Critical Essay by Robert Hampson

SOURCE: Hampson, Robert. ""Heart of Darkness" and "The Speech that Cannot be
Silenced"." English 29, no. 163 (spring 1990): 15-32.

In the following essay, Hampson investigates the role of racism in Heart of Darkness.

James Clifford, in an insightful essay on Conrad and Malinowski, at one point observes:

It would be interesting to analyze systematically how, out of the heteroglot encounters of

fieldwork, ethnographers construct texts whose prevailing language comes to override,
represent, or translate other languages.1

As Clifford notes, behind this observation lies Talal Asad's conception of "a persistent,
structured inequality of languages" within the process of "cultural translation". In Asad's own
words:

The anthropological enterprise of cultural translation may be vitiated by the fact that there
are asymmetrical tendencies and pressures in the languages of dominated and dominant
societies.2

Elsewhere in the same essay, Clifford refers, in passing, to "the many complexities in the
staging and valuing of different languages in Heart of Darkness".3 I would like to take this
perception and the observations about the problems of "cultural translation" as the starting-
point for an investigation of racism in Heart of Darkness.

I
In Heart of Darkness, as in reports of ethnographic fieldwork, heteroglot experience is
rendered into a largely monoglot text.4 As Marlow says:

"An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice,
too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced.5

There are two or three places where this largely monoglot text is broken into by other
languages, and these instances are highly instructive. For example, Marlow ends his account
of the two women knitting outside the door of the Company offices with the following
apostrophe:

"Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant!"

(p. 57)
The Latin tag points to the common culture of Marlow and his audience: a culture grounded
in the shared educational background of English public schools.6 The two other instances
occur in the same part of the text, but serve a different function. When Marlow recounts his
meeting with the "great man" who runs the Company, he observes:

"He shook hands, I fancy, murmured vaguely, was satisfied with my French. Bon voyage."

(p. 56)

Then, after his medical examination, the Doctor concludes:

""Adieu. How do you English say, eh? Good-bye. Ah! Good-bye. Adieu. In the tropics one
must before everything keep calm & Du calme, du calme. Adieu.""

(p. 58)

These passages indicate that, though Marlow's narrative is in English, many of the encounters
that he subsequently recounts are to be imagined as originally taking place in French. Yet,
apart from these two speeches, no attempt is made to indicate that French is generally the
medium of communication, except in so far as explicit references to English dialogue serve
this end. Marlow is careful to specify that English was the medium for his conversations with
the Swedish captain (who spoke "English with great precision and considerable bitterness", p.
63); that he made a speech in English "with gestures" to his African bearers (p. 71); and that
English was one of the links between Marlow and Kurtz (he "could speak English to me"
since he "had been educated partly in England", p. 117). But in what language are we to
imagine Marlow and the Russian conversing? The Russian could certainly read English (as
his annotated copy of Towson's Inquiry shows) and he tells Marlow that he had "served some
time in English ships" (p. 123), but would English or French have been the medium for their
conversations?7 The indeterminacy is itself significant, since it suggests that English and
French are granted similar status within the narrative.

By comparison, Russian and African languages are present in the text in ways that suggest
they have been assigned a lower position in an implicit hierarchy of languages.8 Russian is
encountered in written form in the annotations to Towson's Inquiry:

"& the notes pencilled in the margin, and plainly referring to the text. I couldn't believe my
eyes! They were in cipher! Yes, it looked like cipher!"

(p. 99)

The annotations, though not actually decipherable by Marlow, are recognised as potentially
meaningful. They have the same status as the Russian's signature on the board found with the
firewood:

"We came to the bank, and on the stack of firewood found a flat piece of board with some
faded pencil-writing on it. When deciphered it said: "Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach
cautiously." There was a signature, but it was illegible--not Kurtz--a much longer word."9
The Russian annotations are not decipherable because Marlow cannot read the script.
Marlow's failure to even recognise Cyrillic script opens a gap between Marlow and Conrad,
and suggests that the text's hierarchy of languages is Marlow's rather than Conrad's.10 This is
particularly important in relation to the representation of African languages in the text.

Where Russian exists in the text as script, as a written code that is potentially meaningful,
African languages are present only as sound. They appear as "a burst of yells" (p. 96); "angry
and warlike yells" (p. 112); "tumultuous and mournful uproar" (p. 102); "a tremulous and
prolonged wail (p. 112); "complaining clamour, modulated in savage discords" (p. 102).11
They are represented consistently as pre-verbal, pre-syntactic sound--as sound that is the
direct expression of emotion, as sound that is pure sound (akin to music), as sound that is
utterance without meaning:

"& they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of
human language & all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulated,
rapid, breathless utterance."

(pp. 145-6)

This representation is in accord with the emphasis, elsewhere in the text, on gesture. I have
already mentioned Marlow's speech in English to his African bearers. His account implied
that it was not the speech that communicated his meaning but rather the accompanying
gestures "not one of which was lost to the sixty pairs of eyes before me" (p. 71).12 More
significant still is Marlow's account of the first appearance of Kurtz's African mistress:

"Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head &"

(p. 136)

Marlow produces this iconic image of the African woman, communicating by dramatic
gesture, but it is followed by a very different representation of her in the Russian's brief, inset
account of an incident involving her and Kurtz:

""She got in one day and kicked up a row about those miserable rags I picked up in the
storeroom to mend my clothes with & At least it must have been that, for she talked like a fury
to Kurtz for an hour, pointing at me now and then. I don't understand the dialect of this
tribe.""

(p. 137)

Instead of an iconic "noble savage", the Russian presents a domestic drama; instead of pre-
verbal Africans, the Russian presents discursive speech; instead of undifferentiated sound,
there is an awareness of language and the ability to discriminate between different African
dialects.13 Marlow reduces Russian script to cipher and African speech to noise, but, for the
Russian, both have the status of language. The text's hierarchy of languages is again clearly
Marlow's, and is presented as the product of Marlow's specifically English incomprehension.
Ii
The African drumming and Marlow's use of the ship's steam-whistle can usefully be
examined in this context of non-verbal means of communication. Drumming is part of
Marlow's account of Africa from his description of his first experience of the jungle during
his journey to the Central Station:

"A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums,
sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild--and
perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country."

(p. 71)

We might compare this with W. Holman Bentley's account of his first journey to Kinshasa in
1881:

We had heard drums before, but until now had not thought much of them. From this time they
became an intolerable nuisance. As we passed along, one town would beat a warning to the
next.14

Bentley's narrative assigns a reasonable purpose to the drumming: it functions as a method of

communication within what is perceived as an organised social system. Marlow's
representation of the signal-drums is of a piece with his representation of African spoken
language: their communicative function is supplanted by his emotional response to what he
does not understand.15 On the other hand, Marlow plays in this passage with the idea of
cultural equivalence.16 In its context, this is clearly part of a narrative strategy designed to
undermine the ethnocentricity of his audience.17 Generally, the drumming becomes the heart-
beat of the "heart of darkness" and signifies "forgotten and brutal instincts":

"This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush,
towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone
had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations."

(p. 114)18

Here Marlow's narrative has clearly moved from notation of reality to projection and the
demonization of the other. Bentley, too, slips easily into representing Africans as devils. For
example, as he and his companions approached Kinshasa for the first time, they came under
attack from the inhabitants of the area ("men, hideous in war paint, armed with spears, guns,
and knives, rushed out"), and Bentley comments: "Perfect fiends they appeared, howling and
yelling".19 Later, after describing the punishment of a man and woman at Manzi, he observes:

Fiendish cruelty and heartlessness have made their home in these dark places.20

This casual demonizing of the "other" suggests the unthinking metaphors of stereotyping. It is
facilitated by Bentley's missionary project in Africa and his frame of reference as a Christian.
(Bentley, for example, regards both Stanley and Leopold II as agents of Providence.) Where
Bentley uses the stereotype unthinkingly, unreflectingly and unreflexively, Marlow makes
this devilish stereotype the basis for a phantasmagoria:

"We were within thirty yards from the nearest fire. A black figure stood up, strode on long
black legs, waving long black arms, across the glow. It had horns--antelope horns, I think--
on its head & it looked fiend-like enough."

(p. 143)21

The metaphor calls attention to itself as the scene takes on the overtones of Faustian pact or
Walpurgisnacht. This might be criticised as a more pernicious because more powerful
presentation of the stereotype: the stereotype empowered by Conrad's superior literary skills
and resources. Alternatively, the passage can be approached in terms of Marlow's deployment
of the categories of perception of European culture--as Marlow drawing upon the resources of
a literary culture that includes Dante and Goethe in his attempt to represent and comprehend
this non-European experience. "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz" (p. 117), and
"all Europe" contributes to Marlow's narrative. Marlow's narrative displays the cultural
resources that are part of his bond with Kurtz, and Conrad sets that culture up for analysis
through its confrontation with Africa in Marlow's narration. One result of this confrontation
is, as Marx had put it,--

The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before
our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it
goes naked.22

The ship's steam-whistle could be seen as a European equivalent of the African use of signal-
drums as a non-verbal means of communication, but, where the drumming is represented as a
language used by the Africans which the Europeans cannot understand, the steam-whistle is
used in Heart of Darkness only as a signal from the Europeans to the Africans. The Russian
advises Marlow on the effectiveness of the steam-whistle as a means of dispersing hostile
crowds:

""One good screech will do more for you than all your rifles. They are simple people.""

(p. 123)

Marlow's narrative has already supplied a demonstration:

"With one hand I felt above my head for the line of the steam whistle, and jerked out screech
after screech hurriedly. The tumult of angry and warlike yells was checked instantly &"

(p. 112)

The word "screech" converts the steam-whistle into an animal or bird, just as the "yells and
screams" dehumanise the Africans and reduce them to animals or demons. The immediate
response of the Africans to Marlow's use of the steam-whistle reinforces this dehumanisation:
the subliminal message is of communication on an animal level, but this message does not
reduce the Europeans. On the contrary, it re-affirms the superiority of the Europeans, since
Marlow has shown his ability to communicate skilfully even on this level, while the Africans
have demonstrated their incomprehension of European technology. Norman Sherry has
argued that, although there is ample evidence of the use of steam-whistles to disperse armed
Africans, such a tactic would be unlikely to have been effective on the Congo in Conrad's
time, since steamers and steam-whistles would have been commonplace.23 Certainly, to judge
by Bentley's account, steamers were far more frequent than Marlow's narrative suggests.
Bentley, however, also records an incident similar to the one Marlow describes. Grenfell, on
board the steamship Peace, was exploring the Congo between Stanley Pool and Stanley Falls.
He entered one of its northern affluents, the Lubi river, and at Mosaku the following occurred:

The chief was very friendly, and made us a small present, venturing on board to do so. He
was evidently greatly impressed by the white man's fine canoe; when one of our men, not
thinking what the result would be, suddenly opened one of the steam valves, this impression
was so profoundly deepened, that his kingship and all his satellites jumped overboard, as
well as the occupants of some twenty or thirty canoes alongside, and swam ashore.24

The Africans' response to the steam-whistle (in Heart of Darkness) accords with the
representation of their response to the steamer generally. For example, Marlow gives the
following account of the steamer's departure:

"I steamed up a bit, then swung downstream, and two thousand eyes followed the evolutions
of the splashing, thumping, fierce river-demon beating the water with its terrible tail and
breathing black smoke into the air."

(p. 145)

Even the African fireman on board the steamer is represented as approaching his work in
terms of "the evil spirit inside the boiler" (p. 98). This emphasis on animistic responses to
European technology is in line with stereotypes of "primitive" behaviour and "primitive"
ways of thinking:

"Primitive" man & spent his whole life in fear of spirits and mystical beings & he worshipped
animals and trees, tried to control the mystical forces of nature by means of ceremony, ritual,
taboos and sacrifices, and explained the wonders of the universe in imaginative but
"unscientific" myths.25

Indeed, an animistic representation of the "primitive" response to European technology is a

recurrent trope in Victorian fiction.26 It would be possible to ascribe these stereotypes to
Marlow rather than to Conrad, except that, like the Africans' response to the steam-whistle,
they are inscribed as events into the narrative. The departure of the steamer is attended by the
display of a fetish (p. 145); the African fireman wears a charm "made of rags, tied to his arm"
(p. 98) to protect him from "the evil spirit inside the boiler" (p. 98). In these instances, it
seems to be Conrad rather than Marlow who is making use of conventional racist and
imperialist modes of representation.

Iii
The most forceful attack on Conrad as a racist has been made by Chinua Achebe.27 Achebe's
force, however, is often at the expense of subtlety: what he attacks is a grossly simplified
version of Heart of Darkness. To begin with, he elides the gap between Marlow and Conrad:
he ignores both the text's dramatisation of a consciousness (Marlow's) and Conrad's strategic
use of the distance between himself and his narrators.28 Conrad is not "pretending to record
scenes", he is not presenting an account of Africa: he is presenting Marlow's experience of
Africa and Marlow's attempt to understand and represent that experience. Marlow is a
fictional character whose consciousness operates according to contemporary codes and
categories. Marlow's perceptions are often racist, because those codes and conventions were
racist, but the narrative method (which Achebe dismisses) represents a more radical stance
since it problematises Marlow's narrative, his perceptions and representations.

Achebe also misrepresents the way in which antitheses operates in Heart of Darkness. He
describes the narrative as setting up the Congo as the antithesis of the Thames, but then adds:

It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship & the Thames
too "has been one of the dark places of the earth". It conquered its darkness, of course, and is
now in daylight and at peace.

(p. 252)

As Achebe's first statement partly acknowledges, Heart of Darkness does not construct its
narrative by means of static oppositions: Conrad destabilises the antithesis of imperialist
discourse by tracing connections where there should only be oppositions.29 It is not just that
the Thames "has been one of the dark places of the earth", but, by the end of Marlow's
narration, the anonymous primary narrator has learned from it to revalue the Thames:

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the
uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the
heart of an immense darkness.

(p. 162)

This hardly suggests that the Thames has "conquered its darkness".30 In addition, Achebe
ignores the way in which Marlow's remark about "the dark places of the earth" initiates a
challenge to the rhetoric of imperialism. Bentley again provides a point of reference. For him,
as for Marlow, the European presence in Africa prompts thoughts of the Roman colonisation
of Britain:

It is more than probable that our forefathers were a wild lot. The Romans found the Britons a
tough people to tackle.

But Bentley then draws a very different moral:

The very grit, go, manliness, energy, and general noblesse, which, when properly tempered
and directed, has resulted in so great a nation, was the cause of their wildness and violence.31
Bentley uses the analogy with the Roman colonisation of Britain to justify European
interference in Africa. Since the English are manifestly "so great a nation" (in terms of "grit,
go, manliness, energy"), they are obviously well-placed to "temper and direct" the Africans.
Marlow, by contrast, alludes to the Roman colonisation of Britain in order to subvert his
audience's ethnocentricity:

"Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages,--precious little to eat fit for a civilized man &"

(p. 49)

Marlow's words destabilise the antithesis of savage/civilized from the outset, and the
continuation of his speech shows how the idea of "savagery" is a product of the colonisers'
fear in the face of the "incomprehensible":

"He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a
fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination &"

(p. 50)

The opposition between Kurtz's African mistress and "the Intended" is also not as
straightforward as Achebe suggests. He reads her as "a savage counterpart to the refined
European woman".32 The passage he quotes suggests that an opposition is constructed in
terms of the "savage" (from "the night of the first ages") and the European woman with her
"mature capacity for fidelity"--that is, an ideological opposition underwritten by evolutionary
theory. But Achebe distorts the passage by leaving out one sentence: "I noticed she was not
very young--I mean not girlish" (p. 157). The word "mature" compares what she is ("not very
young") with what Marlow might have expected her to be ("girlish"): it is not, primarily, part
of a contrast between the European and the African woman. Achebe also assumes that
Marlow's view of "the Intended" is not problematical: it is worth noting that Marlow's first
impression of her ("She seemed ready to listen without mental reservation, without suspicion,
without a thought for herself", p. 155) is not supported by the outcome of the interview.
Achebe also ignores the way in which the African woman is associated with life, vitality,
passion (p. 136), while the European woman is associated with lifelessness and death:

"The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood
massively in a corner; with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished
sarcophagus & The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy
evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow,
seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me."

(pp. 156-7)

The opposition between these two women is further complicated by the presence in the text of
a third woman: the "woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch" (p. 79) in
Kurtz's painting. Marlow does not specify whether this woman is white or black, but she is
configurated with the other two and she reflects unambiguously upon the "civilizing mission"
of the Europeans.
Iv
The nub of Achebe's criticism of Conrad is Conrad's representation of Africa and Africans:

Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role
of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real
question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this agelong attitude has
fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which
celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be
called a great work of art.33

Achebe is right: African culture and history have been denied adequate representation in
European writing, and Heart of Darkness does nothing to remedy this. Bentley again
provides an instructive comparison. He devotes his first two chapters to a history of the
Congo from 1484 to 1877, and his narrative generally gives much more sense of social
relations and social organisation within and between different peoples in the Congo basin, but
his history of the Congo is written from the perspective of European contact with the Congo
and his narrative generally is firmly fixed within a racist, imperialist Christian framework.34
Heart of Darkness, however, does not offer a representation of Africa: it offers a
representation of representations of Africa. Edward Said has described "Orientalism" as more
"a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient" than "a veridic discourse about the
Orient" and that distinction is also important in this context.35 Conrad does not present himself
as an expert on Africa and Africans: he creates a narrator and a narrative situation; he does
not use the pseudo-authoritative first-person report of so many magazine articles of the
period.36 Heart of Darkness fixes on the power-relation between Europe and Africa and holds
up for analysis the European discourses produced in that context. Said argues that

The imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a
sovereign Western consciousness & according to a detailed logic governed not simply by
empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections.37

And it is precisely those "desires, repressions, investments, and projections" that Heart of
Darkness exposes in the discourses of imperialism. Africa is not the arbitrarily-selected
backdrop for a story about "the break-up of one petty European mind": Kurtz's "break-up" is
the result of his place in the power-laden engagement of Europe and Africa; Kurtz is a victim
of one of the discourses of imperialism; and Kurtz's history shows how damaging that
discourse is to both Africans and Europeans.

Achebe also ignores the implied reader of Heart of Darkness. As Benita Parry reminds us:

Conrad in his "colonial fictions" did not presume to speak for the colonial peoples nor did he
address them & His original constituents were the subscribers to Blackwood's and New
Review, an audience still secure in the conviction that they were members of an invincible
imperial power and a superior race.38

In the case of Heart of Darkness, Conrad knew in advance that his readers would be those of
Blackwood's Magazine, and he also knew what that implied.39 Talal Asad notes:
When anthropologists return to their countries, they must write up "their people", and they
must do so in the conventions of representation already circumscribed & by their discipline,
institutional life, and wider society.40

Conrad shows his understanding of the parameters within which he was writing by mirroring
them in Marlow's relations with his audience. Marlow's audience, like the readership of
Blackwood's Magazine, is made up of males of the colonial service class. Marlow is forced to
confront the problem of making his experience intelligible to an audience which readily
manifests the limits of its understanding and tolerance: ""Try to be civil, Marlow," growled a
voice" (p. 94). Marlow adopts various rhetorical strategies in relation to this particular
audience, and Conrad similarly shapes his narrative strategies in Heart of Darkness to a
specific, known implied reader. But far from purveying "comforting myths" (as Achebe
alleges), the narrative strategies of both Conrad and Marlow work to subvert many of the
"comforting myths" accepted by the implied reader. However, as Achebe registers, one myth
Heart of Darkness fails to challenge is that of racial superiority.

Parry rightly states that Achebe's "protest at Conrad's insulting representations of Africa
should be listened to by critics for the "truth"" it asserts: Achebe's protest is "a voice that
cannot be silenced".41 However, as Parry implies, Achebe's "truth" needs to be situated in
relation to other "truths". It might be argued, for example, that Heart of Darkness needs to be
placed in its historical context: Achebe treats Heart of Darkness without reference to the
context in which it was written and without consideration of the kinds of awareness to be
expected from an English novelist of the 1890s. Achebe seems more concerned with Heart of
Darkness as a text existing within modern institutional parameters: as "the most commonly
prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American
universities".42 He provides anecdotal evidence of depoliticised readings of the novel within
these institutional parameters, but he does not indicate how widespread this depoliticised
reading is or was (as he notes, "travellers' tales" are not trustworthy evidence); nor does he
seek to explore the relationship between the depoliticised reading and the institutionalisation
of the text; nor does he seek to relate depoliticised institutional readings of Heart of
Darkness (if such readings are the norm) to the imperialism of the "wider society".
Furthermore, if we consider the present institutional status of Heart of Darkness, the text is
now supplemented (literally, in the case of the Norton edition) by Achebe's exposure of its
racist attitudes. In short, if Heart of Darkness is seen as a text of the 1890s, then Achebe has
not attended sufficiently to that context; on the other hand, if Heart of Darkness is the text as
institutionalised by modern teaching and publishing, then Achebe has not sufficiently
explored the implications of institutionalisation--including his own paradoxical position as
supplement to what he describes as "an offensive and deplorable book".43

Finally, Achebe's implicit demand for an adequate "picture of the peoples of the Congo", the
yardstick by which Heart of Darkness is measured, is similarly problematical. Said's
exploration of orientalism soon raises the question of "how one can study other peoples", and
it is precisely this question that modern dialogic or reflexive anthropology engages with. As
Said observed:

No production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author's
involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances.44

Or, as James Clifford puts it, the ethnographic experience involves "a state of being in culture
while looking at culture."45 The narrative method of Heart of Darkness can be seen as an
exemplary response to this part of the problem: Marlow's "image of Africa" is scrupulously
contextualised by the frame narrative. (In this light, Marlow's racism is less surprising, given
his involvement in the imperialist enterprise.) Indeed, for Clifford, Conrad provides a model,
not just in this one work, but in the entire body of his work, or rather in the act of writing that
body of work:

It is not surprising to find throughout his work a sense of the simultaneous artifice and
necessity of cultural, linguistic conventions. His life of writing, of constantly becoming an
English writer, offers a paradigm for ethnographic subjectivity; it enacts a structure of
feeling continuously involved in translation among languages, a consciousness deeply aware
of the arbitrariness of conventions, a new secular relativism.46

Conversely, Achebe's rejection of Heart of Darkness might be compared to Gabriel Garcia

Marquez's comment on representations of colonised peoples generally:

The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever
more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.47

For Achebe and other black readers Heart of Darkness is clearly offensive and imprisoning
(although Ngugi, for example, seems to have found Conrad an enabling influence), but for
white European readers coming to terms with an imperialist past (or European/American
ethnographers engaged with the problematics of the adequate representation of other cultures)
Heart of Darkness still has much to offer--though not as an "image of Africa".48

Notes

James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski" in The

Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard
University Press, 1988), p. 112n.

Talal Asad, "The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology" in James
Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography (University of California Press, 1986), p. 164.

Clifford, p. 100n.

During his time in the Congo, when he was (presumably) mainly speaking French, Conrad
was writing letters in French and Polish and keeping a diary in English (with occasional
African and French words).

Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness" in Youth (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1923), p. 97. All
references are to the Uniform Edition, which has the same pagination as the Dent Collected
Edition (1946) and the World's Classics edition (1984).

As every English public-schoolboy would have known, Marlow is alluding to the words
addressed by Roman gladiators to the Emperor before they engaged in combat. Since access
to Latin and Greek was effectively restricted to public-schoolboys, the use of Latin functions
as a sign of gender and class. On the role of public schools in relation to imperialism, see
Alan Sandison, The Wheel of Empire (Macmillan, 1967), pp. 13-16.

Their first exchange is not very helpful: "I swore shamefully & "You English?" he asked, all
smiles. "Are you?" I shouted from the wheel." (p. 122). Clearly Marlow swears in English
(hence the Russian's question), but is the rest of the dialogue to be imagined as taking place in
French or English? The Russian's exclamation "My faith, your pilot-house wants a clean-up!"
(p. 123) suggests either French or English with French interference.

It is perhaps significant that, in "The Crime of Partition" (Notes on Life and Letters, J. M.
Dent and Sons, 1924), Conrad describes France and Poland as the "two centres of liberal
ideas on the continent of Europe" (p. 117), whereas Russia is described as "an Asiatic Power"
(p. 115).

"Heart of Darkness", p. 98. If we continue to interrogate the text according to the logic of
realism, these words would presumably have been in French.

The picture is further complicated by the suspicion of eloquence and the awareness of what
cannot be spoken that are also present in the text. See Jeremy Hawthorn, "Heart of Darkness:
language and truth" in Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness (Edward
Arnold, 1979), pp. 7-36.

A distinction should be made between the Africans on the banks of the river and the African
crewmen. According to Sherry, the crew of the Roi des Belges were probably Bangalas: see
Conrad's Western World (Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 59; also Heart of Darkness,
pp. 102-3. It is their Bangala speech which is represented as "short, grunting phrases" (p.
103). This still seems closer to the animal than the human, but we might note that Marlow
also refers to the comments of a member of his audience as "grunting" (p. 97). At other times,
these African crewmen are represented as engaging in verbal communication with the
Europeans, but it is difficult to say in what language we are to imagine these communications
taking place. It seems unlikely that they would have used English to a French-speaking crew;
and Conrad does not represent them as speaking Pidgin ("chop" would be more accurate
Pidgin than "eat" p. 103). According to W. H. Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo, 2 vols.
(Religious Tract Society, 1900), "Portuguese was the trade language on the Congo" (I, p. 88),
but it is also possible that French patois might have been used. The representation of their
language in the text is perhaps better seen in the context of Loretto Todd's observation:
"literary insertions of pidgins and creoles were, in the past, based less on actual observation
than on a form of literary convention" (Pidgins and Creoles, Routledge and Keegan Paul,
1974, p. 77).

This reading is supported by the entry in Conrad's "Congo Diary" recording a similar
incident: "Expect lots of bother with carriers tomorrow. Had them all called and made a
speech which they did not understand" (Z. Najder ed., Joseph Conrad: Congo Diary and
other uncollected pieces, [Doubleday & Company, 1978], p. 14).

The Africans at the Inner Station are presumably to be imagined as speaking a particular
dialectal form of Bantu with which the Russian was unfamiliar. This is not an instance of that
racist reductionism according to which Europeans are represented as having languages, while
non-European languages are reduced to the status of "dialects". (I am indebted to Robert
Fraser, here and elsewhere, for information about West Africa.)

Bentley, I. 315. Bentley records his work as a missionary in the Congo from 1879 to 1900.
Conrad mentions Bentley in his "Congo Diary" (p. 12).

Indeed, he emphasises the Europeans' incomprehension: "At night sometimes the roll of
drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly &
Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell" (p. 95). The stage image draws
attention to the Europeans' sense of alienation from African realities: they experience
themselves for this moment as spectators, passive and powerless, waiting for a performance to
begin.
Marlow might be nearer the truth than he realised. Bentley notes that Ntotela, "King of
Congo", ordered drums to be beaten at San Salvador on Saturday night and Sunday morning
to announce the Christian Church Service (I, 136).

Compare "I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes,
just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilize you" (pp. 51-2) and "Well, if a lot of
mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the
road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for
them &" (p. 70).

Compare Chinua Achebe's use of the same image in Things Fall Apart (Heinemann, 1958;
reprint 1988): "The crowd had surrounded and swallowed up the drummers, whose frantic
rhythm was no longer a mere disembodied sound but the very heart-beat of the people" (p.
36). Achebe uses the image to signify a sense of collective identity, which he thereby
celebrates; for Marlow, it expresses a kinship which is feared.

Bentley, I., 352-3.

Bentley, I., 386.

Achebe singles out this passage for comment in his essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in
Conrad's Heart of Darkness", The Massachussetts Review, 18 (1977), 782-94. A revised
version of this essay is included in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough
(W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), pp. 251-62. Since this is more readily accessible, all references
will be to this text. (The essay is also included in Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments,
Heinemann, 1988.) The blackness which Marlow stresses is not, however, a matter of skin
colour: he is describing a figure silhouetted against a fire in a forest at night.

Karl Marx, "Future Results of British Rule in India" quoted by Benita Parry, Conrad and
Imperialism (Macmillan, 1983), p. 128.

Sherry, Conrad's Western World, pp. 54-5. For Najder's opposed view, see Z. Najder, Joseph
Conrad: A Chronicle (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 134.

Bentley, II. 97. Bentley also records an incident during a journey on the Kwangu, when four
men in a canoe tried to levy a toll on the steamship: "They demanded blackmail, and lay
across our bows. The two whistles of the Peace shrieked their loudest & There was an instant
collapse in the canoe; guns were dropped and paddles were seized and plied to their utmost"
(II, 139). Again, however, the distinction perhaps has to be made between people who lived
on the banks of the Congo and those who lived on the banks of its tributaries.

Brian V. Street, The Savage in Literature: Representations of "primitive" society in English

Fiction, 1858-1920 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 7.

See, for example, H. G. Wells's short story "The Lord of the Dynamos".

Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness". See also
Achebe's "Viewpoint", T.L.S. 4010 (1 February 1980) and Hunt Hawkins, "The Issue of
Racism in Heart of Darkness", Conradiana, XIV 3 (1982), 163-71. More recently, Craig
Raine's review of Achebe's Hopes and Impediments ("Conrad and Prejudice", London Review
of Books, 22 June 1989, 16-18), which chose to concentrate on Achebe's criticism of Conrad,
provoked a lively correspondence. Patrick Parrinder's contribution ("Conrad and Eliot and
Prejudice", London Review of Books, 14 September 1989, 4) convincingly engaged with the
issue of "cannibalism".
Achebe observes that "Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of
insulation between himself and the moral universe of history" (p. 256). But if Conrad was "a
thoroughgoing racist" (p. 257), it is not clear why he would feel the need for such insulation.
The readers of Blackwood's Magazine would not have demanded such insulation from racist
and imperialist ideas. Achebe's subsequent criticism that Conrad "neglects to hint however
subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions
and opinions of his characters" (p. 256) misreads the mode of Conrad's fiction: to borrow
Andrew Gibson's terms, Achebe seeks to convert an "immanent" text into a "transcendent"
one. (See Andrew Gibson, "Sterne, Beckett, and the Novel").

For a subtle analysis of H. G. Wells's similar explorative use of destabilised oppositions, see
John Huntington, The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction (Columbia
University Press, 1982).

Indeed, as Eric Woods has shown, "darkness" was appropriated by the discourse of Victorian
social reform for the areas inhabited by the urban poor. See Eric Woods, "A Darkness
Visible: Gissing, Masterman, and the Metaphors of Class, 1880-1914", Unpublished D. Phil.
Thesis, University of Sussex, 1989.

Bentley, I., 443.

Achebe, p. 255.

Achebe, p. 257.

Bentley might be compared with Achebe's District Commissioner (in Things Fall Apart) with
his book on The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. The paragraph he
intends to devote to the character who has been the central figure in Achebe's book stands as
an eloquent symbol of the European's depth of understanding of African society and culture.

Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1979), p. 6.

See Robert Hampson, "Conrad and the Idea of Empire" in Jaques Darras (ed.), L'Epoque
Conradienne (Limoges, 1990) for an account of Heart of Darkness in this context.

Said, p. 8.

Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism (Macmillan, 1983), p. 1.

In November 1911, Conrad wrote to his agent, J. B. Pinker: "There isn't a single club and
messroom and man-of-war in the British Seas and Dominions which hasn't its copy of Maga."

Asad, p. 159.

Parry, 138n.

Achebe, p. 259.

Achebe, p. 259.

Said, p. 11.

Clifford, p. 93.
Clifford, p. 96.

Quoted by Rana Kabbani, Europe's Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule (Macmillan, 1989) as
epigraph.

For a discussion of the influence of Conrad on Ngugi, see Peter Nazareth, "Out of Darkness:
Conrad and other Third World Writers", Conradiana, XIV, 3, (1982), 173-87, and Jacqueline
Bardolphe, "Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood as readings of
Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Victory," The Conradian, 12, 1 (May 1987), 32-49.