Joseph Conrad

HEART OF DARKNESS

Edited with Introduction and Notes by
Owen Knowles

THE CONGO DIARY

Edited with Notes by
Robert Hampson

General Editor
J. H. Stape

Contents

Introduction to Heart of Darkness

Introduction to ‘The Congo Diary’

A Note on the Texts

Map of the River Congo

HEART OF DARKNESS

THE CONGO DIARY

Appendix: Author’s Note (1917)

Further Reading

Notes

Chronology

Glossary of Nautical Terms

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

A Note on the Texts

The copy-text for Heart of Darkness is that of the first English edition of 13 November 1902; that for ‘The Congo Diary’ is the manuscript held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; and that for the ‘Author’s Note’ is the text first published in the second English edition of the Youth volume in September 1917 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons).

Conrad composed Heart of Darkness during the period from mid-December 1898 to early February 1899 for the thousandth issue of Blackwood’s Magazine. A nearly complete manuscript is held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and a portion of revised typescript in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

Under the title ‘The Heart of Darkness’, the story was serialized in Britain during February–April 1899, and appeared in the United States in The Living Age, June–August 1900. Along with two other stories, ‘Youth’ and ‘The End of the Tether’, it was first collected in Britain in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1902) and in the United States by McClure, Phillips of New York (1903). In both editions the story was renamed ‘Heart of Darkness’.

Although this is not a critical edition, emendations to the Heart of Darkness copy-text have been made to correct outright errors, repair typographical flaws and rationalize minor inconsistencies. The first English edition has been compared with earlier stages of the text, including the manuscript (MS) and typescript fragment (TS), in order to take into account the complex circumstances of its early drafting, typing and printing, and thus to rectify a number of transmissional errors, mainly originating in the typescript prepared by Conrad’s wife, Jessie, and passing into all printed forms.

Some features of Blackwood’s house-style have been silently modified. An occasional feature of Blackwood’s house-style, a comma and em-dash in combination (,—), has been replaced by an em-dash only. In the case of some spellings, Conrad’s habitual usage has been preferred to that in the first English edition: thus ‘further’, ‘by the bye’, ‘by and bye’ and ‘entrusted’ are preferred to ‘farther’, ‘by-the-by’, ‘by-and-by’ and ‘intrusted’. Ambiguous hyphenation has been resolved on the basis of majority practice in the text, and, where no clear precedent exists, is determined by the spelling of the period.

Written during his visit to the Congo in 1890, Conrad’s ‘Diary’ did not appear in print until after his death, when Richard Curle published an edited and annotated version in Blue Peter 5 (October 1925), pp. 319–25. This was later republished in his edition of Conrad’s Last Essays (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926).

The manuscript bears the typical signs of an informal private diary not intended for publication, notably in its irregular or missing punctuation, abbreviated words and occasional unusual spellings. The present text remains faithful to these features. Conrad’s frequent use of dashes instead of full stops is preserved, and punctuation is supplied or emended sparingly and only at points of potential ambiguity or confusion (see the list below). Minor inconsistencies of spelling have not been standardized, and irregular spellings are signalled in the notes but not repaired. Likewise, the apparently random underlinings and superscript letters in the manuscript have been preserved in order to remain faithful to the form of the original document. In the case of abbreviations and shorthand symbols, letters missing from words are supplied in square brackets (as in ‘off[ic]er’ or ‘comp[an]y’).

In the ‘Author’s Note’, Dent’s house-style has been silently modified in only one respect: where the original text italicized the titles of short stories, this text places all such titles in inverted commas.

LIST OF EMENDATIONS

The rejected reading of the copy-text appears to the right of the square bracket.

Heart of Darkness

The Congo Diary

Author’s Note

HEART OF DARKNESS AND THE CONGO DIARY

Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was born in December 1857 in Berdichev (now in the Ukraine) of Polish parents. His father, a poet and translator, and his mother were exiled for nationalist activities and died when he was a child. He grew up and was educated informally in Lemberg (now L’viv) and Cracow, which he left for Marseilles and a career at sea in 1874. After voyages to the French Antilles, he joined the British Merchant Service in 1878, sailing first in British coastal waters and then to the Far East and Australia. In 1886, he became a British subject and received his captaincy certificate. In 1890, he was briefly in the Congo with a Belgian company. After his career at sea ended in 1894, he lived mainly in Kent. He married in 1896 and had two sons.

Conrad began writing, in his third language, in 1886. His first novels, Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), were immediately hailed as the work of a significant new talent. He produced his major fiction from about 1897 to 1911, a period that saw the publication of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and the political novels Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). Considered ‘difficult’, his writing received considerable critical acclaim, but not until 1914 after the appearance of Chance did it win a wide public. The dazzling narrative experiments and thematic complexities of Conrad’s earlier fiction are largely absent from his later writings, pitched to a more popular audience.

Fame saw the offer of honorary degrees and a knighthood (both declined) capped by a triumphal publicity tour in America in 1923. In addition to novels, Conrad produced short stories, plays, several essays and two autobiographical volumes, The Mirror of the Sea (1906) and A Personal Record (1908–9). He died in August 1924 at the age of sixty-six.

Owen Knowles, Research Fellow in the University of Hull, is the author of A Conrad Chronology (1989), An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Joseph Conrad (1992) and the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad (2000) (with Gene M. Moore). Advisory Editor of The Conradian, he has edited Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly (1995), and has co-edited A Portrait in Letters: Correspondence to and about Joseph Conrad (1996) and, for Cambridge University Press, Volumes VI and IX (2002 and forthcoming) of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad.

Robert Hampson is Professor of Modern Literature in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. A former editor of The Conradian, his publications include Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992) and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Conrad’s Malay Fiction (2001). The author of numerous articles, he has also edited Victory and Nostromo, Rudyard Kipling’s Something of Myself and Soldiers Three/In Black and White and Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines for Penguin.

J. H. Stape has taught in universities in Canada, France and the Far East. Author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007), he has edited The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (1996) and Conrad’s Notes on Life and Letters (2004) and co-edited A Personal Record (2007) and Volumes VII and IX (2005 and forthcoming) of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad for Cambridge University Press. He has also co-edited Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands and The Rover for Oxford World’s Classics, and has written on Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, William Golding and Angus Wilson. He is Contributing Editor of The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK).

Introduction to Heart of Darkness

New readers are advised that this Introduction makes details of the plot explicit.

Mention the name of Joseph Conrad and the answering response will commonly invoke his celebrated African novella of 1899, Heart of Darkness. If the work has acquired an iconic status comparable to that of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (1893), its title has by contrast become something of a tired cliché in being so repeatedly used by newspaper headline-makers. Conrad, who modestly hoped that the work might have a continuing ‘vibration’, would have been astonished by these contemporary reverberations.

The story’s emergence as a twentieth-century ‘classic’ forms a first stage in the history of its remarkable after-life. A key moment arrived with T. S. Eliot’s use of a fragment from Heart of Darkness as an epigraph to his poem, ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925). Eliot’s epigraph signals a temporary kinship and establishes a bridge between the two works, but it also probably signifies a more intangible sense of indebtedness – to Conrad as an important founder-member of a tradition of British Modernist writing.

The story’s major rediscovery dates from the 1950s when its apocalyptic symbolism and existentialist uncertainty seem to have entered the collective consciousness of a generation who lived through the Second World War or were coming to terms with its legacy. As one critic of the time put it, the story had become ‘a Pilgrim’s Progress for our pessimistic and psychologizing age’ (Guerard, p. 33). Its more recent impact has been equally dramatic, if more controversial. Now standing at the centre of a wider contemporary debate about race, imperialism and feminism, its aesthetic dimensions and experimental character have almost been left behind. It has acquired the status of an awkward problem novel, a standard text in the classroom and – for better or worse – a litmus test for a variety of theoretical preoccupations. As a modern quest parable translated into many languages, it has simultaneously had a powerful generative effect upon twentieth-century writers and film-makers, inspiring emulations, adaptations and counter-versions.

I

Conrad’s direct and indirect engagement with things African has a long pre-history. It extends as far back as his childhood, when the young Pole pored over maps of the continent, devoured tales of the first European explorers in Africa and vicariously shared the perils of Dr Livingstone’s travels. Like all dreams of heroic adventure, this one was destined to meet with a rude awakening. In 1890, towards the end of his career as a merchant seaman, the thirty-three-year-old Conrad signed a long-term contract to work for a Belgian company in the Congo Free State. The country he entered had since 1885 been the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium, who, under the guise of a philanthropic concern to bring ‘light’ to the ‘dark’ continent, was brutally engaged in what Conrad later described as ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’.¹

Conrad’s growing desire to return to Europe was unexpectedly realized when he suffered a physical breakdown: plagued with the after-effects of dysentery and malaria, he ended his stay after seven months, returned to a period of hospitalization in London and suffered a legacy of ill health for the rest of his life. His first-hand encounter with the effects of Leopold’s rule in the Congo almost certainly left him with deeper scars: according to a close friend, the episode formed ‘the turning-point in his mental life’, shaped ‘his transformation from a sailor to a writer’ and ‘swept away the generous illusions of his youth’.²

One of the products of this period was ‘The Congo Diary’ (included in this edition), Conrad’s record of his daily movements during the first part of his stay. Severely factual and never intended for publication, the diary nevertheless offers his earliest written account of a peopled Africa and may have been kept to preserve material that would be of use to the later writer.

Conrad’s first African work, ‘An Outpost of Progress’, was composed six years later. A fine short story in its own right, ‘An Outpost’ also represents an important stage in Conrad’s attempt to fashion a serious and grown-up colonial fiction distinct from the boyish adventure stories of G. A. Henty and Rider Haggard. From his early Eastern novels the story inherits the large spectacle of the European abroad, removed from the constraints of the Western ‘crowd’, isolated in the wilderness and undergoing swift collapse. Here, however, the predicament is shaped by an acutely political awareness, with the focus partly upon its two carefully chosen types (a bureaucrat and a soldier) and partly upon the representative imperialist fictions arriving from Europe with them.

The degeneration of the two supposed ‘light-bringers’ is remorseless: they arrive in Africa voicing the conventional view that as racially superior Europeans they have the right and duty to civilize ‘backward’ peoples, but ironies emerge when it transpires that, as two of Europe’s failed rejects, they are happy to cultivate failure, content with their fellowship in idleness and oblivious to the civilized litter they leave around an increasingly inefficient trading-post. Ultimately, however, the strengths of the story as a polemic – its aloof omniscient narration, singleness of focus and sparkling sarcasm – also serve to define its limits. In Conrad’s later view, ‘An Outpost’ was mainly an important stepping-stone towards Heart of Darkness, in which an English narrator, Marlow, agitatedly reflects upon an earlier visit to Africa and his quest there towards the charismatic European trader, Kurtz. According to Conrad, his return to an African subject coincided with a widening sense of its possibilities and was accompanied by an intense ‘nightmare feeling’ (Collected Letters, vol. II, p. 162).

II

Enigmatic though Heart of Darkness may finally prove to be, its early episodes are remarkable for their trenchant topicality. At the outset of its composition, Conrad described the story as being of ‘our time distinc[t]ly’ in its concern with the ‘criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa’ (Collected Letters, vol. II, pp. 140–41). For his subject, he again returned to what was bluntly described in a coinage of 1884 as the ‘Scramble for Africa’, one resulting in the systematic annexation and exploitation of Africa by European powers during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

At an early point, the story offers a summary of these developments. The map of Central Africa available to the youthful Marlow presents it as a white blankness, an unexplored and unnamed terra incognita. To the older Marlow, the area has become, presumably as a result of European expansion, a more impenetrable and menacing ‘place of darkness’ (9), while yet another map of the continent presents him with a multi-coloured chart, its pattern the visible evidence of European territorial possessions. Even more topically, the story’s opening sequences confronted its first readers with echoes of their most recent newspaper headlines – in references to the building of a railway or to expanding trade-syndicates or to increasing militarization in Africa, as signalled by the presence of mercenary soldiers and a blockading French gunboat.

This sense of topical issue is, however, most marked in Marlow’s acerbic quarrel with manifestations of the period’s sophisticated propaganda machinery, of which the popular press formed a crucial cog. Heart of Darkness was written against a background of recent imperial celebration of a feverishly utopian kind. Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 occasioned an exaltation of the British Empire and the importance of the imperial idea to the country’s future as an international power. In her diary for that year, Beatrice Webb summarized the social mood: ‘Imperialism in the air! – all classes drunk with sight seeing and hysterical loyalty’.³ Articles in the New Review evoke the wider note of intoxicated eulogy in lauding the Queen as ‘the Great White Mother, the fame of whose virtue has won the loyalty of native races as the genius of Alexander or a Napoleon never could’ and characterizing the British imperial idea as an onerous religious destiny: ‘Since the wise men saw the star in the East, Christianity has found no nobler expression’.⁴ A stream of propaganda also emanated from Brussels, where, as Conrad later observed, Leopold had commandeered press opinion – by, in effect, colonizing its language – in order to engineer an outrageous ‘newspaper “stunt” ‘.⁵

The story’s early progress from Europe to Africa offers a virtual initiation into the contagious power of the period’s official imperial propaganda – in the anonymous narrator’s eulogy to the River Thames, in the colourful hyperbole picked up by Marlow’s aunt from her newspapers and through a variety of European voices in Africa. Sharing his creator’s sense of the power of the printed word, Marlow is acutely aware of its journalistic misuse in rendering people essentially blinkered and insentient. Its invasive power is further suggested by the fact that for most of these speakers such rhetoric is a reflexive act: they are not, on the whole, individuals seeking to use hyperbole to disguise an unsavoury truth, but inert victims and instruments of linguistic coercion.

Marlow’s counter-response takes a number of forms: sometimes he simply speaks plainly of newspaper ‘rot’, often he notes the spurious authority given to bureaucratic functionaries in Africa by their naming (as in the case of the euphemistically styled ‘Workers’ or ‘agents’), while elsewhere he is shocked by the outrageous incongruities thrown up by the unthinking use of cliché. For example, his grim mirth at hearing from The Harlequin that the heads on stakes belong to ‘rebels’ prompts the comment: ‘Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks’ (73).

If much of the best imaginative literature thrives on the exposure of what George Orwell termed Newspeak, it also abhors a vacuum. Silences usually prevailed in the popular press of the 1890s about the exact nature of European rule in Africa and its effect upon her indigenous peoples and customs. By 1897, however, damning facts about the Congo were beginning to filter into British newspapers, as in The Times of 13 May, which reported an ex-Congo missionary’s testimony that ‘gross atrocities were perpetrated by the soldiers of the State on the natives, amounting in some cases to shooting and in others to mutilation, for refusal to labour in the gathering of india-rubber. Whole villages were spoliated and destroyed’.⁶ The first part of Conrad’s story belongs to this early move towards silence-breaking: ‘I have a voice … and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced’ (44).

Marlow’s initiation into Africa allots him a role not unlike that of an on-the-spot foreign correspondent, with his own independent sense of what is newsworthy: he watches, listens, reports on his interviews and trusts in the power of hard, definite particulars. The picture of Africa to emerge combines the image of a messily organized scramble for ‘loot’ with that of a chaotic war zone littered with upturned rusting trucks, abandoned drainage pipes and gaping craters. He also allows space for voices unheard in the newspapers of the time – those of the European ‘agents’, traders and other hangers-on. These voices range from the brickmaker and his version of justice – ‘Transgression—punishment—bang! Pitiless, pitiless. That’s the only way’ (31) – to Marlow’s companion and his reasons for being in Africa – ‘To make money, of course. What do you think?’ (24) – and include a description of the agents’ collective voice: ‘The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse’ (27).

The sense given of a narrator wishing to recover an Africa lost, ignored or silenced culminates in the description of the ‘grove of death’:

[The African workers] were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest … Near the same tree two more, bundles of acute angles, sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence. (20)

Like a poem by Wilfred Owen from the First World War battlefront, this heightened reportage quickly dispenses with the rattle of official verbiage in order to recover unreported facts – in this case, of wasted African lives. The sense of waste is intensified by the wider context. Marlow has just passed through a rubbish tip for discarded pipes and rusty machinery, and the implication is that the worn-out Africans have been similarly discarded: having served their function, they are thrown away like disposable objects. Crass labels discarded, Marlow assimilates the details of human waste into an extended elegy, with an invitation to complete it by recalling a picture of Bosch-like extremity.

In conjunction with other contemporary events, Heart of Darkness played no small part in effecting a linguistic change that, in turn, reflected a wider shift in attitudes. In 1897, the words ‘Imperial’ and ‘Imperialism’ (both normally capitalized) carried hardly any pejorative meanings and, with their Latin equivalents (Imperium et Libertas), formed a natural part of the period’s rhetoric. But by 1903, in the aftermath of the Boer War and when the scandal of the Congo caused E. D. Morel to found the Congo Reform Association, the terms began to acquire less reputable associations and could no longer be used as a form of unthinking national self-congratulation.

III

During its composition, Heart of Darkness developed like ‘genii from the bottle’ in ways that seem to have surprised Conrad himself, prompting him later to feel that its last two instalments were ‘wrapped up in secondary notions’ (Collected Letters, vol. II, pp. 146, 157). One sign of its changing character is that Marlow, predominantly a detached figure in Part I, becomes with his journey upriver an involved participant, increasingly excited, feverish and panic-stricken. Simultaneously, he is obsessed by the charismatic voice of Kurtz, a spectral figure who actively dominates the later part of the story. With these developments, the pattern of the quest becomes more insistent. Marlow conceives of his journey as culminating in a meeting with Kurtz, who is himself engaged in a quest into unexplored regions: when the two make contact late in the story, they become, in effect, agents in each other’s lives.

Successive generations of critics have been impelled to testify to the nature of the elusive developments following upon Marlow’s upriver departure, and there is now virtually an interpretation of the story to suit every predilection – the psychoanalytic, philosophic, political, post-colonial and gender-based. Each generation has also thrown up a major dissenting critic. In the immediate post-1950 period, F. R. Leavis was highly influential with his claim that the story was marred by an ‘adjectival insistence upon … inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery’.⁷ Later generations have been overshadowed by the Nigerian novelist and critic Chinua Achebe, whose angry polemic of 1975 accused Conrad of virtually betraying his subject by eliminating ‘the African as a human factor’, lamented his ‘preposterous and perverse arrogance in reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind’ and condemned the author as a ‘bloody racist’.⁸

Traditionally, the most immediate problem for readers has been that of adjusting to the tale’s dramatically changing character. Although Part I anticipates some of the terms of Marlow’s coming quest, it hardly foreshadows the ambitious symbolic method to be brought into play. In part, Marlow himself becomes an active symbol-maker, constantly seeking a figurative equivalent for his feelings. But in addition, the obscure nightmare in which he is embroiled increasingly determines the character of the story and embraces Kurtz as a significant part of its structure: everywhere felt but only occasionally glimpsed, the latter emerges as a strangely protean presence, forming and re-forming like the genie from a bottle. Achebe regards the story as involving a single ‘petty European’, but the symbol of dark nightmare also has a strenuously generalizing effect in suggesting that all Europeans are involved in the breakdown of the imperial dream.

Symbolic method also brings with it a new, and in some ways, problematic range of ‘secondary’ interests. In moving away from the symptoms of colonial rowdyism in Part I, the tale is not thereby always less topical, but it now devises markedly wider tests in order to probe the credentials of the European mission in Africa. As a compendium of decadent excesses, the figure of Kurtz is obviously central to the tale’s free-wheeling and – as some readers have felt – erratically widening scope. His is the most comprehensive test and the most spectacular fall; in one of his many guises, he offers access to what might be called Europe’s political unconscious – into the underlying obsessions and needs that both fostered and found relief in the imperial project. And finally, when Marlow returns to Europe, he brings with him a Kurtzian legacy that helps to shape an even wider vision of Western civilization and its discontents.

Early in Part II, with the beginning of Marlow’s journey to the interior, the tale signals that the narrator’s own inherited British traditions will be the first to come under scrutiny. The terms of this ordeal would have been familiar to late-Victorian readers, since what is on trial is a principle at the very basis of their culture and underpinning its ‘mission’ in the colonies – the work ethic as an agency of order and progress. In Britain, the gospel of work was associated with the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle, in whose writings the principle gathered numerous moral, religious and philosophic resonances. As a British merchant seaman, Marlow’s tradition is a seamanly inflexion of the Carlylean gospel. Marlow spells out the tonalities of this humanistic ideal: ‘I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others’ (35). For him, the notion brings with it a view of the seaman’s life as involving the pursuit of an honourable vocation, the performance of a social obligation in the cause of human solidarity and the restraining of individuality by the collective ethic. Translated into the context of colonial ‘work’, the ethic also involves a tough, no-nonsense pragmatism – the ability, as Marlow puts it, to bury dead hippo without being too bothered by the smell.

But even an immunity to noxious smells cannot defend Marlow from being challenged on several fronts. He is quickly made aware, when he becomes ‘one of the Workers, with a capital’ (14), that a wider political machinery can itself be found to exploit the superficial rhetoric of the Carlylean work ethic to legitimize its ultimately criminal purpose. (In 1898, Leopold had required of his agents that they ‘accustom the population to general laws, of which the most needful and the most salutary is assuredly that of work’.)⁹ Once in Africa, he quickly learns that his work efforts are either rendered futile by a lawless inefficiency or part of a process ultimately devoted to base ends.

Even though Marlow tries to attend to practicalities involved with the job in hand – the problem of acquiring rivets, tracking river obstacles and efficient steering – he is increasingly forced to question how far the job-sense is a necessary avoidance of a painful knowledge of the self and world. At a crucial point in the narrative, two documents serve to bring home his crisis of choice: on the one hand, the clear seamanly purpose he finds in Towson’s nautical manual, a symbolic reminder of his inherited traditions, or, on the other, the searing self-contradictions of Kurtz’s pamphlet, a signpost to the possibility of different kinships and allegiances.

In more senses than one, Marlow loses navigational clarity and purpose. The pressures put upon him reflect more widely on a tradition of liberal humanism that, when faced by the flinty actualities of wider colonial politics, has commonly suffered painful defeat and been left with a legacy of nervous irritation, panic, hysteria and frustrated silence. At the point where Marlow’s panic sets in, Kurtz becomes a more material presence; as the narrator begins to share empathically in Kurtz’s ordeal, their crises intermesh.

From a point of hindsight, Conrad himself seems to have been aware of the dangerous risk involved in the treatment of the tale’s presiding symbolic figure: ‘What I distinctly admit is the fault of having made Kurtz too symbolic or rather symbolic at all’ (Collected Letters, vol. II, p. 460). Even in the first part of the tale, the Kurtz who emerges through hearsay and gossip is a bewildering medley of possibilities – now universal genius, now noted ivory-hunter, now confirmed solitary with ambitious plans for Africa and now threatening spectre. The problem of Kurtz’s shifting metamorphoses becomes more formidable as the tale progresses, since this figure will become part of the tumultuous content of Marlow’s nightmare, shaping its form and providing its climax. With each of his metamorphoses, moreover, Kurtz also contributes to a shifting sense of the nature and location of the ‘heart of darkness’. How various and plural are his main incarnations, and how are their meanings registered in Marlow’s narrative?

One of Kurtz’s symbolic identities memorably extends the ‘dark’ evidence of European rule in Part I. Several descriptions focus upon his extreme deformity and grotesque, puppet-like movements in order to bring home the sense in which, as Europe’s offspring, he enacts the logic of its expansionist and acquisitive drives. In his restless energy as an explorer, conqueror and self-styled hero of Empire, he is a powerfully iconoclastic caricature. To the extent that he casts aside the need for any hypocritical pretence and unashamedly acts out the will to acquire vast amounts of ivory, he embodies a brute economic imperative as well as an unnatural idolatry of the material object.

Where some nations tended high-mindedly to regard overseas expansion as an organic extension of their destiny, Heart of Darkness can suggest a powerfully alternative vision: of imperialism as a historical deformation, whose working out involves an inevitable principle of degeneration. Central to this version