Heart of Darkness

1. When an organization describes its own work in noble language — a mission, a service, progress — what would make you trust that description, and what would make you doubt it?
2. Think about a story you have heard secondhand, told aloud by someone who was there. What does that form of telling add, and what does it cost in reliability?
3. Before 1900, most Europeans knew about Africa only through maps, adventure books, and company advertising. How does learning about a place only through other people's accounts shape what you expect to find there?
4. The word 'darkness' in this book's title is doing several jobs at once. What different things can that word mean when applied to a place, to a person, or to a time in history?
5. Chinua Achebe argued that a novel can be brilliantly written and still do damage through how it represents a whole people. How would you go about judging both of those things in the same book?
6. What responsibility does a reader have toward a work written in another era, whose author's assumptions about race and empire differ from your own?

• The gap between the language an institution uses about itself and what actually happens on the ground.
• Restraint — what holds a person to a code when no law, neighbour, or witness is present to enforce it.
• The frame narrative: a story told aloud, inside another story, by a narrator who admits he cannot make himself understood.
• Work as an anchor — Conrad's characters cling to practical tasks as a way of staying attached to reality.
• Who is given a voice in this book and who is not, and what that silence does to the reader's sense of the people described.
• Light and darkness as unstable images that keep changing sides throughout the novel.

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, in a Polish family living under Russian rule in what is now Ukraine. His father, a poet and translator active in the Polish independence movement, was exiled by the Russian authorities; both parents died before Conrad was twelve. At sixteen he left for Marseille and went to sea, first in French ships and then in the British merchant service, rising over twenty years to master mariner and becoming a British subject in 1886. In 1890 he took a post commanding a steamer on the Congo River, a journey that left him seriously ill and permanently changed his view of the imperial enterprise. He began publishing fiction in his late thirties, writing in English — his third language, after Polish and French — and produced Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes before his death in 1924.

The novel appeared in three installments in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1899 and in book form in 1902. Its immediate subject was the Congo Free State, a territory roughly the size of Western Europe that King Leopold II of Belgium held from 1885 as personal property, not as a Belgian colony. Officially the enterprise was a humanitarian and scientific mission; in practice it was an extraction operation, first in ivory and later in wild rubber, run on forced labour and hostage-taking, and the death toll ran into the millions. Conrad had seen a piece of that system firsthand in 1890, and he wrote the book at a moment when European publics still largely believed the official story. Within a few years journalists and campaigners such as E. D. Morel and Roger Casement had documented the reality and forced Leopold to surrender the territory to the Belgian state. Conrad's novel is not a documentary report — he never names the country, the river, the company or the city — but its readers at the time knew precisely which enterprise he meant.