connection between Conrad and Tacitus

Tacitus and Conrad: A Suggestion of Intent Plunderers of the world, after they, laying everything waste, ran out of land, they search out the sea: if the enemy is wealthy, they are greedy; if he is poor they seek prestige; men whom neither the East nor the West has sated, they alone of all men desire wealth and poverty with equal enthusiasm. Robbery, butchery, rapine they call empire by euphemisms, and when they produce a wasteland, they call it peace. -Calgacus, leader of the Caledonians, on the Roman Empire They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind…The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. -Heart of Darkness, on the European “civilizers” of Africa. Ivan Hannaford outlines the classical distinction between civilization and barbarism in his book, "Race: The History of an Idea in the West." Attempting to extricate Greek and Roman political theory from the notion of biological racism—the fusion of the two occurring in modern, racialist interpretations—he seizes upon the differences between the rules of Nature and the rules of Man. Hannaford maintains that the Greeks and Romans defined barbaros as those “held together only by custom and habit,” and who live “brutishly…according to nature…rather than according to man-made laws.” Conversely, the civilized are those with “the ability to rise above the mortal life…demonstrating by human excellence…a capacity to engage in speech, argument, discourse in a reasoned and gifted way in a public arena.” The writings of Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c.55-c.120), the departure point for any historical catalogue of ethnographic texts, reflect an understanding of this philosophical model and yet seem to depart from its idealistic convictions. Similarly, Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness," often maligned and more often misunderstood, takes up the historical discussion of barbarism without granting civilization the benefit of the doubt. The degree to which the accounts of Tacitus’ "Agricola" and "Germania" harbor the ulterior motives of the statesman and legal counselor remains an issue for scholarly debate. However, even while neglecting his familiarity with Roman law, his awareness of the matters of state, and his experience of brutality and corruption under the Emperor Domitian, it is rather difficult to ignore the audience to whom his works are directed: the “educated aristocracy of Rome.” As one of his recent editors, Herbert Benario, points out, “[among] the most striking aspects of the work is the respect shown for the Germans, whose lives and characters are described as purer and simpler than those of his contemporaries.” Then, as if to paraphrase Tacitus’ “disputed” intent, Benario continues, The theme of the noble savage, whose simplicity is shown to be superior to Rome’s higher civilization, is a commonplace in ancient writing. Civilization has many advantages, to be sure, but it tends to corrupt mores, the basic sense of what is right. Interesting here is Benario’s evocation of the “noble savage”—a term with obvious relevance for colonial literature—when talking about “barbarians.” To understand Conrad, as with Tacitus, it is convenient to utilize the surviving information about the author in order to fashion an entrance into his perspective. As a Pole in exile writing in his third language, we can acknowledge his distaste for cultural oppression. We might also expect Conrad’s sailing career—with all that it entailed for the nineteenth-century traveler—to have engendered a “wandering” identity. His time in Africa, described in epistolary form in The Congo Diary, obviously contributed to his hatred of all colonial ventures, financial and political. In defending a novelistic treatment of “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration,” he writes, “[t]he criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa is a justifiable idea." Given this context, it is, nonetheless, the highly symbolic language of Heart of Darkness itself that provides the greatest tool for comprehending the complexity of Conrad’s socio-political ideology. The thematic and methodological continuity that exists between Tacitus and Conrad is sufficiently apparent to warrant a detailed analysis—even if it were mere coincidence. The purpose of this paper—this suggestion—is to appropriately flesh out Conrad’s viewpoint, and its intentional or unintentional debt to Tacitus, so as to move beyond the apocryphal literary criticism to which Heart of Darkness has been subjected. Significantly, the first words spoken by Marlow specifically refer back to the Roman conquest of Britain. He memorably makes his presence known with the remark that England, too, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” Thus begins, in earnest, a narrative of compelling inversions of expectation and reality, in which the division between civilization and barbarism is drawn along lines vastly different than those perceived by Conrad’s subject and audience: the European consciousness. Tacitus derives his effectiveness as a moral commentator by wedding his sense of shame with his keen ethnographic eye. For him, observations of morality—characterized by relative degrees of right and wrong—are achieved in much the same manner as perceiving cultural variation, which are visible in terms of similarity or contrast. Like Conrad, whose self-proclaimed “task” it is “to make you see,” Tacitus acts as the journalistic eyes for a readership with an otherwise sedentary vantage point. In a discussion of German women’s partially revelatory dress, Tacitus emphasizes that “[in] spite of this, marriages there are strict.” Clearly, he is issuing a warning to those who would confuse a naked breast with lascivious behavior and at the same time illustrating how projected dignity need not betoken internal virtue. Conrad is sensitive to the same superficiality of presentation. Believing fiction to be sturdier than history, as it is “based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena,” he presents us with manifold images of appearances that obscure, rather than reveal. Most telling is the description of Brussels as a “whited sepulchre,” an object with a bleached exterior, hiding the decaying remains of the dead within. Tacitus moves beyond implication to express a direct comparison between the uniform German protection of chastity and the Roman world with its “attractions of games” and “seductions of banquets.” All but the least attentive of readers would have recognized Tacitus’ remonstrance of Roman pretense. Just so we find Conrad’s portrait of the Company’s chief accountant, impeccably dressed and wholly engrossed with the realm of ledgers. Marlow sardonically estimates the relationship between clothes and man, saying, “His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character.” The Company accountant is Conrad’s vision of hypocrisy, revealing the real African “mission.” The philanthropy of civilization could not be further from the mind of a man who hates “those savages…to the death.” Continuing with his cultural introspection, Tacitus questions the value of codified law. Freed from the fear of tribal opprobrium and from the moral seriousness of a society wherein all is based on the honor system, Romans may find it shocking that among the Germans “no one laughs at vices, and corruption and being corrupted are not excused by invoking the ‘times.’…there good customs have greater influence than good laws elsewhere.” Conrad develops this idea further, demonstrating that man-made laws, aside from being simply less effectual than laws based on nature or a tradition of common decency, are in fact detrimental to the formulation of an individual’s moral faculties. In a piece called “A Familiar Preface,” Conrad reverentially quotes Leonardo da Vinci on the importance of work, Work is the law. Like iron that lying idle degenerates into a mass of useless rust, like water that in an unruffled pool sickens into a stagnant and corrupt state, so without action the spirit of men turns to a dead thing, loses its force… For Conrad, the idea of “work” extends beyond physical labor. Morality demands constant exercise to prevent the atrophy of one’s inherent sense of right and wrong. The unseen function of law, then, is to equip the individual with an exoskeleton—outwardly impressive, unchallenged by daily decisions of life and death, altogether providing “the assurance of perfect safety,” yet all the time weakening that which it encloses. At times Conrad offers a metaphorical image of this, as he does with the discarded railway truck “on its back with its wheels in the air,” the “decaying machinery,” and the “stack of rusty nails.” Elsewhere Marlow expressly names the agents of European moral decrepitude and fearsomely describes the “utter solitude without a policeman” and the absence of whispering neighbors in the Congo: “When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength.” Other times Conrad personifies the complacency of man-made law, as he does with the Lawyer: “the best of old fellows—had, because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on the deck and was lying on the only rug.” And, in a turn that approaches overstatement, Conrad’s Company workers are lazy nearly to the point of caricature. What happens when the walking products of man-made law are thrust into a world ruled by natural law? Mutually sustained—yet unequally distributed—destruction. In his essay, “The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness,” Frances B. Singh contends that “words like brutal, monstrous, vengeful, implacable, inscrutable, evil, accursed, hopeless, dark, and pitiless,” used to describe the African landscape confer upon the wilderness and Africans a malevolent identity. This reading does grave injustice to Conrad’s pioneering modernism. Marlow, who, importantly, is narrating a tale simultaneously within the narrative of another anonymous passenger aboard the Nellie, offers us a representative European consciousness—a consciousness occasionally punctured by instances of epiphanic cognizance. These momentary insights allow Marlow to express his disdain for the Company and his wonder at viewing Nature, no longer “the shackled form of a conquered monster.” Such instances do not and should not prevent the reader from understanding the rule to which this periodic intuition is the exception: Marlow’s is an essentially threatened awareness created in Europe and subject to its prejudices. Conrad relied heavily on poetic license in giving Marlow the perceptual scope he did with all its mysterious, penetrative power. But, however improbable Marlow is, beset by ambivalence and visual access to metaphysical dynamics, he represents Conrad’s hope for conversion: “To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of its being made so.” The ultimate reproach voiced in Chinua Achebe’s essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” objects to Conrad’s utilization of Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? Africa and Africans are indeed reduced to allegory in Heart of Darkness. And so is everyone else—not for “the break-up of one petty European mind,” but rather for the dissolution of the collectively petty European mind. Africa and Africans, cooperative components of Conrad’s symbolized natural law, are utterly intolerable to the European, the hollow mannequin advertising man-made law. Working from this angle, Conrad crafts a story in which Africa is a creative “rioting life”, “waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion,” embodying “the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” Europeans are destructive “flabby weak-eyed devil[s],” “hairdresser’s dumm[ies],” “papier-mache Mephistopheles,” who, like Kurtz (the making of whom “All Europe contributed to”), possess “ a weirdly voracious aspect as though” wanting “to swallow all the air, all the earth.” The forces of natural law and man-made law are utterly incompatible. For the most part, the European cause strives in vain. Civilization’s attempt to impose arbitrary structure on the wilderness is stunted by the “wall[s] of vegetation…ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man…out of his little existence.” Violence and impotence typify the influence of civilization, as Conrad points out in the “objectless blasting” of the cliff “not in the way of anything” and after which no change appeared. Tacitus notes a similar resistance among the barbarians of Britain. In a particularly unabashed condemnation of Roman expansion, he justifies the case for barbarian physical force: For, when fear was removed by the absence of the governor, the Britons discussed among themselves the evils of slavery…Nothing was now safe from their greed, nothing from their lust. In battle it is the stronger who plunders: now, as things were, their homes were seized, their children dragged off, levies imposed upon them as if their country was the only thing for which they did not know how to die, by men who were for the most part cowardly and unwarlike. For how small was the number of soldiers who had come there if the Britons should take a muster of themselves!… They, the Britons, had country, wives, parents as reasons for war, the Romans had avarice and luxury. Conrad also demonstrates, during one of Marlow’s more lucid moments, the cannibals’ adherence to natural law in the face of dire circumstances: Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn’t go for us—they were thirty to five…And I saw that something restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there…Yes—I looked at them as you would on any human being with curiosity of their impulses, motives, capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity. Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear—or some kind of primitive honour? Simply put, Marlow perceives the thoughtless implementation of natural law and responds with incredulity. These Africans have not yet been tainted or subjugated by civilized law. Rather than face the reality of their cultivated depravity—thrown into stark relief on the canvas of natural Africa—the Europeans will target for conversion those who shame their immoral sensibilities. Tacitus reports on the unfortunate effects of imperialism in Agricola, lamenting “they gave in to the attractions of vices, porticoes and baths and the elegance of banquets. And this was called civilization among those who did not know better, although it was part of slavery.” Conrad depicts a similar corruption when describing the “unspeakable rites” in honor of Kurtz. Without textual evidence to the contrary, it is possible to suggest that the natives, deceived by his rhetoric and awed by his sadism, are taken in by the epitome of the European presence. When the enemy proves to be “implacable” or “inscrutable”, civilization will invent enemies to combat so as avoid facing off against the enemy within. Tacitus praises the Chauci tribe as noble and considers their aversion to warfare evidence of this nobility. He writes, “This is particular proof of their high character and strength, that they do not gain their superiority through aggression,” but one wonders how this sounded to the expansion-minded ruling class of Imperial Rome. Marlow dubiously recounts the story of the French man-of-war pummeling the thickly jungled coast, no adversary in sight. A shipmate assures him that “there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.” Conrad consistently plays with this suspicious label so often applied to Africans. Upon questioning Kurtz with regard to his “trophies,” Marlow is told that they were rebels and responds, “Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were rebels.” The European system of definition provides convenient justification for cruelty and illustrates the pretentious authority of civilized law. Unfortunately, ideological abstracts can wreak extremely tangible havoc. The Africans are chained and demoralized to the point of animalistic crawling: “they were nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.” The spirit of natural law is not without its own weapons. There are instances of aggressive retribution, such as when a fire destroys a shed filled with calico, cotton prints, and beads “so suddenly that you would have thought the earth had opened to let an avenging fire consume all that trash.” Mostly, Africa and Africans exist as an unattainable ideal for the European who, sensing his perversity, sinks further into corruption or else is driven insane. The “gorgeous” native woman is crucial to Kurtz’s recognition of “the horror.” She is the majestic incarnation of natural law and Marlow’s narrative corroborates this fact: the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul. Often explained away as Kurtz’s mistress, there is no reason to believe that this woman is anything other than the force that expels him from the interior. Though Kurtz’s disciple, the motley harlequin, insists that “You don’t talk with that man—you listen to him,” we find later that the woman had “talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour.” Significantly, “fury” immediately conjures up classical associations for those who recognize the Greek symbol for primitive justice. Conrad uses the word “barbarous” twice in all of Heart of Darkness. Both times it is used to paint this female portrait of natural law. In the end, civilization’s anomic, colonial edifice is crushed under the weight of its own lawlessness. An onslaught of barbaric surroundings and feverish introspection conspire to hasten Kurtz’s demise. Since he “lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts,” it seems that his European training has failed him. This failure launches an inward journey to the heart of darkness, as Marlow explains: “Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by Heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.” In another astute diagnosis, Marlow declares “The wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion.” There is a dim hope in the purgation of this European archetype and in Conrad’s general indictment of evil. There is esperance, also, in the moral diffusion between Africa and Marlow. As if by osmotic transference from the wilderness he is privy, at times, to a nearly omniscient perspective of time and space. Relating his impression of the trip on the Congo River, Marlow invokes the image of a lawless, prelapsarian paradise: “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.” Further on, he imagines We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet…We could have fancied ourselves the first men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil This picture of civilization’s beginnings certainly deviates from the classical ideal of political life. It tends to sound as if Marlow’s vision momentarily frees him from the conceptual strictures of man-made law, a freedom that reflects the Rousseauistic solution to the crisis of civilized modernity. What Conrad seems to be calling for is not simple atavistic reversion, in which one regresses to “perpetual childhood,” but rather the recolonization of one’s individual humanity—by shaking off the shackles of civilization. Tacitus seems impressed with German honesty: “The race, without natural or acquired cunning, even reveals its innermost contemplations in spontaneous good humor, therefore every person’s thought is laid bare and exposed.” Isolating and destroying the abject qualities of the Imperial consciousness requires a reassessment of the relationship between eloquence and virtue. Classical civilization, according to Hannaford, places faith in gifted discourse to propel the resolution of naturally occurring human conflicts. Conrad openly contradicts this reliance on language. The African wilderness—the spirit of natural law—is consistently described as “stillness,” “silence,” and “soundless life.” The Company men become “chattering magpies.” The proper sphere for Kurtz, according to the Company Manager, “ought to have been politics ‘on the popular side.’” On his deathbed Kurtz is little more than a voice of unsurpassed eloquence. Given the moral texture with which he endows these symbolic characters throughout Heart of Darkness, one can surmise, with a reasonable degree of conviction, which side of this debate over discourse Conrad supports. Conrad’s story of “black savages” and “white slaves,” like Marlow’s yarns, depends on the reader’s willingness to see that “the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out.” Heart of Darkness is purposefully Eurocentric in that the true focus, topical and didactic, is Europe. Though Marlow “had no particular desire to enlighten them,” it appears as if Conrad has something to say. Whether Tacitus’ works were meant to morally prepare Romans for virtuous conquest is hard to know. Conrad’s writing is less ambiguous in its evaluation of “the terror and horror of natural existence.” To those seeking to interpret Heart of Darkness as racist or even extend that criticism to Conrad himself—and there are many—it should be noted that such appellations would be as inappropriate for him as they would be for the pre-racial thought of classical antiquity. Among the saddest by-products of over three centuries of virulent, essentialist racism is an insidious legacy of mistrust and paranoia within the post-colonial consciousness. We are reluctant to admit that Conrad’s discerning contribution is even ahead of our time, but we should, lest we too “invent enemies” in order to evade the enemy within. Works Cited Benario, Herbert (editor). Tacitus’ Agricola, Germany, and Dialogue on Orators. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Kimbrough, Robert (editor). Heart of Darkness. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. Miller, Christopher. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985.