The Journal
Who was Joseph Conrad and why does Heart of Darkness still provoke debate?
Joseph Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv, in what is now Ukraine, the son of a Polish nobleman and patriot, Apollo Korzeniowski, who was exiled to Russia for his political activities. Apollo died of tuberculosis when Conrad was eleven. Conrad was raised by his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski.
He became a British subject in 1886, published his first novel at thirty-nine, and wrote the English prose of Heart of Darkness in a language he had not spoken until adulthood. English was his third language after Polish and French.
This is one of the stranger facts in literary history.
What was his life at sea?#
Conrad spent twenty years as a merchant sailor before he became a writer. He sailed with the French merchant navy from 1874, transferred to the British merchant navy in 1878, worked his way up to the rank of master mariner, and captained ships in the Gulf of Thailand, Australian waters, and the Congo.
The Congo voyage in 1890 -- as captain of a river steamer for a Belgian trading company -- was the experience that became Heart of Darkness. He went to manage a steamboat whose previous captain had been killed by Africans resisting Belgian rule. He saw the conditions of the Belgian Congo under Leopold II: forced labour, severed hands as punishment for insufficient rubber collection, systematic extraction enforced by violence. He was ill for much of the journey and returned to England in poor health, carrying material that took him nine years to process into fiction.
Why does Heart of Darkness still provoke debate?#
Heart of Darkness is 38,000 words long -- barely a novella. It has generated more critical controversy than many novels ten times its length.
The specific debate turns on Chinua Achebe's 1975 lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Achebe argued that Conrad uses Africa and Africans as a backdrop and a symbol for European psychological drama, thereby dehumanising them -- that the novella's African characters have no interiority, no voice, no humanity beyond what they reflect of European anxieties.
Achebe's argument is that Conrad was a "thoroughgoing racist," and that the literary praise heaped on Heart of Darkness is part of a Western critical tradition that finds it easier to appreciate a European's discomfort with colonialism than to notice the absence of African humanity in the text.
The countervailing view -- held by critics including Cedric Watts -- is that Conrad was, for his time and context, an exceptionally perceptive critic of colonialism, that Heart of Darkness was one of the first works of fiction to subject the Belgian Congo specifically to serious moral examination, and that reading it as a straightforwardly racist text misrepresents its complexity.
Both arguments are serious. The debate is not resolved. For the specific question of what the fog in Heart of Darkness represents, that piece covers the symbolic dimensions and the Achebe critique in more detail.
What did Conrad write beyond Heart of Darkness?#
Lord Jim (1900) is probably his second-most-read work -- a study of honour, cowardice, and the impossibility of redemption following a single act of abandonment at sea. Nostromo (1904) is his most ambitious novel: a fictional South American country, a silver mine, political revolution, and the corrupting power of material interests. Many of Conrad's admirers consider it his finest work. The Secret Agent (1907) is a London-set political thriller about anarchists and a government double agent that reads strikingly modern.
He died on 3 August 1924 at his home in Kent, of a heart attack, while declining an offer of knighthood. He was sixty-six.
Further reading#
Heart of Darkness is free on Foxing.
For what the fog symbolises and how to read the novella's controversial elements, what the fog means in Heart of Darkness covers the analysis.
For the tradition of British maritime fiction Conrad belongs to, the best adventure novels in the public domain includes Conrad alongside other essential titles.
Sources#
- Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007
- Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," The Massachusetts Review, 1975; collected in Hopes and Impediments, Doubleday, 1988
- Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, University of California Press, 1979