Edited by D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke
Third Edition
Broadview Editions, 2020 344pp.
Available at Sarasavi Bookshop, Nugegoda
This is the third of a well-established edition of Heart of Darkness by Broadview Press. For this edition, Goonetilleke has broadened the range of documentary evidence in the appendices, and in particular given voice to black observers of the Congo such as Disasi Makulo.
Makulo was enslaved as a child in the 1870s by Tippu Tip, the infamous trader from Zanzibar, from whom he acquired his nickname. “Disasi” means “cartridge,” a grimly apt moniker for a child in a continent resonating with the sound of gunfire. A substantial extract from The Life of Disasi Makulo is included here and, as Goonetilleke writes in the preface, this “opens an unprecedented window” on life in the Congo in the late nineteenth century.
Makulo’s account also helps contextualise Heart of Darkness, his nickname alone recalling Marlow’s encounter with the French gunship: “In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.” Makulo was later purchased by Henry Morton Stanley, along with twenty-two other children. He regarded Stanley as his “liberator” from Tippu Tip, and his account is all the more powerful for its lack of irony or anger, as he recalls how the great explorer informs them: “I cannot let you return to your parents’ homes since I do not want you to become like them: savage people, cruel people, who do not know the Good Lord”.
Revealing accounts
There are many other revealing accounts in this edition, but those about Stanley are worth highlighting. Also included are the diary entries of William G. Stairs, the explorer who accompanied Stanley up the Congo in 1887, three years before Conrad’s trip. Stairs notes how Stanley gets “worked up”; is “excitable”; “says and does a great many foolish things”.
Stairs’s account of Stanley may recall Conrad’s characterisation of Kurtz, who in the wilderness is like a “spoiled and pampered favourite” who can be “contemptibly childish” (152). The documents by and about Stanley thereby encourage us back to Conrad’s narrative and this exemplifies the value of the contextual resources in this edition. As Goonetilleke suggests, these offer “perspectives on the reality out of which this particular fiction emerged”.
The documents in the appendices encompass correspondence, speeches, lectures, diaries (including the Congo Diary), memoirs, satires, articles, contemporary illustrations, maps and photographs. There is an open letter to King Leopold, written by the African-American writer George Washington Williams in 1890. This impassioned letter is new to this edition and reflects what is essentially a “vocal” collection of documents. Here the style alone is worthy of a close reading, as Williams shifts in tone from his “disappointment” to a final blistering indictment of Leopold and the Belgian Government’s “deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave-raiding and general policy of cruelty”.
An existing section, “British Perspectives on Race and Imperialism,” has been extended for this edition. This includes a variety of accounts, which illustrate prevailing nineteenth-century racial prejudices. There is, for example, Thackeray writing to his mother in 1853 that black men “don’t seem to me to be the same as white men”.
The other extracts include speeches by Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes, and a section from Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897) where she confesses “I am not an enthusiast on civilising the African”. Together, these provide invaluable further reading and also help contextualise Goonetilleke’s discussion on race and imperialism in the introduction.
Focus on the text
Goonetilleke has wisely avoided contextual overload around the text itself, which is taken from Heinemann’s 1921 Collected Works. The textual annotations, helpfully printed at the end of each page, are limited to standard explanations, definitions and alerts to manuscript changes, rather than to all the historical documents at the end. This “uncluttered” approach keeps the focus on the text itself.
Goonetilleke’s wide ranging introduction includes historical information on the Congo; discussions about imperialism, race and gender; details about Conrad’s reading; and analyses of his narrative strategies and style. There is also an appropriately but frustratingly short section on Kurtz.
Inevitably, the exigencies of space and format lead to some over-ambitious sections, such as “Style, Image, and Symbol,” where the context of literary modernity was not established. Instead, Conradian scholars positively sprint through the pages with their specialities: Ian Watt and Cedric Watts (delayed decoding); F. R. Leavis and C. B. Cox (Con- rad’s language); and Martin Mudrick (modern symbolism). This illustrates the problem of trying to cover big ideas in small spaces which is not made any easier by the long critical history of Heart of Darkness.
In keeping with the aims and focus of this edition, Goonetilleke’s discussion of imperialism and race is detailed and developed. He begins by locating Conrad’s Congo journey in a “period of high-flown ideas as to the “civilising” in fluence of European civilisation”. The documents in the appendices enable readers to further contextualise such ideas.
Edward Garnett’s 1902 review of Heart of Darkness is also revealing in this context. He finds no “prejudice” in the story, but concludes it is a “work of art” through which “the meaning or meaninglessness of the white man in uncivilised Africa can be felt in its really significant aspects”. Such terms foreground the novella’s representation of an existential, but clearly white, experience of Africa.
Achebe’s critique
This anticipates Chinua Achebe’s critique 70 years later, that Heart of Darkness presents Africa as a “metaphysical battlefield” through which the “wandering European enters at his peril” (23). Goonetilleke cites and discusses Achebe’s critique, before identifying some key episodes in Conrad’s narrative which counter his arguments. This is then balanced by other examples, where, through Marlow, Conrad seemingly draws on contemporary stereotypes such as the myth of the “Noble Savage.” The section ends with just some of the “vexed ethical and aesthetic questions” (34) surrounding Conrad’s treatment of race. These provide a helpful framework for debate, particularly for student readers and anyone new to teaching Conrad studies.
Near the end of the introduction, Goonetilleke quotes from Conrad’s letter to Cunninghame Graham in August 1897, where he asserts: “For one writes only half the book, the other half is with the reader” (55). Conrad could not have anticipated how Heart of Darkness “the book” would evolve into the Heart of Darkness “the scholarly edition.”
Nowadays, as Goontetilleke’s new edition exemplifies, the surrounding commentaries and contextual material are often much longer than the novella itself. But Conrad’s observation can equally apply to text and context. Readers will, of course, interpret the documentary evidence and introduction in different ways, just as they will the narrative itself.
There is always the risk that students new to Conrad will confuse context with influence, presuming that the historical evidence must have informed his fiction. However, Goonetilleke takes pains to unpack the chronological detail, pointing out, for example, how colonial oppression had intensified in the Congo by the time Conrad wrote the novel in 1898-99, almost a decade after the trip that inspired it. Most importantly, this volume offers a wide range of different perspectives on which to draw, and readers will be inspired to keep returning to Conrad’s narrative.
- Patricia Pye
Joseph Conrad Today, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring 2021. (USA)