ࡱ> ` &bjbjss 2\ &nnn8$,&D21111111$2hb5T1***11w1w1w1*1w1*1w1w1w1 p8ZSn-w11,20D2w15/5w15w1 JL"w1\%t'%111XD2****&&&d &&&&&& The Vexed Question of Humanity in Heart of Darkness: A Historicist Reading The mind of man is capable of anythingbecause everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Assessing the wealth of criticism that Conrads Heart of Darkness has generated over the years since its first appearance as The Heart of Darkness in Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine between February and March 1898, the contemporary scholar may well wonder if anything new can be contributed: to some extent such a doubt is justified. Yet, accepting that the novel has been critically exhausted risks confining it to the limits of received criticism. Recent historicist literary criticism has sought to liberate the literary text from the confines of an older historical approach that assumed historical facts could be objectively determined. As Ross Murfin has argued, new historicist investigations contest the notion that history can be fixed as fact: what historicist critics have come to wonder is whether the truth about what really happened can ever be purely and objectively known. Such a challenge to traditional assumptions about historical inquiry thus liberates the text from its critical shackles and propels it back into a world where no route of investigation can be exhausted, and where no truth is absolute. Further, Michel Foucault encouraged historicists to outwardly redefine the boundaries of historical inquiry, while at the same warning them to be aware that investigators are themselves situated. What Foucault means is that our own cultural perspective always limits our powers of observation and investigation: we read a text through the lens of the received culture and perception of our own time. As such, each new generation of literary commentator will have new interpretations to bring to bear on the literary text. As Arnold Kettle said, literature cannot be read in a vacuum (kettle quote). Recent historicism is acutely aware of this fact and consequently extends the disciplinary base available to the literary critic: It is a movement that would destabilize our overly settled conceptions of what literature and history are. It is one, too, that would define history broadly, not as a mere chronicle of facts and events but, rather as a thick description of human reality, one that raises questions of interest to anthropologists and sociologists, as well as those posed by traditional historians. Historicism thus offers us new vantage points from which to view the well-thumbed texts of the past. Criticism can traverse disciplinary boundaries at will in its quest to enrich our understanding. As Stephen Greenblatt says, this means that the new wider focus of criticism should prevent it from permanently sealing off one type of discourse from another or decisively separating works of art from the minds and lives of their creators and their audiences. Historicism now attempts to situate literature within its historical context. However, as Paul Hamilton observes, it is suspicious of the stories the past tells about itself, but equally it is suspicious of its own partisanship. It offers up both its past and its present for ideological scrutiny. In Henry James: An Appreciation, written for the North American Review in 1905, Conrad wrote: In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr. Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. I think that the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwritingon second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. Obliquely, then, Conrad signals his awareness of the dangers of trying to posit historical truth. Sir Hugh Clifford, a close friend of Conrad, was similarly aware of the historical significance of literature. In 1927, in his preface to In Court and Kampung (1897), Clifford claims for his work a significance that reaches beyond traditional perceptions of literary value: Today my tales are to be valued, not only as historical, but as archaeological studies. Along with Henry James, both writers are conscious of the power of literature as history for coming generations. But Conrad is aware of something more than Clifford: the fact that fiction inscribes a past that is unavailable in any other form, a history that, unlike bald documentation, is open to interpretation. Historicism in the present age enables interpretation by leading the literary investigator down the back alleys and hidden passages of history, alleys and by-ways that were previously closed to, or ignored by the critic. Cultural critiques of Conrads fiction have widened the possibilities for interpretation and understanding of his work. Edward Said made a considerable contribution to theories of how the Western world views eastern cultures in Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). In the latter, Said suggests that Conrad is complicit in the imperial project: His historicist vision overrides the other histories contained in the narrative sequence; its dynamic sanctions Africa, Kurtz, and Marlowdespite their radical eccentricityas objects of a superior Western (but admittedly problematic) constitutive understanding. Peter Edgerly Firchow, however, examines Kurtz through carefully researched historical data that allows for new interpretations of Conrads fictional Congo. Firchows new historical data deepens our understanding of what Conrad may (and may not) have known at the time of writing Heart of Darkness. Similarly, Martin Bock has widened the parameters of investigation by relating Conrads work to psychological illness: he compares Marlows rhetoric of restraint with Kurtzs rhetoric of hysteria and presents this argument within the context of Conrads own medical illnesses and his neurasthenia. Bock offers us a narrative of Conrads actual medical experiences, and explores how those experiences helped to shape his fictions and his characters. Such critics have given us new, often contradictory, perspectives on Heart of Darkness; but in each case the challenges to received criticism of the novel have proven that there is much still to be said. The framed narrative of Heart of Darkness begins and ends in London, on the river Thames at Gravesend, so as to focus the narrative scrutiny on the heart of the African Congo and on the heart of the British Empire. Acknowledging London as a legitimate site of analysis allows us to consider metropolitan anxiety at the end of the nineteenth century and how this may be inscribed in the novel. Geographically, culturally, and ideologically, we can range between the Congo and the metropolitan centre and thus consider how the cultural perspective of fin de sicle London impacts on a novel whose main action takes place in Africa. In line with recent historicist approaches to Conrads work, what is examined here are some of the concerns that dominated the British and European cultural landscape at the time when Conrad was writing Heart of Darkness, and how some of these issues can be seen inscribed in the text. Humanity, Hysteria, and Cultural Prejudice in Heart of Darkness The closing years of the nineteenth century witnessed a perceived degeneration in the individual, and in the very fabric of British society, that added to a sense of instability and doubt that characterized the fin de sicle, and contributed a defining theme to the emerging modernist imagination of European writers. Max Nordau, whose influential study of European thought and culture, Degeneration, appeared in Britain in translation in 1895, summed up the mood: Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall, because man is weary, and there are is no faith that is worth an effort to uphold them. Nordau speaks in apocalyptic terms of the Dusk of Nations as he laments the passing of an earlier age and the advent of one he sees as threatened by degenerate tendencies. Degeneracy for Nordau, in line with Lombroso, to whom he dedicated Degeneration, was to be seen in physical characteristics, but also, in a pseudo-Darwinian sense, heralded the decline of a species: under any kind of noxious influences an organism becomes debilitated and then the healthy, normal type of the species passes on to new generations the morbid deviations from the normal formgaps in development, malformations and infirmities. Thus, for Nordau any behaviour that deviates from the perceived norm threatens the persistence of the whole species. Conrad satirizes medical obsession with physical degeneration when he has the Belgian doctor measure Marlows head. The mood of Heart of Darkness, and Marlows often pugnacious and sourly ironic narrative style registers a recognition of, and scepticism about, some of the more extreme medical and psychological theories of the time. Yet, in this same narrative we can detect some of the dominant concerns that caused such anxiety in the fin de sicle. Kurtz is a deviant human. Marlow calls him an initiated wraith (50); and speaks as though he were already a dead man: And the lofty frontal bone of Mr Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes, but thisahspecimen was impressively bald. The wilderness has patted him on the head, and behold, it was like a ballan ivory ball; it had caressed him andlo!he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. (49) Kurtz had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the landI mean literally (49). He is, in Nordaus sense, an organism that has become debilitated; but such explanations are not enough for Marlow. He needs to explore the moral dimensions of Kurtzs fall from grace in altogether more complex forms that Nordaus hysteria allowed. Marlow asks his listeners to imagine themselves cut off from all the trappings of the civilized world, from the constraint of a policed society, or a society where neighbourliness offers support in time of weakness: These little things make all the difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness (50). Kurtz presents the possibility that even the most civilized of individuals may not be strong enough to withstand the pressure when the moral crutches of civilization are not available, or when the temptation to barbarity becomes overwhelming. Pseudo-medical theories like Lombrosos were complemented by the social-Darwinism that was used to justify imperialism in Africa and elsewhere; but with evidence apparently emerging that some Britons themselves were degenerating into savages, cultural commentators began to fear that this justification was weakening. As Said has argued, particularly concerning Kiplings representation of the 1857 Indian Mutiny in Kim (1901), but his words apply to imperial fiction in general: we have left the world of history and entered the world of imperialist polemic, in which the native is naturally a delinquent, the white man a stern but moral parent and judge. Implicitly, the world of history is one of multiple perspectives; that of imperialist polemic is one of paradigmatic white European ideology. Assumptions about white European superiority had underpinned the push to colonize the Empire and improve the native subject and Conrad, with comic irony, has Marlow ridicule his aunt for such beliefs: It appears however I was also one of the Workers, with a capitalyou know. Something of an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time; and the excellent woman living right in the rush of all that humbug got carried off her feet. She talked about weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways, till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit. (16) The emissaries of light that Marlows aunt imagines penetrating the darker reaches of the Congo include the far from apostolic Kurtz, a man fatally flawed and dangerously in conflict with himself, a man who, for Marlow, and probably for Conrad, exemplifies all that is corrupt and inhuman in the imperial endeavour. Yet Kurtz is also the representative of European civilization in Africa: Kurtz had been educated partly in England andas he was good enough to say himselfhis sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz (50). Despite Marlows earlier warm comments on English imperial efficiency, it is evident that Kurtzs English heritage contributes to his moral fibre, or rather to his lack of it. Kurtz, as a composite character, contains within his lanky frame the moral contradictions and tensions that were symptomatic of the mood of the fin de sicle. In 1885 W. T. Stead exposed, in his Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, the fact that members of the upper classes were conducting forays into the slums of the East End of London to procure young girls for sex. He exposed the mothers who were selling their daughters for as little as 5. The public was outraged at such depravity amongst its most apparently upright citizens. W. E. Henley sent copies of Steads articles to Robert Louis Stevenson, who was in the process of writing Jekyll and Hyde (1886). Stevensons Dr Jekyll indulged in a dual life in the city, the life of the respectable doctor and that of the debauched, troglodytic Hyde. His immorality was all the more recognizable after the Stead expos. Further, the Cleveland Street affair of 1889, in which telegraph boys were made prostitutes for young aristocrats at a gay London brothel further heightened public anxiety. The involvement of Lord Arthur Somerset, from the Prince of Waless household, and the rumours that Prince Albert Victor was implicated, helped to fuel a growing sense that the British male could be as degenerate as the savage native of Empire. Confidence in the purity of the British gentleman was severely shaken; and Kurtz, an imperial adventurer-gone-wrong, exemplifies that anxiety. Marlow takes Kurtz for a journalist or a painter, but even the cousin could not tell [Marlow] what he had beenexactly (71). Kurtzs elusive identity marks him out as a Jekyll and Hyde, a creature of conflicting impulses, of dual identities, the good citizen gone bad. Conrad, like Stevenson, was deeply conscious of the multi-faceted nature of human identity, of the fact that in one breast could beat a heart of the purest intentions, yet with the urge to perform the blackest of deeds. Kurtzs eloquence, his high principles aimed at improving the lot of the African, (he could perform a power for good practically unbounded), contrasts awfully with his postscript Exterminate all the brutes! (50, 51). Dr Jekylls realization that man is not truly one, but truly two, and that it was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together is also Kurtzs dilemma. Like the sexual predators of Steads expos, Kurtz is both a civilized man and a monster, and a product of European civilization. The wilderness of the Congo seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions (65). Kurtz thus exists as a reminder of our own repressed savage instincts, or as Wildes London libertine, Dorian Gray, puts it, of the fact that Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him. Plumbing the depths of Kurtzs moral soul, Marlow bitterly acknowledges that this man who could write with the eloquence of a respected gentleman scholar was not exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him. With caustic incision Marlow avers that he can confine Kurtzs memory for an everlasting rest in the dustbin of progress, amongst all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of civilisation (51). Marlow agonizes over Kurtzs depravity: the unspeakable rites that as far as Marlow reluctantly gathered were offered up to himdo you understandto Mr. Kurtz himself were, in the ideology of empire, evidence of the native savage, not the civilized European. Marlows incredulity at this speaks of a Europeans distress at recognizing his own potential inhumanity. If a man of Kurtzs reputation can succumb to such savagery, what does that tells us about ourselves? What does that tell us about humanity as a whole? The doubts about the integrity of the civilized individual that beset the fin de sicle are laid bare when Kurtz succumbs to his savage inner self. Such attitudes towards humanity reflect a late-nineteenth century anxiety about degeneration, the other, and the metropolis, issues that are evident in Nordaus Degeneration, Le Bons The Crowd (English translation, 1896), and also in Booths Darkest England (1890). Nordaus degenerates included aesthetes, symbolists and homosexuals, all of whom were cited as evidence of a race in decline. Kurtz belongs amongst Nordaus degenerates: That which nearly all degenerates lack is the sense of morality and of right and wrong. For them there exists no law, no decency, no modesty. Nordau harnessed arguments about degeneracy as a warning to civilized humanity; but others were more circumspect about the issue and recognised that the civilized individuals of the modern metropolis were moved by the same impulses as their African counterparts. For example, in Rider Haggards Allan Quatermain (1887), the eponymous hero inveighs against his superior readers with mocking irony: And yet, my dear young lady, what are those pretty things around your own neck?they have a strong family resemblance, especially when you wear that very low dress, to the savage womans beads. Your habit of turning round and round to the sound of horns and tom-toms, your fondness for pigments and powders, the way in which you love to subjugate yourself to the rich warrior who has captured you in marriage, and the quickness with which your taste in feathered headdresses varies,all these things suggest touches of kinship; and remember that in the fundamental principles of your nature you are quite identical. Conrad, writing some eleven years later is less dogmatic, but nonetheless, through Marlow, he challenges the complacency of his readers perceptions of the African. They were not inhuman, and what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanitylike yoursthe thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar (37-8). For both Haggard and Conrad kinship is fundamental and the trappings of civilization are no proof against barbarity; like Quatermain, Marlow angrily confronts his listeners assumptions: Principles? Principles wont do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty ragsrags that would fly off at the first good shake. No. Finally Marlow acknowledges his own inner savage when he admits his temptation to go ashore for a howl and a dance (38). What preserves his veneer of civilization is his devotion to duty. Marlow challenges his urbane metropolitan interlocutors to deny their kinship too: Yes it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which youyou so remote from the night of first agescould comprehend (38). In the middle of the Thames estuary, in fin de sicle London, Marlow forces his listeners, and Conrad forces his readers, to confront the fact that modern humanity has the same impulses as the so-called savage. The metropolis is also home to the savage; and the civilized. Marlows anger, his impatience with his fellow Londoners, speaks of his own anxieties about the meaning of his tale. When William Booth says there is a darker continent east of Temple Bar, he is referring not to Africa, but to the East End of London itself. Marlows uncertainties about Kurtzhis admiration and his horrorreveal that Marlow too has recognized, as did Booth, the inherent barbarity of human nature. The physical evidence of barbarism was on the doorstep of every London citizen if he or she chose to look. Campaigners like William Booth, Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor, Charles Booth in Life and Labour of the People in London (1892), and Andrew Mearns in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1885), attempted to awaken the bourgeois metropolis to the appalling conditions of the East End. When Marlow says, with historical import, And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth, he links London with Africa. Conrads contemporaries were finding genuine evidence in the rookeries of the East End that not much had changed since the Roman times that Marlow speaks of. The mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men was amply in evidence in the poorer districts of London. Kurtz himself, the product of European thought and culture, demonstrates the latent savagery of the civilized man. Gustave Le Bon had accused the metropolitan crowd of mindless mob behaviour, and Marlows pilgrims aboard the steamer export that mentality to the Congo. Attacked from the shore, the pilgrims opened with their Winchesters and were simply squirting lead into that bush (46). They are Le Bons creatures acting by instinct: Making part of a crowd, [the individual] is conscious of the power given him by number, and it is sufficient to suggest to him ideas of murder or pillage for him to yield immediately to temptation. The bloodthirsty little gingery beggar who felt that they had made a glorious slaughter of them in the bush was motivated by the instinctual response of Le Bons crowd. When they leave Kurtzs station the pilgrims give in to their murderous crowd behaviour once again: And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck started their little fun and I could see nothing more for smoke (67). In Le Bons sense the members of this mob have subsumed their individual humanity into a collective savage bloodlust. The humanity of the Europeans is an unresolved issue in Heart of Darkness. The native African is frequently referred to in terms of animal behaviour; but the white men are described in terms of inanimate fabric. The brickmaker is a papier-mch Mephistopheles who when poked would reveal a little loose dirt rather than flesh, and whose eyes glittered like mica discs (29, 27). The Chief Accountant is described only in terms of his clothes (21), and Kurtz is a dead man walking, associated forever with the fossil ivory that drives his particular imperial project. Commentators have noted that the African in Heart of Darkness is often figured in animal terms; yet Kurtz problematizes that perspective because he too is more animal than the African. Despite Marlows efforts to distance himself from Kurtz, he is fascinated and drawn to this remarkable man. Just as he recognises a profound familiarity in his dying helmsmans gaze, so, in some respects, Marlow understands Kurtz only too well: But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitudeand the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core. (57-8) The Europeans in Heart of Darkness, with the notable exception of Marlow, are singularly without substance. Kurtz is indistinct like a vapour exhaled by the earth; he was very little more than a voice (64, 48). His crimes, like those of Jack the Ripper, are all to gruesomely obvious in the shrunken heads on poles, yet like the Ripper, Kurtz is never really known. The Ripper murders, committed in Whitechapel in the late summer of 1888, sent shock waves through the popular consciousness. The murders amplified the call for more street lighting to make the city streets safe. Such illumination was seen as a measure necessitated by the threat posed to the Empire by the declining civilization of the East End of London. As the Star put it on 1 October 1888: Unless these and other things come, Whitechapel will smash the Empire, and the best thing that can happen to us is for some purified Republic of the West to step in and look after the fragments. Such rhetoric links the health of the Empire to the moral health of the home of the Empire. Conrad exposes the rotten, unhealthy, regime of the Belgians in the Congo; and Kurtz, the Belgian Empires favoured son, and the representative of European imperialism and civilization, sits at the center of a conquered Congo, and is hollow at the core. The Whitechapel murders inevitably raised questions about the nature of the Ripper. He was variously thought to be a Malay, a Jew, and a deranged doctor. There was an anxiety that reached out in two directions: such hideous crimes could have been performed either by an underdeveloped, barbarian native subject, the primitive Malay, or they were committed by an appallingly overdeveloped, over civilised member of polite society, the deranged doctor. These contradictory assumptions about the identity of the Ripper remind us that Kurtz is at once the eloquent, educated painter/journalist and at the same time the barbarian cannibal who crawls through the jungle on his knees attempting to return to his satanic rites. In fact W. T. Stead was among the first to suggest a Jekyll and Hyde parallel for the Ripper; and as L. Perry Curtis details, many prominent citizens were suspected of the crime: Far more eminent suspects at the time included that most virtuous of Liberal leaders and ardent rescuer of prostitutes William Gladstone, as well as the painter Walter Sickert, the brilliant Anglo-American actor Richard Mansfield, and the esteemed patron of destitute children Dr. Thomas Barnardo. Ten years before the writing of Heart of Darkness, British citizens were facing the possibility that civilization was no absolute proof against barbarity, and that too much repression of the savage self may cause dangerous eruptions of the barbariana fact that Stevenson had all too clearly laid bare with his hypocrite Jekyll. Kurtz had some very bloodcurdling antecedents. These murders concentrated metropolitan anxieties about the constituent parts of London society. The influx of European Jews into the East End caused many to view that quarter as populated by people of darker skin and/or swarthier complexion, and therefore primitive qualities. Many felt that a foreigner was responsible: Convinced that no true Englishman could commit such savage crimesif only because the culprit killed far too swiftly, viciously, and silently for an ordinary phlegmatic Englishmanethnocentric readers were quick to construct a Jewish monster or a culprit who belonged to some other inferior race. Blaming another, inferior, race, these readers revealed not only their cultural prejudices, but also their subconscious suspicion that their civilization was a mere sham. When he came to write Heart of Darkness, Conrad exposed those prejudices and fears through Marlows complex response to the humanity of the African, and through Kurtz and his satanic rites. Stevenson had earlier revealed his belief in the potential bestiality of the civilized man. When Hyde/Jekyll mauls the unresisting body of Sir Danvers Carew and then flees the scene in the same divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on [his] crime, light-headedly devising others in the future, we are reminded that Kurtz shuns Marlows attempt to return him to civilization, opting instead to drag himself, animal-like, back to the scene of his atrocities and his horrific existence. For George Bernard Shaw the Ripper Murders were a function of class rather than gender, because they arose out of the brutal exploitation of workers by mercenary capitalists. Prefiguring doubts about exploitation in the Empire, the murders brought to the British consciousness an awareness of how the rich benefited from the labours of the poor in the East End of London. On 5 October 1888, the Star complained: The West owes to the East something more than platitudinous gush and sentimental and spasmodic almsgiving The brutalisation of nine tenths of our population is too heavy a price to pay for the culture and refinement of the other tenth. These are arguments familiar to critics of imperialism: when Marlow hands a ships biscuit to the dying African in the grove of death he enacts the same empty almsgiving that the Star derides. Metropolitan anxiety about the East End poor is echoed in Marlows recognition of the inhumanity of the work in Africa: The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die (20). No one stated the parallel more starkly than William Booth who, in 1890, declared: As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation, which can breed its own barbarisms, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stones throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest? He is, of course, referring to the East End of London. The question of humanity and how it is constituted is interrogated in Heart of Darkness, but no conclusion is reached. If the painterly journalist Kurtz, who can write an inspiring tract on the good that can be done in African, and then descend into the kind of fetishistic ritual that culminates in shrunken heads on poles outside his home, then the very existence of this civilized man problematizes the notion of humanity. Conrad had experimented with the idea before in An Outpost of Progress where Kayerts and Carliers lack of restraint results in ignominious insanity and death. As Firchow suggests, they do not realize that the pure, unmitigated savagery that they encounter in Africa is chiefly located within their own breasts. This is Marlows point too: when he challenges his listeners to deny the appeal of the savage and admits his own temptation, Marlow is concurring with Booth that darkest England is as real as darkest Africa. Stevenson had recognized that fact, Nordau, Le Bon and others had tried to intellectualize the problem, the Ripper Murders had provided evidence of an innate bestial nature, and the East End of London was a physical, moral, and irrefutable reminder that barbarity was a common human experience. Metropolitan anxiety is also registered in Heart of Darkness through the city that reminds Marlow of a whited sepulchre, a tomb-like metropolis, forbidding and neglected, like the Congo Empire it purports to control: A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting between the stones, imposing carriage archways right and left, immense double doors standing ponderously ajar (13). The city seems dead, like Marlows predecessor, Fresleven, whose skeleton had grass growing through [its] ribs, in an echo of the metropolitan pavements (13). The image of the dead city and the dead imperial administrator occur within a paragraph of each other, making a compelling link between Europe and Africa, just as the two rivers, the Thames and the Congo, at the heart of the novel seem to bind Britain with Africa. Ranging back and forth from Africa to Europe, Marlows narrative emphasises the anxiety that Europe and Europeans may, after all, be no better than the Africa that they seek to conquer. Indeed, the stations that Kurtz avers should be like beacons on the road towards better things, are in fact represented by the Central Station that was on a backwater surrounded by scrub and forest, with a pretty border of smelly mud on one side and on the three others enclosed by a crazy fence of rushes (34, 24). The flabby devil who was running that show has been sent from the sepulchral city. The chaos and inefficiency of his management speaks of a Belgian cultural malaise springing from a neglected ghost-like metropolis. Marlows description of the white workers at the station who with long staves in their hands appeared languidly from amongst the buildings strolling up to take a look at [him] and then retired out of sight somewhere, are barely distinguishable from the Africans they have enslaved (24). In the heart of the African Congo, Belgian, and thereby, European, superiority is interrogated and found to be a chimera. Marlow travels to the yellow heart of an Africa that is Dead in the center (13). The pun deliberately betrays his disgust. Conclusion When Conrad has Marlow aver that the mind of man is capable of anythingbecause everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future, he is, like T. S. Eliot, aware that it is our cumulative history that defines us (38). At the beginning of Four Quartets (1944) Eliot states: Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. Eliot, like Marlow, sees the significance of history to human understanding and experience: he recognizes how the past and present shape the future, and how the present is understood through the past. When Stephen Dedalus despairingly declares in Ulysses (1922), History is the nightmare from which I am trying to escape, he is, among other things, defining a dilemma of memory. Marlows nightmare of the Congo journey haunts him too, and in recounting it he betrays his own obsession with the memory, as he does in the repeated tellings of the story of Lord Jim. Perhaps Conrad too, is trying to exorcise his own ghosts of memory through the writing of Heart of Darkness. The point is, however, and despite the pain of the memory for Marlow, and probably for Conrad, that Heart of Darkness has inscribed for us numerous human histories that continue to require revisiting time and again in order to reinterpret the text through the lens of the present time, and through the recovered history of the past. As Conrad said in his article on Henry James, Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing, For Stephen Dedalus, history is the subconscious horror he is trying to avoid; for cultural and literary historians, following Conrad and James, history is the consciousness that we are trying to recover.      Ross C. Murfin ed., Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. (New York: St. Martons Press, 1989), 228.  Murfin, 230.  Murfin, 226. The thick description that Murfin refers to is a term from Clifford Geertz.  Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance of Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5.  Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 2003), 3.  Joseph Conrad, Henry James: An Appreciation. Reprinted in Notes on Life and Letters. (London: Dent, 1949), 17.  Hugh Clifford, In Court and Kampung (Singapore: Graham Brash, 1989), 219.  Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 199.  See Peter Edgerly Firchow, Envisioning Africa Racism and Imperialism in Conrads Heart of Darkness (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000).  Martin Bock, Conrad and Psychological Medicine (Lubbock: Texas tech University press, 2002). See in particular pages 113-5.  Nordau in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, The Fin de Sicle: A Reader in Cultural History C. 1880-1900. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.13.  Ledger and Luckhurst, p. 15.  Martin Bock notes that after his breakdown in 1910 Conrads Marlow would refere disparagingly to the theory of poetical genius being allied to madness . . . in some idiotic book everybody was reading a few years ago. Bock, pp. 14-15.  See, for example, Linda Dryden, Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 29-34 for more discussion on empire and degeneracy.  Said, Culture and Imperialism, 30.  See Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary 鶹s: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) pp. 76-109, for more discussion of Stevenson, Stead, and degeneracy.  Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde & The Merry Men and Other tales and Fables. (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1999), pp. 42-43.  Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray ed. Donald L. Lawler (London: W. W. Norton, 1988) p. 122.  Ledger and Luckhurst p. 16.  H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain. (London: Lonmans, Green, and Co., 1904) pp. 4-5.  William Booth. In Darkest England and the Way Out. (London: International Headquarters of the Salvation Army, 1890) p. ?  London Labour and the London Poor was first published in 1851 with a newer edition appearing in 1861.  Gustave Le Bon. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. (Atlanta, Georgia: The Cherokee Publishing Company, 1982) pp. 12, 19.  See Achebe  Curtis, p. 263.  Lee Perry Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press. (London: Yale University Press, 2001) p. 29.  Curtis, p. 41.  Curtis, p. 41.  Stevenson, pp. 49-50.  Curtis, 262-3.  Curtis, 263-4.  William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London: International Headquarters of the Salvation Army, 1890), p. 11.  Firchow, p. 105.  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets. (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 13. 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