The Rest Is History - 541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

“The horror! The horror!” Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ - the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's ‘Apocalypse Now’ - is one of the most celebrated literary works of all time, though now increasingly contentious. Based on Conrad’s own terrible journey into the Congo in 1890, and the horrors he beheld there while it was under the sway of King Leopold of Belgium’s monstrous regime, the novella, published in 1899, delves into man’s capacity for evil - the primal beast lurking beneath the surface of all humans - and has long stood as the preeminent cultural representation of European colonialism. It tells the story of Mr Kurtz, a great ivory trader who has disappeared deep into the African interior, and appears to have lost his mind, having penetrated some terrifying, ancient truth. Initially, Conrad’s disturbing account was viewed as the ultimate attack on imperialism, though aspects of the novella have also invited accusations of racism and imperialism, in part owed to Conrad’s own sympathy for Empire. So what is the truth at the heart of 'Heart of Darkness'? And who was Joseph Conrad himself? What horrors did he behold to have inspired such a poignant account of the nightmares within and without…? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’ and the real life events that inspired it, and the long term reverberations of the novella in culture and literary criticism today. EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Editor: Jack Meek Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hi everybody, Dominic Sambrook from The Rest is History here. Now as you can probably tell from the noise of the pool, I am joined by friend of the show, Anthony Scaramucci, who is on his island surrounded by the luxurious trappings of wealthy, is of course the host of The Rest is Politics US and Anthony and I have a very special announcement. On Sunday the 30th of March, Anthony is over in the UK, and we have decided to do a live show together at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London.

Haven't we, Anthony? We have. You know, and thank God I'm not British, because the Brits actually admire my American Arrivista attitude about life, okay? But in any event, okay, it'd be the first time on stage with Dominic. I am very excited.

We're gonna be doing a show on US political history called The Rest is Assassinations, from Lincoln to JFK. But Dominic and I both know on the 30th of March, 2025, it's the 44th anniversary of the attempted assassination on Ronald Reagan. So there's not only assassinations here, which are terrible, but there's an attempted assassination, several of them, Dominic, right, throughout US history. And so we're excited to go through this and what the impacts were on American history and global history.

Right. And there's so many great stories. So obviously JFK, you and I disagree about JFK because I of course think it was Lee Hovey Oswald acting alone and you think differently. But there are other stories. You mentioned attempted assassinations. So for example, FDR, FDR was almost shot before his inauguration in 1933. And that's an attempted assassination that really could have changed the course of history,

because no FDR, does the United States still enter the Second World War? Does the story of the 20th century play out completely differently? So there was so much to talk about, and I'm really, really looking forward to doing it. What are you looking forward to most, Anthony? Well, I mean, all of that,

but I wanna delve into a little bit of the Secret Service and some of the men in that service. Clint Hill is still alive. He was riding alongside of Jackie and John Kennedy on the 22nd of November in 1963. And we'll talk about what he saw. We'll talk about what other agents have written about recently.

And of course, now that Donald Trump is releasing the JFK assassination files, I think there'll be a lot to talk about there. The people coming to the show are going to learn things that have never been said or heard before. So the listeners, if you're not excited by that, I don't know what would excite you, frankly. So the good news is pre-sale tickets are available this Friday, the 21st of February from 10

o'clock in the morning exclusively for our Rest is History club members. You will get an email with the link before the sale begins and if you're not a member of the Rest is History club just go to therestishistory.com to sign up and to get your email with the link. General sale for this event will be open to the public on Monday the 24th of February at 10 a.m. UK time. We'll send out the link to our mailing list in the morning as well as posting it on the rest is history and the rest is politics US's social media feeds. So if you're a patriotic Brit who loves the special relationship, if you're an American living in London, or if you're an American who just loves getting on planes across the Atlantic to see the

very highest quality entertainment, we absolutely expect to see you there in the West End on Sunday, the 30th of March. And to tell you the truth, what I'm really hoping is that on the night, Anthony will finally reveal the truth behind the JFK assassination. Well, I'm probably going to Guantanamo for many reasons, Dominic, but that would be probably the top one. But anyway, we hope to see you there. I think you'll learn a lot. There'll be a lot of insight we'll provide and also provide great context on American and British and global history. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea

with twice the speed of our upward progress. And Kurtz's life was running swiftly too, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time. Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power,

of craven terror, of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision. He cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath. twice, a cry that was no more than a breath. The horror, the horror. So that was Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, first published in Blackwoods magazine in 1899, and one of the most celebrated novellas, not just in English, but full stop, ever written. We are not not the rest is literature, but this is a book that quite aside from its incredible literary value is also well worth doing in a history podcast for reasons that we have been touching on Dominic throughout the series that we've just finished about the Belgian Congo because at the heart of darkness is all the history,

all the horror, as Kurtz might put it as he dies, that we have been talking about in those three episodes. Absolutely, Tom. Yes. Hi, everybody. So, Heart of Darkness, Conrad's great novel or novella, has kind of overshadowed the series that we've done in the Congress. Yeah.

It would be weird not to have an episode talking about it because it's arguably one of the most influential works of literature written in the last 120 years or so. We are not the rest is literature, but purely in a literary sense, in a kind of purely literary cultural sense, it's an enormously important book. It's a brilliant example of literary modernism. The prose is very dreamlike, It's like a hallucination. It's very overwrought. There are shifts in time, narrators within the raters. And the effect of all this is when you're reading it, it's quite a short book, isn't it Tom? But you feel unsettled the whole time. There's a kind of sense of anxiety and it's very influential. So T.S. Eliot, he, the great poet, he loved Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

He had a poem called The Hollow Men that begins with a quotation later on in the book, Mr. Kurtz, he dead. And that passage that you read at the beginning, ending with those famous words, the horror, the horror, he wanted that, didn't he, as his original epigraph for his great poem, The Wasteland? Will Barron Well, I mean, the thing about Heart of Darkness is it's incredibly quotable. We have been quoting it throughout this series and things like The Horror of the Horror of Mr. Kurtz, He Dead. I mean, Eliot, who has a kind of magpie eye for brilliant snatches of phrasing. I mean, it's not surprising that he would fix on it. And

I wonder also, The Wasteland is a poem about the First World War, if you like, the heart of darkness that had been revealed within European civilization. And I think that there is a sense in which one of the reasons that Heart of Darkness has the status it does is it has slightly has the quality of prophecy because that Heart of Darkness that is located in Belgian Congo turns out to have been a prophecy of the darkness that will engulf Europe in 1914. Yeah, I completely agree with you Tom, I think it's a really good point. I think you can argue the Heart of Darkness prefigures so much of the kind of cultural commentary of the 20th century about, and we'll get onto this in the second half,

about man's capacity for evil. Fartic, you might call it. Exactly. Gazing into the future and seeing the horrors that await. Now if you're not interested in literature at all, you may be thinking, well, so what, who cares? I mean, here's a good answer to that. Heart of Darkness, I would argue, is by far the preeminent cultural representation

of Western imperialism, particularly in Africa. So it's King Solomon's minds. I think it's heart of darkness now. So we did, we, I think heart of darkness and King Solomon's minds are kind of the polar opposites, aren't they? Yeah, they really are. King Solomon's minds is the journey into the heart of Africa that is swashbuckling, that is ultimately an optimistic story, that is jolly, that never questions, I think, ultimately,

the right of the adventurous to be there. This is an adventure that goes horribly wrong. And it's very much about the dark side of that. And also it's the fact that you keep expecting adventure type themes to kick in and they never quite do or if they do in a distorted and hallucinatory way. And to read them as a pairing I think is, I mean, really fascinating. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more.

And actually rather liking Solomon's Minds, Heart of Darkness has had a massive cultural footprint. So everything from video games like the Far cry series which basically riffs on how to don this to most famously frances coppers film apocalypse now. Which came out in nineteen seventy nine and transpose is it to vietnam war and apocalypse now even the making of it turned out to be a kind of riff on how to Darkness because they made a film about the making of it called Hearts of Darkness. And very famously, Francis Ford Coppola said about the making of Apocalypse Now, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane. Yeah, the horror, the horror. Absolutely, absolutely.

And then there's a third dimension, I think, of this book that makes it incredibly interesting. And that is that initially, in the first few decades after its publication, it was seen as a book that was very critical of imperialism. It was seen as the great literary assault on the civilizing mission. Because am I right that imperialism is a word that is coming into common use exactly at the time when Conrad is writing this? Exactly. 1890s, 1900s is the high point of the discourse as it were of imperialism, both pro and anti. But now in the 21st century, Heart of Darkness is seen not as an attack on imperialism by

a lot of critics, but as an example of it as a book that is fundamentally imperialistic and above all, very racist. And it's probably the one book that has come to symbolize the attack on the Western canon, I suppose you might call it, or the criticism of the Western canon. So if you're at all interested in what people think about imperialism, Europe in the world, literary history, cultural history in the last century, Heart of Darkness is at the center of a lot of those kind of debates, isn't it? So we'll get into a lot of these issues, particularly in the second half. But in the first half,

I think we should set out two things. The first of all is who is Joseph Conrad and what's he doing in the Congo at all to inspire this book? And secondly, what is the book about for people who don't know? So just very, very quickly, very swiftly to summarize, if you have never read the book, it's the story of a sea captain called Marlow. He takes a steamboat up the Congo and he's looking for a brilliant agent of the company of this what appears to be a concession company Called mr. Kurtz Who's a great ivory trader? He's up there in the interior and he seems to have lost his marbles and

When Marlow gets there he finds out that all kinds of stuff has been going on Yeah, all kinds of stuff has been going on will unpick All kinds of stuff has been going on. We'll unpick all that a bit later on. Now, Conrad was asked, what's the book about? And he said, heart of darkness is experience pushed a little and only very little beyond the actual facts of the case. In other words, you really want to understand what it's about. It's a, it's a true story. It's a, it's a true story exaggerated.

So it's autobiographical, but it's also a portrait of a real political situation. Exactly. And the political situation is what we've been talking about in the previous three episodes. Exactly. So let's start with Conrad himself. His name actually isn't, I mean, Joseph Conrad's fiction is full of kind of halls of mirrors and, you know, stories within stories. His name actually isn't Joseph Konrad. His name is Jozef Teodor Konrad Kozianowski and he was born to a Polish noble family and a impoverished family in what's now Ukraine in 1857. And this was a very rural world that had once

been part of the eastern borderlands of Poland and has now been swallowed up by the Russian Empire. His mother Ava died when he was seven. His father, who had the brilliant name Apollo, who was a poet. I love that. Yeah. And a Polish revolutionary. So he's a tremendous man, Apollo Korzieniewski.

He died when Joseph was 11. So he's brought up by relatives. He's very bored at school. He's obviously, you know, he's not in the best of form. And he says he wants to go to see, he wants to go away to see. Because apparently Dominic, I read that this in part was because his father had been a kind of political prisoner. That's right.

And as such, as the son of a political prisoner, he was liable for a possible 25 year term of conscription into the Russian army. Yes. And so that's one of the reasons why he decides to go abroad. And I suppose he's specific, he ends up in Marseille, doesn't he? And France is the great refuge for Polish refugees in this period. Yes. Now, if you want to become a sailor, you go to France and Marseille would be the obvious place.

Exactly. Exactly right. So in 1874, his relatives club together and they get together the money to send him to what is he 1617 to send him to Marseille to join the French merchant Marine. This is a weird thing that he shoots himself. Yeah, he's a chest, but it seems to have been a little bit performative. Yeah. As I guess so much is in his fiction. I think that's absolutely right. And I think he's come out as always a very, I think a troubled man is too strong, but

he is a man with a deep sense, a deep melancholy to him, I think throughout his life. He sails all over the world, Caribbean, South America, and then he goes up in the world. He joins the British merchant Marine and he stays there for until 1889. And he has all kinds of adventures all over the world. He goes to Australia. He goes to Bangkok he goes to India Singapore and you can see a lot of that reflected in his fiction lots of tales of Adventure in the South Seas and all of this Yeah

and this is the thing about him is that he is riffing on the same themes as kind of boys own adventurers as You know Ryder Haggard all this kind of ripping yarns and yet they're always stranger and darker and more hallucinatory than any of those. They are indeed exactly so there is something when his books first came out people reviewed them as kind of slightly sea stories you know classic tales of the sea but a bit weirder than usual and only over time did people kind of work out exactly what he was doing. So this point is still using the name Korzhonovsky.

English is his third language. I mean, this is the amazing thing. He starts writing in the late 1880s. He writes his stories in English. But I mean, imagine writing in your third language. He, he seems not to have spoken English at all before he was 21. I mean, it's just unbelievable that he learns it so fluently that he can write some of the masterpieces of English prose. Although I

gather, did you see the comment on Conrad's English by Ford Maddox Ford, his words absolutely exact as the meaning, but his accentuation so faulty that he was at times difficult to understand. People have said the same about us. I think specifically Tom, they've said it about you, to be fair. I think occasionally you as well. I accept maybe, maybe me more often than you. Tom who speaks English like it's his third language. But Conrad as a man, he's very reserved.

He's very sensitive. He has this deep sense of irony and kind of skepticism that runs through everything he does. Very skeptical about human nature. He is intensely, in many ways, intensely conservative. Indeed, quite anti-democratic in many ways. When people sometimes say, you can't create great art or great literature, you know, if you're of a very reactionary disposition, I think Conrad is one of those people who

probably proves that comprehensively wrong. Anyway, 1889 has been off in the South Seas. He comes back to London, he starts writing his first novel, Almey's Volley. Then at the beginning of 1890, he goes for the first time back to his homeland, Ukraine. And it doesn't go well. He doesn't get on with his family when they're there. You can imagine, well imagine, he's probably built it up in his mind about what it would be like. It's very disappointing because he's quite aloof

and because he's had all these strange experiences, he doesn't quite fit. Well, also he's got sea legs now, hasn't he? You think he's wobbling all over the place in the... Well, yes, but I mean, he's in the middle, surrounded by land, surrounded by the great Eurasian land mass. He must, do you think he's got a yearning for the sea? I don't know, maybe I mean, he's in the middle surrounded by land, surrounded by the great Eurasian landmass. He must, do you think he's got a yearning for the sea?

I don't know. Maybe I'm being over romantic. Possibly. Because when he gets back and it's disappointing, the first thing he does is to go to sea. Now before he'd gone to Ukraine, he'd been talking to a company in Brussels, a Belgian shipping firm about joining one of their ships and he's actually already signed a contract. Now this company, people we reminded of all these companies from the episode we did about

E.D. Morrell, all these steamship companies with concessions and contracts. This company is called the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut Congo. So it's handling the commerce from the upper Congo and it had been founded a year earlier to export ivory and rubber from the interior. So it runs a steamer service and it has a series of trading stations of its own. And why does Conrad sign up with this company? Well, obviously one reason is he needs the money. He's effectively, you know, a mercenary.

He will take the money to go on various voyages all over the world. know, a mercenary, he will take the money to go on various voyages all over the world. But as his great biographer, Zdryswof Nida, who's a Pole, his book is absolutely, it's quite hard to get hold of. Is this your third language, Polish? Yeah, exactly. Exactly, Tom. Fluent pronunciation there. Yeah, thank you.

It's not like I've been preparing for hours. Nida points out that Konrad had always dreamed of Africa. As a boy in Ukraine, aged about nine, he had pointed his finger at a map where there was a blank space as there was in those days. And he had said, when I grow up, I'd like to go there. Now he gives that line to Marlow, doesn't he? In the Heart of Darkness. And there's no reason to doubt that Conrad himself thought like that.

Anyway, there's also no reason to believe, by the way, that he doubts the civilizing mission because he actually writes about this and lets us to his uncle at the same time. Anyway, May 1890, the 10th of May, he boards the ship, the SS Ville de Massey-aux-Aubordeaux, for this journey that his biographer Nida says is the most traumatic journey of his life. They go off down the coast of Africa, even before they get to the Congo, one passenger says to him, you're going to the Congo. That's an absolute nightmare. That's not what you want to hear, is it? Yeah.

He says basically everybody who goes there, they either die or they come home early because it's so terrible. And Conrad actually says, and I quote, I'm a Polish nobleman cased in British tar. Does it get better than that? No, that's the best thing you can possibly be. So anyway, about a month later, they reach the capital of the Congo Free State, Boma. So it's just 50 miles inland. And here, if people remember from the previous episodes, there's the various complicated

ways you have to move up the river. Because of the rapids and all that Malaki. So he gets a steamer up river to Matadi and Matadi is the last point before the rapids where you have to get off. Now at Matadi, he meets somebody that we talked about on Monday. And this is somebody who we're going to be hearing about from John Banville in next week's bonus episode. And this is Roger Casement.

about from John Banville in next week's bonus episode, and this is Roger Casement. So the British Consul, great Irish Patriots, an amazing character. And Conrad really took to Casement, didn't he? He said it's a great pleasure to have met him. He thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic. And there's a lot of talk that you find that Conrad, about Conrad and Casement and what they did. Conrad himself seems to have misremembered what they did. He said, we shared a room together.

They undoubtedly didn't because Casement wasn't there for a lot of the time. But they definitely spent a lot of time together and they probably made trips together to see some of the local villages, to find porters and things to carry all Conrad's stuff. So I think it's probably at this point that Conrad starts to see that some of the terrible scenes that we've quoted in the previous episodes. So for example, Tom, you read that passage about the six blokes with baskets of earth on their heads. Do you want to remind us of that?

Some of the horror? Yeah. So I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope, each had an iron collar on his neck and all were connected together with a chain whose bite swung between them rhythmically clanking and then comes to a grove and sees people there dying, black shapes, black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. And of course, the justification that Leopold is giving for this effectively slave labour is that it's progressive slave labour, that it will enable the introduction

of Western technology, steam trains, all of that, and then it will ease the burden on the porters. But there's a kind of very ironic spin on this in Heart of Darkness because when Marlowe gets to the top of the rapids wait to look for his steamer, he finds that it's been sunk and he has to dredge it up and they haven't got the bit, the bolts that would enable it to be put together. Yeah. Rivets. The rivets.

You have the sense of even the claims to kind of technological superiority are a kind of sham. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, what does comrade say? He said at one point his book was when he's pitching it to Blackwoods He said it was a portrait of inefficiency and incompetence in there in Africa. It's like getting a train in Britain So right he's on a realm of placement bus. That's what he's on

So he's hangs around with Kacen for a couple of weeks and then they've got the porters and he's ready to start overland from Matadi and he wrote a diary in English in his third language, which gives you some sense of what it was like. Mosquitoes at night when the moon rose heard shouts and drumming in distant villages past a bad night, no water camped on an exposed hillside near a muddy creek. No shade tent on a slope, sun heavy, wretched, night miserably cold, no sleep, mosquitoes. And on they go, and at one point he definitely passes a skeleton tied to a post, which is a very- I mean, imagine seeing that when you-

Yeah. So that's a sign, you know, remember, Conrad is very, very, very well traveled. I mean, admittedly, most of his travels have been at sea. So he hasn't often gone inland in the places he's visited. That's so interesting, isn't it? Because we talked earlier about how to begin with for Europeans, Africa is all about the coast, that they didn't go inland, that they just seemed a waste of effort. about the coast, that they didn't go inland, that it just seemed a waste of effort. And perhaps in that sense, Conrad is kind of emblematic of the transition that European

adventurers make from experiencing Africa as along the coasts and going inland. He's kind of compressing that entire history into his own person. Yeah, I think that's a fair point. And the deeper he goes inland, the more the violence becomes apparent to him. Perhaps violence that you don't see to the same extent on the coast, it's hard to say. So at one point he sees a government official beating porters, blows with sticks, raining hard, stopped it. In other words, he intervenes to break it up.

The 2nd of August he arrives at Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And there, as you mentioned in the novel, his proposed steamer has been damaged. So he has to transfer to another steamer, which is called, with sublime irony, the Hua de Belge. You often read that he's the captain. He's not the captain. There's a guy called Koch, a Dane, who is the captain, and Conrad is going to be the number two. And we know from his correspondence, he's already disillusioned because his uncle Tadeusz writes to him at this point and says, don't walk out on the contracts. You'll lose all your money and you'll get a bad reputation among the companies as somebody who can't be relied upon.

So he's clearly been writing home and saying, I'm at, this is terrible. I'm actually thinking of breaking my contract and his biographers think. This is probably because he's fallen out with a company manager who he's going to have to give a lift to. So he's been traveling with him and the company manager is a Belgian called Camille Delcommune and he really is in heart of darkness because there's the company manager in heart of darkness who is modeled directly on this bloke del commune.

And whose relationship to Kurtz and his plans for Kurtz is kind of twist isn't that? Exactly. So on they go up river, they go very quickly, they're covering a thousand miles in a month. I mean these don't mess around these steamers and on board the ship there's Captain Koch, there's Conrad, there's a mechanic from Belgium, there are 25 African crewmen, Del Commune and three other company agents. And we know from traders accounts that the passage up river it's very lonely. You don't pass many other ships. The countryside is desolate, there are burned out villages, the people are hiding in the bush, depredations of the force public. And

so as Zizewsow Nida says in his biography, the atmosphere of Heart of Darkness clearly is inspired by this kind of oppressive, claustrophobic isolation that Conrad must have felt on this boat going upriver with just the silence and the emptiness. We mentioned this before, but there are kind of prefigurings of the lost world and all those novels and then films where people go back into a prehistoric past and the sense of silence and desolation proceeding some appalling revelation of some saurian bursting out of the jungle or something. I mean Heart of Darkness is much more sophisticated than that but there is, you sense some terror, some horror is waiting.

Definitely do, definitely. So on the first of September they get to the last navigable point on the river. This is what's then called Stanley Falls. Now it's called Kizangani. And this is basically now in the heart of Central Africa. And Conrad wrote later, I said to myself with awe, this is the very spot of my boyish boast. What an end to the idealized realities of a boy's daydreams. So this is the point that he pointed to on the map all those years ago.

And he's got there and the sense of not just crushing disappointment, but more than that, dare I say the horror of what he has seen. Like Musk arriving in Mars. That wasn't a comparison I expected to be honest. Right, they stay there, Stanley falls for about a week, and they pick up the local agent, who's a guy called Klein, a Frenchman, Georges-Antoine Klein. He's in his late 20s. We know very little about him.

He had terrible dysentery, and they decide, well, we're going to take this guy Klein back. So then they turn back. Now Klein died on the return journey. He died after a couple of weeks and his story is clearly the model in some way for the story of Kurtz and Kurtz when Conrad first, you know, sat down and started writing the book, he was called Klein. But apart from that, there is nothing to connect them.

There's no sense that this guy, Klein, was a madman, a bad guy, a guy who'd stared into the depths of the human soul. He's just a French bloke who's got terrible dysentery. But here is the sort of the germ of the idea of Mr. Kurtz, I guess. Anyway, they get back to Kinshasa after about three weeks. And here, Konrad writes to a friend of his back in Belgium called Marguerite Porodowska. And he says to her, I've actually now got terrible dysentery and fever. And I'm incredibly miserable. He says, I regret having come here.

I regret it bitterly. I find everything repugnant. Especially, he says, the people. and he's talking about the Europeans and I am repugnant to them too from the director in Africa who has taken the trouble of telling a good many people of his intense dislike of me down to the lowest mechanic. Basically everybody hates me. Now the interesting thing is he never mentions the Congo itself and the violence in the Congo is a reason for his unhappiness.

And do you think that's he's burying it? Well possibly because Sir Jusrof Nida says in his book and I think this does make sense. He says it's clear he thinks that Conrad had basically failed to hide how unhappy and how shocked he was with what he could see and that the, the other people, the, they'll commune, the other agents saw that and took against him. It was kind of lily livid liberal. Yeah. That he basically is spoiling their fun and he's judging them.

And you can see therefore it would sort of make sense that they would find him repugnant because he says he's a walking rebuke to their project. So he's definitely ill for the next few weeks. Um, and then he vanishes. So Conrad vanished at the paper trail disappears and he vanishes from sight. As Nida puts it, the image becomes confused, blurred, obscure, which is actually very appropriate given the way Conrad writes and actually the next time we come across him, he's back.

He's in Brussels in January 1891 and then next time we see him after that, he's in London. In February, there's no diary entries, there are no letters, there is nothing. And it's as though I think whatever has happened in those last days or weeks in the Congo, he wants to forget it, you know, whatever it is. So it's a kind of epistolary heart of darkness. It is indeed. You know, we don't know.

And I think it's plausible that it's during those last weeks that he really reaches his verdict on the Congo Free State. Yeah. When he attains what he called the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. And there are sort of fragments in later letters and whatnot that give a sense of what he thought. So in 1903, just a few years later, he told his friend Cunningham Graham, a founder of

Tom of the Scottish National Party, so a man with whom you'd have a lot to talk about. He said to Cunningham Graham that Leopold and his Free State agents were, and I quote, a gigantic and obscene beast. So that's fascinating, isn't it? Because again, we're talking about this idea of going into a prehistoric landscape. That is the beast. That is the beast. And he actually ends a letter to Cunningham Graham saying, you know, if you want to find

out about this, you should talk to my mate Roger Casement. He could tell you things, things I've tried to forget, things I never did know. You know, there's this kind of sense of like the stuff at the periphery of his vision, half glimpsed, half understood that's going on. And he doesn't really want to think about it because it's so terrible. And I know we'll come to this, but there is something kind of the Freudian idea of a repressed memory, a darkness that even if you try and repress it, it is kind of bleeding out into your your dreams and your your fantasies.

Absolutely, and the book absolutely has that flavour. So for the next three years, Conrad goes back to the merchant marine, he sails around, and then in 1894, he retires from the sea and he devotes himself to writing. And he writes a couple of novels, and he writes lots of stories and magazines like Blackwoods and the Strand, famously where Sherlock Holmes started. And in the middle of December, 1898,

he starts his third piece for Blackwoods magazine. And he says to the publisher, it's a narrative about a bloke who's on a river in central Africa. I'm thinking of Cornead, the heart of darkness, but the narrative is not at all gloomy. Which is clearly, I mean, that's not true. And he's, he obviously doesn't want the publisher to say, yeah, not for us mates. Yeah. It's like us with the trying to persuade him to do an episode. It's really upbeat and jolly and people will love it. Full of fun. And Comrade says to

him, the theme is the criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling civilizing work in Africa. Now, interestingly, this is Conrad's own thing. He's not been inspired by E.D. Morel's campaign or anything like that because that hasn't even started yet. Hasn't begun, has it? No, nowhere near. So it's obviously something that he feels he has to do or wants to do. And it's presumably the time where everyone still thinks it's brilliant and it's civilizing and hooray. Exactly. Now the most shocking thing for people like us, Tom, is how much Conrad is being paid. Blackwood's paid him £60 for this. So in relative income terms, that's about almost £50,000 today, which is a sign of how well this kind of writing was paid back

then. And how highly rated Conrad is, I assume. I mean, it's not Conan Doyle, I accept, but at this point, he's not that highly rated. There's just so much money in short stories and journalism, far, far more than there is today. Great days. Yeah, great days. So he turns it round by the 6th

of February, he delivers 38,000 words to Blackwells, which I think is quite slow. I think it's pretty fast. That's three weeks work. That is three weeks work. Come on, mate. Anyway, it's published in February, March and April 1899. So just before we go to the break, for people who are not familiar with the book, or need reminding what has he produced? Most accounts that you read say that it's narrated by this guy Marlow. That's actually not true. Marlow is not the narrator. It's Russian dolls, isn't it? Yeah, there are narratives within narratives. So basically, the narrator is part of a group of people who are on this ship, the Nellie, off Gravesend in the Thames, so in England. And night is falling and they're all just hanging around on this boat, but they've

got to wait there for the turn of the tide, haven't they? They can't go home yet. And I think it makes it clear that the narrator in some ways is to be equated with Conrad, because narrator in some ways to be equated with Conrad because this hanging around on a ship on the Thames is exactly what Conrad was doing. And he did it with kind of various mates, one of whom was a company director, one of whom is an accountant, one of whom is a solicitor. And that maps exactly onto the description of the three people with Marlowe in the boat. Yeah. And Marlow is kind of leaning against the mast is sort of sitting down leaning against the mast.

He's a, a sort of weather beaten sort of sea dog, you know, hard face, sea dog character, and he kicks off suddenly they're all just sitting around in a desultory way as night is falling and he doesn't talk about the Congo. He talks about Britain and he says very famously, and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth. And then he starts musing. You mean we, you talked about this time when we did long time ago, when we did an episode about Roman London. I think we opened with this message. Yeah. He says, what must it have been like to be a Roman in Britain?

The feeling, you know, to be sent north from Italy or wherever. And you arrive in Britain and you have this feeling that the savagery, the utter savagery had closed around him. All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. And that of course is very redolent of the Congo. And so also is his account of what it must have been like for a Roman soldier advancing inland here and there, a military camp lost in a wilderness,

like a needle in a bundle of hay. Yeah. Which of course is historically very inaccurate. But then he's very, he's very unsentimental about the Roman empire. He says it was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale and men going at it blind as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. And then he kind of goes on from that to think about empires in general. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means that taking it away from those who have a different

complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only that it's kind of a noble ideal, but in practice. Well, in that he has switched from the Romans to Europeans, hasn't he? He has indeed. He has indeed. And this then leads him to tell them a story. And this is the story of Heart of Darkness. And it's a story set in the past.

So it's not during, it's not set in 1899 when they're getting rubber. It's back in the heyday of ivory. And he says, you know, the word ivory rang in the air. You would think people were praying to it. Of course, that's as we'll discover. Literally true. That's literally true. Marlow, like Conrad is hired to take a steamboat up to the Congo, although the Congo is never

named. Well, Dominic also, I mean, Belgium is never named and Leopold is never named and Brussels is never named. It's what's it's called the white and sepulchre. Yeah. The sepulchre city or something. Exactly. Yeah. So, but it's clear, you know, there's no, it's clear, I think, what, where we're talking about. But I suppose it kind of universalizes it a bit. Yes, I think so. I mean, I think so.

Exactly. Yeah. I think it definitely universalizes it, which is why I think it's completely reasonable to set it in Vietnam in apocalypse now or whatever. So his job is to go up the river to collect this agent, Mr. Kurtz from the interior. Everybody says to him, are you going to see Mr. Kurtz? Mr. Kurtz is absolutely brilliant. Mr. Kurtz is, Mr. Kurtz, he's half English, he's half French.

Although people say all Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz. He's a brilliant writer. He's painted this oil, beautiful oil sketch of a woman holding a torch, kind of a figure of progress, of course. He is, and I quote, an emissary of pity and science and progress. He is the enlightenment. He is Western civilization. You know, he's, he's just absolutely brilliant. But he is also praised as the man who gets as much ivory as all the other agents put together. So he is also being praised for his acquisitiveness and whatever qualities are required to obtain

that amount of ivory. Yeah. So there is a darkness there right from the start. There is indeed. And quite early on, Marlow starts to get some kind of sense that all is not well with Mr. Kurtz. And at one point later on, not well with Mr. Kurtz. And at one point later on, he discovers that Mr. Kurtz has written this enormous report for the international society for the

suppression of savage customs. And it's a brilliant piece of work. You know, it's amazingly well written, but it ends with this weird scrawled phrase, exterminate all the brutes. Which kind of sets alarm bells ringing I think another of those kind of terrifyingly quotable phrases yeah so Marla gets the boat up river he has a series of quite scary adventures I say adventures but they're not really are they thing is they're riffs on the kind of adventures you would see in boys stories but they're told in a really unsettling, like

he can't understand what's going on. But also nothing ever happens. So that fun stuff about hearing drums in the distance or whatever in in Ryder Haggard, that would immediately presage an attack that would involve guns and heroism and all kinds of stuff. I mean, nothing like that ever happens. Well, there is an attack when they reach the station. Remember, there's all the spears that are thrown at them and the bloke next to him is killed actually.

But it's not standing in the middle of King Solomon's mind being, I mean, it's just not that kind of adventure. No, it's not at all. And Marlow is just standing there basically doing nothing during all of it. He's not an asset of active, exciting protagonist. Loading his rifle or that kind of thing. Anyway, they get to Kurtz's station. All the worst suspicions are confirmed. The station is surrounded by posts with severed heads. And I don't want to spoil the story completely for people who haven't read it, but, um, as the company manager puts it, Kurtz's methods have proved unsound.

He's been going about his business in an unsound manner. I mean, he's basically being worshipped by the locals as a god, but he's behaving very violently. Kurtz himself is a very sick man. He's an emaciated ghostly figure on a stretcher. So not like Marlon Brando. Not like Marlon Brando at all, but very like this bloke Klein that Conrad himself had picked up.

Marlow and Kurtz have a series of chats, slightly strange chats, very elliptical, hard to elusive, hard to work out exactly what they're talking about. Kurtz is dying, clearly. Kurtz says to Marlow, oh, it's terrible shame. I'll never have the chance to carry out my, I had immense plans, he says. It's going to carry out great things, but we never really find out what those immense plans add up to. Anyway, they finally head back downstream with Kurtz, who is dying. And then we get to that scene that you opened with Tom, where Kurtz,

his final words is lying there and he says, it's like he's looking into the distance, and he says, or is he looking into his own soul? We don't know. And he says, the horror, the horror. Um, it's a really famous death scene. There's a brilliant essay for people who are interested online by the New Yorker's critic, David Denby. He first wrote it in 1995 and he calls it the most famous literary death scene

since Shakespeare. And I think it's very famous now because of Marlon Brando, because of apocalypse. Now, I mean, since Shakespeare, but you might say since Christopher Marlowe and the death of Faustus who has sold his soul in return for earthly riches and then gets plunged down into hell. And it can't be a coincidence. I think that Marlowe, the character who meets with Kurtz shares the name with the playwright who wrote that drama.

It's a nice parallel. Contemporary of Shakespeare's. Exactly. Now in Apocalypse Now, for people who've seen the film, this is basically the end. Kurtz dies, end of the film. But interestingly, that's not the end of Heart of Darkness. Marlowe comes back to Europe and something in him has changed. He talks again and again about feeling loyal to Kurtz.

He says that Kurtz will have a bit of the reading in the next half, I think, that Kurtz has stepped over the edge of something and seen something profound. We don't know what it is. As a result of this, Marlow comes back and he goes to Brussels and he feels completely alienated from life in Brussels. He's had an experience that has changed him. Now, Kurtz has given him a packet of papers and trusted it to him.

And the very last scene of the novel is him giving the papers to Kurtz's grieving fiance. Because all the owners of the company want these papers, don't they? Yeah. And Marlow is saying that, you know, I don't have them. And also just to say one thing that we admitted, Kurtz has had an

African woman who loves him. That's right. And she is actually, I think the most Ryder Haggard figure in the whole thing. She's got kind of a crazy headdress or something. And I felt kind of slightly out of tune with everything else in the novella. I totally agree with you. I think that's the one moment in the book where Conrad yields to kind of late Victorian African melodrama.

Agreed. In this woman who's like incredibly impressive and statuesque and sort of, she stands there, you know, lamenting loudly. Waving spears and... Yeah. And all of this. Kind of a Boudicca figure. Anyway, he hands over these papers to the fiance and to his horror, she says, tell me

about when he died, what was the last thing he said to you? And the very last thing that Marlow does in the whole story is he looks her in the eye and he lies to her and he says the last word he pronounced was your name. Well, I mean, unless her name was horror. Yeah, seems very unlikely. Seems unlikely. Anyway, Dominic, thank you. So that's the life of Conrad and the plot of Heart of Darkness.

But Dominic, what does it all mean? What's it all about? We will find out after the break. Now before we get to the break, I would really like to tell you about another Goldhanger podcast, Legacy, hosted by Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch. That's right. They go through the annals of history and revisit the lives of some of the most famous men and women to ever have lived and ask if they have the reputation they deserve. And this season, they are looking at perhaps one of the most famous leaders of all time,

Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader whose empire expanded from Korea to parts of Eastern Europe. And Dominic, as Peter Frankopan, a cricketing compadre of mine, would tell you, it's actually pronounced Chingis. Did you know that? Do you know Tom, that's an amazing revelation to me, I didn't know that. You did not know that. Genghis Khan, Chinggis Khan, however you want to call him, extraordinary figure. I mean, unbelievably brutal figure. It's said that his conquests and those of his immediate successors resulted, I think something like 40 million deaths, which would be about 10% of the world population at the

time. And yet, Tom, that's only one side of the story, isn't it? Because did he not also develop the Yam postal system across his empire and his treatment of women I read was entirely inconsistent. Yes because he and his army certainly used sexual violence as a weapon of war but also at one point he did ban the kidnapping of women. And the series is a really extraordinary listen in no small part because Peter wrote the bestseller The Silk Roads which is all about Genghis's part of the world. And you will be hard pressed to find someone who knows more about the Mongols than Peter Frankapan. And with AfioHersh as well as co-host, you're all in for a real treat. So listen to Legacy

now wherever you get your podcasts or listen to episodes early and ad free at Wandery. Wondery. Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed it up.

He had judged. The horror. He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief. It had candor. It had conviction. It had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper. It had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth, the strange commingling of desire and hate.

So that's the verdict that Marlow delivers on Kurtz after his death towards the end of Heart of Darkness. And I guess, you know, Heart of Darkness is a very, very well chosen title. That sense that there is something that a mystery that you can't penetrate, which Kurtz in some strange way embodies. And you have the sense of kind of great depths, but it's hard exactly to say what lurks in those depths. And so Dominic, I mean, here are the questions for you.

So what is it that Kurtz has seen? What is the truth? What is the horror? lurks in those depths. And so Dominic, I mean, here are the questions for you. So what is it that Kurtz has seen? What is the truth? What is the horror? Is it something he's seen in himself? Is it something he's seen in the Congo? Is it something he has seen in the nature of imperialism? Is it something about the human condition full stop?

I mean, what is going on? That's a very good question, Tom. Well, I have loads of questions for you. Yeah, we'll answer all those questions in this. You have 45 minutes. Pick up your pen. Start now. Literary scholars have tried for more than a century to answer those questions. And finally, we can reveal the answers.

Brilliant. It's like the Kennedy assassination. So on Kurtz himself, loads of scholars have tried to argue that he's a real person and they've tried to find out who Conrad was inspired by and I think there are Three or four candidates that come up again and again So one candidate is a bloke called Major Edmund Bartolot and he I'm sorry to say was a British officer He had gone with Stanley Henry Morton Stanley to rescue

And he has such a complicated story. Basically they went to rescue an Egyptian governor called Emin Pasha who didn't need rescuing in the Sudan. And this guy Bartolot behaved as fair to say very poorly. He went mad. He started flocking people wildly. He put loads of people in chains and he started running around biting women. Really?

Yeah. Very bad behavior. And eventually this African bloke shot him dead and he started running around biting women. Really? Yeah. Very bad behavior. And eventually this African bloke shot him dead and that was the end of him. And everyone said, God almighty, what a terrible advert for Britain. Let's never speak of this again. So there's that guy Bartolot. He possibly is an inspiration for Kurtz. Then there's a Belgian called Arthur Hodister.

Strange name for a Belgian, I always think, but there you go. He was an ivory trader and was brilliant at it like Kurtz. He was ruthless. He had a harem of local women. There were rumors that local people worshiped him as a God, but he came to a very different end from Kurtz. He was tortured, beheaded, and according to some accounts, eaten by Swahili slave traders for kind of intruding on their patch. That would have been a good end to Heart of Darkness.

It would have been an unexpected end. Yeah. Then there's a guy called Carl Peters who was a German. He was basically German, his answer to Henry Morton Stanley. He launched his own expedition to rescue this blow game in Pascha, who didn't need rescuing. He discovered ancient sites along the Zambezi river. He's basically got a bit of the Indiana Jones. Unfortunately, even Germans were embarrassed by this.

He also went a bit mad. He was incredibly violent. His nickname was hangman Peters because basically, you know, you said good morning to him and he hanged you. He was very violent. And even the Germans who were behaving quite badly, it's fair to say, or indeed very badly in South West Africa at this point, even they're ashamed of him, which tells his own story.

And then the final candidate, which Adam Hochschild mentions in his book, King Leopold's Ghost, is a guy called Leon Rom. Rom was a Belgian. He was a captain in the Force public. Like Kurtz, he liked painting and writing and he collected butterflies, which is nice. Like Vladimir Nabokov and Maximilian Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, but also he's an obsessive hunter. He had loads of African concubines.

He had at the time and I quote the reputation of having killed masses of people for petty reasons and he kept a flower bed at his station ringed with human heads. Oh, that's very Kurtz. Which is very Kurtz. So as Giswaf Nida says in his biography of Conrad, Conrad may well have drawn on all these examples, but it's clear that Kurtz is all of them and none of them. As Nida says, the model for Kurtz comes from literary and philosophical tradition as much as it does from real life African behavior. Well there's the quality of the Byronic hero, the man who is elevated by the terrible knowledge

that he has won from experience. I mean it's definitely a kind of literary trope. You mentioned what I think is the obvious thing which is Faust. So Faust sold his soul to the devil and it's not just Marlowe but obviously Goethe wrote about Faust and then Thomas Mann will write about Faust a few decades after Conrad. And there are a few references Marlowe says at one point in Harte Danas, Kurtz has taken a high seat among the devils of the land and later on he talks about how the powers of darkness are about to claim him for their own. So this idea that Kurtz has soul is sold to the devil.

You know, it's a very old idea and kind of European, but there's also something new about Kurtz. He's the embodiment of progress. Remember that he's so talented. He's so, he is the epitome, he's the embodiment of civilization. And there is an argument, I think that what he's doing in that long, remember he writes that very long report. Yeah, so exterminate all the brutes. Exactly. There's an argument that that report is in itself the embodiment of the European project in Africa.

To categorise, to set down on, to turn everything into accounts and ledgers. Which began with Napoleon going to Egypt. Exactly. To put Africa down on paper and control it and map it. Very Edward Said. Yeah, that is the act of colonialism effectively. Well, European colonialism. European colonialism, yeah. So is this therefore a story about colonialism

and is Kurtz the embodiment of all that's wrong with it? At one level, I think the answer is obviously yes. Marlowe at the beginning is given those lines about taking the earth away from people with flatter noses than ourselves that are kind of very pointed. Later on in the book, only a little bit later, before Marlow actually goes to the Congo, he goes to visit his aunt and his aunt has been reading newspaper stories about Africa and empire and she says, oh, it's brilliant. Love this project. Weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways. And Marlow actually says to her, this is even before he's gone.

He says, it's about money. The company has run for profit. You know, he's unsentimental about what is, um, what is motivating this. And of course, then when he gets to the Congo, everything that he sees could come from a charge sheet about the crimes of empire, the skulls, the Congo, everything that he sees could come from a charge sheet about the crimes of empire, the skulls, the skeletons, the violence, all of that kind of thing. I mean, one of the things that strikes me about it, a bit like War of the Worlds, where Wells transposes the horrors of European colonialism to Britain, there's a sense that

occasionally that Conrad is doing the same thing. So the whole opening with Britain as Africa. But also there's a kind of an amazing passage. So Marlow is looking out at all the villages that are abandoned. And he says, well, if loads of Africans suddenly armed with terrifying weapons started appearing on the road that stretches between Deal and Graves End in Kent, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them. I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon. And of course that is a prefiguring of the slave labor in due course that the Nazis will introduce in the heart of Europe. I think that's absolutely right and I think the beginning of the book by transposing what happens to Britain,

the beginning of the book by transposing what happens to Britain, it makes it very obvious that Conrad is conscious that this has a wider implication, that this is kind of a universal message. But here's the complication within the complication. The framing narrator is very keen on the British Empire because while he's at Gravesend, he muses on the night errants of the sea, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire, the dreams of men, the seed of Commonwealth, the germ of empires. People have sailed out from here with the spark of Britishness and isn't that brilliant? Marlow, the other narrator, he also thinks the British Empire is brilliant. He says at one point he sees a map with a lot of Africa splashed with British Imperial pink or red.

And he said, oh, that's good to see because one knows that real work is being done there. IE the British Empire is different from other empires. So very Kipling. But we know that Conrad himself thought that. So just after he's finished Harte Danis, the Burr War breaks out and his Polish relatives say to him, what do you make of this? You know, an empire against a little people at the Burrs, you know, doesn't ring any bells. And he says, what?

The British are brilliant. Liberty can only be found under the English flag all over the world. So he's for the Burr War. And then after he died, his great friend and collaborator, Ford Malick Ford said of him, a line that always amuses me, the British Empire was for Conrad, the perfection of all human perfections. So Conrad obviously a brilliant judge of, of empires, but this has led some people to say, well, hold on, you know, you can't celebrate this book as a, as a

criticism of empire. In fact, let's go further. This book is itself massively tainted with the crimes of Empire. In fact, let's go further. This book is itself massively tainted with the crimes of Empire. It's a tainted example of imperialist literature. Although, if you read it and you didn't know about Coronet's enthusiasm for British imperialism, would you necessarily recognize that? Well, there are at least two critics who think you would.

So one of them, I think you mentioned him already, didn't you? Edward Said, Palestinian American critic, one of the most famous literary critics of the last half century, who wrote a brilliantly influential book, shall we say, called Orientalism, which some scholars think is a terrible book. I think it's brilliant. I think you say it's brilliant. Anyway, Said says, yes, you would recognize comrades as an imperialist because he doesn't ever reject imperialism in his book. He doesn't give the, you know, his book should end with people being given their freedom or some savage critique of the imperialism that has enslaved them. I mean, that is what you get.

That is what you get. What? A savage critique? Yes. Well, maybe it's not savage enough for Edward Said and Edward Said is also really disappointed that Conrad doesn't give the Africans a chance of redemption or a chance of escape. And I mentioned in the essay by David Dembe of the New Yorker, he had a little passage in this essay in 1995 imagining saying, well, how would that

work? Like at the end of the book, you know, Kurtz rises from his deathbed and says to an African chief, one day your people will be free and the clouds clear and the sun shines and everybody's singing and dancing. It'd be ridiculous. But that's why Said is a brilliant cultural critic, but he's, you know, he never writes a great work of literature because it would simply be agitprop. Conrad's story is vastly more complex and unsettling than a kind of programmatic response to this would demand.

I totally agree with you about that, Tom, but there's a more substantial critique. Now this is by an African writer called Chinua Achebe. So Nigerian isn't he? Yeah, born in 1930 and in 1975 Achebe gave this lecture at the University of Massachusetts. To people who don't know this will sound like such a trivial and footling thing but this is one of the most influential lectures ever given about kind of about literary culture at all. It's one of the great demolition jobs and it's actually a foundational moment for what's called postcolonial literary studies.

And Achebe said, this is, I hate this book, I hate Conrad and I hate this book basically because he just sets up Africa as the heart of darkness. It's the place where Europeans go to find the evil within themselves. You know, you shouldn't, the Conrad's message is keep away from Africa or else, you know, you'll fall victim to the allure of the jungle. The darkness will find you out. You know, you'll become evil if you go to Africa. And he said, and I'm going to quote him, the point of my observation should be

quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thorough going racist. And he goes on to say, can a book which dehumanizes Africans, which treats Africa as the heart of darkness, et cetera, et cetera, can it be called a great work of art? My answer is no, it cannot. And this has always been incredibly contentious, this argument among scholars and enthusiasts for Joseph Conrad. You know, is this basically a racist book? And now on college campuses, you will find a lot of people who say it is and either don't teach it or who teach it as an example of literary racism. Now, a lot of people listen to this would

expect because with the rest of his history that at this point we kind of turn our guns on Chinua and Chaby and say, this is terrible, Konrad's brilliant, blah, blah, blah. Actually, there are elements of his critique, I don't know what you think, Tom, but that I think are justified. So first of all, he does present, the book does present Africa as primeval, as unfathomable, as prehistoric. Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.

Okay, I accept that. However, one of the reasons why it is traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world is that there are no humans and there are no humans there because they've all been scared off by the depredations of European colonialists. So he's not simply saying, you know, the silent, what is it? He says an empty stream, a great silence. That great silence is expressive of the depredations of European colonists. I agree with you, but you might not know that reading Conrad's book.

Well, he does. He said it. I mean, we just quoted the stuff not know that reading Conrad's book. Well, he does. He said it. I mean, we just quoted the stuff about, you know, the Africans turning up in Kent and launching attacks. Yes, I suppose so. I suppose so. But those two passages are quite far apart and you might not draw the connection. But that is why Conrad is a great writer because he's setting up these, you know, these echoes

in the prose that reverberate. Now, the second charge, I think slightly harder to quibble with, I would argue, is that this is a book about Africa that has no serious African characters at all. And when they speak, they don't speak. They chant, they grunt, they make, and I quote, a drone of weird incantations, strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language, like the responses of some satanic litany. And even the physical descriptions that are quite harrowing,

they're quite dehumanizing. So the porters that you mentioned, the people who are carrying the stuff on their heads and they're chained together, they had the complete death-like indifference of unhappy savages. Or the railway workers dying in the grove. Black shapes, black shadows of disease and starvation.

Would you talk like that about white European characters? I'm not entirely convinced that you would. That I would accept. And we've already touched on Kurtz's African concubine, who is pure stereotyping. Yeah. I mean, the pure kind of fantasy figure. And I think that is where Conrad's kind of literary mastery falls down. Well, I mean, first of all, there's a real complication here, which is that this isn't actually Conrad talking.

This is Marlowe talking. Well, yes, yes and no. I mean, because there is a risk that you then start saying anything racist is Marlowe talking. Well, yes, yes and no. I mean, because there is a risk that you then start saying anything racist in it is Marlowe talking. I mean, you can do it either way. I mean, if you start playing that game, depending on what you know, whether you want to, to get Conrad off the charge or not, you can, you can fix the fix your critique. You can, but I think you have to.

So Achibi basically says in his lecture, I'm going to just basically treat Marlow as if he's Conrad, but Marlow isn't Conrad. Conrad is the character listening to Marlow, if Conrad is in the story at all. So I think you just have to be a bit careful by always assuming that an author and their main character are the same person. Well you notice this very, very powerfully when Marlow is coming back and he's puzzling over Kurtz's character and what he represents. You have the sense that Marlow is wrestling all the time.

He's groping after truth, but there's always a sense that it's kind of slipping his fingers and clearly, you know, he's grasping after the secrets of the human condition, but he is also grasping after the reality and the truth of what is going on in the Belgian Congo. And as we've said, this is written before Morel starts his kind of forensic examination of the details of what has been happening. And you could say that there's an element there of the difficulty that historians have in making sense of what has been happening. And you could say that there's an element there of the difficulty that historians have in making sense of what's been going on. And it is noticeable that we don't have African accounts of what happened.

I mean, this has been a problem that you've been acknowledging throughout our account, that it really is a story about what Europeans get up to rather than Africans. And I suppose that, you know, Conrad could talk to the Europeans, but he couldn't talk to the Africans. I think that's absolutely right. Now, actually, ultimately, I think this question about is it a racist book or is it not is actually quite a boring one.

I don't think it's Conrad clearly. I mean, it's such a terribly cliched thing to say. Conrad obviously is a man of his age. He reflects the assumptions that he has grown up with, both in Russian occupied, you know, Eastern Poland and Ukraine, and later on sailing around on British merchant ships. I mean, he's not, you know, he's not outside time. Of course he has prejudices and assumptions of his own and they are expressed in his writing. But the overall effect of this book is obviously not a, I mean it's a book that clearly makes

you think really seriously about the moral issues of imperialism and the civilizing mission and colonialism and what not. I mean how can it not? Morel who devoted his entire life to combating Leopold's regime in the Congo said of it that it is the most powerful thing ever written on the subject. Yeah. And I think that is true. And I think that a reigning authors, because they failed to measure up to the ideological standards of 2024, is the least interesting approach to literature that you could possibly

adopt. Couldn't agree more. I mean, whether or not, of course, Conrad may have been racially prejudiced. I mean, he may mean he may not have been. It's as you say, it's actually, I think, an incredibly boring question because this is a such an interesting book and there's so many more things to say about it. But the possibility that he might be, I think, is woven into the story. I think that might be, you know, the heart of darkness.

That might be the horror. Conrad, Marlow, whoever it is, is Conrad's voice within the heart of darkness. I mean, all those people, I think, are implicated in what is being discussed. And I think that going beyond that, the lasting appeal of the book is obviously it's about more than the Belgian Congo. It's about more than King Leopold's free state or anything like that. To me, the key line in the book is actually that line that we quoted earlier, right at the beginning before they even got to the Congo, where Marlow says to the people on the boat, and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.

And he's talking there about England. He's not talking about the Congo and the darkness is there even before the steamboat has started its journey up the river. I, the darkness is not in the Congo. It's not even in England. It's in humanity. It's the human soul. That's what I think the book's about. And he's riffing there on the tendency.

Well, Stanley is always doing it. Isn't he all his kind of massive volumes, he's always referring to darkest Africa. That is the pivot that London is one of the dark places, that the Thames Estuary was one of the dark places. And of course, dark has all these kind of rich shades of meaning. And it may be that one of those, one of those shades of meaning could be cast as racist, but it is only one of them. And the, the, the, the racism that Europeans display towards Africans is also part of the racism that is being displayed by Romans towards the Britons. Yeah. That this is what imperialists do.

And I don't think it's even that he thinks this is what imperialists do. I think it's what human beings do. I think it's what human beings do. Conrad had a remarkably, I find it very attractive because I share it, a remarkably bleak view of human nature. In his letters to his friend Cunningham Graham, the SMP bloke that we mentioned earlier, he says of mankind, the year before he wrote Heart of Darkness, he wrote to Cunningham Graham, he said, mankind is silly and cowardly, a wretched gang. We're born initiated and succeeding generations clutch the inheritance of fear and brutality without a thought. And another letter, he said, people go on, he said, about honor, justice, compassion, but nobody really believes

in them. People believe only in, and I quote, gain personal advantage, satisfied vanity, and words vanish and nothing remains, absolutely nothing, Only a drop of mud, cold mud, dead mud launched in black space, turning round and extinguish sun. I love those lines. Conrad has a view of mankind, of human beings that is unbelievably skeptical, ironic, bleak, dark. Conservative. Yeah.

Conservative. bleak, dark. Conservative. Yeah, conservative. I mean, he's sceptical about notions of progress and that Jerusalem can be built on the earth. Definitely. But I think the interesting thing about that is it's not just temperamental, but it's of his time. Because I was thinking about the literature of the 1880s, 1890s.

So in 1890, the year he went to the Congo, um, one of my favorite books, La Betty Humaine by Emily Zola, which is about basically a, I know it sounds very unpromising. It's about a Parisian train driver who turns out to be a sex crazed homicidal maniac. Um, he published this book and it's basically about the evil that is lurking within us all. You know, even the most banal person is actually deep down. You know, we could all be serial killers and rapists and whatnot.

This is such a popular idea in very late Victorian culture. Dracula, which is Dracula, published in 1897. The idea of darkness coming to England. Yeah, absolutely. Or 1899, the same year Conrad publishes Heart of Darkness. That's the year that Freud publishes the interpretation of dreams. The idea that buried deep down in this kind of very primal and unfathomable way, our anxieties and ghosts and terrible urges that we try to repress in our kind

of civilized daily lives, but will come always come to claim us at night. I mean, again, all of this sort of stuff is simmering away in the European imagination at the time that Conrad is writing. I mean, there's no question that Heart of Darkness has given to very committed anti-racists, anti-imperialists, some of its language. So there was, I think it was, what was it? Netflix or something. There was a, a documentary series called Exterminate All the Brutes came out three,

two or three years ago. And it was about European colonialism and was not favorable at all. Right. And it was based on a book by Sven Linkfist, who is a Norwegian writer who is absolutely excoriating about imperialism, particularly British imperialism. And of course, that title is coming from Kurtz's phrase, which in turn is written by Conrad. And so the echoes are very complex, I think, the kind of the ripples, the reverberations, I think to condemn it as a racist book is harsh.

I think, I think it's not just harsh. I think it's a total waste of time. I think it's a complete and utter waste of time when the book is so rich and we've talked for too long and actually we shouldn't. We're not in the business of preaching to listeners. Listeners can make up their own minds. They should read the book. If you think it's racist, great crack on.

If you don't brilliant. Um, Tom, why don't we end with the end of the book? Okay. Marlow ceased and sat apart in distinct and silent in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. We've lost the first of the Ebb said the director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost

ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky, seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.