Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [3]
1924 A rheumatic Conrad refuses an offer of knighthood a few months before he succumbs to a fatal heart attack.
1926 Conrad’s volume Last Essays is posthumously published.
1958 The Congo forms its first parliamentary government.
1960 The Congo wins its independence from Belgium.
1979 Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a movie largely inspired by Heart of Darkness, premieres.
INTRODUCTION
While engaged in the mundane chore of packing ivory tusks into casks, in his second week in the Congo as an employee of a Belgian company, Joseph Conrad could hardly have dreamed that the events of the next six months would provide him with the basis for one of the most influential works of fiction of the modern era. In fact, at the time, in June 1890, he felt this task to be “idiotic employment” (Conrad, “The Congo Diary,” p. 161; see “For Further Reading”), an impression he recorded in a journal that is one of the earliest samples of his writing in the English language as well as a document that demonstrates how closely aspects of Heart of Darkness are based on his own experiences. Perhaps it was the unpleasant memory of his physical contact with the coveted substance for which the Congo region was being plundered that would lead him, twenty-seven years later, to make clear that he did not profit from the endeavor materially but only artistically: two stories, one of which was Heart of Darkness, he maintained, “are all the spoil I brought out from the centre of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business” (Author’s Note, p. 4). Conrad was not yet a writer in 1890, although he had a year earlier tentatively begun work on what would eventually become his first novel, based partly on his observations in the Malay Archipelago. His relatively late start, however, was essential to his success, for by the time he began he had amassed a wealth of experiences of the sort that most other writers could only imagine. In fact, while Heart of Darkness is the best-known instance of Conrad’s penchant for transforming personal experiences into fiction, it is only one of numerous such works by this prolific author. By presenting this novella along with several of Conrad’s finest short stories—“Youth,” “Amy Foster,” and “The Secret Sharer,” each of which also draws on his travels and observations from around the world—the current volume aims to facilitate an appreciation of the diverse fruits of his genius.
Life and Career
In an essay written shortly after Conrad’s death in 1924, Virginia Woolf copiously praised her fellow novelist’s artistry. Yet even though Conrad had been naturalized as a British subject nearly four decades earlier, the quintessentially English Woolf viewed this Polish émigré, who “spoke English with a strong foreign accent,” as a “guest” in Britain. She further described him as “compound of two men,” as one who was “at once inside and out,” and who was therefore possessed of a penetrating “double vision” (Woolf, Collected Essays, pp. 302, 304). Ever the penetrating observer herself, Woolf thus crystallized what is perhaps the most basic aspect of Conrad’s identity: the fact that it was structured according to a series of dichotomies. He was a Pole and a Briton as well as a seaman and a writer, a fact he alluded to in a 1903 letter in which he characterized himself as a “homo duplex” (double man) in multiple senses (The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 3, p. 89). As a result of his dual nationalities and careers, he had a plurality of experiences and insights on a wide range of issues. Indeed, he was a consummate example of what Salman Rushdie (himself a hybrid product of India, Pakistan, and Britain) has termed “translated men”—expatriate artists whose geographical, cultural, and linguistic border crossings have resulted in rich cross-fertilizations of identities and perspectives (Imaginary Homelands, p. 17). One salient example of Conrad’s variety of experiences is on the matter of imperialism. Having been born in Russian-occupied Poland to a family of ardently nationalistic Poles