Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [18]
Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain... (p. 51 ).
In a spectacle that he likens to something out of Dante’s depiction of Hell in the Inferno, he subsequently sees what the fate of such men is when they become too exhausted and sick to work:
Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.... [T]his was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.
They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom (pp. 52-53).
During the several months that Marlow spends in the Central Station (modern Kinshasa, then named Leopoldville), he becomes intrigued by the reputation of the one company agent who appears to be a genuine humanitarian. The chief of the Inner Station (modern Kisangani, then Stanley Falls), Kurtz is, moreover, an accomplished painter, poet, musician, and essayist; in short, he is a consummate example of the best that European civilization has to offer. As Marlow sets out on his thousand-mile, two-month-long steamship journey upriver to retrieve Kurtz, the spectacle of rampant hypocrisy among his colleagues has led him to be curious to see how someone fortified with what appear to be genuine “moral ideas” (p. 69) has fared under these circumstances. Toward the end of the journey, when the ship comes under native attack, Marlow assumes the violent episode to indicate that Kurtz must be dead, but he subsequently finds that this is not the case. (Later, Kurtz’s young Russian worshiper will confide in him that it was actually the great man himself who ordered the attack on the ship.) By the time Marlow reaches the compound and sees human heads displayed on stakes, he realizes that Kurtz is not at all the enlightened altruist he had been hoping to meet. These impressions are confirmed later when Marlow learns of the appalling circumstances of Kurtz’s rule, which have included “midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites” (p. 92) over which he has presided.
Marlow becomes acquainted with Kurtz in person during the brief remainder of the emaciated ivory trader’s life (he presumably has dysentery, an illness that Conrad himself contracted while in Africa) and concludes that he has undergone a reversal of the instinctual renunciations upon which civilization is based: “the wilderness,” Marlow observes, “seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts” (p. 111). What Marlow finds particularly illuminating in documenting this reversal is the manuscript of an essay that Kurtz has entrusted to him. Before coming to Africa, Kurtz has been asked by “the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” to write up “a report, for its future guidance.” (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.) The essay, which he has evidently written before his breakdown, describes how Europeans, allegedly further along in the evolutionary process than members of other races, “can exert a power for good practically unbounded” by presenting themselves to non-Europeans as “supernatural beings.” It continues for seventeen pages that are “vibrating with eloquence” but ends startlingly with a phrase that has been “scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand... :