Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [136]
19 (p.86) I was looking.... We were being shot at!: This episode is another instance of what Ian Watt has termed Conrad’s method of “delayed decoding.” For an account of this technique, see “Youth” endnote 15, above.
20 (p.90) the hair goes on growing: That is, on corpses. Three sentences earlier, Marlow has referred to “the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz.”
21 (p.92) International Society... Savage Customs: Conrad appears to have drawn the title of this organization from L’Association Internationale pour l‘Exploration et la Civilisation en Afrique (the International Association for Exploration and Civilization in Africa), which was headed by King Leopold II.
22 (p.96) Dutch trading-house: That the Russian has begun his entrepreneurial career with a Dutch company alludes to the fact that the Congo region was a heavily contested commercial territory during this era. Sherry points out that one of the greatest competitors of the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo (the Belgian company that employed Conrad) was actually a Dutch trading house, the Nieuwe Afrikaansche Handels-Vennootschap (Conrad’s Western World, p. 69).
23 (p. 101) “He declared he would shoot me.... was true, too”: The Russian’s account of Kurtz’s arbitrary ruthlessness is not only an indication of his idol’s individual madness. The Machiavellian manager similarly contemplates having the Russian hanged for ivory poaching, and he is encouraged in this plan by his buccaneer uncle, who says “Why not? Anything—anything can be done in this country” (p. 72). Such pronouncements accurately reflect the attitudes and practices of the time. As Hochschild observes,
For a white man, the Congo was... a place to get rich and to wield power. As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted, and impose whatever punishments you liked. If you got carried away, the penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist. A station chief at Manyanga, on the big rapids, who beat two of his personal servants to death in 1890 was only fined five hundred francs. What mattered was keeping the ivory flowing back to Belgium (King Leopold’s Ghost, pp. 136-137).
24 (p.102) those heads on the stakes: Hochschild has compiled impressive circumstantial evidence to support the claim that Kurtz was likely modeled on several particularly sadistic white officers in the Force Publique (the private army created by Leopold II to police the Congo) who, like Kurtz, collected the heads of their African victims. One such officer, Léon Rom, is an especially strong candidate. He was the station chief at Leopoldville (the Central Station) when Conrad passed through there in 1890, and he subsequently became a commander at Stanley Falls (the Inner Station, site of Kurtz’s compound), where he decorated the outside of his home with the heads of twenty-one slain Africans. Hochschild points out that Conrad almost certainly would have known of Rom’s head collecting from multiple reports in the British press, including one in The Saturday Review (which he read faithfully) on December 17, 1898, several days before he began writing Heart of Darkness (King Leopold’s Ghost, p.145).
25 (p.104) Kurtz-that means short in German: Marlow’s observation serves both as an ironic commentary on Kurtz’s fraudulent career (“the name was as true as everything else in his life,” he quips of the man whose emaciated body appears to be “at least seven feet long”) and as an evocation of the name of the actual company agent upon whom Kurtz is loosely based: Georges Antoine Klein’s surname means “small” in German.
26 (p.106) She walked with measured steps.... passionate soul: Marlow’s account of the African woman is highly exoticized as well as eroticized. Conrad toned down the latter aspect by deleting from the