Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [21]
To gain perspective on the artistic license Conrad took, it is useful to contrast his novella with the writings of two men who were in the Congo at the same time he was. The first, an African-American lawyer named George Washington Williams, appalled by what he had witnessed, responded by immediately writing at Stanley Falls (Kurtz’s fiefdom) an open letter to King Leopold, dated July 18, 1890, several weeks after Conrad’s arrival in the region. In this lengthy document Williams enumerated the crimes of Leopold’s agents and roundly criticized their hypocrisies. The second, an Irishman named Roger Casement, whom Conrad befriended shortly after arriving in Africa, would subsequently dedicate much of his life to publicizing the human rights abuses, most notably in the form of a widely circulated report he published in 1904 that detailed the atrocities. Conrad’s sentiments were largely the same as both of these activists. As he wrote to Casement in 1903, railing against the “ruthless, systematic cruelty towards the blacks” and offering his “warmest wishes” for the success of the Irishman’s campaign, “It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago... put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State to day. It is as if the moral clock has been put back many hours” (Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 95-97). Nonetheless, Conrad consistently declined to write political pamphlets or to become directly involved in the protest movement in any other manner. As he sheepishly wrote of Casement’s cause several days later to Cunninghame Graham, “I would help him but it is not in me. I am only a wretched novelist inventing wretched stories and not even up to that” (Collected Letters, vol. 3., p. 102). Indeed, although some of Conrad’s contemporaries viewed Heart of Darkness as an expose of Leopold’s Congo (E. D. Morel, founder of the Congo Reform Association, praised it as such in his 1903 pamphlet The Congo Slave State), its political usefulness was ambiguous at best. For whereas the goal of politically engaged writing is to galvanize conviction, what Heart of Darkness mainly tends to elicit is moral indecisiveness. To recur to the primary narrator’s opening characterization of Marlow’s storytelling method, as the tale merely casts a glow on a haze, it steadfastly resists providing the reader with a kernel of truth of the sort that can serve as a basis for resolute action.
Perhaps the best illustration of how the text functions to blunt potential political effect is in the representation of Marlow’s rather perplexing allegiance to Kurtz, whom, notably, he first alludes to with the chummy phrase “the poor chap” (p. 42). Explaining why he has “remained loyal to Kurtz to the last,” Marlow says that his deathbed epiphany was “a moral victory,” albeit one that was obtained at the price of “abominable terrors” (p. 117). What is disturbing here is the way that Marlow’s telling of the story subordinates the “abominable terrors” (the enslavement and murder of Africans) to the “moral victory” (Kurtz’s apparent insight into his own depravity). Further, the term “loyal” is a euphemism, for what he specifically means is that he has suppressed the truth about Kurtz