Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary by Joseph Conrad Read Free Book Online

furnishes an early example–albeit of limited range–of the Anglo-Polish author’s command of English (his third language), which, with its occasional strange word like ‘andulating’, indicates a Polish influence and, with some eccentric spellings like ‘ressemble’ or ‘mentionned’, also echoes French orthography.
    The question of the diary’s further importance may be broached by asking why Conrad should have chosen to keep it at all since, though some of its details are of a practical kind, the overall purpose is not an obviously practical one. In Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911), the narrator speaks of the variety of ‘inscrutable motives’ leading some individuals to keep diaries (Part First). In conditions of extreme loneliness and stress, the act of keeping a diary can be a form of consoling self-communication, as well as a way of establishing a familiar routine and of using written language to bring a modicum of structure to confusing and chaotic experiences. Some of these reasons may help to explain the existence of ‘The Congo Diary’. But the more intriguing likelihood is that Conrad may have felt that the diary would be of future use to him as a writer. In other words, its contents might later be used to reactivate his memories and serve as a creative catalyst–the diary becoming, in effect, part of what Conrad later described as the literary ‘spoil’ he brought back from Africa ( ‘Author’s Note’, 112).
    Whether or not Conrad consulted the diary eight years later when he started to compose Heart of Darkness remains an open question, although the presence of a handful of half-echoes in the story suggests that he may well have re-acquainted himself with some of its striking definite images: ‘[T]he dead body of a Backongo. Shot? Horrid smell’ (100); ‘Saw another dead body lying by the path in an attitude of meditative repose’ (102); ‘On the road today passed a skeleton tied-up to a post. Also white man’s grave–no name. Heap of stones in the form of a cross’ (106); ‘Chief came with a youth about 13 suffering from gunshot wound in the head. Bullet entered about an inch above the right eyebrow and came out a little inside the roots of the hair’ (108).
    Ultimately, however, an approach to Heart of Darkness by way of ‘The Congo Diary’ can be misleading if it encourages the view that Conrad’s story is merely a fuller autobiographical extension of the diary and its figures always dependent upon ‘real-life’ sources. Even Norman Sherry, the critic most associated with the study of the novella’s biographical and historical origins, is forced to admit: ‘For Conrad it [the overland journey to Kinshasa] must have been the most gruelling part of his Congo journey…yet the experience as passed on to Marlow is dealt with in one paragraph and is one of the least significant aspects of his experience.’ 1 In this instance, the fiction is neither constrained nor even determined by events of the corresponding period described in the diary. Forms of displacement and reinvention are at work in the way that the creative writer’s return in 1898 to earlier African experiences involves a significant act of self-withdrawal: Conrad the writer is not now overtly visible, his function being taken over by a dramatized actor-narrator, the English sea-captain, Charlie Marlow. In addition, the period covered by the diary is subject to a new proportioning, with the result that its events are severely compacted and remodelled: whereas Conrad’s original journey, as recorded in the ‘Diary’, is full of references to specific times, places and named people, the later story dissolves strict clock-time, occupies an unspecific geography (with the Congo only implicitly identified as its setting) and names most individuals according to their professional or