“Heart of Darkness: A tale or short novel by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), published in 1902. The story is told by Marlow, who captains a river boat in the Congo and slowly sails upriver into the ‘heart of darkness,’ which is both Africa, the ‘dark continent,’ and the heart of evil. Marlow’s mission is to reach Kurtz, the most successful of the company’s agents. He finds that the charismatic Kurtz, once a man of culture and civilization, has turned himself into an omnipotent ruler by the use of unimaginable cruelty, hinted at by the row of heads impaled beside his compound. Kurtz’s dying words are ‘The horror! The horror!’ The story ends:
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
When he was a child in Poland, Conrad had jabbed his finger at the centre of a map of Africa and declared that one day he would go there. In 1890 he did, when he took command of a river boat in the Congo Free State. The Congo was then the private fiefdom of the Belgian king, Leopold II, and was exploited with the utmost barbarity. Eventually, in 1908, international outrage led the Belgian government to take over the colony.
Heart of Darkness inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, and the words ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’ follow the title of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men.’”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
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