The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Joseph Conrad · a novella in three parts, told within a frame · first a serial in three numbers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, February to April 1899 · scored on the book text of 1902, in Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, in Conrad’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
A seaman’s yarn told within a frame, turned into confession, satire of empire and descent to the underworld
Mythos
The descent to the underworld, with the Fates at the door; the Faustian pact; the man who has gone farthest in, and the word brought back and not delivered truly
Phase
One evening on the Thames, from dusk into night, enclosing a journey out from a European city to the inner station and back to the woman Kurtz left behind
Presentation
Prose fiction in three parts, first a serial in three numbers of Blackwood’s (1899), then the second of three stories in the Youth volume (1902)
Register
One voice holding comedy, horror, satire and lyric; the long periodic sentence against the sudden flat one; an insistent vocabulary of the unspeakable
Scale
Five men on a yawl, one river and its stations, and an empire from the Romans on the Thames to Leopold’s Congo
Governing Proposition
At dusk on the Thames a seaman tells four listeners how he went out for a Belgian trading company and up an African river to the inner station of its ivory agent, Kurtz, and found him worshipped and dying. The wager of the novella is that the civilising mission is a lie the civilised need in order to do what they do, that the lie is kept by everyone, the teller included, and that a story told by a man who cannot pass on what he saw can carry that knowledge home to the river it began on.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens not in Africa but on the Thames. The cruising yawl Nellie lies at anchor in the estuary as the light goes, and five men are on her deck: the Director of Companies, the Lawyer, the Accountant, an unnamed narrator, and Marlow. The narrator praises the river and its history. Marlow answers that “this also” has been “one of the dark places of the earth”, and turns to the Romans who came up the same river. Before his story has begun the book has set its law: the darkness is not somewhere else. “The conquest of the earth”, he says, is “not a pretty thing when you look into it too much”; “What redeems it is the idea only”. The rest of the book shows what the idea redeems.
The frame narrator says how Marlow tells a story. To him the meaning of an episode was “not inside like a kernel but outside”, “enveloping the tale”. That is a description of the book about to be told, and a warning to read it so. Marlow speaks into the dark to men who never answer him; the frame breaks in on him at least once in the first part and returns at the close. He was not new to Conrad’s readers. He had told “Youth” (1898), and he would tell Lord Jim (1900) and Chance (1913). Here, for the first time, his telling is the subject as well as the means: a man trying to pass on what cannot be passed on, to listeners whose trades, the company, the law and the accounts, are the trades of the enterprise he describes.
Conrad had made such a journey in 1890, when he went out to the Congo for the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo and for a time had charge of the river steamer Roi des Belges. The novella appeared first as “The Heart of Darkness” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in three numbers, February, March and April 1899, the February number being the magazine’s thousandth. In 1902 it was printed in Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, between “Youth” and “The End of the Tether”, and that book text is the work scored here. Its three parts, of roughly equal weight, match the three numbers of the serial. The river is never named, and the company is a Belgian trading company. The English is Conrad’s own, his third language after Polish and French.
Movement II
Marlow gets his post through the company’s office in a city that reminds him of a “whited sepulchre”. At the door two women sit knitting black wool. A doctor measures the heads of the men going out. Nothing is said to make these figures stand for anything, and nothing needs to be said: they are the Fates at the entrance to the underworld, and the ferryman’s clerk who takes the names. The descent is built from the first office, in plain particulars, and every later station will be read against it. The city that sends men out and the place they are sent to belong to one order, and the book has already begun to show it.
The voyage down the coast gives the enterprise its first image: a man-of-war shelling a continent from the sea. At the Company station Marlow finds a chain gang, and then a grove where the worked-out labourers have come to die. Beside the grove the chief accountant keeps his books in order and his starched collars and his linen immaculate. The irony is not stated; the two are set side by side, and the reader is left to see what a clean collar costs. It is among the most concrete passages in the book, and the concreteness is where its knowledge is made: the outrage is in the order of things set down, not in any word for it.
At the Central Station the steamer Marlow is to command lies sunk, with a hole in her bottom, and he must wait for rivets. The manager, whose only gift is that he is never ill, keeps an uneasy smile, and the brickmaker is a second comedy beside him. It is comedy, and it is the same argument again, that the enterprise is hollow at every level before Kurtz is reached. This long middle of waiting is where the book is weakest. It makes its point once more than it must, and the prose leans here, as elsewhere, on its words for the inscrutable and the impenetrable. The charge is fair in part, and it is the charge on which the book’s necessity is held.
Movement III
Then the river. Going up it, Marlow says, was like travelling “back to the earliest beginnings of the world”. The forest stands at the banks. The journey up is the way down: the descent that began at the office door continues on the water, and the book’s image of the journey to the interior, the image later fiction would take to read empire, is made here. The river and the forest are the natural order the book holds, and they are given at their full weight; they are also the screen on which a European darkness is shown, and that is the book’s blind side as much as its power.
In a fog the steamer is attacked from the bank. The narrative withholds the sense of what is happening until after it has happened: Marlow sees sticks, and only then understands that they are arrows. Ian Watt in 1979 called the method delayed decoding, and it is the book’s method in small, the meaning arriving after the thing seen. The helmsman is killed, and his look as he dies is among the book’s heights. The dialogue around such scenes is spare: each voice, the manager’s, the brickmaker’s, the Russian’s, is a person and not a type.
Near the inner station they meet the Russian in his motley, a comic figure in a place of horror. Marlow, looking at the station through his glass, takes certain round knobs on the posts for ornaments, and then sees that they are heads. The revelation is paced so that the reader sees as Marlow sees, first the shape and then the fact. Kurtz, it is now plain, has taken “a high seat amongst the devils of the land” and is worshipped, and the book speaks of “unspeakable rites” without describing them. The withholding is a choice and a cost at once: it keeps the horror particular to what is seen, and it leaves the people of the place without speech.
Movement IV
Kurtz is the company’s ivory agent, and he is also an eloquent man. He has written a report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, seventeen pages of high feeling about the civilising mission, and at its foot he has scrawled a postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!” The sudden flat sentence after the eloquence is the book’s disclosure in one stroke. The idea that was to redeem the conquest of the earth has a conclusion, and its author has drawn it. “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”, Marlow says, and the sentence carries the darkness back to the city and the river it came from.
Kurtz is carried out. As the steamer leaves, a woman stands on the shore and raises her arms. Like the Intended at the other end of the book she is more emblem than person: the book’s figures nearest Kurtz are its least particular. Under the descent to the underworld a second pattern now shows, the Faustian pact. Kurtz is the man who has gone farthest in, and the journey to him has found no treasure and no truth but a hollow man; the book has turned the adventure romance of the interior, the treasure at the end of the journey, inside out.
His last words are a cry: “The horror! The horror!” Then the manager’s boy puts his head in at the door with the news, “Mistah Kurtz”, “he dead”, and the book moves on without pause. Whether the cry is a judgment on what Kurtz did or only a cry, a victory of recognition or a defeat, is one of the questions the book leaves open, and a century of criticism has not closed it. The boy’s words became the epigraph to Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (1925), and Eliot had wanted Kurtz’s cry for The Waste Land before Pound dissuaded him.
Movement V
Marlow comes back to the city. The Intended, Kurtz’s betrothed, receives him in her drawing room, in black. Marlow says he hates a lie, and he lies to her: he tells her that Kurtz’s last word was “your name”. The scene is the book’s last height, and it is pitched at a melodrama the rest of the book refuses, its rhetoric heightened to the point of strain, whether Conrad meant the strain or not. But the lie is the end of the argument. The idea is kept, by the man who knows best what it covers, for the woman who must not know; and it is told inside a telling that is supposed to be true.
Then the frame returns. Marlow’s tale ends, and the narrator, who began by praising the Thames, looks up and sees it lead “into the heart of an immense darkness”. The close answers the opening, and the listeners have been implicated in what they heard. The echoes reach across the whole: the two women knitting at the office door and the woman in black in the drawing room, the Roman on the Thames and the Belgian on the Congo. One law governs the book, from its first page to its last: civilisation is a surface kept up by work, rivets and lies, and the darkness under it is in the cities that send men out.
The reception has been long and divided. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948) charged it with adjectival insistence; Albert Guerard read it in 1958 as a night journey, Ian Watt as an impressionist experiment, Hochschild’s history of 1998 as a document of the Congo Free State. In 1975 Chinua Achebe called it racist: its Africans are given almost no speech and no inner life, and Africa serves as the setting for a European crisis. The charge is weighed, not dismissed, and it marks the limit of what the book sees. The book is scored on what it discloses, that the civilising mission is a lie, as well as on what it fails to see. Naipaul, Tayeb Salih and Achebe himself wrote with it or against it; Welles meant to film it, and Coppola did.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds almost nothing to take from the sequence. Each station is a stage of one disclosure: the women knitting black wool at the door of the office, the shelling of a continent from the sea, the grove where the worked-out labourers come to die, the accountant who keeps his books and his linen immaculate beside it, the manager whose only gift is that he is never ill. Remove any and the sequence loses a step in its argument that the enterprise is hollow at every level before Kurtz is reached. The frame is required too: the Thames at the close answers the Thames at the opening. What holds the axis is the prose’s own insistence, its words for the inscrutable and the unspeakable used more often than the knowledge needs, and a long middle of waiting at the Central Station that makes its point once more than it must.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the civilising mission is a lie that the civilised need in order to do what they do, and the lie is kept by everyone, the teller included. “The conquest of the earth”, Marlow says early, is “not a pretty thing when you look into it too much”; “What redeems it is the idea only”. The book then shows the idea at work. Kurtz’s report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs runs eloquent for seventeen pages and ends in a scrawled postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!” And Marlow, who hates a lie, ends by telling the Intended that Kurtz’s last word was “your name”. That is a meaning, not a mood. It stops short of the top on the charge Chinua Achebe made in 1975: the people whose land this is are given almost no speech and no inner life, and the condition disclosed is Europe’s alone.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The elevation is dreadful, and it comes often. Marlow’s first words on the darkening Thames, that “this also” has been “one of the dark places of the earth”, and the Romans coming up the same river. A man-of-war shelling a continent from the sea. The grove of death. The river journey as travel “back to the earliest beginnings of the world”. The fog and the attack, and the helmsman’s look as he dies. The heads on the posts, taken at first through the glass for ornaments. The woman on the shore raising her arms as the steamer leaves. Kurtz’s last cry, “The horror! The horror!”, and the manager’s boy putting his head in at the door with the news. Held below the top because the height is sometimes reached for rather than made, as in the adjectival passages, and because the scene with the Intended, its last height, is pitched at a melodrama the rest of the book refuses.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is a descent to the underworld. The two women knitting black wool at the door of the office, in a city like a “whited sepulchre”, are the Fates, and the doctor who measures the heads of those going out is the ferryman’s clerk. The river is the way down, the grove of death a circle of the damned, and Kurtz the man who has gone farthest in, from whom Marlow brings back a word he cannot deliver truly. Under the descent lies a second pattern, the Faustian pact: Kurtz has taken “a high seat amongst the devils of the land” and is worshipped. Both patterns bear the weight, and both stay particular: rivets, ivory, a steamer with a hole in her bottom. Held off the very top only because the figures nearest Kurtz, the Intended and the woman on the shore, are emblems more than persons.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The inheritance is the imperial adventure romance of Haggard and Kipling, the sea yarn, and the narrative of African exploration that Stanley had made popular. Conrad turned all three inside out. The yarn is told by a man who distrusts yarns; the journey to the interior finds no treasure and no truth but a hollow man; the exploration ends in a lie. The method turned with it. Meaning, the frame narrator says, was to Marlow “not inside like a kernel but outside”, “enveloping the tale”, and the narrative withholds the sense of what is seen until after it is seen: the sticks that are arrows, the round knobs on the posts that are heads. The stake was real, for the book was written for Blackwood’s, a Tory magazine of empire, read by men like the Director, the Lawyer and the Accountant. Held below the top because Conrad had already found Marlow and the frame in “Youth”.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Told directly, by an omniscient narrator, the story of Kurtz would be an exposé. Told by Marlow to men who never answer him, on a river that was once one of the dark places of the earth, it becomes a confession that implicates its hearers. The double frame is the instrument: the tale is heard through a narrator who began by praising the Thames and ends by seeing it lead “into the heart of an immense darkness”. Marlow’s struggle to tell is itself the subject, that what he lived through cannot be passed on; and the lie at the end is told inside a telling that is supposed to be true. Held a step down because the form’s scepticism about telling at times becomes the adjectival vagueness it describes.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The evidence is a century and a quarter of return that has not exhausted it. The criticism has read the book in turn as a moral fable (Leavis), a psychological descent (Albert Guerard’s night journey, 1958), an impressionist experiment (Ian Watt’s delayed decoding, 1979), a racist text (Achebe, a lecture of 1975, published in 1977), a document of the Congo Free State (Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, 1998), a feminist case built on the Intended and the world apart in which Marlow says women are kept, and a narratological one. The questions stay open: whether Kurtz’s last words are a judgment or a cry, a victory or a defeat; why Marlow lies; whether the book indicts empire or shares its vision. Its forms yield on return too: the knitting women answered by the Intended, the Roman on the Thames by the Belgian on the Congo. Held below the summit because some of the return is controversy around the book rather than the book’s own yield.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is the English novel at the turn of the century and, through it, modern fiction in English and beyond. The intrinsic force: the book made the short novel a vehicle of moral and political knowledge, made the unreliable teller and the framed telling central to modern fiction, and set the image of the journey to the interior that later fiction used to read empire. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Eliot took “Mistah Kurtz” and “he dead” for the epigraph to “The Hollow Men” (1925), and had wanted Kurtz’s last cry for The Waste Land before Pound dissuaded him; Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway is a Marlow; Greene, Naipaul (A Bend in the River, 1979), Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North, 1966) and Achebe wrote with it or against it; Welles meant to film it in 1939, and Coppola did, as Apocalypse Now (1979). Held below the highest figures because it reorganised a manner and an image more than the novel’s whole form, which Joyce and Proust did more to change.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival is weighed on form first. The text survives whole and fixed, in print without a break since 1902, in the Blackwood volume, the Dent collected editions and every later edition of note; nothing that carried meaning is lost. On presence, it has been read and taught for a hundred and twenty-seven years since the serial, among the most taught works of fiction in English, translated into most written languages, adapted and argued over, and the controversy since 1975 has increased its presence rather than reduced it. What holds it here is the rubric’s charge on a surface fixed to its moment: much of its reading is now of its racial vocabulary and its picture of Africans, read against the book as much as with it, and part of its teaching survives as the case for the prosecution. A survival of a century and more, it stands below the works that have lasted for many centuries.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Conrad’s English, his own and no translation, though it was his third language after Polish and French. The command is great: the long periodic sentence that holds an image open, as in the Thames at dusk; the sudden flat sentence that delivers an outrage, “Exterminate all the brutes!”; the irony of the accountant’s collars and the manager’s uneasy smile; the delayed decoding of the attack in the fog; the pacing by which the heads are revealed. The dialogue is spare, and each voice is a person: the manager’s, the Russian’s, the brickmaker’s. Charged on three counts: the adjectival insistence that Leavis named in The Great Tradition (1948), fairly in part; a few constructions that sound carried over from French; and the scene with the Intended, whose rhetoric is heightened to the point of strain, by design or not.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs the whole: civilisation is a surface kept up by work, rivets and lies over a darkness that is not in Africa but in those who come there, and in their cities. Take the two most distant elements: the Roman legionary imagined on the Thames in the first pages, and the drawing room at the end, where the Intended mourns in black. Both obey the law. The darkness is at the heart of the empire as of its outpost, and the frame narrator’s last sight of the Thames confirms it. The range is wide for a short book: the comedy of the manager, the brickmaker and the Russian in his motley, the horror, the satire and the lyric are held in one voice. Held at this figure because the law has one blind side, Africa as the screen on which a European darkness is shown, which the book’s own logic invites the reader to question and does not answer.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as a novella, it holds a great deal. Consciousness, Marlow’s and, at its limit, Kurtz’s. Labour, in the chain gang, the rivets, the boiler and the dying workers. Commerce and the corporation, the ivory trade and its books. The state and empire, from Rome to Leopold. History, as the line from the Thames to the Congo. Race, as the book’s stake and its blind spot. The sacred, in Kurtz worshipped and the “unspeakable rites”. The natural order, in the forest and the river. These are joined through one journey and one telling, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the African world is held only as an exterior, the family and the city are glimpsed, love and the household enter only in the Intended and the woman on the shore, and the form is short, which the figure describes and does not punish.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 9.2, then The Archetypal Deep, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.1. A double frame that turns an exposé into a confession implicating its hearers; a century and a quarter of criticism that has not closed its questions; a descent to the underworld built from an office door, a grove and a river; a reach from Eliot’s epigraph to Coppola’s film; and a text whole, in print without a break since 1902.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3: a great deal is held in one journey and one telling, but the African world only as an exterior, the family and the city glimpsed, and the form short. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.7 and The Made at 8.8, held by the same insistence on the unspeakable, a middle of waiting that repeats its point, a few constructions carried over from French, and the strain of the scene with the Intended.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 9.0 and The Unconcealment at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.9.
Basis · Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, scored on the book text of 1902 as printed in Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London), between “Youth” and “The End of the Tether”. The serial, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for February, March and April 1899, is context, and nothing on this page turns on the differences between serial and book. The work is in Conrad’s English, his third language; there is no translation between the desk and the work, and every axis is judged on the English as he wrote it. Read from knowledge: no text of the novella was in hand and no quotation was checked against a file. The book is known closely in its three-part structure, the order of its main episodes, its persons and its principal sentences, and in the main lines of its reception from Leavis to Achebe and after; it is not argued page by page. Quotation is confined to short phrases whose words are certain, and none is cited by page. Matters that could not be verified, among them the dates of composition, the length in words, the exact order of some episodes, the extent of the differences between serial and book, and the exact wording of several passages often quoted from it, are not given.