Joseph Conrad is one of the most respected and acclaimed novelists in the English language, which has always been remarkable since, as most readers know, he was born to Polish parents in what is now part of Ukraine but at the time of his birth was a part of the Russian empire. Thus his native language was Polish, and when he left Poland he worked several years in the French Merchant Marine, so that he became quite fluent in French. He did not join the English merchant marine until he was well into his twenties, and only then did he begin to learn English. But his uncanny ability to create radiant impressionistic prose in English won him many faithful readers and admiring fellow writers whom he counted as friends, including Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells, and Stephen Crane. And his works went on to influence and inspire countless other writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, and the list goes on. It is, therefore, virtually impossible to create a list of the greatest English novels without including Conrad on the list.
Several of his novels could be candidates for the list, perhaps most especially Lord Jim, featuring one of the great antiheroes of early Modernist fiction; Nostromo, an exciting novel that reflects the complexities of South American politics in the early twentieth century; The Secret Agent, a political novel from late in his career dealing with the nascent espionage and terrorism that would come to define the later part of that century. But the quintessential Conrad will probably always be his short, haunting early novel Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness was ranked #67 on the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century (though it was published in 1899 as a three-part serial in Blackwood’s Magazine, it was published in book form three years later). It was also among the top l00 favorite books selected by Penguin Classics readers, the Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest novels, and the BBC’s list of the 100 greatest British novels of all time. And I am including it as #21 (alphabetically) on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Books in the English Language.”
This is a book that’s not “lovable” in the sense of being a “feel good” story, but rather one that memorably depicts with bitter irony the moral debacle of colonialism. I think it likely that the vast majority of people reading this will have read Conrad’s short novel, so let me give just a very brief synopsis: The story is told by an old sailor named Charles Marlow, who tells of being hired by what we infer is a Belgian company to captain a steamer into the interior of Africa, on what must be the Congo River, though Conrad never identifies the river or country by name. At the time, of course, the so-called Congo Free State was a private colony essentially owned (and notoriously exploited) by Belgium’s King Leopold II. Conrad himself had been employed in just such a capacity, and wrote the book eight years later based on some of his own experiences.
Marlow’s job is to transport ivory. He has heard all the platitudes about the Europeans’ duty to bring civilization to the savages of Africa, but is shocked by the condition of the indigenous people who have come under the influence of the “civilizing” European traders—people who are sick or worked nearly to death, or, in the case of some who work for his company on the boat, “detribalized” natives who have been wrenched from their tribal culture and found no code of ethics to replace it.
Marlow finally focuses on finding the ivory procurement agent named Kurtz, who has a station far up the river and is reputed to be a rising star in the company, with high ideals concerning the whites’ moral duty to colonize of the Africans. But Kurtz is said to be ill, and Marlow expects to find him and rescue him. What he finds though, is a man who has himself lost his “civilizing” moral center. I won’t go into the gory details of the ending just in case you haven’t actually read the book, but suffice it to say that Kurtz’s last words are, famously, “The horror! The horror!” By the time the reader travels with Marlow into the heart of the continent, one is willing to concede that in every human breast (whether European or African) lies a heart of darkness, and, more specifically, the hypocritical project of colonization is purely for the profit motive, and corrupts, rather than improves, not only the colonized but the colonizers as well. Thus Kurtz ends up a monster of his own making.
It’s easy to see greed as a corrupting factor in this “civilizing” venture. But even motives that begin generously but assume that “we European Christians know best” ultimately become the imposition of an alien belief system on a subjugated people. As for those in charge of this imposition, the Kurtzes of the world, they soon come to consider themselves as beings superior to the savages they live among, and demand unquestioning obedience from them. Thus power corrupts even the humble servant, until he writes, as Kurtz ultimately does, “exterminate the brutes” across the pages of his last report. The mendacity of this situation affects even Marlow himself, who claims to detest a lie more than anything on earth. For when Marlow, upon returning to England, visits Kurtz’s betrothed to tell her how her fiancé had died, and she begs to know Kurtz’s last words, Marlow tells her the last thing Kurtz said was “your name.” Now, unless her name actually is “the horror,” he’s lying. And his lie will in fact perpetuate the lie that Kurtz’s “mission,” and by extension the whole imperial enterprise, is a worthwhile endeavor.
It is impossible to discuss Conrad’s novel nowadays without acknowledging Chinua Achebe’s famous critique of Heart of Darkness, in which he called the novel “an offensive and deplorable book” that dehumanized and depersonalized African people, and called Conrad a racist and a xenophobe. Achebe’s 1975 lecture became a touchstone of postcolonial debate, but most readers of Conrad would argue that Achebe’s critique of the novel is focused more on the situation presented in it, rather than Conrad’s reaction to it. It’s true that Marlow begins his journey with blinders on about the presumed superiority of the white race with regard to the Africans, and one might be tempted to equate Conrad’s views with Marlow’s, but even Marlow ultimately comes to see the hypocrisy of that attitude, so that the bitter irony in his voice is clear when he responds to the pitiful chained slaves he sees with the self-condemnatory “After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings.” E.D. Morel, the British journalist who led the successful campaign against slavery and other abuses in King Leopold’s Congo Free State, called Heart of Darkness “the most powerful thing written on the subject.” Many African scholars and readers, however, still insist that Conrad’s novel reinforces old racist stereotypes about Africans, and contemporary readers should probably be sensitive to that aspect of the novel.
Readers over the past century have been moved and inspired by Conrad’s novel. Orson Welles created a radio play of the story in 1938, and planned a film version that turned Kurtz into a fascist dictator. That project was never realized, but Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), adapted the story as a parable of America’s descent into madness in the morass of the Vietnam war. ln the 21st century, the novel has continued to influence a large variety of responses in various media, including an opera by Tarik O’Regan and librettist Tom Phillips that premiered at the London Royal Opera House in 2011; the novel State of Wonder by acclaimed author Ann Patchett, also in 2011, which places the story among female scientists in Brazil; the James Gray sci-fi film Ad Astra (2019), which makes the Kurtz character a scientist gone rogue on the edge of the solar system; and at least two video games (Far Cry 2 and Spec Ops: The Line) released within the past fifteen years.
But nothing really wields the power of the original novel and Conrad’s densely charged prose. You really need to read—or reread—the original, which richly deserves its high status as an English language classic.