Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [16]
Marlow prefaces his account of his experiences in the Congo, which he narrates while on a yacht on the Thames, with some observations about imperialism in general. He begins by anticipating one of the central themes of his tale—the collapse of the distinction between civilization and barbarism—by recalling that Britain itself, the world’s foremost imperial power, was at one time a colony of a mighty empire: alluding to the Roman invasion and conquest of Britain more than 1,800 years earlier, his first words are “[a]nd this also... has been one of the dark places of the earth” (p. 39). Such a reminder would have been particularly bracing to an English readership that had recently been steeped in the self-congratulatory excesses of Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee, which primarily took the form of an ostentatious celebration of Britain’s imperial might. Marlow’s prologue thus provides a sobering historical frame of reference for his ensuing tale about the seedy, hypocritical side of empire. And what we come to recognize as the story unfolds is that this is merely the first in a series of such rhetorical moves. In fact, much of the tale’s energy is invested in systematically dismantling those binary oppositions (civilization/barbarism, Europe/Africa, Christian ity/heathenism, white men/black men) that provided the ideological foundation of Anglo-European society of the era.
Noting the slim margin of difference that separates the vanquisher from the vanquished, Marlow remarks that the ability to subjugate another people is “nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.” And, he continues, “[t]he conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (p. 41). He does, however, qualify these assertions by upholding—that is, by exempting from the logic of his tale—one binary opposition: that between what he terms “colonists” and “conquerors.” The Romans in Britain, like King Leopold’s agents in the Congo, “were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force.... They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale” (p. 41). When he proceeds to the action of the narrative, he vividly illustrates this distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of imperialism in his recollection of “a large shining map [of Africa], marked with all the colours of a rainbow,” which he has seen in the Brussels office of his new employers prior to his journey to the Congo:
There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow (p. 45).
Maps during this era often represented imperial territories according to this color-coded system—red for British, blue for French, green for Italian, orange for Portuguese, purple for German, and yellow for Belgian. Further, they served not merely as geographical but also as ideological tools; as Marlow demonstrates by singling out the red (British) territories for praise and the purple (German) territories for disapprobation, they enabled one to distinguish between different types of imperialism and morally to evaluate them accordingly. He has earlier asserted that what