541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
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Hi, everybody. Dominic Sandbrook from The Rest Is History here. Now, as you can probably tell from the noise of the pool, I am joined by a friend of the show, Anthony Scaramucci, who is on his island, surrounded by the luxurious trappings of wealth. He is, of course, the host of The Rest Is Politics US. And Anthony and I have a very special announcement.

On Sunday, the 30th of March, Anthony is over in the UK and we have decided to do a live show together at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London. Haven't we, Anthony? We have. You know, thank God I'm not British because the Brits actually admire my American accent.

a revista attitude about life. Okay. But in any event, okay, it'd be the first time on stage with Dominic. I am very excited. We're going to be doing a show on U.S. political history called The Rest is Assassinations.

From Lincoln to JFK, but Dominic and I both know on the 30th of March, 2025, it's the 44th anniversary of the attempted assassination on Ronald Reagan. So there's not only assassinations here, which are terrible, but there's an attempted assassination, several of them, Dominic, right, throughout U.S. history. And so we're excited to go through this and what the impacts were on American history and global history.

Right. And there's so many great stories. So obviously JFK, you and I disagree about JFK because I, of course, think it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. And you think differently. But there are other stories. You mentioned attempted assassinations. So, for example, FDR. FDR was almost shot before his inauguration in 1933. And that's an attempted assassination that really could have changed the course of history because no FDR. Does the United States still enter the Second World War? Does the story of the 20th century play out completely differently? So,

There is so much to talk about, and I'm really, really looking forward to doing it. What are you looking forward to most, Anthony? Well, I mean, all of that, but I want to delve into a little bit of the Secret Service and some of the men in that service. Clint Hill is still alive. He was riding alongside of Jackie and John Kennedy on the 22nd of November of 1963. And we'll talk about what he saw. We'll talk about what other agents have written about recently. And

And of course, now that Donald Trump is releasing the JFK assassination files, I think there'll be a lot to talk about there. I think people coming to the show are going to learn things that have never been said or heard before. So the listeners, if you're not excited by that, I don't know what would excite you, frankly. So the good news is,

Pre-sale tickets are available this Friday, the 21st of February from 10 o'clock in the morning, exclusively for our Rest Is History Club members. You will get an email with the link before the sale begins. And if you're not a member of the Rest Is History Club, just go to therestishistory.com to sign up and to get your email with the link.

General sale for this event will be open to the public on Monday, the 24th of February at 10 a.m. UK time. We'll send out the link to our mailing list in the morning, as well as posting it on the Rest is History and the Rest is Politics US's social media feeds.

So if you're a patriotic Brit who loves the special relationship, if you're an American living in London, or if you're an American who just loves getting on planes across the Atlantic to see the very highest quality entertainment, we absolutely expect to see you there in the West End on Sunday, the 30th of March. And to tell you the truth, what I'm really hoping is that on the night...

Anthony will finally reveal the truth behind the JFK assassination. Well, I'm probably going to Guantanamo for many reasons, Dominic, but that would be probably the top one. But anyway, we hope to see you there. I think you'll learn a lot. There'll be a lot of insight we'll provide and also provide great context on American and British and global history. Welcome to Naughty Yacht.

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The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress. And Kurtz's life was running swiftly too, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time. Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before.

and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of an intense and hopeless despair.

Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision. He cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath. The horror, the horror.

That was Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, first published in Blackwoods Magazine in 1899. One of the most celebrated novellas, not just in English but full stop, ever written. The rest is literature.

This is a book that, quite aside from its incredible literary value, is also well worth doing in a history podcast for reasons that we have been touching on, Dominic, throughout the series that we've just finished about the Belgian Congo. Because at the heart of darkness is all the history, all the horror, as Kurtz might put it as he dies, that we have been talking about in those three episodes. Absolutely, Tom. Yes. Hi, everybody. So,

Heart of Darkness, Conrad's great novel or novella, has kind of overshadowed the series that we've done on the Congress. It would be weird not to have an episode talking about it because it's arguably one of the most influential works of literature written in the last 120 years or so. We are not the rest is literature.

But purely in a literary sense, in a kind of purely literary cultural sense, it's an enormously important book. It's a brilliant example of literary modernism. So the prose is very dreamlike. It's like a hallucination. It's very overwrought. There are shifts in time, narrators within narrators. And the effect of all this is when you're reading it, it's quite a short book, isn't it, Tom? But you feel unsettled the whole time. There's a kind of sense of anxiety. Yeah.

And it was very influential. So T.S. Eliot, the great poet, he loved Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He had a poem called The Hollow Men that begins with a quotation later on in the book, Mr. Kurtz, he dead. And that passage that you read at the beginning, ending with those famous words, the horror, the horror.

He wanted that, didn't he? His original epigraph for his great poem, The Wasteland. Well, I mean, the thing about Heart of Darkness is it's incredibly quotable. We have been quoting it throughout this series and things like The Horror of the Horror of Mr. Curtsy Dead. I mean, Elliot, who has a kind of magpie eye for books

brilliant snatches of phrasing. It's not surprising that he would fix on it. I wonder also, The Wasteland is a poem about the First World War, if you like, the heart of darkness that had been revealed within European civilization. I think that there is a sense in which one of the reasons that Heart of Darkness has the status it does is it slightly has the quality of prophecy, but

Because that heart of darkness that is located in Belgian Congo turns out to have been a prophecy of the darkness that will engulf Europe in 1914. Yeah, I completely agree with you, Tom. I think it's a really good point. I think you can argue the heart of darkness prefigures so much of the kind of cultural commentary of the 20th century about, and we'll get onto this in the second half, about man's capacity for evil. Fartic, you might call it. Exactly. Gazing into the future and seeing the horrors that await.

Now, if you're not interested in literature at all, you may be thinking, well, so what? Who cares? I mean, here's a good answer to that. Heart of Darkness, I would argue, is by far the preeminent cultural representation of Western imperialism, particularly in Africa. More than King Solomon's mines?

I think it's Heart of Darkness now. I think Heart of Darkness and King Solomon's Mines are kind of the polar opposites, aren't they? Yeah, they really are. King Solomon's Mines is the journey into the heart of Africa that is swashbuckling, that is ultimately an optimistic story, that is jolly, that never questions, I think, ultimately, the right of the adventurers to be there. This is an adventure that goes horribly wrong.

And it's very much about the dark side of that. And also it's the fact that you keep expecting adventure type themes to kick in and they never quite do, or if they do in a distorted and hallucinatory way. And to read them as a pairing, I think is, I mean, really fascinating. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And actually rather like King Solomon's Minds,

Heart of Darkness has had a massive cultural footprint. So everything from video games like the Far Cry series, which basically riffs on Heart of Darkness, to most famously Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, which came out in 1979 and transposes it to the Vietnam War. And...

Apocalypse Now, even the making of it turned out to be a kind of riff on Heart of Darkness because they made a film about the making of it called Hearts of Darkness. And very famously, Francis Ford Coppola said about the making of Apocalypse Now, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.

Yeah, the horror, the horror. Absolutely, absolutely. And then there's a third dimension, I think, of this book that makes it incredibly interesting. And that is that initially, in the first few decades after its publication, it was seen as a book that was very critical of imperialism. It was seen as the great literary...

assault on the civilising mission. Am I right that imperialism is a word that is coming into common use exactly at the time when Conrad is writing this? Exactly. 1890s, 1900s is the high point of the discourse, as it were, of imperialism, both pro and anti-imperialism.

But now, in the 21st century, Heart of Darkness is seen not as an attack on imperialism by a lot of critics, but as an example of it, as a book that is fundamentally imperialistic and, above all, very racist. And it's probably the one book that has come to symbolise the attack on the Western canon, I suppose you might call it, or the criticism of the Western canon. So if you're at all interested...

in what people think about imperialism, Europe in the world, literary history, cultural history in the last century. Heart of Darkness is at the centre of a lot of those kind of debates, isn't it? So we'll get into a lot of these issues, particularly in the second half. But in the first half, I think we should set out two things. The first of all is, who is Joseph Conrad?

And what's he doing in the Congo at all to inspire this book? And secondly, what is the book about for people who don't know? So just very, very quickly, very swiftly to summarize. If you've never read the book, it's the story of a sea captain called Marlo. He takes a steamboat up the Congo and he's looking for a brilliant agent of the company, this what appears to be a concession company called Mr. Kurtz.

who's a great ivory trader. He's up there in the interior and he seems to have lost his marbles. And when Marlow gets there, he finds out that... All kinds of stuff has been going on. Yeah, all kinds of stuff has been going on. We'll unpick all that a bit later on. Now Conrad was asked, what's the book about? And he said, Heart of Darkness is experience pushed a little and only very little beyond the actual facts of the case. In other words, you really want to understand what it's about? It's a true story.

It's a true story exaggerated. So it's autobiographical, but it's also a portrait of...

a real political situation. Exactly. And the political situation is what we've been talking about in the previous three episodes. Exactly. So let's start with Conrad himself. His name actually isn't... I mean, Joseph Conrad's fiction is full of kind of holes and mirrors and stories within stories. His name actually isn't Joseph Conrad. His name is Joseph Theodore Conrad Korzynowski. And he

And he was born to a Polish noble family, an impoverished family in what's now Ukraine in 1857.

And this was sort of very rural world that had once been part of the eastern borderlands of Poland and has now been swallowed up by the Russian Empire. His mother, Ava, died when he was seven. His father, who had the brilliant name Apollo, who was a poet. I love that. Yeah. And a Polish revolutionary. So he's a tremendous man, Apollo Korzyniowski.

He died when Yusuf was 11. So he's brought up by relatives. He's very bored at school. He's obviously, you know, he's not in the best of form.

And he says he wants to go away to sea. Because apparently, Dominic, I read that this, in part, was because his father had been a kind of political prisoner. That's right. And as such, as the son of a political prisoner, he was liable for a possible 25-year term of conscription into the Russian army. Yes. And so that's one of the reasons why he decides to go abroad. And I suppose he ends up in Marseille, doesn't he? Mm-hmm.

France is the great refuge for Polish refugees in this period. Yes. If you want to become a sailor, you go to France and Marseille would be the obvious place. Exactly. Exactly right. So in 1874, his relatives clubbed together.

And they get together the money to send him to, what is he, 16, 17? To send him to Marseille to join the French merchant marine. This is a weird thing that he shoots himself. Yeah. The chest. But it seems to have been a little bit performative. Yeah. As I guess so much is in his fiction. I think that's absolutely right. And I think he's, Conrad is always a very...

I think a troubled man is too strong, but he is a man with a deep sense of deep melancholy to him, I think, throughout his life. He sails all over the world, Caribbean, South America, and then he goes up in the world. He joins the British merchant marine and he stays there for until 1889.

and he has all kinds of adventures all over the world. He goes to Australia, he goes to Bangkok, he goes to India, Singapore, and you can see a lot of that reflected in his fiction. Lots of tales of adventure in the South Seas and all of this. Yeah, and this is the thing about him, is that he is riffing on the same themes as kind of boys' own adventurers, as...

you know, Ryder Haggard, all this kind of ripping yarns. And yet they're always stranger and darker and more hallucinatory than any of those. They are indeed. Exactly. So there is something when his books first came out, people reviewed them as kind of slightly sea stories, you know, classic tales of the sea,

but a bit weirder than usual and only over time did people kind of work out exactly what he was doing. So at this point he's still using the name Korzhenyovsky. English is his third language. I mean, this is the amazing thing. He starts writing in the late 1880s. He writes his stories in English and

But I mean, imagine writing in your third language. He seems not to have spoken English at all before he was 21. I mean, it's just unbelievable that he learns it so fluently that he can write some of the masterpieces of English prose. Although I gather, did you see the...

the comment on Conrad's English by Ford Maddox Ford. His words absolutely exact as to meaning, but his accentuation so faulty that he was at times difficult to understand. People have said the same about us. I think specifically, Tom, they've said it about you, to be fair. I think occasionally you as well. I accept. Maybe me more often than you. Tom who speaks English like it's his third language. But Conrad as a man,

He's very reserved. He's very sensitive. He has this deep sense of irony and kind of skepticism that runs through everything he does. Very skeptical about human nature. He is intensely, in many ways, intensely conservative. Indeed, quite anti-democratic in many ways. When people sometimes say you can't create great art or great literature, you know, if you're of a very reactionary disposition. I think Conrad is one of those people who probably proves that comprehensively wrong.

Anyway, 1889, he's been off in the South Seas. He comes back to London. He starts writing his first novel, Almayer's Folly. Then at the beginning of 1890, he goes for the first time back to his homeland, Ukraine. And it doesn't go well. He doesn't get on with his family when they're there. You can well imagine he's probably built it up in his mind, a

about what it would be like. It's very disappointing because he's quite aloof and because he's had all these strange experiences, he doesn't quite fit. Well, also, he's got sea legs now, hasn't he? You think he's wobbling all over the place in the... Well, yes, but I mean, he's in the middle, surrounded by land, surrounded by the great Eurasian landmass. Do you think he's got a yearning for the sea? I don't know. Maybe I'm being over-romantic. Possibly. Possibly.

Because when he gets back, and it's disappointing, the first thing he does is to go to sea. Now, before he'd gone to Ukraine, he'd been talking to a company in Brussels, a Belgian shipping firm, about joining one of their ships. And he's actually already signed a contract. Now, this company, people will be reminded of all these companies from the episode we did about E.D. Morel, all these steamship companies with concessions and contracts. This company is called the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Congo.

So it's handling the commerce from the upper Congo. And it had been founded a year earlier to export ivory and rubber from the interior. So it runs a steamer service and it has a series of trading stations of its own. And why does Conrad sign up with this company? Well, obviously, one reason is he needs the money. He's effectively, you know, a mercenary. He will take the money to go on various voyages all over the world.

But as his great biographer, Zdzisław Nida, who's a Pole, his book is absolutely, it's quite hard to get hold of. This is your third language, Polish? Yeah, exactly. Excellent. Excellent, Tom. Thank you. Fluent pronunciation there. Yeah, thank you. It's not like I'd been preparing for hours. Nida points out that Conrad had always dreamed of Africa. As a boy in Ukraine, aged about nine, he had pointed his finger at a map where there was a blank space, as there was in those days, and he had said...

when I grow up, I'd like to go there. Now, he gives that line to Marlow, doesn't he? In Heart of Darkness. And there's no reason to doubt that Conrad himself thought like that. Anyway, there's also no reason to believe, by the way, that he doubts the civilising mission because he actually writes about this in letters to his uncle at the same time.

Anyway, May 1890, the 10th of May, he boards the ship, the SS Ville de Maceo, a Bordeaux, for this journey that his biographer Nida says is the most traumatic journey of his life. They go off down the coast of Africa. Even before they get to the Congo, one passenger says to him, you're going to the Congo? That's an absolute nightmare. That's not what you want to hear, is it? Yeah. He says, basically, everybody who goes there, they either die or they come home early because it's so terrible.

And Conrad actually says, and I quote, I'm a Polish nobleman cased in British tar. Does it get better than that? No, that's the best thing you can possibly be.

So anyway, about a month later, they reach the capital of the Congo Free State, Boma. So it's just 50 miles inland. And here, if people remember from the previous episodes, there's the various complicated ways you have to move up the river. Because of the rapids and all that malarkey. So he gets a steamer upriver to Matadi, and Matadi is the last point before the rapids where you have to get off. Now, at Matadi, he meets somebody that we talked about on Monday.

And this is somebody who we're going to be hearing about from John Banville in next week's bonus episode. And this is Roger Casement. So the British consul, great Irish Patriots, an amazing character. And Conrad really took to Casement, didn't he? He said it's a great pleasure to have met him. He thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic. And there's a lot of talk that you find about Conrad and Casement and what they did, but

Conrad himself seems to have misremembered what they did. He said, we shared a room together. They undoubtedly didn't because Casement wasn't there for a lot of the time. But they definitely spent a lot of time together and they probably made trips together to see some of the local villages to find porters and things to carry all Conrad's stuff. So,

I think it's probably at this point that Conrad starts to see some of the terrible scenes that we've quoted in the previous episodes. So, for example, Tom, you read that passage about the six blokes with baskets of earth on their heads. Do you want to remind us of that, some of the horror? Yeah, so I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope. Each had an iron collar on his neck and all were connected together with a chain whose bites swung between them, rhythmically clanking.

And then comes to a grove and sees people there dying. Black shapes, black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. And

Of course, the justification that Leopold is giving for this effectively slave labour is that it's progressive slave labour, that it will enable the introduction of Western technology, steam trains, all of that, and then it will ease the burden on the porters. But there's a kind of very ironic spin on this in Heart of Darkness, because when Marlow gets to the top of the rapids to look for his steamer, he finds that it's been sunk and he has to dredge it up and

and they haven't got the bolts that would enable it to be put together. Yeah, rivets. The rivets. You have the sense of even the claims to kind of technological superiority are a kind of sham. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, they are. I mean, what does Conrad say? He said at one point his book was, when he was pitching it to Blackwoods, he said it was a

a portrait of inefficiency and incompetence in Africa. It's like getting a train in Britain. He's on a rail replacement bus, that's what he's on. So he hangs around with Casement for a couple of weeks and then they've got the porters and he's ready to start overland from Matadi.

And he wrote a diary in English in his third language, which gives you some sense of what it was like. Mosquitoes. At night when the moon rose, heard shouts and drumming in distant villages past a bad night. No water. Camped on an exposed hillside near a muddy creek. No shade. Tent on a slope. Sun heavy. Wretched. Night miserably cold. No sleep. Mosquitoes.

And on they go. And at one point, he definitely passes a skeleton tied to a post, which is a very... I can imagine seeing that when you... Yeah. So that's a sign, you know. Remember, Conrad is very, very, very well-travelled. I mean, admittedly, most of his travels have been at sea, so he hasn't often gone inland in the places he's visited.

That's so interesting, isn't it? Because we talked earlier about how, to begin with, for Europeans, Africa is all about the coast. That they didn't go inland, that it just seemed a waste of effort. And perhaps in that sense, Conrad is kind of emblematic of the transition that European adventurers make from Europe.

experiencing Africa along the coasts and going inland. He's kind of compressing that entire history into his own person. Yeah, I think that's a fair point. And the deeper he goes inland, the more the violence becomes apparent to him. Perhaps violence that you don't see to the same extent on the coast, it's hard to say. So at one point he sees a government official beating porters, blows with sticks, raining hard, stopped it,

In other words, he intervenes to break it up. The 2nd of August, he arrives at Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And there, as you mentioned in the novel,

His proposed steamer has been damaged. So he has to transfer to another steamer, which is called, with sublime irony, the Roi des Belges. You often read that he's the captain. He's not the captain. There's a guy called Koch, a Dane, who is the captain. And Conrad is going to be the number two. And we know from his correspondence he's already disillusioned because his uncle, Tadeusz, writes to him at this point and says, don't walk out on the contract.

You'll lose all your money and you'll get a bad reputation among the companies as somebody who can't be relied upon. So he's clearly been writing home and saying, this is terrible. I'm actually thinking of breaking my contract. And his biographers think this is probably because he's fallen out with the company manager who he's going to have to give a lift to. So he's been traveling with him. And the company manager is a Belgian called Camille Delcommune.

And he really is in Heart of Darkness because there's the company manager in Heart of Darkness who is modelled directly on this bloke, Del Comune. And whose relationship to Kurtz and his plans for Kurtz is a kind of twist, isn't there? Exactly. So on they go upriver. They go very quickly. They're covering a thousand miles in a month. I mean, these don't mess around, these steamers.

And on board the ship, there's Captain Koch, there's Conrad, there's a mechanic from Belgium, there are 25 African crewmen, Del Commune, and three other company agents.

And we know from traders' accounts that the passage upriver, it's very lonely. You don't pass many of the ships. The countryside is desolate. There are burned out villages. You know, the people are hiding in the bush. Depredations of the force publique. And so, as Ziziswaw Nida says in his biography,

The atmosphere of Heart of Darkness clearly is inspired by this kind of oppressive, claustrophobic isolation that Conrad must have felt on this boat going upriver with just the silence and the emptiness. And we mentioned this before, but there are kind of prefigurings of the lost world and all those...

novels and then films where people go back into a prehistoric past and the sense of silence and desolation preceding some appalling revelation of some saurian bursting out of the jungle or something. I mean, Heart of Darkness is much more sophisticated than that, but you sense some terror, some horror is waiting.

Definitely do. Definitely. So on the 1st of September, they get to the last navigable point on the river. This is what's then called Stanley Falls. Now it's called Kizangani. And this is basically now in the heart of Central Africa. And Conrad wrote later, I said to myself with awe, this is the very spot of my boyish boast.

So this is the point that he pointed to on the map all those years ago, and he's got there, and the sense of not just crushing disappointment, but more than that, dare I say, the horror of it.

of what he has seen. Like Musk arriving in Mars. That wasn't a comparison I expected, to be honest. Right. They stay there, Stanley Falls, for about a week and they pick up the local agent who's a guy called Klein, a Frenchman, Georges-Antoine Klein. He's in his late 20s. We know very little about him. He had terrible dysentery.

and they decide, well, we're going to take this guy Klein back. So then they turn back. Now, Klein died on the return journey. He died after a couple of weeks. And his story is clearly the model in some way for the story of Kurtz. And Kurtz, when Conrad first sat down and started writing the book, he was called Klein. But apart from that, there is nothing to connect them. There's no sense that this guy Klein was a

A madman, a bad guy, a guy who'd stared into the depths of the human soul. He's just a French bloke who's got terrible dysentery. But here is the sort of the germ of the idea of Mr. Kurtz, I guess. Anyway, they get back to Kinshasa after about three weeks. And here, Conrad writes to a friend of his back in Belgium called Marguerite Porodowska. And he says to her, I've actually now got terrible dysentery and fever. And I'm incredibly miserable.

He says, I regret having come here. I regret it bitterly. I find everything repugnant, especially, he says, the people. And he's talking about the Europeans. And I am repugnant to them, too, from the director in Africa who has taken the trouble of telling a good many people of his intense dislike of me down to the lowest mechanic. Basically, everybody hates me.

Now, the interesting thing is he never mentions the Congo itself and the violence in the Congo as a reason for his unhappiness. And do you think he's burying it? Well, possibly, because Sajiswaf Naida says in his book, and I think this does make sense, he thinks that Conrad had basically failed to hide how unhappy and how shocked he was with what he could see.

And that the other people, the del Comune, the other agents, saw that and took against him. He was kind of livid liberal. Yeah, that he basically is spoiling their fun and he's judging them. And you can see, therefore, it would sort of make sense that they would find him repugnant because he's a walking rebuke to their project. Yeah.

So he's definitely ill for the next few weeks. And then he vanishes. So Conrad vanished. The paper trail disappears and he vanishes from sight. As Nida puts it, the image becomes confused, blurred, obscure, which is actually very appropriate given the way Conrad writes.

And actually, the next time we come across him, he's back. He's in Brussels in January 1891. And then he's next time we see him after that, he's in London in February. There's no diary entries. There are no letters. There is nothing. And it's as though I think whatever has happened in those last days or weeks in the Congo, he wants to forget it.

Whatever it is. So it's a kind of epistolary heart of darkness. It is indeed. We don't know. And I think it's plausible that it's during those last weeks that he really reaches his verdict on the Congo Free State. When he attains what he called the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration.

And there are sort of fragments in later letters and whatnot that give a sense of what he thought. So in 1903, just a few years later, he told his friend Cunningham Graham that

a founder Tom of the Scottish National Party so a man with whom you'd have a lot of you'd have a lot to talk about yeah he said to Cunningham Graham that Leopold and his free state agents were and I quote a gigantic and obscene beast so that's fascinating isn't it because again we're talking about this idea of going into a prehistoric landscape that is the beast that is the beast and

And he actually ends a letter to Cunningham Graham saying, you know, if you want to find out about this, you should talk to my mate, Roger Casement. He could tell you things, things I've tried to forget, things I never did know. You know, there's this kind of sense of like the stuff at the periphery of his vision.

half glimpsed, half understood that's going on and he doesn't really want to think about it because it's so terrible. And I know we'll come to this, but there is something kind of the Freudian idea of a repressed memory, a darkness that even as you try and repress it, it is kind of bleeding out into your dreams and your

your fantasies. Absolutely. And the book absolutely has that flavour. So for the next three years, Conrad goes back to the Merchant Marine, he sails around, and then in 1894, he retires from the sea and he devotes himself to writing. And he writes a couple of novels and he writes lots of stories in magazines like Blackwoods and The Strand, famously where

where Sherlock Holmes started. And in the middle of December 1898, he starts his third piece for Blackwoods magazine. And he says to the publisher, it's a narrative about a bloke who's on a river in Central Africa. I'm thinking of calling it The Heart of Darkness, but the narrative is not at all gloomy. Which is clearly, I mean, that's not true. And he obviously doesn't want the publisher to say, yeah, not for us, mate. Yeah, it's like us with Theo trying to...

Exactly. It's a way for him to do an episode. It's really upbeat and jolly and people will love it. Full of fun. And Conrad says to him, the theme is the criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling civilising work in Africa. Now, interestingly, this is Conrad's own thing. He's not been inspired by E.D. Murrell's campaign or anything like that because that hasn't even started yet. Yeah, it hasn't begun, has it? No, nowhere near. Yeah.

So it's obviously something that he feels he has to do or wants to do. And it's presumably the time where everyone still thinks it's brilliant and it's civilising and hooray. Exactly. Now, the most shocking thing for people like us, Tom, is how much Conrad is being paid. Blackwood's paid him £60 for this. So in relative income terms, that's about almost £50,000 today, which is a sign of how well this kind of writing was paid back then.

And how highly rated Conrad is, I assume. I mean, he's not Conan Doyle, I accept, but at this point, he's not that highly rated. There's just so much money in short stories and journalism, far, far more than...

than there is today. Great days. Yeah, great days. So he turns it around. By the 6th of February, he delivers 38,000 words to Blackwell's, which I think is quite slow. I think it's pretty fast. That's three weeks' work. That is three weeks' work. Come on, mate. Anyway, it's published in February, March and April 1899. So just before we go to the break, for people who are not familiar with the book or need reminding, what has he produced?

Most accounts that you read say that it's narrated by this guy, Marlowe. That's actually not true. Marlowe is not the narrator. It's Russian dolls, isn't it? Yeah. There are narratives within narratives. So basically, the narrator is part of a group of people who are on this ship, the Nelly, off Gravesend in the Thames.

So in England and night is falling and they're all just hanging around on this boat, but they've got to wait there for the turn of the tide. Haven't they? They can't, they can't go home yet. And I think it makes it clear that the narrator in some ways to be equated with Conrad, because this hanging around on a ship is,

on the Thames is exactly what Conrad was doing. And he did it with kind of various mates, one of whom was a company director, one of whom is an accountant, one of whom is a solicitor. And that maps exactly onto the description of the three people with Marlowe in the boat. Yeah. And Marlowe is kind of leaning against the mast, is sort of sitting down and leaning against the mast. He's a sort of weather-beaten sort of sea dog, you know, hard-faced sea dog character. And he can't,

kicks off suddenly they're all just sitting around in a desultory way as night is falling and he doesn't talk about the congo he talks about britain and he says very famously and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth

And then he starts musing. You talked about this, Tom, a long time ago when we did an episode about Roman London. I think we opened with this message. He says, what must it have been like to be a Roman in Britain? The feeling, you know, to be sent north from Italy or wherever.

And you arrive in Britain and you have this feeling that the savagery, the utter savagery had closed around him. All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. And that, of course, is very redolent of the Congo. And so also is his account of what it must have been like for a Roman soldier advancing

In land, here and there, a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay. Yeah. Which, of course, is historically very inaccurate. But then he's very unsentimental about the Roman Empire. He says, it was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind, as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.

And then he kind of goes on from that to think about empires in general. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. That it's kind of a noble ideal.

But in practice. Well, in that he has switched from the Romans to Europeans. He has indeed. He has indeed. And this then leads him to tell them a story. And this is the story of Heart of Darkness. And it's a story set in the past. So it's not during it's not set in 1899 when they're getting rubber. It's back in the heyday of ivory.

And he says, you know, the word ivory rang in the air. You would think people were praying to it. Of course, that's as we'll discover. Literally true. That's literally true. Marlowe, like Conrad...

It's hard to take a steamboat up the Congo, although the Congo is never named. Well, Dominic, also, I mean, Belgium is never named and Leopold is never named and Brussels is never named. It's called the White and Sepulchre. Yeah, the Sepulchral City or something like that. Sepulchral City, yeah. But it's clear, I think, where we're talking about. But I suppose it kind of universalises it a bit. Yes, I think so. I mean, it's...

Exactly. I think it definitely universalizes it, which is why I think it's completely reasonable to set it in Vietnam in a Bulk Lips Now or whatever.

So his job is to go up the river to collect this agent, Mr. Kurtz, from the interior. Everybody says to him, oh, you're going to see Mr. Kurtz? Mr. Kurtz is absolutely brilliant. Mr. Kurtz is half English, he's half French, although people say all Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz. He's a brilliant writer. He's painted this beautiful oil sketch of a woman holding a torch, kind of a figure of progress, of course.

He is, and I quote, an emissary of pity and science and progress. He is the Enlightenment. He is Western civilization. He's just absolutely brilliant. But he is also praised as the man who gets as much ivory as all the other agents put together.

So he is also being praised for his acquisitiveness and whatever qualities are required to obtain that amount of ivory. So there is a darkness there right from the start. There is indeed. And quite early on, Marlowe starts to get some kind of sense that all is not well with Mr. Kurtz. And at one point later on, he discovers that Mr. Kurtz has written this enormous report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs.

And it's a brilliant piece of work. You know, it's amazingly well written. But it ends with this weird scrawled phrase, exterminate all the brutes.

which kind of sets alarm bells ringing, I think. Another of those kind of terrifyingly quotable phrases. Yeah. So Marla gets the boat upriver. He has a series of quite scary adventures. I say adventures, but they're... They're not really, are they? The thing is, they're riffs on the kind of adventures you would see in boys' stories, but they're told in a really unsettling, like he can't understand what's going on. But also nothing ever happens. So that stuff about hearing drums in the distance or whatever...

In Rider Haggard, that would immediately presage an attack that would involve guns and heroism and all kinds of stuff. I mean, nothing like that ever happens. Well, there is an attack when they reach the station.

Remember, there's all the spears that are thrown at them. And the bloke next to him is killed, actually. But it's not standing in the middle of King Solomon's mines being... I mean, it's just not that kind of adventure. No, it's not at all. Marlow is just standing there basically doing nothing, doing all of it. He's not a sort of active, exciting protagonist. Loading his rifle or that kind of thing. Anyway, they get to Kurtz's station. All the worst suspicions are confirmed.

The station is surrounded by posts with severed heads. And I don't want to spoil the story completely for people who haven't read it, but as the company manager puts it,

Kurtz's methods have proved unsound. He's been going about his business in an unsound manner. I mean, he's basically being worshipped by the locals as a god, but he's behaving very violently. Kurtz himself is a very sick man. He's an emaciated ghostly figure on a stretcher. So not like Marlon Brando. Not like Marlon Brando at all, but very like this bloke Klein that Conrad himself had picked up.

Marlo and Kurtz have a series of chats, slightly strange chats, very elliptical, hard to elusive, hard to work out exactly what they're talking about. Kurtz is dying. Clearly, Kurtz says to Marlo, oh, it's terrible shame. I'll never have the chance to carry out my I had immense plans. He says it's going to carry out great things, but we never really find out what those immense plans add up to. Anyway.

They finally head back downstream with Kurtz, who is dying. And then we get to that scene that you opened with Tom, where Kurtz, his final words, is lying there. And he says, it's like he's looking into the distance. And he says, or is he looking into his own soul? We don't know. And he says, the horror, the horror.

It's a really famous death scene. There's a brilliant essay for people who are interested online by the New Yorker's critic, David Denby. He first wrote it in 1995 and he calls it the most famous literary death scene since Shakespeare. And I think it's very famous now because of Marlon Brando, because of Apocalypse Now. I mean, since Shakespeare, but you might say since Christopher Marlowe and the death of...

Faustus who has sold his soul in return for earthly riches and then gets plunged down into hell and it can't be a coincidence I think that Marlow the character who meets with Kurtz shares the name with the playwright who wrote that drama it's a nice parallel contemporary of Shakespeare's exactly now in Apocalypse Now for people who've seen the film this is basically the end Kurtz dies end of the film but interestingly that's not the end of Heart of Darkness

Marlowe comes back to Europe and something in him has changed. He talks again and again about feeling loyal to Kurtz. He says that Kurtz, we'll have a bit of the reading in the next half, I think, that Kurtz has stepped over the edge of something and seen something profound. We don't know what it is. As a result of this, Marlowe comes back and he goes to Brussels and he feels completely alienated from life in Brussels. He's had an experience that has changed him.

Now, Kurtz has given him a packet of papers, entrusted it to him, and the very last scene of the novel is him giving the papers to Kurtz's grieving fiancée. Because all the owners of the company want these papers, don't they? Yeah. Marlowe is saying that, you know, I don't have them. And also, just to say one thing that we omitted, Kurtz has had –

an African woman who loves him. That's right. And she is actually, I think, the most Ryder Haggard figure in the whole thing. She's got a kind of crazy headdress or something. And I felt kind of slightly out of tune with everything else in the novella. I totally agree with you. I think that's the one moment in the book where Conrad...

yields to kind of late Victorian African melodrama. Agreed. And this woman who's like incredibly impressive and statuesque and sort of, she stands there, you know, lamenting loudly. Waving spears and... Yeah, and all of this. Kind of Boudicca figure. Anyway, he hands over these papers to the fiancee and to his horror, she says, tell me about when he died. What was the last thing he said to you?

And the very last thing that Marlowe does in the whole story is he looks her in the eye and he lies to her. And he says, the last word he pronounced was your name. Well, I mean, unless her name was horror. Yeah, seems very unlikely. Seems unlikely. Anyway, Dominic, thank you. So that's the life of Conrad and the plot of Heart of Darkness. But Dominic, what does it all mean? What's it all about? We will find out after the break.

Now, before we get to the break, I would really like to tell you about another Goalhanger podcast, Legacy, hosted by Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch. That's right. They go through the annals of history and revisit the lives of some of the most famous men and women to ever live.

ever have lived and ask if they have the reputation they deserve. And this season, they are looking at perhaps one of the most famous leaders of all time, Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader whose empire expanded from Korea to parts of Eastern Europe. And Dominic, as Peter Frankopan, a cricketing compadre of mine, would tell you, it's actually pronounced Chinggis. Did you know that?

Do you know, Tom, that's an amazing revelation to me. I didn't know that. You did not know that. Genghis Khan, Chinggis Khan, however you want to call him, extraordinary figure. I mean, unbelievably brutal figure. It's said that his conquests and those of his immediate successors resulted, I think, something like 40 million deaths, which would be about 10% of the world population at the time. And yet, Tom, that's only one side of the story, isn't it? Because did he not also develop the yam problem?

postal system across his empire and his treatment of women i read was entirely inconsistent yes because he and his army certainly used sexual violence as a weapon of war but also at one point he did ban the kidnapping of women and the series is a really extraordinary listen in no small part because peter wrote the bestseller the silk roads which is all about genghis's part of the world and you will be hard pressed to find someone who knows more about the mongols

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Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare that could not see the flame of the candle but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed it up. He had judged the horror. He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief. It had candour. It had conviction.

It had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper. It had the appalling face of a glimpse truth, the strange commingling of desire and hate. So that's the verdict that Marlow delivers on Kurtz after his death towards the end of Heart of Darkness. And I guess...

Heart of Darkness is a very, very well-chosen title. That sense that there is something, a mystery that you can't penetrate, which Kurtz in some strange way embodies. And you have the sense of...

kind of great depths, but it's hard exactly to say what lurks in those depths. And so Dominic, I mean, here are the questions for you. So what is it that Kurtz has seen? What is the truth? What is the horror? Is it something he's seen in himself? Is it something he's seen in the Congo? Is it something he has seen in the nature of imperialism? Is it

something about the human condition, full stop? I mean, what is going on? That's a very good question, Tom. Well, loads of questions for you. Yeah, we'll answer all those questions in this. You have 45 minutes. Pick up your pen. Start now. Literary scholars have tried for more than a century to answer those questions. And finally, we can reveal the answers. Brilliant. It's like the Kennedy assassination. So on Kurtz himself, loads of scholars have tried to argue that he's a real person. And they've tried to find out who Conrad was inspired by.

And I think there are three or four candidates that come up again and again.

So one candidate is a bloke called Major Edmund Bartolot. And he, I'm sorry to say, was a British officer. He had gone with Stanley, Henry Morton Stanley, to rescue an... It's such a complicated story. Basically, they went to rescue an Egyptian governor called Emin Pasha, who didn't need rescuing, in the Sudan. And this guy Bartolot behaved, it's fair to say, very poorly. He went mad and...

He started flogging people wildly. He put loads of people in chains and he started running around biting women. Really? Yeah. Very bad behavior. And eventually this African bloke shot him dead. And that was the end of him. And everyone said, God almighty, what a terrible advert for Britain. Let's never speak of this again. So there's that guy Barthelot. He possibly is an inspiration for Kurtz.

Then there's a Belgian called Arthur Hoddister. Strange name for a Belgian, I always think, but there you go. He was an ivory trader and was brilliant at it, like Kurtz. He was ruthless. He had a harem of local women. There were rumors that local people worshipped him as a god.

But he came to a very different end from Kurtz. He was tortured, beheaded, and according to some accounts, eaten by Swahili slave traders for kind of intruding on their patch. That would have been a good end to Heart of Darkness. It would have been an unexpected end. Yeah. Then there's a guy called Karl Peters, who was a German. He was basically Germany's answer to Henry Morton Stanley. He launched his own expedition to rescue this bloke, Emin Pasha, who didn't need rescuing.

He discovered ancient sites along the Zambezi River. He's basically got a bit of the Indiana Jones. Unfortunately, even Germans were embarrassed by this. He also went a bit mad. He was incredibly violent. His nickname was Hangman Peters, because basically, you know, you said good morning to him and he hanged you. He was very violent. And even the Germans who were behaving quite badly, it's fair to say, or indeed very badly in Southwest Africa at this point, even they're ashamed of him, which tells his own story.

And then the final candidate, which Adam Hochschild mentions in his book, King Leopold's Ghost, is a guy called Léon Romm. Romm was a Belgian. He was a captain in the Force Publique. Like Kurtz, he liked painting and writing, and he collected butterflies, which is nice, like Vladimir Nabokov. And Maximilian. Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. But also he was an obsessive hunter. He had loads of African concubines. He had, at the time, and I quote, the reputation of having killed masses of people for petty reasons. Yeah.

And he kept a flower bed at his station ringed with human heads. That's very Kurtz. Which is very Kurtz. So as Jiswaf Nida says in his biography of Conrad...

Conrad may well have drawn on all these examples, but it's clear that Kurtz is all of them and none of them. As Nida says, the model for Kurtz comes from literary and philosophical tradition as much as it does from real-life African behaviour. Well, there's the quality of the Byronic hero, the man who is elevated by the terrible knowledge that he has won from experience. I mean, it's definitely a kind of literary trope. You mentioned what I think is the obvious thing, which is Faust.

So Faust has sold his soul to the devil. And it's not just Marlow, but obviously Goethe wrote about Faust and then Thomas Mann will write about Faust a few decades after Conrad. And there are a few references Marlow says at one point in Heart of Darkness, Kurtz has taken a high seat among the devils of the land. And later on, he talks about how the powers of darkness are about to claim him for their own. So this idea that Kurtz's soul is sold to the devil, you know, it's a very old idea in kind of European literature.

But there's also something new about Kurtz. He's the embodiment of progress. Remember that he's so talented. He is the epitome. He's the embodiment of civilization. And there is an argument, I think, that what he's doing in that long... Remember he writes that very long report. Yeah, so exterminate all the brutes. Exactly. There's an argument that that report is in itself the embodiment of the European project in Africa.

to categorise, to set down on, to turn everything into accounts and ledgers. Which began with Napoleon going to Egypt. Exactly. To put Africa down on paper and control it and map it. Very Edward Said. Yeah. That is the act of colonialism, effectively. Well, European colonialism. European colonialism. Yeah.

So is this, therefore, a story about colonialism? And is Kurtz the embodiment of all that's wrong with it? At one level, I think the answer is obviously yes. Marlowe at the beginning is given those lines about taking the earth away from people with flatter noses than ourselves that are kind of very pointed.

Later on in the book, only a little bit later, before Marlowe actually goes to the Congo, he goes to visit his aunt. And his aunt has been reading newspaper stories about Africa and empire. And she says, oh, it's brilliant. Love this project. Weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways. And Marlowe actually says to her, this is even before he's gone, he says, it's about money. The company is run for profit. You know, he's unsentimental about what is happening.

what is motivating all this. And of course, then when he gets to the Congo, everything that he sees could come from a charge sheet about the crimes of empire, the skulls, the skeletons, you know, the violence, all of that kind of thing. I mean, one of the things that strikes me about it, a bit like War of the Worlds, where Wells transposes the horrors of European colonialism to Britain. There's a sense that occasionally that Conrad is doing the same thing. So the whole, the opening with Britain as Africa,

But also there's a kind of an amazing passage. So he's looking out at Marlow, he's looking out at all the villages that are abandoned. And he says, well, you know, if loads of Africans suddenly, you know, armed with terrifying weapons, um, started appearing on the road that stretches between deal and graves end in Kent, uh,

catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them. I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon. And of course, that is a prefiguring of the slave labour in due course that the Nazis will introduce in the heart of Europe. I think that's absolutely right. And I think the beginning of the book, by transposing what happens to Britain, it makes it very obvious that Conrad is conscious that this has a wider implication, that this is a kind of universal message. But here's the complication within the complication.

The framing narrator is very keen on the British Empire because while he's at Gravesend, he muses on the knight errants of the sea, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire, the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealth, the germ of empires. People have sailed out from here with the spark of Britishness. And isn't that brilliant?

Marlow, the other narrator, he also thinks the British Empire is brilliant. He says at one point he sees a map with a lot of Africa splashed with British imperial pink or red. And he said, oh, that's good to see because one knows that real work is being done there. I.e. the British Empire is different from other empires. So very Kipling. But we know that Conrad himself thought that. So just after he's finished Heart of Darkness, the Burr Wall breaks out.

And his Polish relatives say to him, what do you make of this? You know, an empire against a little people at the Burrs, you know, doesn't ring any bells. And he says, well, the British are brilliant. Liberty can only be found under the English flag all over the world. So he's for the Burr War.

And then after he died, his great friend and collaborator, Ford Maddox Ford, said of him a line that always amuses me. The British Empire was for Conrad the perfection of all human perfections. So Conrad, obviously a brilliant judge of empires. But this has led some people to say, well, hold on. You know, you can't celebrate this book as a criticism of empire. In fact, let's go further. This book is itself massively tainted with

with the crimes of empire. It's a tainted example of imperialist literature. Although, if you read it and you didn't know about Coronet's enthusiasm for British imperialism, would you necessarily recognise that? Well, there are at least two critics who think you would. So one of them, I think you mentioned him already, didn't you? Edward Said.

Palestinian-American critic, one of the most famous literary critics of the last half century, who wrote a brilliantly influential book, shall we say, called Orientalism, which some scholars think is a terrible book. I think it's brilliant. I think you say it's brilliant. Anyway, Said says, yes, you would recognize Comrades as an imperialist because he doesn't ever reject imperialism in his book. His book should end with people being given their freedom.

or some savage critique of the imperialism that has enslaved them. I mean, that is what you get. That is what you get. What? A savage critique? Yes. Well, maybe it's not savage enough for Edward Said, and Edward Said is also really disappointed that Conrad doesn't give the Africans a chance of redemption or a chance of escape. And I mentioned in the essay by David Denbigh, The New Yorker,

He had a little passage in this essay in 1995 imagining, saying, well, how would that work? Like at the end of the book, Kurt rises from his deathbed and says to an African chief, one day your people will be free and the clouds clear and the sun shines and everybody's singing and dancing. It'd be ridiculous. But that's why Said is a brilliant cultural critic, but he never writes a great work of literature. Why?

because it would simply be agitprop. Conrad's story is vastly more complex and unsettling than a kind of programmatic response to this would demand. I totally agree with you about that, Tom. But there's a more substantial critique. Now, this is by an African writer called Chinua Achebe. So Nigerian, isn't he? Yeah, born in 1930. And in 1975, Achebe gave this lecture at the University of Massachusetts on

To people who don't know, this will sound like such a trivial and footling thing, but this is one of the most influential lectures ever given about literary culture at all. It's one of the great demolition jobs, and it's actually a foundational moment for what's called post-colonial literary studies.

And Achebe said, I hate this book. I hate Conrad and I hate this book basically because he just sets up Africa as the heart of darkness. It's the place where Europeans go to find the evil within themselves. Conrad's message is keep away from Africa or else you'll fall victim to the allure of the jungle. The darkness will find you out. You'll become evil if you go to Africa.

And he said, and I'm going to quote him, the point of my observation should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. And he goes on to say,

Can a book which dehumanizes Africans, which treats Africa as the heart of darkness, et cetera, et cetera, can it be called a great work of art? My answer is no, it cannot. And this has always been incredibly contentious, this argument among scholars and enthusiasts for Joseph Conrad. You know, is this basically a racist book? And now on college campuses, yes.

you will find a lot of people who say it is and either don't teach it or who teach it as an example of literary racism. Now, a lot of people listening to this will expect, because with the rest is history, that at this point we kind of turn our guns on Chinua and Chibi and say, this is terrible, Conrad's brilliant, blah, blah, blah. Actually, there are elements of his critique, I don't know what you think, Tom, but that I think are justified. So, first of all, he does present, the book does present Africa as...

primeval, as unfathomable, as prehistoric. Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. Okay, I accept that. However, one of the reasons why it is travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world is that there are no humans. And there are no humans there because they've all been scared off by the depredations of European colonialists. So he's not simply saying

You know, the silent... What is it? He says, an empty stream, a great silence. That great silence is expressive of the depredations of European colonists. I agree with you, but you might not know that reading Conrad's book. Well, he does. He said it. I mean, we just quoted the stuff about, you know, the Africans turning up in Kent and launching attacks. Yes, I suppose so. I suppose so. But those two passages are quite far apart and you might not draw the connection. But that is why Conrad is a great writer, because he's setting up these...

you know, these echoes in the prose that reverberate. Now, the second charge, I think slightly harder to quibble with, I would argue, is that this is a book about Africa that has no serious African characters at all. And when they speak, they don't speak. They chant, they grunt, they make, and I quote, a drone of weird incantations, strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language, like the responses of some satanic litany.

And even the physical descriptions that are quite harrowing, they're quite dehumanizing. So the porters that you mentioned, you know, the people who are carrying the stuff in their heads and they're chained together, they had the complete death-like indifference of unhappy savages. Or the railway workers dying in the grove.

black shapes, black shadows of disease and starvation. Would you talk like that about white European characters? I'm not entirely convinced that you would. That I would accept. And we've already touched on Kurtz's African concubine, who is pure stereotyping. I mean, the pure kind of fantasy figure. And

And I think that is where Conrad's kind of literary mastery falls down. Well, I mean, first of all, there's a real complication here, which is that this isn't actually Conrad talking. This is Marlowe talking. Well, yes, yes and no. I mean...

Because there is a risk that you then start saying anything racist in it is Marlowe talking and it's not, it's Conrad talking. I mean, you can do it either way. I mean, if you start playing that game, depending on what you, you know, whether you want to, to get Conrad off the charge or not, you can, you can fix the...

fix your critique. You can, but I think you have to... So Achebe basically says in his lecture, I'm going to just basically treat Marlowe as if he's Conrad. But Marlowe isn't Conrad. Conrad is the character listening to Marlowe, if Conrad is in the story at all. So I think you just have to be a bit careful by always assuming that an author and their main character are the same person. Well, you notice this very, very powerfully when Marlowe is coming back and he's puzzling over Kurtz's character and what he represents.

You have the sense that Marley is wrestling all the time. He's groping after truth, but there's always a sense that it's kind of slipping his fingers. And clearly...

He's grasping after the secrets of the human condition, but he is also grasping after the reality and the truth of what is going on in the Belgian Congo. As we've said, this is written before Morel starts his forensic examination of the details of what has been happening. You could say that there's an element there of the difficulty that historians have in making sense of what's been going on. It is noticeable that we don't have African...

of what happened. I mean, this has been a problem that you've been acknowledging throughout our account, that it really is a story about what Europeans get up to rather than Africans. And I suppose Conrad could talk to the Europeans, but he couldn't talk to the Africans. I think that's absolutely right. Now, actually, ultimately, I think this question about is it a racist book or is it not is actually quite a boring one. I don't

I don't think it's Conrad clearly. I mean, it's such a terribly cliche thing to say. Conrad obviously is a man of his age. He reflects the assumptions that he has grown up with both in Russian occupied, you know, Eastern Poland, Ukraine, and later on,

sailing around on British merchant ships. I mean, he's not outside time. Of course, he has prejudices and assumptions of his own, and they are expressed in his writing. But the overall effect of this book is obviously not a... I mean, it's a book that clearly makes you think really seriously about the moral issues of imperialism and the civilising mission and colonialism and whatnot. I mean, how can it not? Morel, who devoted his entire life to...

Leopold's regime in the Congo said of it that it is the most powerful thing ever written on the subject. I think that is true. I think that reigning authors, because they fail to measure up to the ideological standards of 2024,

It's the least interesting approach to literature that you could possibly adopt. Couldn't agree more. I mean, whether or not, of course, Conrad may have been racially prejudiced. I mean, he may mean, he may not have been. It's, as you say, it's actually, I think, an incredibly boring question because this is such an interesting book and there's so many more things to say about it. But the

But the possibility that he might be, I think, is woven into the story. I think that might be the heart of darkness. That might be the horror. Conrad, Marlowe, whoever it is, is Conrad's voice within the heart of darkness. I mean, all those people, I think, are implicated in what is being discussed. And I think that going beyond that, the lasting appeal of the book is obviously it's about more than the Belgian Congo. It's about more than King Leopold's free state or anything like that.

To me, the key line in the book is actually that line that we quoted earlier, right at the beginning, before they even got to the Congo, where Marlow says to the people on the boat, and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth. And he's talking there about England. He's not talking about the Congo. And the darkness is there even before the steamboat has started its journey up the river. The darkness is not in the Congo. It's not even in England.

It's in humanity. It's the human soul. That's what I think the book's about. And he's riffing there on the tendency. Well, Stanley is always doing, isn't he? All his kind of massive volumes. He's always referring to darkest Africa. Hmm.

That is the pivot, that London is one of the dark places, that the Thames Estuary was one of the dark places. And of course, dark has all these kind of rich shades of meaning. And it may be that one of those shades of meaning could be cast as racist, but it is only one of them.

And the racism that Europeans display towards Africans is also part of the racism that is being displayed by Romans towards the Britons. Yeah. That this is what imperialists do. And I don't think it's even that he thinks this is what imperialists do. I think it's what human beings do. Conrad had a remarkably, I find it very attractive because I share it, a remarkably bleak view of human nature. In his letters to his friend Cunningham Graham, the SMP bloke that we mentioned earlier, he

He says of mankind, the year before he wrote Heart of Darkness, he wrote to Conor Graham, he said, mankind is silly and cowardly, a wretched gang. We're born initiated and succeeding generations clutch the inheritance of fear and brutality without a thought.

And another letter he said, people go on, he said, about honour, justice, compassion, but nobody really believes in them. People believe only in, and I quote, gain, personal advantage, satisfied vanity. And words vanish and nothing remains, absolutely nothing, only a drop of mud, cold mud, dead mud, launched in black space, turning round an extinguished sun. I love those lines. Conrad has a view of mankind, of human beings that is...

Ironic, bleak, dark. Conservative. Yeah, conservative. I mean, he's sceptical about notions of progress and that Jerusalem can be built on the earth. Definitely. But I think the interesting thing about that is it's not just temperamental, but it's of his time. Because I was thinking about the literature of the 1880s, 1890s. So in 1890, the year he went to the Congo...

One of my favorite books, La Bete Humaine by Emil Zola, which is about basically, I know it sounds very unpromising. It's about a Parisian train driver who turns out to be a sex-crazed homicidal maniac. He published this book, and it's basically about the evil that is lurking within us all. Even the most banal person is actually deep down. We could all be serial killers and rapists and whatnot.

This is such a popular idea in very late Victorian culture. Dracula, which is Dracula in 1897. The idea of darkness coming to England. Yeah, absolutely. Or 1899, the same year Conrad died.

publishes Heart of Darkness. That's the year that Freud publishes the Interpretation of Dreams. The idea that buried deep down in this kind of very primal and unfathomable way are anxieties and ghosts and terrible urges and

that we try to repress in our kind of civilized daily lives, but will always come to claim us at night. I mean, again, all of this sort of stuff is simmering away in the European imagination at the time that Conrad is writing. I mean, there's no question that Heart of Darkness has given to very committed anti-racists, anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists,

some of its language. So there was, I think it was, what was it? Netflix or something. There was a, a documentary series called exterminate all the brutes came out three, two or three years ago.

And it was about European colonialism and was not favourable at all. And it was based on a book by Sven Lindqvist, who is a Norwegian writer who is absolutely excoriating about imperialism, particularly British imperialism. And of course, that title is coming from Kurtz's phrase, which in turn is written by Conrad.

And so the echoes are very complex, I think, the kind of the ripples, the reverberations. I think to condemn it as a racist book is harsh, I think. I think it's not just harsh. I think it's a total waste of time. I think it's a complete and utter waste of time when the book is so rich. And we've talked for too long. And actually, we shouldn't. We're not in the business of preaching to listeners. Listeners can make up their own minds. They should read the book. If you think it's racist, great. Crack on. If you don't, brilliant.

Tom, why don't we end with the end of the book? Okay. Marlowe ceased and sat apart, indistinct and silent in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. We have lost the first of the ebb, said the director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky, seemed to lead into the heart.

of an immense darkness. Goodbye. Goodbye.