Heart of Darkness-Part Three

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a tale within a tale. It reads like a weird tale, with feelings of foreboding and menace and atmospheres of darkness and the unknown. It has deeper meaning, but it can also be read as a simple adventure story. Heart of Darkness could easily have been in a pulp magazine or a men's magazine of the 1910s through the 1960s. Originally published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February 1899, one hundred twenty-six years ago this month, Conrad's novella may have made just one more magazine appearance, in The Golden Book Magazine of January through April 1933. (Thanks to The FictionMags Index.)

The teller of the tale within a tale is the seaman Marlow. He journeys first to the Continent to secure his position with a company doing business in Africa. In the company offices, he has an eerie encounter with two silent women. There are only two of them and they are knitters rather than weavers, but they remind me of the Fates, or of their Nordic counterparts, one of whom is Wyrd.

I have a collection of books now from a neighbor who died. I'll have more to tell on that shortly. One of these books, which I received just this week, after I had begun writing about Conrad, is Jeffrey Meyers' biography of the writer from 1991. In reading Heart of Darkness, I detected in its pages a possible awareness of what we now call science fiction. On page 28 of Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Mr. Meyers described some of his subject's early reading: "books on distant voyages and exotic exploration," adding, "Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, and adventure novels by Captain Marryat and Fenimore Cooper inspired him to become a sailor." There isn't an entry on Jules Verne in the index, but in Heart of Darkness, Marlow recounts that at out the outset of his journey to Africa "I felt as though, instead of going to the centre of a continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the earth." (Dell, p. 39) Later in his career, while on shore, Conrad "read extensively in English and French literature." (Meyers, p. 53). It seems almost certain that he would have read Verne. I can only assume that in using the phrase "the centre of the earth," Conrad was referring to Verne's romance of 1864 and 1867.

Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells were acquaintances, though not friends. Conrad first encountered Wells through Wells' early science fiction novels. Ford Madox Ford introduced them to each other in 1899. Conrad called Wells "a very original writer, romancier du fantastique, with [. . .] an astonishing imagination." (Meyers, p. 151) In Heart of Darkness, Marlow, in thinking about the dark heart of Africa, remembers "a Scotch sailmaker who was certain, dead sure there were people in Mars." (Dell, p. 58) He goes on. Again, Conrad seems to have been alluding to the science fiction of his time, specifically to Wells. There is one more possible allusion, or maybe this is an example of Conrad's own science-fictional imagination at work, for in remembering his upriver trip, Marlow says: "We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet." (Dell, p. 69)

Less than a century before, Americans had begun their own explorations into the heart of a continent. But the literature of American exploration and journeying westward is romantic rather than science-fictional: our explorations predated fiction based in science and technology and instead rested within the romantic period of the early to mid nineteenth century. The only science-fictional Western that springs to mind is The Valley of Gwangi, from 1969, which came well after the fact. It's interesting, though, to find what sound like metafictional allusions to science fiction within a literary work of the late 1800s, a work that has such affinities to adventure fiction and weird fiction, or two older genres. Remember, too, that there were pulp genres drawn from works of this type, including jungle adventures and South Seas adventures.

To be continued . . .

Here is an interesting juxtaposition of images related to Joseph Conrad and his South Seas fiction, above, a paperback cover of An Outcast of the Islands, and below, a movie poster or lobby card of the movie version. In any relationship, sometimes the man is in the superior position and sometimes the woman.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley