Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (10 page)

Weber was familiar with the religions and economic practices of non-European areas of the world, such as India, China, and the Middle East, and this imbued
The Protestant Ethic
with an authority it might otherwise not have had. He argued that in China, for example, widespread kinship units provided the predominant forms of economic cooperation, naturally limiting the influence both of the guilds and of individual entrepreneurs.
⁵⁷
In India, Hinduism was associated with great wealth in history, but its tenets about the afterlife prevented the same sort of energy that built up under Protestantism, and capitalism proper never developed. Europe also had the advantage of inheriting the tradition of Roman law, which provided a more integrated juridical practice than elsewhere, easing the transfer of ideas and facilitating the understanding of contracts.
⁵⁸
That
The Protestant Ethic
continues to generate controversy, that attempts have been made to transfer its basic idea to other cultures, such as Confucianism, and that links between Protestantism and economic growth are evident even today in predominantly Catholic Latin America suggest that Weber’s thesis had merit.

Darwinism was not mentioned in
The Protestant Ethic,
but it was there, in
the idea that Protestantism, via the Reformation, grew out of earlier, more primitive faiths and produced a more advanced economic system (more advanced because it was less sinful and benefited more people). Others have discovered in his theory a ‘primitive Arianism,’ and Weber himself referred to the Darwinian struggle in his inaugural address at the University of Freiburg in 1895.
⁵⁹
His work was later used by sociobiologists as an example of how their theories applied to economics.
⁶⁰

Nietzsche paid tribute to the men of prey who – by their actions – helped create the world. Perhaps no one was more predatory, was having more effect on the world in 1900, than the imperialists, who in their scramble for Africa and elsewhere spread Western technology and Western ideas faster and farther than ever before. Of all the people who shared in this scramble, Joseph Conrad became known for turning his back on the ‘active life,’ for withdrawing from the dark continents of ‘overflowing riches’ where it was relatively easy (as well as safe) to exercise the ‘will to power.’ After years as a sailor in different merchant navies, Conrad removed himself to the sedentary life of writing fiction. In his imagination, however, he returned to those foreign lands – Africa, the Far East, the South Seas – to establish the first major literary theme of the century.

Conrad’s best-known books,
Lord Jim
(1900),
Heart of Darkness
(published in book form in 1902),
Nostromo
(1904), and
The Secret Agent
(1907), draw on ideas from Darwin, Nietzsche, Nordau, and even Lombroso to explore the great fault line between scientific, liberal, and technical optimism in the twentieth century and pessimism about human nature. He is reported to have said to H. G. Wells on one occasion, ‘The difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!’
⁶¹
It was a Conradian joke, it seems, to dedicate
The Secret Agent
to Wells.

Christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, Conrad was born in 1857 in a part of Poland taken by the Russians in the 1793 partition of that often-dismembered country (his birthplace is now in Ukraine). His father, Apollo, was an aristocrat without lands, for the family estates had been sequestered in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. In 1862 both parents were deported, along with Józef, to Vologda in northern Russia, where his mother died of tuberculosis. Józef was orphaned in 1869 when his father, permitted the previous year to return to Kraków, died of the same disease. From this moment on Conrad depended very much on the generosity of his maternal uncle Tadeusz, who provided an annual allowance and, on his death in 1894, left about
£
1,600 to his nephew (well over 100,000 now). This event coincided with the acceptance of Conrad’s first book,
Almayer’s Folly
(begun in 1889), and the adoption of the pen name Joseph Conrad. He was from then on a man of letters, turning his experiences and the tales he heard at sea into fiction.
⁶²

These adventures began when he was still only sixteen, on board the
Mont Blanc,
bound for Martinique out of Marseilles. No doubt his subsequent sailing to the Caribbean provided much of the visual imagery for his later writing, especially
Nostromo.
It seems likely that he was also involved in a disastrous
scheme of gunrunning from Marseilles to Spain. Deeply in debt both from this enterprise and from gambling at Monte Carlo, he attempted suicide, shooting himself in the chest. Uncle Tadeusz bailed him out, discharging his debts and inventing for him the fiction that he was shot in a duel, which Conrad found useful later for his wife and his friends.
⁶³

Conrad’s sixteen-year career in the British merchant navy, starting as a deckhand, was scarcely smooth, but it provided the store upon which, as a writer, he would draw. Typically Conrad’s best work, such as
Heart of Darkness,
is the result of long gestation periods during which he seems to have repeatedly brooded on the meaning or symbolic shape of his experience seen against the background of the developments in contemporary science. Most of these he understood as ominous, rather than liberating, for humanity. But Conrad was not anti-scientific. On the contrary, he engaged with the rapidly changing shape of scientific thought, as Redmond O’Hanlon has shown in his study
Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientific Thought on Conrad’s Fiction
(1984).
⁶⁴
Conrad was brought up on the classical physics of the Victorian age, which rested on the cornerstone belief in the permanence of matter, albeit with the assumptions that the sun was cooling and that life on earth was inevitably doomed. In a letter to his publisher dated 29 September 1898, Conrad describes the effect of a demonstration of X rays. He was in Glasgow and staying with Dr John Mclntyre, a radiologist: ‘In the evening dinner, phonograph, X rays, talk about
the
secret of the universe, and the non-existence of, so called, matter. The secret of the universe is in the existence of horizontal waves whose varied vibrations are set at the bottom of all states of consciousness…. Neil Munro stood in front of a Röntgen machine and on the screen behind we contemplated his backbone and ribs…. It was so – said the doctor – and there is no space, time, matter, mind as vulgarly understood … only the eternal force that causes the waves – it’s not much.’
⁶⁵

Conrad was not quite as up-to-date as he imagined, for J. J. Thomson’s demonstration the previous year showed the ‘waves’ to be particles. But the point is not so much that Conrad was
au fait
with science, but rather that the certainties about the nature of matter that he had absorbed were now deeply undermined. This sense he translates into the structures of many of his characters whose seemingly solid personalities, when placed in the crucible of nature (often in sea voyages), are revealed as utterly unstable or rotten.

After Conrad’s uncle fell ill, Józef stopped off in Brussels on the way to Poland, to be interviewed for a post with the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo – a fateful interview that led to his experiences between June and December 1890 in the Belgian Congo and, ten years on, to
Heart of Darkness.
In that decade, the Congo lurked in his mind, awaiting a trigger to be formulated in prose. That was provided by the shocking revelations of the ‘Benin Massacres’ in 1897, as well as the accounts of Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s expeditions in Africa.
⁶⁶
Benin: The City of Blood
was published in London and New York in 1897, revealing to the western civilised world a horror story of native African blood rites. After the Berlin Conference of 1884, Britain proclaimed a protectorate over the Niger River region. Following the
slaughter of a British mission to Benin (a state west of Nigeria), which arrived during King Duboar’s celebrations of his ancestors with ritual sacrifices, a punitive expedition was dispatched to capture this city, long a centre of slavery. The account of Commander R. H. Bacon, intelligence officer of the expedition, parallels in some of its details the events in
Heart of Darkness.
When Commander Bacon reached Benin, he saw what, despite his vivid language, he says lay beyond description: ‘It is useless to continue describing the horrors of the place, everywhere death, barbarity and blood, and smells that it hardly seems right for human beings to smell and yet live.’
⁶⁷
Conrad avoids definition of what constituted ‘The horror! The horror!’ – the famous last words in the book, spoken by Kurtz, the man Marlow, the hero, has come to save – opting instead for hints such as round balls on posts that Marlow thinks he sees through his field glasses when approaching Kurtz’s compound. Bacon, for his part, describes crucifixion trees surrounded by piles of skulls and bones, blood smeared everywhere, over bronze idols and ivory.

Conrad’s purpose, however, is not to elicit the typical response of the civilised world to reports of barbarism. In his report Commander Bacon had exemplified this attitude: ‘they [the natives] cannot fail to see that peace and the good rule of the white man mean happiness, contentment and security.’ Similar sentiments are expressed in the report that Kurtz composes for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Marlow describes this ‘beautiful piece of writing,’ ‘vibrating with eloquence.’ And yet, scrawled ‘at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment is blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: “Exterminate all the brutes!”’
⁶⁸

This savagery at the heart of civilised humans is also revealed in the behaviour of the white traders – ‘pilgrims,’ Marlow calls them. White travellers’ tales, like those of Henry Morton Stanley in ‘darkest Africa,’ written from an unquestioned sense of the superiority of the European over the native, were available to Conrad’s dark vision.
Heart of Darkness
thrives upon the ironic reversals of civilisation and barbarity, of light and darkness. Here is a characteristic Stanley episode, recorded in his diary. Needing food, he told a group of natives that ‘I must have it or we would die. They must sell it for beads, red, blue or green, copper or brass wire or shells, or … I drew significant signs across the throat. It was enough, they understood at once.’
⁶⁹
In
Heart of Darkness,
by contrast, Marlow is impressed by the extraordinary restraint of the starving cannibals accompanying the expedition, who have been paid in bits of brass wire but have no food, their rotting hippo flesh – too nauseating a smell for European endurance – having been thrown overboard. He wonders why ‘they didn’t go for us – they were thirty to five – and have a good tuck-in for once.’
⁷⁰
Kurtz is a symbolic figure, of course (‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’), and the thrust of Conrad’s fierce satire emerges clearly through Marlow’s narrative.
⁷¹
The imperial civilising mission amounts to a savage predation: ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of the human conscience,’ as Conrad elsewhere described it. At this end of the century such a conclusion about the novel seems obvious, but it was otherwise in the reviews that greeted
its first appearance in 1902. The
Manchester Guardian
wrote that Conrad was not attacking colonisation, expansion, or imperialism, but rather showing how cheap ideals shrivel up.
⁷²
Part of the fascination surely lies in Conradian psychology. The journey within of so many of his characters seems explicitly Freudian, and indeed many Freudian interpretations of his works have been proposed. Yet Conrad strongly resisted Freud. When he was in Corsica, and on the verge of a breakdown, Conrad was given a copy of
The Interpretation of Dreams.
He spoke of Freud ‘with scornful irony,’ took the book to his room, and returned it on the eve of his departure, unopened.
⁷³

At the time
Heart of Darkness
appeared, there was – and there continues to be – a distaste for Conrad on the part of some readers. It is that very reaction which underlines his significance. This is perhaps best explained by Richard Curie, author of the first full-length study of Conrad, published in 1914.
⁷⁴
Curie could see that for many people there is a tenacious need to believe that the world, horrible as it might be, can be put right by human effort and the appropriate brand of liberal philosophy. Unlike the novels of his contemporaries H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy, Conrad derides this point of view as an illusion at best, and the pathway to desperate destruction at its worst. Recently the morality of Conrad’s work, rather than its aesthetics, has been questioned. In 1977 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe described Conrad as ‘a bloody racist’ and
Heart of Darkness
as a novel that ‘celebrates’ the dehumanisation of some of the human race. In 1993 the cultural critic Edward Said thought that Achebe’s criticism did not go far enough.
⁷⁵
But evidence shows that Conrad was sickened by his experience in Africa, both physically and psychologically. In the Congo he met Roger Casement (executed in 1916 for his activities in Ireland), who as a British consular officer had written a report exposing the atrocities he and Conrad saw.
⁷⁶
In 1904 he visited Conrad to solicit his support. Whatever Conrad’s relationship to Marlow, he was deeply alienated from the imperialist, racist exploiters of Africa and Africans at that time.
Heart of Darkness
played a part in ending Leopold’s tyranny.
⁷⁷
One is left after reading the novel with the sheer terror of the enslavement and the slaughter, and a sense of the horrible futility and guilt that Marlow’s narrative conveys. Kurtz’s final words, ‘The horror! The horror!’ serve as a chilling endpoint for where social Darwinism all too easily can lead.