The University of Texas at Austin

Law in Popular Culture collection

Journal of Maritime Law & Commerce 
Vol. 31, No. 4 (October 2000)

Reprinted from "Admiralty Law in Popular Culture", a special 
issue published in 2000 by the Journal of Maritime Law and 
Commerce, a quarterly devoted to maritime law, with the 
permission of the Journal and the Jefferson Law Book Company.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:
A Literary Critique of Imperialism;

DAVID RAY PAPKE

I
INTRODUCTION

     Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness merits a place in any collection of literary works related to the sea and maritime law. Conrad was a seaman who sailed under several European flags before beginning his literary career, and critics of his own era often treated him as a novelist of the sea. Heart of Darkness, perhaps his best known work, does not focus on admiralty or maritime law per se, but it does cast law as one of the central features of 19th century European imperialism. Most importantly, Heart of Darkness exposes imperialism's exploitation of foreign lands and people, leaving the imperialist agents themselves empty and deranged.

II
FROM POLISH SEAMAN TO ENGLISH NOVELIST

     Joseph Conrad's origins made it highly unlikely he would one day be added to the English pantheon of literary greats. Born in 1857 in a part of Poland that had been taken over by Imperial Russia, he was christened Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski. His parents, members of the landed aristocracy, were Polish patriots who deeply resented the way Russian, Prussian, and Austrian powers had dismantled and claimed parts of the Polish homeland. When Conrad was only four, Russian authorities arrested his father and sent him to rural Russia. Conrad and his mother accompanied his father into exile, but his mother died only three years later. Conrad's father was able to return to Poland, but he died when Conrad was 11. One of the most powerful experiences of Conrad's youth was walking behind his 

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father's coffin in a large funeral procession in Cracow honoring a national martyr.
     In a romantic novel written by a lesser novelist than Conrad, he might have picked up his father's cause and led the Polish people to freedom, but Conrad shaped his life and goals in different ways. After several years of schooling in Cracow, he decided there was no future for himself in occupied Poland and left for Marseilles and the life of a seaman. He had never even seen the sea, but like many other young men in the 19th century, he imagined the life of a seaman to be lucrative, adventuresome, and self-fulfilling. Conrad went to Marseilles and chose the French merchant marine both because his uncle had connections in the French port and because, like other educated Poles of his period, he counted French as his second language.
     Conrad spent a total of four years in the French merchant marine, during which he sailed primarily to the West Indies and Latin America. According to some stories, he also fought a duel with an American over his Basque lover. Wounded in the supposed duel, Conrad was rescued by his benevolent uncle, but he then told the uncle his wounds were from an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The truth of the matter remains uncertain, but the duel and/or suicide attempt did precipitate Conrad's departure from the French merchant marine.
     However, Conrad had not finished with sea adventure. Still only 21, he next joined the British merchant marine. Raw opportunity and perceptions of possible career advancement prompted the move, but it also seems Conrad took the British to be a particularly nautical people. Writing in Youth (1902), Conrad said in England "men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak--the sea entering the life of most men and the men knowing something or everything about the sea . . . ."1
     Was Conrad right? Ford Madox Ford, his friend in later years and a distinguished writer in his own right, thought Conrad was misled because the Englishmen he knew best were all connected to the sea:
Most men enter London by way of Charing Cross or Victoria, railway stations about sixty miles away from the sea and its ships. Therefore, for them, London is the City of London. If you questioned them, and they were at all knowledgeable men, they might confess to a dim awareness that, somewhere in that city, there were some ships tucked away in a negligible corner, much as an inhabitant of Minneapolis coming to New York might agree that somewhere near the Battery seagoing craft would probably be found . . . . But Conrad first approached London from its amazing other end, going up a great 
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silver-grey estuary between sixty miles of docks, all with seagoing ships lying shoulder to shoulder, like fish in thick shoals.2
     The British merchant marine served Conrad well. He sailed to Singapore, Malaysia, Borneo, other parts of the East Indies, and Australia. He passed the examinations for master mariner and was thereby able to serve in several brief instances as not a seaman but rather a first mate and even a ship's captain. He also, of course, began to refine his English, and without this important step could never have become a novelist in the English language.
     For immediate purposes at hand, Conrad's most important adventure during his years of service in the British merchant marine involved special arrangements with a Belgian company in 1890. Conrad sailed to the Belgian Congo and then piloted the steamer Roi des Belges up the Congo River into the heart of the African continent. His work was disenchanting and disabling, and ill with dysentery, fever, and gout, Conrad was unable to fulfill his contractual obligations.
     Not only the Congo experiences but also Conrad's larger record as a seaman were crucial resources when, in 1894, he abandoned the sea and settled in England. Using the pen name "Joseph Conrad," he began publishing stories and novels set largely in exotic places or on the sea. Conrad's great novel Nostromo (1904) drew on his experiences in the French merchant marine in Latin America. His short story, The Secret Sharer (1911), derives from British merchant marine experiences in Bangkok and the East Indies. Heart of Darkness (1902) drew on Conrad's brief experiences piloting the Belgian steamer on the Congo River.
     With good reason, critics in the early 20th century (and later) saw Conrad as a novelist of the sea.3 Indeed, one of the first authors claiming to write Conrad's definitive biography used something resembling a ship's log to record the events of Conrad's life and titled the work The Sea Dreamer.4
     For his own part, Conrad rejected these categorizations. Yes, he had left his native Poland to become a seaman. And yes, his stories and novels in English often drew on his experiences at sea. But Conrad was troubled that the "public mind fastens on externals, on mere facts, such for instance as ships and voyages, without paying attention to any deeper significance they might have."5 The sea molds character, he said, "yet, in setting the 

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conditions for shipboard drama--as to some extent it inevitably must--it reveals, like a mirror, the face of character itself."6 Conrad had traveled long geographical, personal, and professional distances in order to become a successful writer, and one request he made in return was that his readers not underestimate his journey.7

III
JOURNEYING INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS

     Conrad had been settled in England for four years before publishing the installments of Heart of Darkness in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899.8 During these years he married Jessie George, welcomed the birth of his son Borys, and relocated to rustic Pent Farm near Kent. Conrad had entered the happiest stage of his life, and his writings had begun to attract critical acclaim. Yet none of the satisfaction he might have felt in his family life and budding literary career is reflected in Heart of Darkness. A brooding, unsettling work, the novella has left many unable to sleep long after turning off their reading lights.
     As the story begins, the cruising yawl Nellie is at rest on the Thames, waiting for the turn of the tide. Men on board reflect on the lower reaches of the Thames, on the men and ships that had followed the river to and from England, and--most generally--on the sea. The narrator defers to a character named Charles Marlow, who will then tell the story inside the story--a device which will allow us to reflect not only on what Marlow has said but also on the degree to which Marlow has understood his own story. Marlow himself is a seaman with sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, and an ascetic, straight back. The narrator warns us that Marlow's story will not be the average sea yarn. While most seamen tell simple stories, "the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut," Marlow was not typical: "to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale." (pg. 3)9
     The story inside the story took place several years earlier, and within this story Marlow contracts with a Belgian trading concern to pilot a steamer up a large African river, a river resembling on the map "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast 

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country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land." (pgs. 5-6) The steamer's prior captain, it seems, had been killed by an angry African villager after the captain had beaten the villager's chief. The steamer was crucial in the transportation of ivory from the inland to the coast, and the Company was anxious to find a new pilot and put the ship back in service.
     Marlow sets off as a passenger in a French ship, sailing along the western coast of Africa to the Congo region. The coast seems to Marlow an enigma--"smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out." (pg. 10) At one point Marlow and his fellow passengers spot an anchored French man-of-war indiscriminately firing its guns into the coastal trees and vegetation. "There was a touch on insanity in the proceeding," Marlow reports. (pg. 11)
     After 30 days, Marlow reaches the mouth of the Congo River and then travels by steamer 30 miles up-river to the Company's chief station, a cluster of three wooden barracks on a rocky slope. One of the first things Marlow notices at the station is a group of six African men wearing iron collars and connected by a chain. Other severely emaciated men lounge about, and the explosions from a nearby mining venture shake the earth and fill the air with harsh, unnerving sounds. Marlow locates the Company's chief accountant, who tells Marlow of Kurtz, the Company's best agent, best obtainer of ivory, and "a very remarkable person." (pg. 15)
     Marlow then sets off with a caravan of 60 men on a 200-mile tramp to another post further up-river. African carriers die in harness, but nobody seems to pay much attention. On the 15th day, the remaining members of the caravan reach the central station, and Marlow learns that the steamer he is to pilot is stuck at the bottom of the river. Marlow, it seems, is expected to fix it. Repairs in turn take several months, during which period Marlow hears time and again of the great Kurtz. Marlow's curiosity is piqued; indeed, he becomes fixated on Kurtz, worried about the illness that has disabled Kurtz and almost desperate to meet him.
     But even after the steamer has been repaired, reaching Kurtz proves to be no easy matter. Going up the Congo River to Kurtz's station, Marlow tells those listening to his tale, "was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world . . . ." The quiet along the river did not seem peaceful to Marlow. "It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention . . . ." (pg. 28) Nevertheless, Marlow, his mates, and the steamer "penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness." (pg. 29)
     One morning, approximately eight miles from Kurtz's station, Marlow awakes to "a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than night." (pg. 32) Somewhere in the fog invisible Africans are shrieking in a way that sounded to Marlow like sorrow. After the fog lifts, natives along the shore fire arrows at the steamer and its passengers. "The arrows came in 

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swarms . . . but they looked as though they wouldn't kill a cat." (pg. 38) Marlow responds by jerking the steamer's whistle and, miraculously, the shrieking and barrage of arrows stop.
     The steamer continues to Kurtz's station, but Marlow and the others then learn that Kurtz has become unhinged, has taken an African lover, adopted African ways, and solicited the adoration of the tribespeople. An immense store of ivory has been accumulated, but the station is bizarre and mysterious, complete with skulls attached to the tops of poles. Kurtz himself is close to death, and Marlow feels as though he is "buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets." (pg. 52)
     Marlow and the crew carry Kurtz through a mass of agitated Africans to the pilot-house on the steamer, but it is too late to save him. "The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us downward towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress, and Kurtz's life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time." (pg. 57) Kurtz gives Marlow a packet of papers and a photograph. Marlow stares at him as he continues to decline, and Kurtz cries out at some image or vision: "The horror! The horror!" (pg. 58) Shortly thereafter, Kurtz dies and is buried in a muddy hole.
     Marlow interprets Kurtz's final words as a summation of his life or perhaps of life in general, and the thought of the horror the dying Kurtz perceived sticks in Marlow's mind. Marlow had been fascinated by Kurtz, even attracted to him, and this makes Kurtz's life summation even more troubling. Despite it all, Marlow continues to think of Kurtz as a remarkable man. "He had something to say," Marlow observes. "Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up--he had judged." (pg. 59)
     Marlow then returns to Europe and, in what amounts to an epilogue of sorts for the novella, he decides to give the papers and photograph from Kurtz to Kurtz's mourning fiancee. In a tortured meeting, they compare notes on Kurtz's greatness, and the fiancee asks to know Kurtz's last words. Marlow lies, unwilling and unable to share thoughts of "the horror." "The last he pronounced," Marlow tells Kurtz's fiancee, "was--your name." (pg. 65)
     With those words, Marlow concludes his story while still aboard the Nellie anchored in the lower Thames. But recall that Marlow, formally speaking, is not the narrator of the entire Heart of Darkness. His tale consumes almost all of the novella, but the undefined narrator of Marlow's narration has the last words. Marlow stopped speaking and sat "indistinct and silent," the narrator says, "in the pose of a meditating Buddha." (pg. 65) 

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     A black bank of clouds stood before the Nellie and its sobered passengers. "The tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness." (pg. 65) In the end, we are invited through the double narrative frame to know more and go even further in our thoughts than Marlow did in his.

IV
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

     What is the lesson of Heart of Darkness? What meaning does the novella convey? As with almost all enduring literary works, no simple answers are available for these questions. Most certainly the work is symbolic, the symbolism is multifaceted, and the meaning is plural. One critic has seen the story as an allegory of the soul's travels through purgatory and hell to salvation, comparable to the quest for the Holy Grail or to the journey in Dante's Inferno.10 Another critic has interpreted the story as a comment on the agony of writing fiction,11 and still another has suggested it is about the incompleteness of self-knowledge, both for Marlow and in general.12
     For purposes of this special issue of the Journal, it might be best to focus on what Eloise Knapp Hay calls "the solid soil of the story."13 To wit: a tale about a man employed by a European company to pilot a steamer up the Congo River to reach the company's best acquirer of African ivory. Although his thoughts do not control the interpretive enterprise, Conrad's own words seem to point to this kind of interpretation. Before the episodes of the story began appearing in Blackwood's Magazine, Conrad wrote to its editor to say the tale was about the "criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa."14
     Put even more bluntly, Heart of Darkness is at least on one level about imperialism. Understood in the earlier 19th century as primarily a political system in which powerful nations controlled others, "imperialism" came gradually to refer to a system of economic as well as political dominance.15 Conrad's novella recognizes both of these dimensions. As the French man-of-war firing into coastal Africa symbolizes, European powers are 

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seeking to establish and maintain political control over the African continent. The Belgian trading company and its agents, Kurtz notwithstanding, are extracting profitable ivory.
     Law plays a role in both the political and economic aspects of imperialism, and in passing (albeit not extended) ways Heart of Darkness reinforces this point. Marlow's trip to Africa, for starters, is buoyed by law. He enters into an employment contract with the Belgian company, and this contract addresses not only salary and length of employment but also travel to the Congo region and other matters. The company also asks Marlow to sign a document promising not to disclose trade secrets and even to undergo a formal medical examination before departing.
     Conrad writes at surprising length about Marlow's required visit to the company's doctor. The latter felt Marlow's pulse and also measured his head with large calipers. Why? The doctor liked to know the measurements of the crania of those heading to Africa. Marlow asks if the doctor also measures the crania of those returning, but the doctor reports he never sees them and "moreover, the changes take place inside you know." (pg. 8) Just why is the doctor making these measurements? Why is this being done? The doctor tells Marlow, "This is my share in the advantages my country shall reap from the possession of such a magnificent dependency."(pg. 9)
     When Marlow reaches the Congo, law continues to contribute to the imperialist milieu in which he finds himself. The law's function at this point seems largely to assist imperialist control. And indeed, as Lee Lourdeaux writes regarding Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 cinematic appropriation of Heart of Darkness, imperialists do more than merely use the law. They seize the very "right to define the law."16
     Time and again Marlow sees Europeans using laws which they have created to control and oppress the African natives. The ugly chain-gang Marlow encounters at the first station, for example, hardly seems to consist of criminals or enemies. However, "the outraged law" had fallen on the natives, Marlow says, like the shells from the man-of-war, like "an insoluble mystery from the sea." (pg. 12) The poorly fed and paid African crewmen aboard the steamer, it occurs to Marlow, "still belonged to the beginnings of time," but "as long as there was a piece of paper written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the river, it didn't enter anybody's head to trouble how they would live." (pgs. 33-34) The skulls displayed on stakes at Kurtz's compound were from men who had also been judged according to European law and felt the wrath of that law. Other Africans encountered on the trip up-river had been "enemies," "criminals," 

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and "workers," but the men at Kurtz's compound had been "rebels." However, Marlow adds wryly, "Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks." (pg. 49)
     Even at the end of the tale, when Marlow returns to Europe, the law continues to play a role. No "exit examination" with the previously encountered doctor awaits Marlow. No post-Congo cranial measurements are taken. But the European society and the culture of the imperialist nations disgust Marlow. "I found myself back in the sepulchral city," he says, "resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams." (pg. 60)
     One day "a clean-shaven man, with an official manner and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles" calls on Marlow. (pg. 60) A representative of the company that had hired Marlow in the first place, the man requests the papers Marlow had received from Kurtz. When Marlow refuses to turn them over, the man "became darkly menacing at last, and with much heat argued that the Company had the right to every bit of information about its 'territories.'" (pg. 60) When Marlow continues to resist, the man withdraws, threatening that legal proceedings will follow. Kurtz's knowledge, Marlow muses, "did not bear upon the problems of commerce or administration." (pg. 60)

V
CONCLUSION

     Is "law" Conrad's chief target in Heart of Darkness? Does Conrad take "law" to be the key to imperialism? No, Conrad has bigger fish to fry. He takes law, as well as missionary zeal, racism, administrative efficiency, and the desire for profit, to all be components of the larger and largely despicable phenomenon of imperialism. Conrad was writing at the beginning of what one critic calls "the new imperialist crisis"--a period of emerging doubt about the imperialist venture.17 Heart of Darkness indicts imperialism in general more than it indicts the role law plays in imperialism.
     Furthermore, Conrad's indictment of imperialism is not simple and limited but rather complex and far-reaching. In real life, Conrad had especially harsh words for the Belgian despoliation of the Congo during the 

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reign of Leopold II. The Congo venture, he wrote, was "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploitation."18 In the novella, meanwhile, Conrad takes steps to generalize imperialism. Even though the company for which Marlow works is clearly Belgian, it is named the Continental Trading Company and, suggesting imperialism in general, Conrad frequently refers to it simply as "the Company." Kurtz, meanwhile, may have had a German name, but Conrad reports that Kurtz's father was half-French and his mother half-English. "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz," (pg. 41) as it did to 19th century imperialism.
     This grotesque political and economic phenomenon not only controlled and exploited non-European peoples but also left empty and deranged the agents of imperialism. Virtually all of the Europeans Marlow encounters in the Congo are superficial, confused, or strange. Kurtz, of course, has almost completely lost his bearings and suffers from what we would today call a nervous breakdown. "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves," Conrad has Marlow say early in Heart of Darkness, "is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." (pgs. 4-5) 

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ENDNOTES

* R. Bruce Townsend Professor of Law and Professor of Liberal Arts, Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis. A.B., Harvard University; Ph.D., University of Michigan; J.D., Yale University. 

1. 16 J. Conrad, Youth and Two Other Stories, in Complete Works of Joseph Conrad 3 (1924).

2. F. Ford, Portraits From Life 58-59 (1937).

3. Representative attempts to link Conrad's experiences as a seaman to his literary work include: Bluefarb, The Sea--Mirror and Maker of Character in Fiction and Drama, 47 Eng. J. 501, 502-10 (1959); Curle, Sea Captain and Novelist: Memories of Joseph Conrad, 32 Listener 102 (July 27, 1944); Warner, The Sea Writer, London Magazine, Nov. 1957, at 21.

4. G. Jean-Aubry, Vie De Conrad (1947). See also J. Allen, The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad (1965).

5. Letter to Richard Curle, July 17, 1923, in II G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters 320-21 (1927).

6. Bluefarb, supra note 3, at 506.

7. Ford Madox Ford suggests Conrad even came to hate life at sea. Reflecting his era's sexism, Ford said Conrad "detested the sea as a man detests a cast-off mistress." Ford, supra note 2, at 57.

8. Shortly thereafter the novella was included in Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories (1902).

9. This quotation and all subsequent quotations are taken from J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness (L. Dean ed. 1960). In order to avoid lengthy footnoting, I have included Heart of Darkness page numbers in the text of this article.

10. Feder, Marlow's Descent into Hell, 9 Nineteenth-Century Fiction 289, 292 (1955).

11. Halle, Joseph Conrad: An Enigma Decoded, Saturday Rev. Lit., May 22, 1948, at 7-8.

12. M. Zabel, Introduction, Youth (1959).

13. E. Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study 110 (1963).

14. Letters to William Blackwood 37 (W. Blackburn ed. 1958).

15. R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society 131 (1976). Conrad, most likely, did not reflect on the process of "cultural imperialism" so frequently discussed in recent years. Rather than exercising political dominion or expropriating natural resources and other varieties of material wealth, the cultural imperialist substitutes the imperialist's values and attitudes for those of indigenous peoples.

16. L. Lourdeaux, Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese 172 (1990).

17. C. Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siecle 150 (1991). Other works dealing at least in part with Conrad's reaction to imperialism include G. Alderman, Heart of Darkness: Search for the Unconscious (1987); P. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988); R. Lee, Conrad's Colonialism (1969); B. Perry, Conrad and Imperialism: Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (1983); A. White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject (1993).

18. Dean, supra note 9, at 78. 

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