In Our Time - Heart of Darkness

Episode Date: February 15, 2007

Melvyn Bragg will be discussing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Written in 1899, Heart of Darkness is a fascinating fin de siecle critique of colonialism and man's greed. Conrad draws on his own adventures for the plot. The story's main narrator is Marlow, a merchant seaman who pilots a steamship upriver in what is largely assumed to be the Belgian Congo. He finds the scramble for Africa well underway, with Europeans desperately competing to make their fortunes from ivory. Marlow's journey takes him into the interior of this mysterious silent continent. After a dangerous passage he finally arrives at the company's most remote trading station. It is reigned over by Kurtz, a white man who seems to have become a kind of God figure to the local people. Marlow is fascinated by him, preferring his messianic ravings to the petty treachery and mercenarism of the other white traders. On the journey back, Kurtz dies, whispering “the horror, the horror”.The interpretation of these words has perplexed readers ever since and the book has prompted a diverse range of readings from the psychoanalytical, that sees the novella as a metaphor for the journey into the subconscious, to feminist readings that examine how Conrad excludes female characters and focuses on the male consciousness. Conrad wrote; “My task is, above all, to make you see”. So did he intend this novella to provoke a discussion of the immorality and rapacity at the centre of colonialism? Was he questioning the hero's welcome given to those famous explorers who came back from “civilising” Africa, as they saw it? Or was he, as the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe put it, “guilty of preposterous and perverse arrogance in reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?” With Susan Jones, Fellow and Tutor in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford; Robert Hampson, Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London; Laurence Davies, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Glasgow University and Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, today it's Heart of Darkness. Written and first published in 1890 by Joseph Conrad, the novella is often seen as a fantasy-eacled critique of colonialism.

Conrad drew on his own adventures for the plot. The story's main narrator is Marlowe, a merchant seaman who pilots a steamship upriver in what's assumed to be the Belgian Congo, as Conrad himself did. He finds the scramble for Africa is well underway, with Europeans ruthlessly competing to make their fortunes from ivory. Marlow's journey takes him into the interior of this mysterious silent continent. After a dangerous passage, he finally arrives at the company's most remote trading station. It's reigned over by Kurtz, a white man who seems to become a kind of god figure to the local people.

Marluss fascinated by him, preferring his messianic ravings to the petty treachery and mercenaries of the other white traders. On the journey back, Kurtz whispers, as he dies, the horror, the horror. Conrad wrote, My task is above all to make you see. So did he intend this novella to provoke a discussion

of the immorality and rapacity at the centre of colonialism? Was he questioning the heroes welcome, given to those famous explorers who came back from civilising Africa as they saw it? or was he, as the Nigerian writer, Chinua Acheb, put it, guilty of preposterous and perverse arrogance in reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of worn petty European mind. Joining me to discuss this, a Robert Hampson, Professor of Modern Literature

at Royal Holloway University of London, Lawrence Davis, Honoris Senior Research Fellow in English at Glasgow University, and visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and Susan Jones fellow and tutor in English at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. Susan Jones, can we just briskly talk a little about Conrad's early life? What do we know about him? Well, we know that he was born in the Ukraine, and it was the part of the Ukraine that was mainly occupied by Polish landowners.

He was born into an extraordinarily complex political situation. His parents were both literary people. His father, Apollo Kozhenyovsky, was a writer and playwright, and he did many translations, including those of Shakespeare and Dickens. So Conrad's first experience of reading Shakespeare and Dickens of English literature would have been through his father's translations. His parents were also involved in political activity.

His father moved to Warsaw, to join an underground group that was hoping to revolt against the Russian hegemony at that time in the 1860s. And he was in fact arrested before the 1863 insurrection. His mother was also arrested and the whole family was exiled to North. northern Russia to Vologda, northeast of Moscow, where they all suffered tremendous privation. In fact, his mother never really recovered her health from this exile. And she died in 1865 when Conrad was only seven years old. His father died when he was 11. So his early life is really colored by

this whole register of an kind of elegiac lamentation. We have in Conrad's memories of his father sitting on the anniversary of his mother's death with her portrait in a room by himself not speaking and not eating. That kind of elegiac registers is very prevalent in his. his later memories. And as you say, it was infused with literature, the house. It was also came from an aristocratic Polish family, but it was settled in the Ukraine,

so the dislocation already there. His father's extraordinarily famous. At his funeral, we are told thousands, some people say 10,000 people attended his father's funeral, led, and Conrad de Boy, this little Levenor boy had to walk in front at this, an image and a fact that, unsurprisingly, he never forgot. and that's a very powerful background, the Revolutionary side.

And then at about 16 or 17, he as it were run away to sea to Marseille and embarked on what became quite successful career as a seaman. Can you again briefly take, why did he go? Well, one of the reasons I think he probably went was that if he had stayed in Russia, he would have been in Poland, he would have been conscripted into the Russian army. I mean, that's a possible reason. He also had a very romantic idea of the sea.

And you have to remember that he was absolutely infused with Polish romantic literature, that his parents had both, you know, given him this idea of the idealism of the Polish romantic national state. But he moved away from that because of, his obvious trauma in losing his parents. He did actually first see the sea with his uncle Tadeus Bobrovsky, that's his mother's uncle, at Odessa. And he, after that, he read a lot of literature

such as Jules Véren and travel writing. And he had this notion that he wanted to go to sea. But when we were finally before we were one about the sea. We are told that when he went to, I'll say it was it, first of all, there's gun running involved with this young boy. There's losing money in Monte Carlo. How much money you've got to

lose as an 18-year-old kid? That doesn't matter, but silly, he lost money. There's suspicion of an attempted suicide attempt. There's quite a lot going on there. But then he buckles down and just to cut to the chase, he becomes a very

good seaman. He goes into the British merchant navy, he ends up first mate and then captain on on extremely adequate, more than adequate ships. So he really knows what he's up about and he travels all over the world. He travels all over the world. He goes to Australia. He goes to the Far East. He goes to Mauritia, Singapore, Bangkok. And he actually only becomes master of one ship, the Otago, which he actually only takes that posed for three months, so he never quite did, he didn't really fulfil his potential as a master or seaman. However, he did realise, I think, quite early on that as Sale was giving way to steamships,

that the employment was going to run out, and he began to think about alternative forms of employment. And not unexpectedly in his background, Robert Hampson, he began to think of writing. Why do you think he wrote in English? It was his third language or his fourth language, which was it in the pecking order? There was Polish, there was Russian. Well, there was Polish and French, which he was brought up with as a Polish aristocrat. And there's very early letters he writes to his father, which is written in French to his father, at about the age of three. It's only about three.

It's about six words, but it's in French. And then at school he would have learned, well, he would have learned German and he would have learned Russian because of the partition of Poland. And you probably learned some Latin at school as well. He's certainly familiar with enough Latin tags in his fiction Moriturite, Salutant, for example, in Heart of Darkness. Yes.

And then he starts learning... Relute those who are going to die. Exactly. Gladiators say to the Caesar of the moment in the arena. Salute us who are going to die. We salute you. That's right. That's right. And then he learns English when he's in the Merchant Navy.

So we've got Polish and we've got French, at least. But why did he decide to write in English? In personal record, he claims that he was adopted by the genius of the language, that it wasn't a decision, it was already determined for him. But against that kind of self-mythologising, that when Almeus Folly, his first novel, was being considered for publication by Fisher-Unwin, he was also discussing with Marguerite Porodowska,

the possibility of collaborating on another version of it in French for Rue de de de Desmond. So it was probably touch and go at that point. But what was the touch then? Why did he, I mean, you are three supreme Conrad scholars. So what we want to know is the business. Why did he decide, thank goodness, to write in the language which I'm attending to speak, rather than in the French that I learned at school? And why did he do that?

Or even in Polish. I assume he was writing in English because he was on board English ships at that point. And certainly that he was carrying the manuscript of Alme's follow with him on those voyages. Can we talk about Heart of Darkness, move towards that now? Can you just give us some context? It was written in the 1890s. it was published first in, let's call it, serial form in 1899, probably published in 1902.

But what's going on in the 1880s, 1890s, that just gives us a context. And maybe we can refer to two things. You can tell us about the Berlin Conference and King Leopold of Belgium. So if we start with the Berlin Conference. The Berlin Conference is 1884, 85. It's called by Bismarck. And it's set up originally by the French and the Germans as a way of controlling and cutting into British possessions in Africa.

but when the conference takes place the attend people at the conference are France, Germany, Holland, Portugal and so on, the main stakeholders were in the colonisation of Africa but once the conference starts Bismarck actually backed Leopold of Belgium who's not there and

what he backs is Leopold at the end of the conference the main person to gain from it is Leopold who gets the Congo. The conference is set up with three aims, explicit aims. One is to free trade on the Congo to free navigation on the Niagara and to set the procedures for the annexation of further properties and further possessions in Africa.

There's a re-energising of colonialism there, isn't there? Can you again just give us the knob of that? Well, to go back in the 1870s, Africa, as hearted up as implies, was still, as far as Europe was concerned, a blank map, it hadn't been, the interior hadn't really been charted. We called it a blank map to be certain persons reaching for that. As the stars of the class of the maths of academics. As far as Europeans were concerned,

as far as European mapping was concerned. By 1884, 85, when the conference takes place, the Scramble for Africa is pretty as well underway that France, Germany, Holland, Britain and so on, have annexed or have formal or informal empires already in process. There's a big push towards that then, with, on the one hand in Britain with Lord Salisbury and the policy of from Cape to Cairo

and from Niagara to Nile. So there's a large kind of territorial ambition there in Britain. It takes a lot, really. That's, if you think of it. That's a lot of Africa. And the other driver is Leopold and what Leopold is doing in Belgium. Let's just mention King Leopold about him for a moment. He had what was virtually a private empire.

Yes, indeed. in what we let's call it, that was in Congo, that's fair enough for the purposes of this conversation. Can you give us some idea of what that meant private empire and how he ran it? Right. Because that is central to this book. Yes.

Leopold had been very impressed by a book by Jay Money called Java or How to Manage a Colony. And he's impressed by two things in that. One was that it described how a colony that was run by a private company where the principal shareholder was the Dutch King, which obviously appealed to Leopold as a model. And secondly, it was a method of working a colony through forced labor. And he saw ways in which that then reduced your costs if you enslaved your workforce rather than paying them.

It was obviously much better for your balance. So that inspired him to want a colony. And he originally put in an offer to Spain for the Philippines, which was turned down. And they subsequently lost it to America. And then he moved into the Congo. And he moved into the Congo. Partly he sent himself up as a philanthropist. and set up the African Association,

which was a kind of philanthropic organisation. And then he also set up the association for the Congo, which was a private company. But it became noted for its intense brutality. It's calling people criminals but using them as slaves and so on. So we've got that there. Now, just another in place, before we come to the book, Lawrence Davis, this was a time of Livingston.

And Stanley, Dr. Livingstone, I presume, and Conrad, as I understand it, was impressed by and influenced by what Livingstone was attempting to do or had done in Africa. Yes. Conrad makes quite a distinction in the course of the book, as we'll see in a moment, between different ways of colonial work exploitation, however you want to put it. He was very much struck by the enormous publicity given to the Stanley expedition, but there was also great controversy about the conduct of Stanley's... column the way they're behaved on their drive south to find Livingston.

So you have that contrast set up. Stanley had a pretty sinister reputation for cruelty. So we have from even from Conrad's taking on people whom he admired, because he always gave the British Empire the edge and British, Anglo-speaking, Anglo-American speaking people, the edge of this. He's still saying, yes, they might say high ideals, but there's dirty work going on in the... Yes, there's a distinction to be made there, I think, for Conrad, between people like Livingston and people like Stanley, who are very enterprising and ruthless man,

was also creating something like a vast publicity campaign, backed by newspapers in the United States, creating this figure of the noble Stanley, the great hero. It was a similar process going on with Cecil Rhodes. And so there's some ambivalence in Britain about this, there's some ambivalence in Europe about this, But certainly there's the idea out there that the missionaries at least are emissaries of light, as the aunt would say in...

And there's a certain sense, isn't it? Because Conrad himself says after going into the Congo, I was a brute before that, before I went there, and then presumably came back, not a brute. And so there's a sense in which you're civilized or courtarized in this cauldron as well. Can you be court-rised in a cauldron? I think we'll just have to let that pass.

But can we just, can you just refer to that from that? Certainly, yes. I think the Congo made Conrad come alive in some ways morally, if you like. It made him think through a lot of his assumptions about what civilization was, what people actually meant when they said certain things, the huge gap sometimes between high, lofty talk and actual deeds. There's also a great difference between what's being said in the mother country, in the metropolis, and what's being done.

And just finally, and it's the last question before on the book itself, there was a lot of literature about, let's say, the empire, the colonies, in daring to do what we would now call Boyzone, White Brits' Triumph style. Very popular. Captain Marriott, Dray to Haggard, and doing in different ways. Kipling, is that? So how do you do you? Did Conrad, as it were, take that on?

Or did he feel he was taking it on? Did he feel he was part of it, against it, and so on? He doesn't talk about it explicitly. We know that he read a lot of Marriott. He read a lot of Captain Main Reid, who was very popular in the 50s and 60s. But what he does in Heart of Darkness is very different from that. He breaks a lot of the rules.

There's a lot of sensational magazine fiction at the time, which talks a lot about which, quotation marks, witch doctors, juju, and so on and so on. It's very sensational stuff. And if you take any of the 1890s magazines, the Strand, for example, or Chapman's, there's lots and lots of that kind of fiction there. Some of it set in Malaysia, for example, but much of it set in Africa. Then you've got the romantic kind, of the Haggard kind, where you've got journeys into the interior where there's a marvel to be found, a wonderful country, a lost race, empresses, she who must be obeyed, all kinds of possibilities. And again, you don't quite find out in Art of Darkness.

Right. Heart of Darkness, Robert Hampson. This is novella. It's considered to be a great book, and it's been studied by people like yourselves, almost since he came out and read massively. Can you just tell listeners briefly? I outlined the story, Manga's of Congo at the end, as man called Kurtz, supposed to be a great civilized figure, has become god-stroke devil. and so on. The story is very straightforward.

Given what Lawrence has said, what would be the difference when people received heart of darkness to what they'd been getting in terms of novels, or anything really, about the colonial experience? I think one difference would be, as Lawrence

was suggesting, that this isn't a story of triumph. And it's not a story of the Europeans triumphing in this case in Africa, which is similar to what Conraded and the Simvers' early fictions in Malaysia, that one of the unsettling things was that these were not stories about the triumphant white man. On the other hand, what does it play into is another narrative which appears later,

which is the narrative of the white man who degenerates in the tropics and all goes native. There's another kind of narrative, though, which was a later version and reflected anxieties about what happens to Europeans when they get too close to other cultures. Do you think there's a tension between what he found when he himself went up there because he kept notebooks, he made observations, and he went there? and although he never liked to say it was the Belgian Congo and got very upset when somebody said, look, it really is. He said it was just a place,

a river that led into sort of west of Africa, went deep into the... That'll do, well, which is fair enough. It's his fiction. He can nominate what his fiction is. That's his right. It's a fiction writer. But was there this...

Did he himself feel this tension? That remark struck me very much reading for this programme. I was a brute before I went there. It's a big thing for... say, isn't it? I mean, he doesn't, he'd never said anything lightly, so. Yeah. Well, I think what, what he experienced in the Congo is he could not possibly have foreseen. I think just the sheer horror of what was being done to the Africans by the, by the, forks, by the force, by Leopold's forces in the Congo, was devastating for him. And also what he saw of the Europeans

around him, which comes across in the people in the central station, the kind of values they're living by, I think. Laurence, I come back to you, one moment, says, but, but, Lawrence, he writes a story within a story. We meet Marlowe. We met before, anyway, meet Marlowe, the seaman, who has this, looks after this little boat, the captain's it first met, and then he tells the story. And more or less 95% of the time, he said, but now and then he breaks off. And the narrator comes in and said, well, Marlowe looked up and at the stars,

and I realize most people who are telling the story to him were asleep and that sort of thing. But it goes in that way. Now, what's the advice? Why did you do that? What's the advantage of that for Conrad? Well, it's a very traditional means of framing a story used very untraditionally. For a start, as the outer narrator says, Marlow's stories are very strange. They're not like Siemens yarns.

You can't just crack open the nut and see the story. Marlowe's very tentative in many ways. He's trying to make sense of something. He's also trying to talk about horrific experiences sometime after the event, and that's one of the ways in which there's a parallel between Marlowe and Conrad. There are a lot of differences too. But Conrad couldn't talk about these experiences in the Congo for years. He used other experiences in his fiction.

There is actually a story called an outpost of progress two years earlier. You couldn't talk about them because he'd been too afflicted by them. Yes, yes, yes. I've talked to psychiatrists about this who've said, aha, what we've got here is some kind of post-traumatic stress, that reluctance to talk about what you've seen. and you've got an audience that isn't paying attention to some extent except for that narrator.

Can I come to Susan? Can you flesh that eye? We've been taken by Lawrence here into something into the heart of the book in a way. What is he saying? What is Marlowe saying that is so terrible, as it were, for the reader and for Marlowe himself? Well, he... Can you just give it some examples, as it were, from the reading that you put on it? Yes.

Well, I think he's... What he's trying to do is to put the onus of interpretation onto the reader to say this, you know, supreme moment of complete knowledge, which is what Marlowe calls Cootes' recognition of the horror, the horror. It's something that is actually unnameable. It's as if he's... The horror of the situation. The horror of the situation.

The situation... The whole thing, yeah. Of the whole thing, of the fact that Coots has given in to... his desires, his earthly, material desires to, you know, to subjugate the natives and to gain a lot of ivory, you know, for personal gain. He started off as a civilising force. He started off and he was very much, you know, he, all Europe went to make up courts, said Marlowe, that he was a highly civilised character. And in fact, at the end of the novella, it's suggested that he, He might have been a musician.

He was very gifted. He is simply a voice by the end of the novel that his body actually disintegrates. So this moment of, you know, supreme knowledge that he actually gains is the nothing, is looking into the abyss and going in there. Whereas Marlowe says that he looked into the abyss but stepped back and his narrative trails off into inconclusive dots at the end. And then the great point that the frame narrator makes there

is to show that the men sitting on the boat, you know, look around and they are looking into the heart of an immense darkness, the 10th, towards London. So there is, in fact, an implication of British colonialism there. The darkness of the centre of empire is talking about that. But I just want to nag away at this, Rob Thompson. he published in a largely pro-colonial magazine and yet he's saying very, very unsympathetic things

about white men, not necessarily British, in fact, whatever they are, but he's very, very unsympathetic about the way they are, their morality, as Susan's mentioned, greed and so forth. Again, I'd like to get closer to it. What's he saying that would have been so disturbing in 1900? Right. I think part of what's going on there

are certain kinds of reader trap as well. and there's two different kinds of reader trap. One is that... Reader trap? Yes. Can you just open that up a bit? Right. There's ways in which he sets traps for his reader,

and there's two different traps he sets. One trap is where he makes statements, or Marley makes statements which are uncomfortable. So, for example, this also has been one of the dark places of the earth, or when he talks about himself having a civilising mission to intrude on the homes of his audience, so that there are words which are used, which kind of resonate awkwardly for the,

for the conservative reader. And the other kind of trap is where he deliberately misleads rather than just creates an uncertainty or doubt. So, for example, when he talks about the Romans in Britain, that comes comfortably, uncomfortably close to home. And in a way, contains already in miniature the entire story about what's going on in the Congo, in terms of both the treatment of the local people,

but also in terms of the exploitation, and also in terms of the way in which languages and things are projected on to the local people. So when he talks about savagery and the savages are in the Thames Valley, that's kind of awkward for the audience, for the readership. But the trap, for example, is he then talks about how British imperialism is different from Roman imperialism. He kind of backs away from the comparison and says, we will be more efficient. And then he then defines colonialism in terms of aggravated murders, so efficiency becomes problematic in that context. And then he kind of reassures again by saying what's important is the redeeming idea.

and then trails off, and we think there's going to be some redeeming idea in the story he tells, but he stops after saying, so he'd set up and bow down before, so the story's actually about the opposite. Just for thanks, I'll come back a moment to him. I just want to get to Kurtz, because we're going to wait as long to get to Kurtz as Conrad does in his book. And Kurtz comes towards the very, very end. He's mentioned quite a few times, but the appearance of Kurtz and the presence, the active presence of Kurtz, is towards the very end of the novel, isn't it? Now, I've said perhaps to, you know, too briefly really, that he was, can you just tell us about what you think was the most important thing about Kurtz?

And first of all, why did Conrad keep him so far? Why does he take so long to get to Kurtz? Because he wants to show Kurtz working away on Marla's imagination, imagining that voice, discoursing. And it's a tremendous irony here because what will impress Marla most, the famous words the horror the horror and he's imagined before that some kind of lofty discourse it's presented earlier on in terms of the report to the Society for the Suppression

of Savage Customs which uses this lofty vocabulary very much like the sort of thing you could see in many Kurtz's paper so called paper and it's you can see a lot of that sort of thing in the British press of the time and Marlow says he took me with me he

he sawed there's a tremendous irony there because clearly he's He's going off into the incomprehensible, the grand abstractions. But the one illuminating thing is the post-scriptum, exterminate all the brutes. So, Kurtz has written the 17-page document, very, very high-minded, about how to treat the people that one encounters in, let's call it, the Congo. And then at some stage later, he's called exterminate the brutes across it. So this, if one, anything, represents a massive change in Kurtz.

Now, let's get to the heart of the change. Okay. And then I know Susan will. are coming on this. Can you just lead us into this? There's a great deal of discussion going on in the late 19th century about whether it's possible for evolution to go backwards, for people to degenerate.

And Malo actually sees Coots trying to crawl towards the forest. Literally, yeah. Yes, yes. It also turns out that Coot's unusual methods have extended beyond the usual brutality of whipping and hanging and hand chopping and so on that was going to. on in the Congo, going so far as to preside over certain rights, in other words, to try to deify himself. And he's become extraordinarily obsessed with possession, my ivory, my intended.

His basis of his wealth is the collection of ivory, and of his fame, the fact that he's collected collect more ivory than anybody else. Right. Yes. Yes. So there's this tremendous grandeur and huge opinion of himself, this greed. He's hollow. he's trying to fill himself up. There's that motif running through the book of internal emptiness.

We've said two or three times, but I'm not particularly counting Susan Jones, these most famous lines in this book are The Horror, the Horror. Can you take us to those lines? Do you decide how we get to those lines and why they're so powerful and why, I mean they're powerful lines anyway, but still why they are so key and memorable in the book? I think partly because Conrad is, is not writing a strictly realist story.

The story is metafictional in a way. And that those words are so powerful because they remind us of all those European stories we already know, the Dantian story of moving towards hell, the inferno. They remind us of the Faustian overreaching. I mean the moment of the horror, the horror is very like Marlowe's last, Marlowe's Faust's last speech, you know, yet one bare hour.

I am in hell, nor am I out of it. This is hell, sorry. This is hell, nor am I out of it. So it's the horror, I think that partly Conrad is taking us through a kind of a reading lesson, you know, in understanding those things that we already know about. What do you think it's meant when he said the horror of the horror? There has been much discussion, not least in the three papers I've had from you three. And my own thing. So what horror is he taught in the horror of what? I mean, one can fill in all sorts of it.

But obviously, you've been the lifetime of thinking. What do you think it was? I think it means it's the horror of the bathos that actually comes out of, that is generated by too much power, by overreaching. Do you agree, Robert? No.

I think what's important is what you're saying is that the horror is open to interpretation by the reader. In a sense, there's a moment in Tarkovsky's film, Solaris, where the camera moves over the shoulder of one of the characters as he's contemplating the most horrific thing, and the screen goes black. And at that moment, you project your deepest fear onto that blackness, onto that blankness.

And that's what happens here, I think, with the horror of the horror. But what's important is that it's a moral statement, whatever it means, which is the difference then from the manager saying, it's an unsound method of trade. And those different discourses, I think, are very important as part of the conclusion. There's a great deal about eloquence in this story. Coates is famous for his eloquence.

Marlowe is notorious. for his own adjectival insistence, as one critic's called it. And yet the most eloquent moment is this succinct, the horror, the horror, which you can take as everything from the reaction of a man who's facing death and who sees his career as a sham, right through to a horror of being in a vast universe where it's very hard to find any meaning. There's a great emphasis on scale in this work,

on the time scale and the geographical scale. No, I mean, but surely that is, In a way, it is a kind, I mean, it's a gesturing towards a grand tragic ending, but it is pathetic, I mean, to go back to my point, that it comes back. It draws you into the, the awful thing about the horror is that it is so real that we understand what the possibility, the potential of overreaching in that way, this commuting of the word of God for the horror.

But doesn't you mean the horror of himself? There he was, a man of civilized, could have been a great musician. Wittell, could have been very eloquent, could have been all sorts of, had all sorts of principalities of intellect in the Western world, goes there and becomes a savage tribal chief in God. I use tribal, not in an African sense,

but in an even older anthropological sense, to be worshipped, to be in command, to terrify thousands of people to do his will, and the horror of what he has become. Exactly. It's as simple as that. It's not as simple as that, but that's sort of basic. On one level, it is very simple.

On another level it opens out to endless interpretations. We've got time for a few of those interpretations. Let's start with interpretation by Chinoa Achebe, the Nigerian writer, who accused Conrad of arrogance in reducing Africa to a prop for the degeneration of a degenerate European. What's your response to that, Robert Hampson? Right. Achab is both right and wrong. I think what's important is the context in which he says that

and the context is in 1970s of America that Conrad's heart of darkness is a standard text on all modern literature courses but the way which it's taught is as a psychological work it's taught precisely as he says as a novel about the breakdown of a European what's left out entirely in the interpretations

in that period is Africa and so Achévi is very important for bringing Africa back reminding us this although Conrad is ambiguous about where it's set that nevertheless there is an African history that has to be put back in. Where he's wrong there, I think, is where he refuses to see

there's a distance between Malo and Conrad, that Lawrence has already referred to ways in which Morrow is and is not Conrad, and the ways of which he's not Conrad, I think, sets up the discourse that Molo produces in the context of the novel for our criticism. So that Malu used the kind of language

that would be used by an Englishman who is complicit with that colonial enterprise, which is what he has been, speaking to other people who's pastors, one of complicity with colonialism. So putting it in a different way, I'm sorry, I'd please excuse my simplicity. It's to say, look, what Marlowe is is a fictional character,

and the views of Marlowe are not the views of Conrad. Exactly. And Marlowe is allowed to be a fictional aberrant. He can lie to be what he is, because he's a fit, whatever, the writer wants him to be, and to say, oh, this is therefore the writer, this is there for the book, is just, it is not, doesn't take you very far.

And in contemporary terms, Conrad, in terms of an 1890s, Conrad was not a racist in those terms, because he believed not that there were separate races, but that he believed there was a common humanity. And he insists over and over again, even in Art of Darkness, that there's a common humanity. It's surprising how widespread it still was massive. I mean, even the Fabian socialist shore, when the Brits went to Chinese, talked about the English as a superior brace or power. It's deeply better. Lawrence, do you want to talk about the reaction to it? if you take us through one or two reactions from the time.

One very important early reaction is that there's a campaign going on to tackle the Belgians, the Congo Reform Association, led by Roger Casement, whom Conrad had met in the Congo, and by Edie Morrell. And they actually found Hard of Darkness very valuable in illustrating what they were doing. The first rumblings of discontent over the Congo come early. An outpost to progress appeared in a magazine

that had also published a very long critique by Sir Charles Dilk of Belgian work. But from quite early on, that anti-imperialist agenda, or anti-Belgian agenda, at least, was picked up. But you also get the more lurid ones. The poet Arthur Simmons, for example, talks about heart of darkness

in terms of savage rights and lurid scenes by torchlight and drumming and so on and so on. And lots of other people didn't know what to make of it. Conrad has a dilemma here. He came out of a world of political influence, and suffering and cruelty. It was very hard to imagine in Britain, easier to imagine in Ireland, I think.

And so it's very clear that even a lot of Conrad's friends, people like John Galsworthy, had a great deal of difficulty understanding what Conrad was talking about. And then there's a long period, as Robert was saying, of interpreting the book entirely without the African backdrop, as a matter of ethical choices in the British tradition, or as a matter of psychological or metaphysical questing in an American tradition. And then there's a turn back and a renewed awareness that, yes, this has a political context. It's not the whole boat, but it's an enormously important part of it. What legacy would you like to bring to bear at this point in the conversation?

Well, I was going to follow on from Lawrence's point there, that actually what Conrad does in that novella is to play with all these contemporary tropes. I think a very good example of that is his representation of Kutz's mistress, the black woman, who in many ways looks like a very typical reading of the savage or the native in Africa, where you will have seen illustrations of this kind of thing. Sir Richard Burton's anthropological writings on Dahomey, for example, is talking about the Amazon dances there, which reminds one very much of the black woman's movement there.

But the thing that Conrad does, he puts a skeptical turn on this by giving her a kind of integrity where she stops and she engages, she's striding along the bank, at the central station, just before Marlowe meets Coates. and she thrust her arms in the air,

a kind of transcendent gesture, and she engages with her eyes, the gaze of the men on the boat. There's no explanation there. There's something beyond language. It seems to me that the legacy of Conrad's novella there is to delineate the failure of language. That comes through inside the book itself.

He talks about it being a dream, the whole thing being a dream subjective. He lives with a dream alone. Robert, you wanted to come out. I was going to say another issue, though, is that Marlowe can't communicate with the African woman. He doesn't speak the African language. There's a very different impression of her that's given by the harlequin, who can speak the local language,

who talks by having an argument with her about clothing, about cloth, material. And the little story he tells gives a very different impression of this woman. Marlowe has to present her iconically because he can't talk to her. He has no language. And yet he is acknowledging that she does have a history and a language. everybody, really, everybody listening will know about Apocalypse Now and the influence that the heart of darkness had on the making of that, the chances of that film.

Is that it's the most obvious legacy in terms of a work, Lawrence, or others you would refer to? There are lots of works that turn in some way on Conrad. There are novels by Gugi Wathiongo, for example, which very much reflect Gugi's reading of Conrad, of Wilson Harris from the Caribbean, from Guyana. There are lots of reworkings of Conrad. Graham Green would be another example of that.

So there's that presence. There's the journalistic presence. It's noticeable how often journalists talking about Africa turn to that phrase as a summing up. And it's, of course, a quarter of a 16th of questions about African traditions, politics, a whole continent, enormous complexity. But people are always falling back on that phrase, the heart of darkness.

And on those images of... Well, they dropped a definite article, didn't they? Well, yes, yes, exactly. And it makes it more mobile in some ways. The other thing is the legacy of thinking about Coots and there's a huge range from people like Lionel Trilling who saw Coots

as a genius and takes literally what I think is a very ironic remark of Mahler's about Coots being a remarkable man, right through to the interpretations that say, no, he's not a great talent, and Monke. He's a jack of all trades. He could have been a journalist, a politician on the popular side. Conrad loathed popular journalism. The tabloid press was just starting.

He was ready to do, literally. Yeah, it was broadsheet in form at the time, but it was just starting, promoting in England and America and in France and Germany, a very aggressive form of colonialism. Coots is a fraud in many ways, and he's banal. One of the extraordinary things about this work is that it makes a banal figure like Coors. into somebody memorable. You can have to be brief. It's also important that he is an idealist and that what you see is the man who has ideals,

which then reveal within themselves at the break open to reveal the will to power that that desire to do good has inside it. Well, thank you very much, Robert Hampson, Lawrence Davis, and Susan Jones. That was fascinating. Next week on in our time, well, it's unique, actually, we're going out the studio, up to the birthplace of William Wilberforce

to look at that radical world-changing figure, that remarkable man. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.