Indeed, few literary works have been so heavily freighted with cultural baggage or tugged in such different directions simultaneously. What tends to be disregarded in this polarized debate, however, is the fact that what makes this work of art enduring is precisely its complex oscillation between perpetuating and challenging the premises of its historical moment. The more we can recognize Heart of Darkness to be the creation of a writer who was neither a passive product of his own culture nor fully able to transcend the assumptions of that culture, the better we will be able to come to terms with this deeply troubling book.

 

A. Michael Matin is a professor in the English Department of Warren Wilson College, where he teaches late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century British and Anglophone postcolonial literature. His essays on Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Anita Desai, and David Lodge have appeared in Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Modem Literature, Scribners’ British Writers, Scribners’ World Poets, and the Norton Critical Edition of Kipling’s Kim. He has also written an introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Conrad’s Lord Jim. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, he is currently writing a book titled Securing Britain: Invasion-Scare Literature before the Great War. He lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina, with his wife and their two daughters.

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

Heart of Darkness was originally published, as The Heart of Darkness, in the February, March, and April 1899 issues of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. “Youth” was originally published in the September 1898 issue of Blackwood’s. Both works were subsequently included in Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (1902). “Amy Foster” was originally published in the Illustrated London News, December 14-28, 1901, and it was subsequently included in Typhoon and Other Stories (1903). “The Secret Sharer” was originally published, as “The Secret-Sharer,” in the August and September 1910 issues of Harper’s Magazine, and it was subsequently included in ‘Twixt Land and Sea (1912).

Because of their complicated textual history, there is no such thing as a generally agreed-upon copy-text for Conrad’s works. Most of Conrad’s works of fiction were initially serialized, then revised to appear in book form, and then revised again for his collected editions. There were, in fact, two prematurely titled “collected editions” of his works that appeared during his lifetime, one published in America by Doubleday in 1920-1921 (the Sun-Dial edition) and the other published in Britain by William Heinemann in 1921. As the Heinemann version introduced numerous minor alterations to the texts to make them conform to that publisher’s house style, the edition I have chosen as the copy-text for all four stories is the less-altered Doubleday version, whose plates were subsequently used for various other collected editions, including those published by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1923-1928 and 1946-1955. I have silently emended some typographical errors but have otherwise made no changes. The volumes of the painstakingly edited Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad (published by Cambridge University Press) that will include these four texts are currently in progress, and when they appear they will constitute definitive scholarly editions.

—A. Michael Matin

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THE THREE STORIES IN this volume1 lay no claim to unity of artistic purpose. The only bond between them is that of the time in which they were written. They belong to the period immediately following the publication of the “Nigger of the Narcissus,” and preceding the first conception of “Nostromo,” two books which, it seems to me, stand apart and by themselves in the body of my work. It is also the period during which I contributed to Maga;a a period dominated by “Lord Jim” and associated in my grateful memory with the late Mr. William Blackwood’s encouraging and helpful kindness.

“Youth” was not my first contribution to Maga.b It was the second. But that story marks the first appearance in the world of the man Marlow, with whom my relations have grown very intimate in the course of years. The origins of that gentleman (nobody as far as I know had ever hinted that he was anything but that)—his origins have been the subject of some literary speculation of, I am glad to say, a friendly nature.

One would think that I am the proper person to throw a light on the matter; but in truth I find that it isn’t so easy. It is pleasant to remember that nobody had charged him with fraudulent purposes or looked down on him as a charlatan; but apart from that he was supposed to be all sorts of things: a clever screen, a mere device, a “personator,” a familiar spirit, a whispering “dæmon.” I myself have been suspected of a meditated plan for his capture.

That is not so. I made no plans. The man Marlow and I came together in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances which sometimes ripen into friendships. This one has ripened. For all his assertiveness in matters of opinion he is not an intrusive person. He haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of a tale I am never sure that it may not be for the last time. Yet I don’t think that either of us would care much to survive the other. In his case, at any rate, his occupation would be gone and he would suffer from that extinction, because I suspect him of some vanity.