreliable. As time has made abundantly clear,
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114 CONRADIANA
Stanley was a fabricator of the first order. His very name and claimed American
ism were an elaborately maintained fiction. By birth he was John Rowlands, a
Welshman abandoned by his mother in his infancy and mainly brought up in a
workhouse (McLynn, Stanley: The Making 14-23; Jeal 17-24). Looking for evi
dence of his textual unreliability, one could point (as McLynn and Jeal both do)
to numerous passages in the Autobiography that was published by his wife, Dor
othy, after Stanley's death.
Even more interesting for current purposes, however, is an example from the
early days of his journalistic career that plainly illustrates his capacity for literary
fabrication. As McLynn recounts, Stanley, following a two-months-long botched
romance with a "young Greek girl," got his career as a war correspondent back
on track with an exciting firsthand account of a trek along the south coast of
Crete with a band of guerrillas who successfully battled a group of Turkish sol
diers, killing twenty-five (Stanley: The Making 77-8). "The trouble," McLynn at
tests, "is that Stanley was nowhere near Crete on the dates (7-18 September)
when he was supposed to be accompanying the gallant guerrillas. On these days
he was either in Athens or Siros or on board ship in the Aegean. Moreover, he
claimed to have taken a direct service from the south of Crete to Alexandria,
when everyone knew there was no such service" (78). As McLynn concludes,
"The entire exciting episode was a fiction, expertly cobbled together with copi
ous circumstantial detail from the mass of information Stanley had acquired on
his passage through the islands" (78).
How much of Stanley's African information, we might wonder, is as fictional
as this early bit of opportunistic journalism? For example, Stanley is perhaps
best known for accounts such as the tale of the fifty-four charging war canoes.
That particular account has now been anthologized (Damrosch 1924-5), and it
was a fan favorite even in Stanley's lifetime. Glave repeatedly speaks of it in In
Savage Africa, claiming that the Africans in his district literally marked time
from it, and telling how Stanley himself, "eyes fired with the reminiscences of the
glorious past," would regale listeners around the campfire in the Congo with the
tale (35,38-9,44). But was the actual encounter really anything like the literary
description that Stanley so meticulously provides? Jeal concedes that what took
place was indeed "a very testing encounter," but attests that Stanley's account of it
"qualifies as one of his classic exaggerations" (201). In fact the famed explorer
ironically "caused totally unnecessary damage to his reputation by inflating the
incident into a major battle in his book" (201). Based on the more credible un
published diary of Frank Pocock, who traveled with Stanley as a sort of first lieu
tenant on the trek recounted in Through the Dark Continent, the fighting did
extend over a span of two days, but no more than eight African canoes were ever
involved at any one time, and the total attacking fleet did not number more than
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 115
twenty (201). More canoes made the tale more exciting, however, and once the
published account was out, Stanley stuck with it and repeated it as written ever
after. The printed record seems to have become his personal reality going for
ward, even in verbal reminiscences with close friends, as Glave's account shows.
This tendency is magnified by instances where Stanleys books exaggerated
the odds against him and the death tolls of his fights in order to put a favorable
spin on events that had not gone well. Jeal points out the narrative that did per
haps the most damage to Stanleys reputation in his own lifetime, his exag
geration of the scope of a tit-for-tat exchange of hostilities with the inhabitants
of the island of Bumbireh on Lake Victoria. According to his biographer, Stan
ley's "psychological need to prove that no one ever got the better of him was a
character weakness he felt unable to admit to in public in order to explain his
exaggeration" (222).
It may even be that Stanley routinely embellished his representations of Afri
can savagery in a deliberate effort to inspire philanthropy. He dreamed of a day
when "all the land be redeemed from wildness, the industry and energy of the
natives stimulated, the havoc of the slave-trade stopped, and all the countries
round about permeated with the nobler ethics of a higher humanity" ( Through
the Dark Continent 1: 223). "But at present," he concludes in Through the Dark
Continent, "the hands of the people are lifted—murder in their hearts—one
against the other; ferocity is kindled at sight of the wayfarer; [... ] and each
tribe, with rage and hate in its heart, remains aloof from the other." His great
wish was for "a band of philanthropic capitalists ... to rescue these beautiful
lands" (1: 223). Though not a man to shrink from a completely self-interested
fabrication, Stanley may have been even bolder in coloring his narratives in in
stances where his ends were philanthropic. The "darker" he could paint it, the
more the African continent seemed to cry out for enlightenment. As Through the
Dark Continent progresses, the theme of a continent needing to be rescued
steadily gains in strength, with more and more frequent accounts of attacks ac
companied by expansive authorial commentaries. Stanley constantly harps on
the "insensate ferocity of the Wadembé cannibals" (2: 59-60) and the rapacious
barbarism of the "savage and murderous and cannibalistic" Manyema (2:86), for
instance, not just to give his readers thrills, but as pleas for intervention.
The significance of such sensationalism informing Heart of Darkness is clear.
If in fact attacks by Africans were not nearly such common nor such cataclysmic
events as Stanleys books suggest, then Conrad's recognizable use of such an
event as a central plot element reiterates a pestilent stereotype. The emphasis
placed in Heart of Darkness on the practice of displaying human heads on posts
further replicates the highly selective attention already focused on that grisly
practice through the narratives of explorers like Stanley and Glave. Of all the
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116 CONRADIANA
possible tropes that could have been invoked by Conrad in relation to central
Africa, he chose to tie in to the most disturbingly memorable images of African
violence.
In theoretical terms, this invocation of familiar elements from prior texts
might be said to function in the mode of what Roland Barthes calls "cultural
codes" (18). Through the invocation or deployment of such codes, which as
Barthes suggests may also helpfully be labeled "reference codes," a work of fic
tion like Heart of Darkness invokes "a galaxy of signifiers" whose connotations
readers interpret in the context of shared cultural "knowledge or wisdom" (18).
This shared "knowledge," which need not be accurate to be influential, works to
"afford the discourse a basis in scientific or moral authority" (18). Stanley and
his literary scions had, through selective, sensational renderings, arrayed prior
to February 1899 a dense galaxy of signifiers around the focal motif of African
savagery. Conrad in turn allusively channeled their narrative precision and
experience-based ethos to lend an air of horrific verisimilitude to his work,
thereby triggering exactly what he "hoped" for: a "sinister resonance" that does
indeed "hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note ha[s] been struck"
("Author's Note" xi).
This artistically effectual but politically reprehensible intertextual alliance
may be seen as an outgrowth of Conrad's broader motives in fashioning his tale.
As Najder cogently attests, Conrad "cared for the authenticity of his sources but
treated them as raw material to be subordinated to artistic transformations"
(119). His correspondence supports this. In a further response to the travel book
by Graham that he so enjoyed, Conrad proclaimed that "nothing approaching it
had [sic] appeared since Burton's Mecca"—the book is "a work of art" (CL 2:
125). A travel book "written like this," he insists, "is no longer a book of travel—
it is a creative work." Conrad esteemed Graham's book "a contribution not to
wards mere knowledge but towards truth—to the truth hidden in men—in
things—in life—in nature—to the truth only exceptional men can see, and not
every exceptional man can present to the ordinary dim eyes of the crowd." There
can be little doubt that Conrad aspired to be creatively exceptional in the
same way, pressing from ordinary experience the precious oil of transcendental
truth, and making that truth available through the fictional medium to his late
nineteenth-century European and American reading public.
To this end, despite repeated avowals of his predisposition to rely on actual
experience or credible facts, he regularly exercised artistic license in his fiction.
In fact, the only explanation that might reconcile his statements with his writerly
practices is that the factual and the fictional in Conrad's artistic eyes were not the
same as for most people. A hint of this comes across in his explanation to Black
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 117
wood that in the Malaysian settings of his first novels he had primarily "looked
for a medium in which to express [him]self" (CI 2: 130). Some years later he
would offer a similar but more illustrative explanation of his artistic philosophy
when confronted by an alert critic with evidence that his avowedly most per
sonal and factual narrative, Youth (the great "feat of memory" referred to in his
"Author's Note"), was, in fact, at least partly inaccurate. Richard Curie revealed
in 1922 that the real world setting of the narrative was the port of Mintok, but
that Conrad's story greatly exaggerates distances and alters the appearance of
that port. To this Conrad protested in obvious exasperation that the real Mintok
is nothing more than "a damned hole without any beach and without any glam
our and in relation to the parag[graph], is not in tone. Therefore the paragraph],
when pinned to a particular spot, must appear diminished—a fake" (qtd. in Naj
der 94). This curious explanation gives an ironic twist to Conrad's avowals that
Heart of Darkness is a narrative "in the manner of Youth" and one "quite as au
thentic in fundamentals as Youth" (CL 2:133,139,145; "Author's Note" xi).
What mattered most to Conrad, as apparently to Stanley before him, was the
effect, the impact, of a text, and possibly his own reputation and credibility in
connection with it. The fact is that both authors were prone to exaggeration and
even outright fabrication in their writing as in their personal lives. Conrad, for
his part, routinely exaggerated his experience as a seaman, inflating his resume
and even lying on one occasion to a merchant marine review board.9 This last
instance in particular Najder finds "rather surprising," considering the setting
and that Conrad maintained his "distortions of fact" even under "rigorous"
questioning, but Najder attests that "on future occasions Conrad similarly
tended to depart from the truth" (187). A Conradian equivalent of Stanley's re
port of running with the guerrillas of Crete appears in Conrad's correspondence
from 1895. Over the course of a couple of weeks in August 1895 Conrad appar
ently engaged in a frenzied "buying and selling [of] claims on South African
gold mines" in Paris (Jeal 213). In later recounting these events in a letter to a
friend, Conrad claimed to have worked closely with a number of important Pa
risian financiers whom he almost certainly never met. Najder calls this "a typical
hoax—not journalistic but epistolary" (214), noting that Conrad's letter "sounds
a little too sensational and boastful to be taken as a faithful rendering of facts"
(213). In general, Najder concludes, Conrad's reminiscences in letters and even
more in literature are often "not reflections of reality" but of a "subjective per
sonal truth" (189). From the roughly twenty years of his adult life preceding his
becoming a professional writer, Conrad "tried to extract... everything precious
they could yield—everything and more" (Najder 189). Conrad and Stanley were
more similar as writers than they might initially appear.
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118 CONRADIANA
V. MOTIVE AND IRONY
In a fascinating final twist, a thorough reassessment of the Conrad-Stanley rela
tionship particularly is warranted in light of Jeal's biography Stanley: The Impos
sible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer (Yale UP, 2007). Jeal provides a riveting
look at the life of the explorer as it emerges from the revelatory pages of a here
tofore restricted collection of more than 7,000 documents acquired from the
Stanley family by the Musée de l'Afrique Centrale in Brussels in 1982. The col
lection includes numerous letters, journals, and exploration notebooks penned
by Stanley, as well as the private diaries of Stanley's wife, and several thousand
letters written to Stanley over the course of his lifetime (Jeal 8-9). Based on new
evidence and nuances derived from these sources, Jeal presents a composite
portrait of Stanley that differs markedly from the caustic portrayals put forward
by Biernan in Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley
(Knopf, 1990), and by McLynn in Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer
(Constable, 1989) and Stanley: Sorcerer's Apprentice (Constable, 1991). While
not denying Stanley's heavily paternalistic rhetorical posture toward Africans, or
his apparently frequent recourse to violence in the course of his travels, Jeal con
vincingly refutes charges that Stanley was maliciously racist or Leopold's willing
accomplice.10 The careful biographer repeatedly confirms his initial suspicion
that Stanley "exaggerated the number and intensity of his conflicts with Africans
in order to make his copy more exciting" (387,10-11). "Journalistic hyperbole"
rather than "literal truth," Jeal posits, characterizes much of the "apparently
damning" content of Stanley's books, rendering the heretofore "immutable ste
reotype" of a "brash and brutal Stanley" quite ironic (11, 472). Stanley was, in
actual practice, typically no more, and usually much less bellicose and biased
than his contemporaries (13-16). But he was absolutely an early tabloid journal
ist, whose works tend to be the more sensational the less they were subject to
corroboration.
Conrad similarly emerges from the pages of his most recent and comprehen
sive biography (the extensively revised second edition of Najder's Joseph Conrad:
A Life (Camden House, 2007)), as an author whose frequent attestations of the
realism of his fiction are belied by abundant evidence of artistic adaptation, of
ten taking the form of sensational exaggeration. A multilayered irony emerges.
Conrad, who to all appearances seems to differ markedly from Stanley in his
politics, personality, and writing style, may fit a similar profile in his approach to
Heart of Darkness, and in so doing replicate and enhance the impact of material
that worked against the grain of core sentiments that both men privately shared.
A deeper and more enveloping irony operates in the possibility that the per
ceived prejudices of readers may have prompted both authors to deliberately
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 119
sensationalize their narratives. The irony in this case, of course, would be that
these narratives would then have quickened the very prejudices that inspired
their production, contributing to the perpetuation of insidious anti-African
sentiments.
There is saving irony, however, in the core political views of both men. A
spotlight that illuminates both Conrad and Stanley is their shared admission,
late in their lives, that they really had no business ever being in Africa at all.
Conrad is quite frank in the "Author's Note" prefacing Heart of Darkness regard
ing the inappropriateness of his presence on the continent. "Of its origins," he
says of the novel, "this much may be said: it is well known that curious men go
prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business)" (x-xi). So it was, he
attests, with his journey to "the centre of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of
business" (xi). Stanley likewise admits as much in an about-face from his self
justification in Through the Dark Continent. In that text he argued that inasmuch
as self-defense, for instance, "appeared to be a necessity, then why should we re
gret it? Could a man contend with the inevitable?" (2: 269). Yet later he would
echo Conrad's confession, drawing an even more pointed conclusion of culpa
bility: "We went into the heart of Africa self-invited—therein lies our fault" (qtd.
in Jeal 225). These are the words of the other Stanley, the heretofore only par
tially perceived Stanley, who Jeal introduces as a man "determined to avoid
fights," who "would never condone thefts from local villagers," and whose "love
of the Wangwana was unfeigned" (217,208).
It seems quite likely that, sensitive as both Stanley and Conrad were to the
prejudices of their European and American readers, both authors sensational
ized their narratives strategically, for their own pragmatic and even moralistic
purposes. As societal outsiders, each in his own way—Conrad through his for
eignness and Stanley through the circumstances of his birth and youth—both
were keenly attuned to the insider prejudices of British society. In the intensely
Orientalist atmosphere of the late-nineteenth century, the craving for books
with contents that matched the sensationalism of the emerging yellow journal
ism was powerful (Said 41-3,102-4). As Charles Dawbarn, in a 1915 article en
titled "The Public and the Press," facetiously notes: "Journalists who conduct
their newspapers for profit should learn to sit upon the fence and only descend
at the proper time when the public has thoroughly made up its mind. Then the
duty of the journalist is to lead the procession—whither it wants to go" (491). A
similar note is struck in a 1919 article from the pages of Current Opinion: "the
difficulty is that what the public wants is not invariably the truth. And the public
molds the newspaper, quite as much as the newspaper molds the public" ("Prob
lem of Truth" 181). Conrad was both a savvy manipulator of reader perceptions
and a man subject to pressures from both within and without. Yet in synching
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120 CONRADIANA
his work with that of explorers like Stanley and Glave, Conrad crafted a narrative
both damaging to Africa and artistically ironic.
Indeed the final irony falls back on Conrad. For implicit in the culminating
textual revelation of Marlows lie to the Intended, herself a transparent stand-in
for the willfully ignorant "civilized" Western world, is the notion that readers, at
least, have received the whole story, unembellished and unabridged—that Mar
low has been totally frank with his hearers, and that readers by extension have
been allowed to eavesdrop on the strict and entire truth. Conrad himself may
well have believed this. But in reality Heart of Darkness, echoing as it does so
many sensational tropes of African savagery, effectively reverberates the spuri
ous cultural codes of its day both forward, across a century of time, and outward,
resoundingly, to "the uttermost ends of the earth" (Heart of Darkness 77).
NOTES
1. Roughly a century after Conrad began his literary career, his notoriety has under
gone a renaissance. As Padmini Mongia pointed out in 2005, "from 1993 onward, the
MLA Bibliography averages over 100 listings a year with Conrad as their subject" (85).
2. The Conrad-Stanley connection is, of course, an obvious one in the sense that it
pairs the most famous African explorer of the late nineteenth-century (Stanley), with the
best known literary figure to have written about Africa in the same era (Conrad). Lines of
relationship between the two have already been drawn by several scholars, most notably
Robert Hampson in his introduction to the 1995 Penguin edition of Heart of Darkness
(reprinted in Penguin Classics in 2000), Rosalind Meyer in a 1998 article focused on liter
ary sources of the novel, and D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke in his introduction to the 1999
Broadview printing of the text. These studies provide a valuable groundwork of compari
sons, especially at the level of plot, motif, and shared colonialist rhetoric, with Stanley and
his works cast as representative of "the late-Victorian context in which [Heart of Darkness]
was produced" (Hampson xii). Glave's contribution has been most fruitfully explored in
the work of Peter Firchow.
3. Conrad had, of course, already used his Congo experience as material for "An Out
post of Progress." This short story, a fierce critique of colonialism, appeared in Tales of Un
rest in March 1898 (Najder, Joseph Conrad xxi), and Conrad later confessed "a preference"
for it, based particularly on his success in attaining therein "a scrupulous unity of tone,"
rather than being "led astray by my subject" (Najder, Congo Diary 82).
4. Tellingly, the Saturday Review column does not treat Glave's account of Rom's sav
agery as a revelation, but simply as a ready example of what was by then a familiar prob
lem. The column itself was a news feature covering a speech delivered to the Royal
Statistical Society in mid-December of 1898 ("Notes," Saturday Review 802). As Hochs
child suggests, it is quite likely that Conrad met that intrepid young officer as he passed
through Leopoldville on his inland trek (145), and would therefore have been struck in a
particular way by news of his subsequent behavior. It was not, in other words, the mere
notion of ghoulish African ornamentation that would have been notable, but that Rom, a
supposedly enlightened European, had indulged in it.
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EASTLEY — Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers 121
5. Glave's narrative is notable in that he never writes of Africa as a strange or forbid
ding place. His boyhood enthusiasm carries over into a mature relishing of every new ex
perience. He expresses no sense of alienation in visiting various ports of call on his
approach to the Congo region, and his arrival at and travel through the area is taken in
stride (In Savage Africa 19-32). He seems to relish "the surrounding scenery [which] is as
wild as the water it encloses" (27), and the people he meets, though variously described as
"fantastically attired" (20), wretchedly "intoxicated" and "listless" (22), and "invariably
friendly" (30), are all welcomed as fellow human beings.
6. In his infamously succinct dismissal of sub-Saharan Africa in the introduction to
The Philosophy of History, Hegel states that "Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has
remained—for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World—shut up; it is the
Gold-land compressed within itself—the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day
of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night" (91). Sub-Saharan Af
rica is "dark" because it keeps no written records of its history. It remains dark (for outsid
ers) owing to its inscrutability—which of course is not innate or inherent, but rather a
reflection of the consciousness of the observer.
7. Glave is noted by one of the first missionaries to cry foul about European atrocities
in the Congo as one "who would have been able to throw a lurid light on the practices of
the State officials"—in other words, as a friend of the cause of Africans oppressed by the
Belgians ("The Congo Free State" 14 Oct. 1895).
8. Although little in the way of direct, provable ties between the two writers exists,
Conrad certainly was aware of Stanley long before he ever went to Africa, and apparently
thought of him while there. Interestingly, Conrad's sole mention of Stanley is inexplicit,
and would seem to indicate that he detested the man. In "Geography and Some Explorers"
Conrad reminisces how, upon visiting Stanley Falls, the "very spot" of a "boyish boast" he
had made to one day go to the heart of Africa, his thoughts in homage to David Living
stone were obscured by "the unholy recollection of a prosaic newspaper stunt and the dis
tasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human
conscience and geographical exploration" (272). The "prosaic newspaper stunt" referred
to is almost certainly Stanley's much publicized finding of Livingstone (Meyer 333-4), and
in order for Stanley to invade his private fantasies, Conrad must have been aware of him.
Indeed, given Stanley's fame, Conrad's proximity to him on various occasions prior to the
writing of Heart of Darkness, and especially Conrad's avid reading of travel literature, it
would seem virtually impossible for Stanley not to have loomed large in Conrad's African
consciousness. Najder, for his part, links Conrad's African sojourn directly back to Stan
ley, stating that although "everything indicates" that Conrad did not specifically seek out
his opportunity to work in Africa, the job offer tendered to him by Albert Thys, Deputy
Director of the Société Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, "probably rekindled his
old interest [in the continent], which had been recently revived by a wave of sensational
news about the African interior connected with Henry Morton Stanley's expedition in
search of Emin Pasha" (138). Moreover, it was just days before Conrad's May 1890 arrival
in Brussels en route to the Congo that Stanley passed triumphantly through that city on
his way back to England, reporting on his expedition and delivering "an impassioned talk"
to the delegates of an Anti-Slavery Conference being held there (Najder 145, Jeal 390).
Conrad was going out even as Stanley was returning, and in a city abuzz with Stanley's
name and fame he could hardly have failed to note that he was embarking on a journey
that literally followed in its early going the Stanley expedition's footsteps, en route to a
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122 CONRADIANA
final destination bearing the famed explorers name: Stanley Falls. Thus it seems quite
likely that Conrad would have taken time at some point to read all of Stanleys books, in
cluding the account which most closely matches Heart of Darkness in terms of its plot line,
that of the Emin Pasha expedition contained in In Darkest Africa. This book came out in
June 1890, just after Conrad had left Europe for Africa, but would have been easy to ac
quire upon his return.
9. Najder repeatedly reveals instances in which Conrad proved unreliable in present
ing his own experiences, even to close friends or family members, and in legally binding
statements. For instance, in recruiting his aunt and beloved confidant Marguerite Porad
owska to help him find work as a seaman, Conrad "made himself a year younger and em
bellished his career" (166). Again, in a 1904 letter to the editor of The Times Conrad
represented himself as one having "nearly a quarter of a century of sea service in all sorts
of craft, upon seas both narrow and wide ... and in command of both sailing and steam
ships"—a claim which Najder duly notes as typical of "Conrad's habitual exaggeration,"
since he had in fact "commanded only one sailing ship,... for fourteen months," and "a
minute river steamboat... in the Congo ... for a period of no longer than two weeks"
(Congo Diary 79,81).
10. One of Jeal's most valuable revelations is that The Congo and the Founding of Its
Free State, the book in which it is recorded that Stanley entered into hundreds of treaties
with African chiefs in Leopold's behalf, was very probably altered by Leopold to implicate
Stanley. As Jeal attests, Stanley was contractually bound to allow Leopold to make "edito
rial changes" or even to prohibit publication of any account of Stanley's work in the
Congo. The final manuscript has disappeared, but it was very likely altered significantly.
Why did Stanley allow this? FJe believed the Congo Free State was a good thing. So: "Un
aware of all the underlying facts, many historians—even well-known ones like Adam
Hochschild—have accepted, mainly on the basis of CFFS, that Stanley took away the sov
ereignty and the ownership of the land of numerous chiefs for a few bales of cloth and
some trinkets. The manuscript pages of CFFS, Volume II, pages 195-204—in which the
words of the treaties that were allegedly negotiated by him are quoted—are not to be
found in the only text of the book that exists in the author's hand, and so could have been
added by Leopold. The manuscript has numerous gaps, additions in other hands, and
pages of printed material inserted at various points. It is therefore a distressing irony that
Stanley's reputation should have been so badly damaged by later generations' reliance
upon such a singularly unreliable printed source" (286).
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