Imperialism: Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Abstract

Nearly forty years ago and long before the Heart of Darkness 'craze', Ford Madox Ford foretold the critical fate of Conrad's novella. He noted that it 'gained when it was written a certain vividness from its fierce lashings at the unspeakable crew that exploited the natives in the Congo,' and predicted that when 'imperialism' vanished, and by imperialism he meant 'spoliation of subject races', the 'masterpiece will then stand by its poetry.'l Although imperialism remains, by Ford's criteria if not by Lenin's and Hobson's, literary critics have neglected imperialism and have transformed the novella into a timeless myth about the exploration of the human soul and the metaphysical power of evil. These are only some of the more radical interpretations; there are others which, if they shed some light, still distort the novella, which gives us a concrete record of Belgian colonialism in the Congo and transforms a personal experience into a myth about imperial decadence. Despite D.H. Lawrence's warning, 'Never trust the artist. Trust the tale', Conrad's own conception of his tale should not be overlooked. The idea of the novella, he told his publisher in I899, was the 'criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa', and the 'subject is of our time distinctly,' though 'not topically treated'. The story was intended as a criticism of colonialists in Africa. Many of his friends agreed. Hugh Clifford, writer and colonial administrator, called it a 'study of the Congo', while Edward Garnett described it as 'an impression taken from life, of the conquest by the European whites of a certain portion of Africa, an impression in particular of the civilizing methods of a certain great European Trading Com-