Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

A native of Poland,
Joseph Conrad
(1857-1924) spent his youth at sea, and although relatively ignorant of the English language until the age of twenty, he ultimately became one of the greatest of English novelists and stylists. At the age of thirty-two, he decided to try his hand at writing, left the sea, married, and became the father of two sons. Although his work won the admiration of critics, sales were small, and debts and poor health plagued Conrad for many years. He was a nervous, introverted, gloomy man for whom writing was an agony, but he was rich in friends who appreciated his genius, among them Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Ford Madox Ford. Among his best-known works are
Almayer's Folly
(1895),
The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus''
(1897),
Lord Jim
(1900),
Heart of Darkness
(1902),
The Secret Agent
(1907),
Chance
(1913), and
Victory
(1915).

Joyce Carol Oates
is the author of numerous novels, as well as collections of stories, poetry, and plays. The Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, she is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, the PEN-Bernard Malamud Award for the short story, and the Prix Femina.

Vince Passaro
is the author of
Violence, Nudity, Adult Content: A Novel,
as well as criticism, essays, and short fiction that have appeared in many national magazines, including
Harper's
,
Esquire
,
GQ
,
Elle
,
O The Oprah Magazine
,
The New York Times Sunday Magazine
,
Story
,
Open City
,
Salon.com
, and others. Both his fiction and essays have been widely anthologized, and he has taught literature and creative writing at New York University and Columbia University.

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First Signet Classics Printing, December 1950
First Signet Classics Printing (Passaro Afterword), August 2008

Introduction copyright © The Ontario Review, Inc., 1997

Afterword copyright © Vince Passaro, 2008
All rights reserved

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Introduction

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you
see.

—Joseph Conrad, Preface,
The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus,''
1897

Like those other masterworks of the English fin de siècle, Robert Louis Stevenson's
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886), Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890-91), and Henry James's
The Turn of the Screw
(1898), to which it bears a subtle thematic kinship, Joseph Conrad's ‘‘Heart of Darkness'' (1902) is a work of the imagination that has transcended its late-Victorian era to acquire the stature, with the passing of time, of one of the great visionary self-examinations of Western civilization. Based, like most of Conrad's fiction, upon personal experience, ‘‘Heart of Darkness'' is a rare Symbolist work with roots in historic authenticity; its theme is nothing less than the acknowledgment of a tragic darkness—the ethic of the ‘‘brute''—in the heart of late-nineteenth-century Christian-capitalist Europe. Out of his outraged witnessing of what he called ‘‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human consciousness''—the plunder of Africa by Europe—Conrad created a universal parable of man's fallen nature in the guise of an adventure/mystery tale.

In
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Robert Louis Stevenson created a vivid, iconic metaphor for civilized man's divided nature: there is the ‘‘good'' if passionless Dr. Jekyll, and there is his suppressed brother self, the stunted, impassioned, ‘‘evil'' Hyde who dwells within Jekyll and can be released—fatally—by a magic elixir. In Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
the seductively beautiful young Dorian commits sins against humanity that are engraved, not on his unblemished, never-aging face, but on the face of his portrait, which has been hidden away: what more striking metaphor for the hypocritical nature of privileged Caucasian bourgeois society? In Henry James's enigmatic
The Turn of the Screw,
that most elegantly constructed of ghost stories, the reader is confronted by a seemingly good Christian governess who may herself be the catalyst of the destruction of her young charges: Does this zealous, well-intentioned young woman discover perversity and evil surrounding her, or is she luridly imagining it? Joseph Conrad's ‘‘Heart of Darkness,'' though elaborately composed of oscillating images of light and dark, order and chaos, is by far the most realistic of these unusual works of fiction; yet here, too, is a powerful mythic portrait of a ‘‘good'' man, Kurtz (the chief of the inner station of the trading company, ‘‘an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else''), who is simultaneously an ‘‘evil'' man (a vicious, unscrupulous trader in ivory who ends up tyrannizing African natives, his jungle sanctuary surrounded by the grisly emblems of his madness, the decapitated heads of native ‘‘enemies''). Kurtz, whom Marlow had sought avidly, risking his own life in a treacherous and foolhardy adventure that comes close to destroying him, is both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the elixir that fatally releases his primitive, evil self is simply distance from home, the freedom of a white man's power over those whom he considers his racial ‘‘inferiors,'' whose influence over him is subliminal and unacknowledged:

It is Marlow's compelling argument, and through Marlow, Conrad's, that the mind of man is capable of anything ‘‘because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.'' Marlow's (and Conrad's) journey up the Congo is, in one sense, a journey back into time: beginning with Marlow's apprehension that England, too, was once ‘‘one of the dark places of the earth'' and moving to a consideration of the ‘‘fascination of the abomination''—the fascination of civilized man for his primitive, atavistic roots. What romance there is in Conrad's prose, in his celebration of such truths: ‘‘The voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother.'' And in the memorable passage in which Marlow describes his excitement at setting out, at last, to meet the mysterious chief of the inner station, Kurtz:

The anxieties aroused by Charles Darwin's controversial, bitterly contested theory of evolution by way of natural selection, first promulgated in
Origin of Species
(1859) and subsequently in
The Descent of Man
(1871) are given tragic dramatic form in the tale of Kurtz's deterioration in the jungle, the much-acclaimed Kurtz of whom it is said by Marlow that ‘‘all of Europe had gone into [his] making.'' Conrad's irony is a constant throughout the narrative, like a haunting vibration beyond the sounds of words normally uttered. And what intransigent irony in Kurtz's final words, as if Shakespeare's unregenerate Edmund, or Iago, and not Lear or Othello, were the touchstones of moral truth. Dying of fever in the jungle, as Marlow nearly dies, Kurtz's famous pronouncement of his own spiritual condition— ‘‘The horror! The horror!''—is a judgment upon man's universal propensity for evil. What is this mysterious kinship that Marlow feels with the doomed man, whom he has traveled hundreds of miles to meet, only to discover him moribund, hideous? ‘‘It was as if an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze.'' (Compare Marlow's subterranean connection with Kurtz to the idealized and romanticized connection between the immature young captain of ‘‘The Secret Sharer'' and his double, the fugitive Leggatt.) Yet, in his symbolic role as chief of the coveted inner station, Kurtz is indeed, as Marlow claims, a remarkable man: