Heart of Darkness, Relevant Quotes on Setting and Style
On The Relationship Between Plot and Experience
“It is a story of the Congo. There is no love interest in it and no woman – only incidentally. The exact location is not mentioned. All the bitterness of those days, all my puzzled wonder as to the meaning of all I saw – all my indignation at masquerading philanthropy – have been with me again, while I wrote. … I have divested myself of everything but pity – and some scorn – while putting down the insignificant events that bring on the catastrophe.” -- Conrad, letter to Richard Curle (publisher), 13 December 1898
“Heart of Darkness is experience too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers.” -- Conrad, “Author’s Note” to , Youth, A Narrative 1913
“Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion. You seem to believe in literalness and explicitness, in facts and also in expression. Yet nothing is more clear than the utter insignificance of explicit statement and also its power to call attention away from things that matter in the region of art.” -- Conrad, letter to publisher 24 April 1922
“…a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. …the symbolic conception of a work of art has this advantage, that it makes a triple appeal covering the whole field of life. All the great creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth and beauty. … But as to “final effect” my conscience has nothing to do with that. It is the critic’s affair to bring to its conclusion his own honesty, his sensibility and intelligence.”
-- Conrad, letter to Barnett Clark, 1918
Symbolism: “the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside in the unseen, enveloping the tale which could only bring it out as a glow brings out a haze.”
-- Narrator, Heart of Darkness, describing Marlowe’s tales, in original manuscript.
Art And The Artist
“One thing I am certain of, is that I have approached the object of my task, things human, in a spirit of piety. The earth is a temple where there is going on a mystery play childish and poignant, ridiculous and awful enough in al conscience. Once in I’ve tried to behave decently. …I’ve neither grinned nor gnashed my teeth. In other words I’ve tried to write with dignity, not only out of regard of myself, but for the sake of the spectacle, the play with an obscure beginning and an unfathomable denoument.”
-- Conrad, letter to Arthur Symons, 1907
On the Belgian Congo
“The mission which the agents of the State have to accomplish on the Congo is a noble one. They have to continue the development of civilization in the centre of Equatorial Africa, receiving their inspiration directly from Berlin and Brussels. Placed face to face with primitive barbarism, grappling with sanguinary customs that date back thousands of years, they are obliged to reduce these gradually. They must accustom the population to general laws, of which the most needful and the most salutary is assuredly that of work.”
-- King Leopold II of Belgium, 1898
“Although the State of Congo promised the Powers of Europe to use all its abilities to suppress the slave trade, the traffic goes on beneath its flag and upon its territory. At Stanley Falls slaves were offered to me in the broad daylight; and at night I discovered canoe loads of slaves, bound strongly together. … But the State not only suffers the trade in slaves to continue, it buys the slaves of natives, and pays its officers 3 pounds per capita for every able-bodied slave it procures. Every military post in the Upper Congo thus becomes a slave market; the native is encouraged to sell slaves to the Sate, which is always ready to buy them.”
-- George Washington Williams, “A Report upon the Congo-State and Country to the President of the Republic of the United States of America”, 1890
“A great melancholy descended on me. Yes, this was the very spot [where Stanley found Livingstone]. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory, but only the unholy recollection of a prosaic newspaper ‘stunt’ and the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human consciousness and geographical exploration. What an end to the idealized realities of a boy’s daydreams! … Still, the fact remains that I have smoked a pipe of peace at midnight in the very heart of the African continent, and felt very lonely there.”
-- Conrad’s Journal, Stanley Falls, Early Sept. 1890
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