Folio Society Published Works Number 3036
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
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Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness (Published in by The Folio Society in 2014. Introduced by Sebastian Barry. Illustrated by Sean McSorley. This edition of Conrad's iconic novella features striking illustrations by Sean McSorley, winner of the 2014 Book Illustration Competition. Describing the effect he wanted his novella to have on the reader, Joseph Conrad wrote of 'a sinister vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck'. He did not fall short of his aim; few works of fiction possess the haunting and enduring power of Heart of Darkness. Inspired by Conrad's 1890 voyage up the Congo River in the service of the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, but given a profound, universal quality apparently outside his direct experience, the story begins with a familiar premise: one man's bid to quench his thirst for adventure by undertaking a journey to a remote part of the world. But swiftly its intense prose, rich in imagery at once alluring and malignant, is immersed in complex, challenging themes: madness, the nature of the soul, the limitations of language in conveying experience, the gulf between perception and reality, and, controversially, the fallibility – or perhaps the damning exposure – of so-called civilised ideals when returned to a 'primeval' environment. Heart of Darkness book. Three quarter-bound in cloth with a Modigliani paper side, printed with a design by Sean McSorley. 160 pages; frontispiece and 6 colour illustrations. Printed endpapers. Blocked slipcase. 9" x 5.75". A haunting portrayal of folly and greed. The controversy surrounding Heart of Darkness is no surprise; its language has inspired criticism of the author's attitude to race. But no one comes off well in this depiction of the Imperial enterprise; while the Africans appear to fit the Victorian stereotype of the unknowable barbarian, they lack the ignoble mix of rapacity, pride and cowardice displayed by the trigger-happy colonialists. The 'heart' of the title belongs at once to the 'silent wilderness' that the seaman, Marlow, enters, and to Kurtz, the 'great' company employee whose ruinous, eloquent being is terrible and unforgettable both to Marlow and to the reader precisely because the depths of his all-seeing, depraved soul remain elusive to the end. A few chilling utterances, at once lucid and crazed, his cadaverous, tormented visage, the blind devotion of his followers and Marlow's inability to reconcile himself with what he has seen, are sufficient to make Kurtz one of the most compelling and disturbing characters in all fiction. Conrad's reflections on his own journey to Central Africa. Sean McSorley won the 2014 Book Illustration Competition for his work on this edition. Combining traditional media with digital techniques, he evokes the brooding atmosphere of what introducer Sebastian Barry calls 'the single most extraordinary book in the English language'. One day, putting my finger on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa, I declared that some day I would go there … It is a fact that, about eighteen years afterwards, a wretched little stern-wheel steamboat I commanded lay moored to the bank of an African river. Everything was dark under the stars. Every other white man on board was asleep. I was glad to be alone on deck, smoking the pipe of peace after an anxious day. The subdued thundering mutter of the Stanley Falls hung in the heavy night air of the last navigable reach of the Upper Congo … Away in the middle of the stream, on a little island nestling all black in the foam of the broken water, a solitary little light glimmered feebly, and I said to myself with awe, 'This is the very spot of my boyish boast.'. A great melancholy descended on me. Yes, this was the very spot. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory, but only the … distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. What an end to the idealised realities of a boy's daydreams!… Still, the fact remains that I have smoked a pipe of peace at midnight in the very heart of the African continent, and felt very lonely there. The above is an extract from 'Geography and some Explorers', an essay written by Conrad in 1923 and published in National Geographic Magazine the following year. A longer excerpt appears in Conrad's Congo. A profound primer for writing itself. The most essential thing for me about Heart of Darkness is the power of its sentences. As astral physics is to physics, so is his writing style to mere writing. It is rocket science. It is a profound primer for writing itself, a discreet university of how to compose: a compendium of form and narration; of character miraculously embodied in the very DNA of the syntax, mysteriously, mightily; and of story engendered by an equally mysterious forward-moving force. As such, perhaps it cannot be learned, but another writer may peer into the complicated theorems and workings, the dark jewels and wheels in the intricate clock of Conradian style, and speculate—and steal what he or she can. Heart of Darkness in its plainest description is about a man who captains a boat on the Congo river, making a difficult journey upstream. He witnesses various horrors of colonial exploitation and ruthless 'enterprise' on the way. It is a tale told on another riverbank, the Thames, and the narrator Marlow, as he talks on in the darkness of the London evening, becomes increasingly obsessed by the nature and enigma of the administrator at the top of the Congo river, whom he has been sent to rescue, more or less, in the very heart of the forest—and therefore of darkness in the book's terms—Mr Kurtz. It is an attempt to talk the solution of the enigma into existence—to meet the solution coming back, as it were, on the path of the story, like Dante in his wood. The story interestingly is sometimes resisted by the listeners, a few colleagues of Marlow's. At one point one of them may even have fallen asleep; it is hard to tell in the dim light. An extract from Sebastian Barry's introduction. From the Folio Society description. )
