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By Root 4710 0

Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. This was five years after the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, a meeting of representatives of the European powers to establish the terms according to which much of the continent of Africa would be divided among them. During this meeting, King Leopold II of Belgium, skillfully playing the jealousies and fears of rival powers off one another, astonishingly managed to secure as his own property over 900,000 square miles of central Africa—that is, a territory roughly seventy-five times the size of the diminutive country he ruled. Under humanitarian pretenses, Leopold’s agents, who had’ begun the process of conquest several years earlier, effectively turned the so-called Congo Free State into an enormous forced labor camp for the extraction of ivory and, later, after the world-wide rubber boom in the early 1890s following the popularization of the pneumatic tire, rubber. In addition to outright murders, the slave labor conditions led to many deaths from starvation and disease as well as a steeply declining birth rate. Even during an era in which most Europeans viewed imperialism as legitimate, the appalling circumstances of Leopold’s Congo (it would officially become a Belgian colony in 1908, and Leopold would die the following year never having so much as visited the territory) led to international outrage. Conservative demographic estimates place the region’s depopulation toll between 1880 and 1920 at ten million people—that is, half of the total population—with the worst of the carnage occurring between 1890 and 1910. Not much was known outside Africa about the conditions of Leopold’s rule when Conrad was there, but in the several years before he began writing Heart of Darkness, in 1898, it became an international scandal, and regular reports appeared in the British and European press denouncing the abuses. Even before the publicity and protests, however (which would peak several years after the novella’s publication), Conrad had seen enough on his own to be thoroughly disgusted.

Yet it is important to recognize that while parts of Heart of Darkness are based on Conrad’s experiences and that it does register his sense of moral outrage, the book is neither a work of autobiography nor history, and (as we shall see, the controversy over how to read it demonstrates) it presents considerable interpretive difficulties. Although the fictional structure is the same as that of “Youth”—again, we have a frame-tale narrative with the Englishman Marlow recounting his experiences to the same quartet of middle-aged men—it is a much more complex work. The terms of that complexity are elucidated in the opening pages by the unnamed primary narrator, who precedes his recapitulation of Marlow’s tale with a figurative description of how this raconteur’s mode of storytelling differs from that of his less-sophisticated seafaring peers:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine (p. 40).

We are presented here with images that illustrate not only two different narrative methods but two distinct epistemologies. On the one hand, in the first sentence we have the typical seaman’s story depicted as presenting no, interpretive problems whatsoever: telling a tale is a straightforward process whose aim is to reveal an unambiguous and easily accessible kernel of truth for the listener’s edification. On the other hand, in the second, more elaborate sentence, Marlow’s stories are depicted (as the primary narrator will later term them) as utterly “inconclusive” (p. 42): telling a story in this manner is aimed not at providing definitive enlightenment, but rather, as Ian Watt puts it, to lead the listener to become