In his late memoirs, Conrad was still coming to terms with events from the distant past. He revisited, more than once, the scene of his sick mother's return from Vologda to Poland for a few months before she went back through the cold, despotic Russia to rejoin her husband. With some irony, Conrad later related the stories that he had heard in his youth from his Polish relatives. An uncle, an officer of the Napoleonic army that invaded Russia, was hiding from the Cossacks in a peasant hut when a dog betrayed him by barking. In response, the uncle cut off the dog's head and devoured the little body. "He had eaten him to appease his hunger, no doubt, but also for the sake of an unappeasable and patriotic desire," wrote Conrad (1919: 78).
John A. McClure was right to state that "Conrad lived both as a native of a colonized country and as a member of a colonizing community." His father was a colonial manager and a victim of foreign imperialism. As a Polish subject of the Russian Empire, he was a victim of external colonization; as a Polish manager of the Ukrainian peasants, he was a colonizer. This double experience was unique among British writers: "Conrad achieved what . . . some, like Kipling, tried: a view from the other side of the compound wall" (McClure 1981: 92; Fleishman 1967). The multilayered experience of Russian colonialism, in which the roles of the colonizer and the colonized repeatedly flipped, provided Conrad with this stereoscopic ability. In Conrad's Eastern Europe, the very idea of progress, with its double effects, was experienced as a colonial conquest: "Progress leaves its dead by the way, for progress is only a great adventure . . . a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an enterprise victims do not count" (Conrad 1921: 156).
The young Jozef's hero was Sir John Franklin, the commander of an Arctic expedition undertaken by two British ships, the Erebus and the Terror. The expedition departed in 1845 to search for the Northwest Passage between Greenland and North America. When the ships disappeared, several attempts were made to find them. In 1859, Sir Leopold McClintock led another expedition that was organized by Franklin's widow, Lady Jane. On an island, McClintock discovered a note that was left by Franklin's expedition, which read: "All well." A second message, written a year later on the margins of the same sheet of paper, reported that the Erebus and the Terror were trapped in the ice and that the crew had abandoned the ships (Conrad 1926: 15-16). The Inuits later said that they saw the sailors eating their dead. These reports of cannibalism among the dying Brits have been confirmed by the later findings of their remains (Keenleyside et al. 1997).
McClintock's book describing the search for Franklin in the Arctic seas was the favorite reading of the young Jozef. "I have read the work many times since," Conrad later wrote; "the realities of the story sent me off on the romantic explorations of the inner self; to the discovery of the taste for poring over maps." This essay, "Geography and Some Explorers," juxtaposed those voyages that were driven by "an acquisitive spirit, the idea of lucre" and those that were "free from any taint of that sort." Examples of the first type were travelers who went south; examples of the second type were polar explorers such as Franklin, "whose aims were as pure as the air of those high latitudes." Even though Conrad's maturation meant a shift of his interests from the north to the south and from purity to lucre, he claimed, "it must not be supposed that I gave up my interest in the polar regions" (1926: 14, 17, 21). In Heart of Darkness Marlow repeated after his creator: "Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. . . . At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth. . . . The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour's off" (p. 11).
Marlow's tropical narrative starts with a reference to John Franklin and his ships, the Erebus and the Terror, which had also departed from the Thames (p. 8). These two names foreshadow Marlow's story. The Greek god Erebus, the son of Chaos, is the personification of darkness. Terror culminates in the last words of Kurtz: "The Horror! The Horror!" Marlow's rescue expedition works in contrast to the extraordinary saga of McClintock's search for Franklin. Marlow lied to Kurtz's fiancee; McClintock did tell the truth to Franklin's wife, by then a widow. Marlow's suspicion of cannibalism amongst black Africans, which has infuriated some of Conrad's critics (Achebe 2001), was also inspired by Franklin's saga.
Heart of Darkness mentions the Thames where the story is told but not once does it name the Congo where the action takes place. Usually a precise geographer, Conrad situates Marlow's travel by using the most general terms - the river, darkness, earth:
Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world. . . . There were moments when one's past came back to one. . . . And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. (p. 35)
With all the difference between the frost and the heat, there is nonetheless an uncanny resemblance between Conrad's depictions of the Congo under Leopold II and Russia under Nicolas II:
The snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history. (Conrad 2001: 25)
There is no doubt that the story about Kurtz was situated in the Congo. However, the fact is that Conrad did not locate the heart of darkness in any specific place but, rather, gave a summary image of the imperial conquest. There were such places on the map "in every sort of latitude" and every time in history; Conrad, like Marlow, had visited some of them. For Locke, "in the beginning all the world was America." For Conrad, at its roots, all the world was Poland.
The Thick Description of Kurtz
The central protagonist, Kurtz, is almost mute in Conrad's novel. The first, unnamed narrator learns about Kurtz from the second narrator, Marlow, who learned about Kurtz from the third narrator, who knew him well. This third source was a Russian. To meet a Russian in the heart of Africa was a surprise of course; Marlow is "lost in astonishment." The son of a priest of the provincial Russian town of Tambov, this self-employed ivory trader stayed, traveled, and traded with Kurtz. He nursed Kurtz during his illness like a civilized man, but adored him and supplied him with ivory like a native. We do not know the name of this Russian. He is a bizarre fellow but, strangely enough, Marlow takes his words at face value:
There he was before me, in motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. . . . His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow. (pp. 53-4)
Marlow likes the strange son of Tambov and solves at least one of his problems. His bizarre outfit "reminded me of something I had seen - something funny I had seen somewhere," he says. At the start of his story, he describes a map that he had seen in the office of the company that hired him. It was a "large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red - good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch" (p. 13). Conrad could base this colorful map on Cecil Rhodes's aphorism, "I contend that we are the first race in the world. . . . If there be God, I think that what he would like me to do is to paint as much of the map of Africa British red as possible" (quoted in Spivak 1999: 13). There was no color to represent Russia on the map of Africa; Russia did not have colonies there. Instead, the colonial colors were all "painted" on a Russian adventurist, who represented for Conrad a personal symbol of imperialism (GoGwilt 1995) and nothingness (Said 1966: 146).