Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary Read Online Free

india-rubber. Whole villages were spoliated and destroyed’. 6 The first part of Conrad’s story belongs to this early move towards silence-breaking: ‘I have a voice…and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced’ (44).
    Marlow’s initiation into Africa allots him a role not unlike that of an on-the-spot foreign correspondent, with his own independent sense of what is newsworthy: he watches, listens, reports on his interviews and trusts in the power of hard, definite particulars. The picture of Africa to emerge combines the image of a messily organized scramble for ‘loot’ with that of a chaotic war zone littered with upturned rusting trucks, abandoned drainage pipes and gaping craters. He also allows space for voices unheard in the newspapers of the time–those of the European ‘agents’, traders and other hangers-on. These voices range from the brickmaker and his version of justice–‘Transgression—punishment—bang! Pitiless, pitiless. That’s the only way’ (31)–to Marlow’s companion and his reasons for being in Africa–‘To make money, of course. What do you think?’ (24)–and include a description of the agents’ collective voice: ‘The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse’ (27).
    The sense given of a narrator wishing to recover an Africa lost, ignored or silenced culminates in the description of the ‘grove of death’:
    [The African workers] were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest…Near the same tree two more, bundles of acute angles, sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence. (20)
    Like a poem by Wilfred Owen from the First World War battlefront, this heightened reportage quickly dispenses with the rattle of official verbiage in order to recover unreported facts–in this case, of wasted African lives. The sense of waste is intensified by the wider context. Marlow has just passed through a rubbish tip for discarded pipes and rusty machinery, and the implication is that the worn-out Africans have been similarly discarded: having served their function, they are thrown away like disposable objects. Crass labels discarded, Marlow assimilates the details of human waste into an extended elegy, with an invitation to complete it by recalling a picture of Bosch-like extremity.
    In conjunction with other contemporary events, Heart of Darkness played no small part in effecting a linguistic change that, in turn, reflected a wider shift in attitudes. In 1897, the words ‘Imperial’ and ‘Imperialism’ (both normally capitalized) carried hardly any pejorative meanings and, with their Latin equivalents ( Imperium et Libertas ), formed a natural part of the period’s rhetoric. But by 1903, in the aftermath of the Boer War and when the scandal of the Congo caused E. D. Morel to found the Congo Reform Association, the terms began to acquire less reputable associations and could no longer be used as a form of unthinking national self-congratulation.
    III
    During its composition, Heart of Darkness developed like ‘genii from the bottle’ in ways