Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Of all the people who shared in the scramble for empire, Joseph Conrad became known for turning his back on the dark continents of ‘overflowing riches’. After years as a sailor in different merchant navies, Conrad removed himself to the sedentary life of writing fiction. Conrad’s best-known books, Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (published in book form in 1902),

Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent

(1907), draw on ideas from Darwin, Nietzsche and Nordau to explore the great fault-line between scientific, liberal and technical optimism in the twentieth century and pessimism about human nature. He is reported to have said to H. G. Wells on one occasion, ‘the difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!’¹⁰³

Christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he was born in 1857 in a part of Poland taken by the Russians in the 1793 partition of that often-dismembered country (his birthplace is now in the Ukraine). His father, Apollo, was an aristocrat without lands, for the family estates had been sequestered in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. Orphaned before he was twelve, Conrad depended very much on the generosity of his maternal uncle Tadeusz, who provided an annual allowance and, on his death in 1894, left about £1,600 to his nephew (well over £100,000 now). This event coincided with the acceptance of Conrad’s first book, Almayer’s Folly (begun in 1889), and the adoption of the pen name Joseph Conrad. He was from then on a man of letters, turning his experiences and the tales he heard at sea into fiction.

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Some time before Conrad’s uncle died, Józef stopped off in Brussels on the way to Poland, to be interviewed for a post with the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo – a fateful interview which led to his experiences between June and December 1890 in the Belgian Congo and, ten years on, to Heart of Darkness. In that decade, the Congo lurked in his mind, awaiting a trigger to be formulated in prose. That was provided by the shocking revelations of the ‘Benin massacres’ in 1897, as well as the accounts of Stanley’s expeditions in Africa. Benin: The City of Blood

was published in London and New York in 1897, revealing to the Western civilised world a horror story of native African blood rites. After the Berlin Conference of 1884, Britain proclaimed a protectorate over the Niger river region. Following the slaughter of a British mission to Benin (now a city of Nigeria), which arrived during King Duboar’s celebrations of his ancestors with ritual sacrifices, a punitive expedition was dispatched to capture this city, long a centre of slavery. The account of Commander R. H. Bacon, intelligence officer of the expedition, in some of its details parallels events in Heart of Darkness. When Commander Bacon reached Benin he saw what, despite his vivid language, he says lay beyond description: ‘It is useless to continue describing the horrors of the place, everywhere death, barbarity and blood, and smells that it hardly seems right for human beings to smell and yet live.’¹⁰⁵ Conrad avoids definition of what constituted ‘The horror. The horror’ – the famous last words in the book, spoken by Kurtz, the man Marlow, the hero, has come to save – opting instead for hints such as round balls on posts that Marlow thinks he sees through his field-glasses when approaching Kurtz’s compound. Bacon, for his part, describes ‘crucifixion trees’ surrounded by piles of skulls and bones, blood smeared everywhere, over bronze idols and ivory.

Conrad’s purpose, however, is not to elicit the typical response of the civilised world to reports of barbarism. In his account Commander Bacon had exemplified this attitude: ‘. . . they [the natives] cannot fail to see that peace and the good rule of the white man mean happiness, contentment and security’. Similar sentiments are expressed in the report which Kurtz composes for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Marlow describes this ‘beautiful piece of writing’, ‘vibrating with eloquence’. And yet, scrawled ‘at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: “Exterminate all the brutes!”.’¹⁰⁶