Critical Insights: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Abstract

Critical Insights offers superb essays by exceptionally credentialed current literary scholars with thoroughly daunting professional histories: Amar Acheraïou, Robert C. Evans, Pei-Wen Clio Kao, Guido Laino; Joseph R, Lease, Gene M. Moore, David Mulry, John G. Peters, Jean M. Szczypien, Nicolas Tredell; Cedric Watts, and Yolanda York. This review discusses, perforce cursorily, the editor Robert Evans's work and only six salient exemplars of major critical approaches: historical, ethical, bibliographical, aesthetic, intertextual, and semiotic.After the editor's introductory note succinctly summarizing the volume's content, a pleasingly readable “flagship” essay by John G. Peters recounts his revisitings of Heart of Darkness (hereinafter abbreviated as HD), each revealing a dimension of the novella (pp. xiii–xxi): the self, colonialism, memory, language, HD's future, and continuing relevance.A Critical Contexts section commences with the editor's description of Sidney Hinde's The Fall of the Congo Arabs, a little-known account of Arab and native African raiding, slave trading, and cannibalism. Evans avers that Conrad may have “downplayed or intentionally overlooked” (p. 18) these atrocities, because Europeans used Africans’ slavery practices to justify colonialism. While that could be so, Conrad's experiences at Boma and Matadi, in the Roi Des Belges, and on his trek to Kinshasa, were limited to Europeans’ murderous exploitation of African slave labour; nothing in his upriver diary and letters to Tadeusz Bobrowski, Maguerite Poradowska, and Roger Casement indicates that he had much, if any, knowledge of African slavers. In any case, the inclusion of Hinde's book adds usefully to HD's ancillary historicism. The editor's “Overview,” a survey of critical works on HD 1899–2015 in major bibliographies of Conrad scholarship, with excerpted commentary on every critical approach to HD, both situates the novella in the history of scholarly discourse and affords a handy reference for research scholars.“Ethics and Horror in HD” by Amar Acheraiou, brilliantly explores the ethical implications of mythopoesis and mythopoeia in the imperial lie as the horror of truth multifold and one. Through the enigmatic eloquence of “object and agent” Kurtz (p. 59) and Marlow's white lie to the Intended Conrad reveals—apparently only half-knowingly, that the Other is Us. Marlow's duality reflects Conrad's “ethics of differentiation” (p. 62), excoriating Belgian imperialism while praising the British brand. Conrad therefore is complicit in that which he condemns.Joseph R. Lease's “Carrying the Fire” elucidates HD's imagery of light and dark intertextually with the Promethean “Apocalyptic Vision” (p. 72) in Cormac McCarthy's dystopia The Road. The bearers of fire, symbol of a spark of hope, are blinded by its light. In HD company agents and “pilgrims” professedly bringing civilization to savages bring destruction.Beginning the Critical Readings section David Mulry's “The High Cube of Iron” traces Conrad's creative processes manifest in the evolution of his holograph MS and additions before HD's publication as a novella. Engross for Conrad editors, he eschews emendation lists in extant editions,1 and works with primary holograph materials. A meticulous record of substantive revisions, excisions, and reinsertions is accompanied by sensible conjecture as to Conrad's reasons and thought processes. Mulry attributes some revisions to Conrad's care to “show rather than tell” (86), and others to his effort to be less mannered, more au point, yet less explicit: “Too much disclosure about Kurtz renders him unknowable, less [. . .] ‘one of us’” (p. 93).“HD: Continuing Problems” by Cedric Watts, a masterly polemical critique of critical judgments, with HD and accusations of its racism as its stalking horses, ponders the aesthetics of critical criteria. Ranging broadly over Western literature, Watts challenges both literary “theorism” and “ideological imperialism” (p. 98). Rather than critical theory, he avers, we need “dialectical” reading—and a “systematic guide to praxis” (p. 116), a “practical handbook of criteria” to “contemplate our own responses to the text” with “critical detachment” (p. 117).In “Polish Literary References in HD and The Secret Agent” Jean Szczypien shows intriguingly the theme and tropes in Zygmunt Krasiński's The Undivine Comedy woven by Conrad into HD and The Secret Agent. Her carefully documented semiotic argument for the Polishness in Conrad's work, largely inaccessible to non-Poles, convincingly compels our assent.The last essay, the editor's “Images from the Congo Region. . .” introduces artists W.B. Davis, Victor Perard, and Herbert Ward. Contemporary with Conrad, their impressions in word (Ward's) and pictures, many grisly, graphically complement our reading of HD.Minor omissions and substantive errors dog the editor's reportage of Conrad's life and work (pp. xxii–xxvii, 279–288). The biography opens inauspiciously with Conrad's parents naming him “Teodor Josef Konrad Nalecz” (p. xxii) instead of Józef Teodor Konrad, with the Korzeniowski family's szlachta clan name Nałȩcz. The Chronology locates Conrad's birthplace in “Polish Ukraine” (p. 279). At the time Berdyczów was in Russian Ukraine's Kyiv guberniya (province). Quotes are at third hand from quotations in the biographies rather than from original sources or authoritative printed versions,2 thereby risking confusion or perpetuation of error; e.g., John Stape's account of Conrad's last words: “[H]is wife heard him cry out ‘Here’—possibly ‘Here you’” (p. xxvii).3 Jessie Conrad herself wrote: “Then a gasping ‘Here . . . you[.]’”4Conrad was not “cared for” (p. xxii) after Apollo's death by his guardian Tadeusz Bobrowski, except in the sense that Tadeusz financed him and oversaw his upbringing mostly from afar at his Kazimierówka estate in Russian Ukraine. Conrad remained in Kraków, cared for by Stefan Buszczyński and living briefly at Ludwik Georgeon's pension, then with his grandmother Teofila Bobrowska, and finally boarding in Lviv with Antoni Syroczyński almost until leaving for Marseilles.5To say that Tadeusz merely “allowed” Conrad to go to France (p. xxii) oversimplifies the case. Adverse circumstances demanded decisive action. Because of some sort of discord Syroczyński refused to keep Conrad any longer; and Tadeusz's attempts to obtain Austrian nationality for him had failed. (The statement “Poland [and] Ukraine [. . .] were dominated by [. . .] the Russian Empire” (p. xxii) takes no account of the partitions; Kraków and Lviv were in Austrian Galicia.) Return to live with Tadeusz at Kazimierówka was out of the question. Born a Russian subject, the son of an insurrectionist faced the prospect of twenty-five years of conscripted service in the Czar's army. Tadeusz was keen that Conrad should obtain citizenship beyond the Czar's reach, and France was an obvious choice. He brought Conrad from Lviv back to Kraków and made preparations for his departure three weeks later. It would have been Tadeusz who arranged for a family friend Wiktor Chodźko to look after him at Marseilles.Significant events influencing Conrad's sea career and oeuvre are omitted. No mention is made of his first two months at Marseilles with Baptistin Solary and the coast pilots, when he first encountered a British ship, James Westoll. Conrad did not “officially join the French Merchant Marine” (p. xxii). The marine marchande was simply an industry, then regulated by the Ministère de Commerce et de l’índustrie (1858–1894). Having sailed in the Delestang et fils firm's barque Mont-Blanc as a passenger, he likely was a crew member on the return voyage. He was taken on as an apprentice on a second voyage. Then he signed onto the Saint-Antoine as steward. The First Mate Dominique Cervoni was Conrad's inspiration for his character Nostromo, and would appear in the Tremolino episodes in The Mirror of the Sea and The Arrow of Gold.“In 1886 [. . .] he [. . .] passed an exam [. . .] as a first mate” (p. xxiii) is wrong, but stated correctly in the Chronology (pp. 280, 281). Conrad qualified as First Officer in 1884 and Master in 1886. The single sentence about Conrad as Torrens's First Officer after captaining Otago (p. xxiv) makes no mention of its significance: his faded prospects of finding a berth as Master, passenger W. H. Jacques's encouraging reading of the unfinished MS of his first novel Almayer's Folly, and his meeting the future popular British literary figure John Galsworthy—vital if not pivotal factors in Conrad's metamorphosis from sailor to author. Although the historicity of the many ships Conrad sailed in bears on his sea tales, Otago is the only ship named in the Chronology; and Tales of Unrest is missing (a lacuna redressed in a list of works).6We close with thoughts on the merits of this volume. The easy prose style and intriguing illustrations afford and encourage an informed reading of HD. The target readership appears twofold: (1) The editor's Conrad biography, list of works, essays and Chronology are helpful for students and generalist readers—but with the caveat that teachers be aware of the minor but substantive flaws. (2) The contributors’ essays, most not geared for lay folks’ reading, are eminently worthy of the attention of peer specialists. Much is to be learned here.