Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary Read Free

arrange for French immersion experience for son John (September). The Rover .
    1924 Declines a knighthood. Succumbs to fatal heart attack on 3 August. After Roman Catholic rites, is buried in Canterbury Cemetery. The Nature of a Crime (with Ford) and The Shorter Tales . Ford rushes out Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance .
    1925–8 Posthumous works published: Tales of Hearsay and the unfinished Suspense (1925); Last Essays , edited by Richard Curle (1926); Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (1927), edited by G. Jean-Aubry; the unfinished The Sisters (1928).

Introduction to Heart of Darkness
    New readers are advised that this Introduction makes details of the plot explicit.
    Mention the name of Joseph Conrad and the answering response will commonly invoke his celebrated African novella of 1899, Heart of Darkness . If the work has acquired an iconic status comparable to that of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (1893), its title has by contrast become something of a tired cliché in being so repeatedly used by newspaper headline-makers. Conrad, who modestly hoped that the work might have a continuing ‘vibration’, would have been astonished by these contemporary reverberations.
    The story’s emergence as a twentieth-century ‘classic’ forms a first stage in the history of its remarkable after-life. A key moment arrived with T. S. Eliot’s use of a fragment from Heart of Darkness as an epigraph to his poem, ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925). Eliot’s epigraph signals a temporary kinship and establishes a bridge between the two works, but it also probably signifies a more intangible sense of indebtedness–to Conrad as an important founder-member of a tradition of British Modernist writing.
    The story’s major rediscovery dates from the 1950s when its apocalyptic symbolism and existentialist uncertainty seem to have entered the collective consciousness of a generation who lived through the Second World War or were coming to terms with its legacy. As one critic of the time put it, the story had become ‘a Pilgrim’s Progress for our pessimistic and psychologizing age’ (Guerard, p. 33). Its more recent impact has been equally dramatic, if more controversial. Now standing at the centre of a wider contemporary debate about race, imperialism and feminism, its aesthetic dimensions and experimental character have almost been left behind. It has acquired the status of an awkward problem novel, a standard text in the classroom and–for better or worse–a litmus test for a variety of theoretical preoccupations. As a modern quest parable translated into many languages, it has simultaneously had a powerful generative effect upon twentieth-century writers and film-makers, inspiring emulations, adaptations and counter-versions.
    I
    Conrad’s direct and indirect engagement with things African has a long pre-history. It extends as far back as his childhood, when the young Pole pored over maps of the continent, devoured tales of the first European explorers in Africa and vicariously shared the perils of Dr Livingstone’s travels. Like all dreams of heroic adventure, this one was destined to meet with a rude awakening. In 1890, towards the end of his career as a merchant seaman, the thirty-three-year-old Conrad signed a long-term contract to work for a Belgian company in the Congo Free State. The country he entered had since 1885 been the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium, who, under the guise of a philanthropic concern to bring ‘light’ to the ‘dark’ continent, was brutally engaged in what Conrad later described as ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’. 1
    Conrad’s growing desire to return to Europe was unexpectedly realized when he suffered a physical breakdown: plagued with the after-effects of dysentery and malaria, he ended his stay after seven