Re-Enchanting the Darkness
In the late nineteenth century, two writers composed a novella each that was set in oddly similar settings. In both novels, on the deck of a freshwater vessel, one of the passengers entertains the others by telling stories of his distant adventures. In the story by Joseph Conrad, a ship is anchored in the Thames. In the story by Nikolai Leskov, a passenger vessel sails on the lake of Ladoga. Although the passengers listen, question, and express doubts in similar ways, the storytellers are vastly different and so are their relations with their public. The English storyteller, Marlow, a commercial seaman who has traveled to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, describes a freshwater trip into the heart of Africa that was even more exotic than his travels on the high seas. The Russian storyteller, Fliagin, a horse groom who pretends to be a monk, tells the passengers the tales of his travels, by foot and on horseback, across Eurasia. Russian literature has focused on ground transportation as much as English literature has on the sea. But the two novellas in question, Leskov's The Enchanted Pilgrim (1873) and Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), are both stories told on river vessels. These works have become highly popular in their respective traditions - national, imperial, and postcolonial. Read together, they provide an exciting perspective on their deep, unacknowledged peculiarities. In this chapter, I will re-read these novellas together with two lesser-known non-fiction texts by the same authors that present helpful self-commentaries to the better-known ones.
Darkness Was Here
Observing the Thames, Conrad's Marlow imagines a Roman colony on its banks:
Darkness was here yesterday. . . . The very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke. . . . Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages. . . . Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness like a needle in a bundle of hay - cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death. (p. 9)[10]
Marlow is not an intellectual but an adventurer. However, he introduces his story of the modern colonizer, Kurtz, by outlining his ancient genealogy. Such a long-term historical perspective is surprising not only for Marlow the sailor, but even for Conrad the writer; he probably received it from a particular kind of romanticized Hegelian historicism that was popular in the Poland of his youth (Niland 2010). Looking at the Thames and thinking about the Congo, Marlow describes a Roman who came to England "in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes." Whatever he traded in England, though it was certainly not ivory, Marlow sees two differences between the ancient and the modern. "What saves us is efficiency," he says with irony. "What redeems it is the idea." Apart from these two ambiguous phrases, he describes the ancient colonizer in a way that is strikingly similar to his modern counterpart:
Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery. . . . There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination - you know. (pp. 9-10)
Here on the Thames, the colonized have become the colonizers. At length, Marlow recounts his attempt to rescue the fabulously efficient Kurtz, an agent who "collected, bartered, swindled, or stole more ivory than all the other agents together," but who got sick or went mad at his Central Station. Though the story centers on ivory, there is no mention of elephants. Kurtz did not hunt; he delivered the "fossil" ivory that the "niggers" had hunted and stored beforehand. Kurtz's secret was to make the natives dig up the product and deliver it in an organized, ritual manner. The natives "adored him"; he approached them "with thunder and lightning. . . . He could be very terrible. . . . The chiefs came every day to see him. They would crawl" (pp. 56-8). Organizing these commercial miracles, Kurtz also raided one tribe with the help of another. Marlow observed heads drying on the stakes near Kurtz's dwelling.
For Marlow and also for Conrad, this hybridized kind of terror, which imitated wilderness by means of civilization, was worse than the wilderness itself. Kurtz made his business by digging into the belief system of the natives and making them adore him as their god. "The wilderness . . . loved him" and he loved the wilderness, with the result that this alliance manifested "the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation." He "presided at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites" and these rites led to swindling the ivory from the natives. From Marlow's common-sense perspective, these "unspeakable rites" felt "more intolerable than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz's windows" (p. 58) As a result, he did not learn much about these improvised rituals. We know only that Kurtz developed "the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honor" and that part of the same business was "aggravated murder on a great scale." The rites and raids worked together to create a profit.
The reader might be disappointed in Marlow's anthropological skills, but Kurtz's were officially recognized. A member of the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, Kurtz argued in his report to this learned society that the whites must necessarily appear to the savages "in the nature of supernatural beings." At the end of this "beautiful piece of writing," Marlow found "a kind of note . . . scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand . . . : 'Exterminate all the brutes!' " (p. 50). Marlow sees these two aspects of Kurtz's business plan as intimately connected. The re-enchantment of the world by the enlightened colonizers for the sake of "the idea" ignites violence and is impossible without it.
Erebus and Terror
In 1870, a Polish boy, Jozef, became addicted to map-gazing (Conrad 1921: 19). He studied in a high school in Krakow and his favorite subject was geography. It was there that he fell in love with multicolored maps, a passion Marlow also feels in The Heart of Darkness. Jozef's family consisted of Russian subjects who lived and worked in a complex colonial situation. His grandfather and father managed leaseholds on land estates in Western Ukraine, which became part of the Russian Empire after the second partition of Poland. Jozef was born in these colonized lands, in the Ukrainian-Jewish town of Berdyczow. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, received his education at the St. Petersburg Imperial University, in the Department of Oriental Studies, which was chaired by Osip Senkovsky, the Pole who established academic orientalism in Russia. Korzeniowski was also a poet and playwright whose work developed under the obvious influence of his Russian predecessors. After having lost his fortune on leaseholds, he turned to underground politics and became a hero of the anti-imperial struggle. He led an underground movement in the Ukrainian city of ZZytomierz and later in Warsaw with the goal of emancipating Poland, along with its ancient domains in Ukraine, from the Russian rule. He was arrested in October 1861 when, in anticipation of the Polish rebellion, the Russians introduced martial law.
In the Austrian-Polish Krakov, Jozef was an orphan and he was stateless. His parents died after being exiled by the Russian Empire to Vologda. Together with Jozef, they had traveled thousands of miles by foot and by horse carriage. Not quite as far as the Arctic, Vologda was nevertheless cold and dangerous enough to justify Jozef's obsession with Arctic maps and the lonely heroes who had died on their way through the ice. At school, Jozef wrote an essay on the subject and, decades later, remembered it as "an erudite performance." But his professors were "persons with no romantic sense for the real" and were not interested in the Arctic (Conrad 1921: 17).