Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

This savagery at the heart of civilised humans is also revealed in the behaviour of the white traders – ‘pilgrims’ as Marlow calls them. White travellers’ tales, like those of H. M. Stanley in ‘darkest Africa’, written from an unquestioned sense of the superiority of the European over the native, were available to Conrad. Heart of Darkness thrives upon the ironic reversals of civilisation and barbarity, of light and darkness. Here is a characteristic Stanley episode, recorded in his diary. Needing food, he told a group of natives that ‘I must have it or we would die. They must sell it for beads, red, blue or green, copper or brass wire or shells, or . . . I drew significant signs across the throat. It was enough, they understood at once.’¹⁰⁷ In Heart of Darkness, by contrast, Marlow is impressed by the extraordinary restraint of the starving cannibals accompanying the expedition, who have been paid in bits of brass wire, but have no food, their rotting hippo flesh – too nauseating a smell for European endurance – having been thrown overboard. He wonders why ‘they didn’t go for us – they were thirty to five – and have a good tuck-in for once’.

¹⁰⁸ Kurtz is a symbolic figure, of course (‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’), and the thrust of Conrad’s fierce satire emerges clearly through Marlow’s narrative. The imperial civilising mission amounts to a savage predation: ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of the human conscience’, as Conrad elsewhere described it.¹⁰⁹

At the time Heart of Darkness appeared there was – and there continues to be – a distaste for Conrad on the part of some readers. It is that very reaction which underlines his significance. This is perhaps best explained by Richard Curle, author of the first full-length study of Conrad, published in 1914.¹¹⁰

Curle could see that for many people there is a tenacious need to believe that the world, horrible as it might be, can be put right by human effort and the appropriate brand of liberal philosophy. Unlike the novels of his contemporaries, Wells and Galsworthy, Conrad derides this point of view as an illusion at best, and the pathway to desperate destruction at its worst.¹¹¹ Evidence shows that Conrad was sickened by his experience in Africa, both physically and psychologically, and was deeply alienated from the imperialist, racist exploiters of Africa and Africans at that time. Heart of Darkness played a part in ending Leopold’s tyrannical misrule in what was then the Belgian Congo.

Born in Poland, and despite the fact that Heart of Darkness is set in the Belgian Congo, Joseph Conrad wrote in English. A final achievement of Empire, which began in earnest with the American colonies but culminated in India and the ‘scramble’ for Africa, was the spread of the English language. Today, there are as many English-speakers in India as there are in England, and five times that number in North America. Across the world, one and a half billion people speak English. Yet for many years – for centuries – English was a minority tongue, which hung on only with great difficulty. Its subsequent triumph, as the world’s most useful language, is, as Melvyn Bragg has said, a remarkable adventure.

The first inkling we have of English was when it arrived in the fifth century AD, spoken by Germanic warriors, who were invited to Britain as mercenaries to shore up the ruins of the recently-departed Roman empire.

¹¹² The original inhabitants of the British Isles were Celts, who spoke Celtish, no doubt laced with a little Latin, thanks to the Romans. But the Germanic tribes – Saxons, Angles and Jutes – spoke a variety of dialects, mutually intelligible, and it was some time before the Angles won out. The present-day language of Friesland, by the North Sea in Holland, is judged to have the closest language to early English, where such words as trije (three), froast (frost), blau

(blue), brea (bread) and sliepe (sleep) are still in use.¹¹³