Joseph Conrad's "wild story of a journalist"

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 71, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 751-774

  Rubery, Matthew ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60949943228     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2004.0042     Document Type: Review

References (85)

1. Quoted from Henry Stanley, "Dr. Livingstone," New York Herald (22 December 1871): 3a.
2. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., gave the assignment to Stanley on 28 October 1869. The famous meeting took place on 10 November 1871, though the news did not reach Europe until 2 May 1872, the same year as the publication of Stanley's How I Found Livingstone in England and America. Conrad was thirteen years old and living in Cracow, Poland, at the time of Livingstone's discovery. See Stanley's Despatches to the New York Herald, 1871-1872, 1874-1877, ed. Norman R. Bennett (Boston: Boston Univ. Press, 1970), for a complete account of Stanley's correspondence from Africa.
3. Joseph Conrad, Last Essays (New York: Doubleday & Page, 1926), 14.
4. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 323.
5. Conrad, Chance (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 87.
6. See Michael Palmer's discussion of Reuters news agency: "The British Press and International News, 1851-1899: Of Agencies and Newspapers," in Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, ed. George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate (London: Constable, 1978), 205-19.
7. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 65.
8. Mitchell Stephens argues that reporting begins earlier in the nineteenth century in A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite (New York: Viking, 1988)
9. a disagreement pursued in "Schudson and Stephens Debate: The 'Invention' of News, Other Sundry Matters," Clio 29.3 (1997): 7-9.
10. Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 210-28.
11. Two recent examples are Stephen Donovan's "Prosaic Newspaper Stunts: Conrad, Modernity and the Press," in Conrad at the Millennium: Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, ed. Gail Fincham (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002), 53-72;
12. and Peter Nohrnberg's '"I Wish He'd Never Been to School': Stevie, Newspapers and the Reader in The Secret Agent," Conradiana 35 (2003): 49-61.
13. "My first English reading was the Standard newspaper," Conrad wrote to the Abbé Joseph de Smet on 23 January 1911 (The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Laurence Davies and Frederick R. Karl, 6 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988], 4:409).
14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 32-35.
15. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), 114.
16. Conrad, quoted from Norman Sherry, Conrad's Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), 5.
17. See Edward Garnett's introduction to Letters from Conrad, 1895-1924, ed. and intro. Garnett (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1928), 15.
18. V. S. Naipaul, "Conrad's Darkness," in The Return of Eva Peron, with The Killings in Trinidad (New York: Penguin, 1981), 226.
19. Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (New York: Doubleday & Page, 1923), 141 ("noxious"), 90 ("large page"; "still uproar").
20. I am grateful to John Stape for directing me to this phrase in the essay's pamphlet proofs, documented in his forthcoming edition of Conrad's Notes on Life and Letters published by Cambridge Univ. Press.
21. Ernest Hemingway, "Voyage to Victory," in By-Line: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, ed. William White (London: Grafton Books, 1968), 363.
22. See the Standard (31 January 1905): 5b.
23. Conrad, Notes, 84.
24. Conrad, Chance, 4, 87.
25. Peter Brooks has argued that the readable report disingenuously supplies narrative coherence to a situation characterized by contradiction and ambiguity. See Brooks's Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1984), 242.
26. Conrad, Under Western Eyes (London: David Campbell, 1991), 137, 138, 141-42.
27. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Continuum, 1973), 59.
28. See V. A. C. Gatrell's discussion of press coverage for executions in the nineteenth century: The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).
29. Conrad, The Secret Agent (London: David Campbell, 1992), 245.
30. Conrad, The Secret Agent, 279 ("Suicide"; " impenetrable"), 283 ("brain").
31. The following works discuss Stanley's life and accomplishments: Frank McLynn, Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer (London: Constable, 1989);
32. McLynn, Stanley: Sorcerer's Apprentice (London: Constable, 1991);
33. and John Bierman, Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990).
34. Karl attributes much of Conrad's interest in Africa to Stanley's "celebrity status" (Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives - A Biography [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979], 275);
35. Andrea White identifies Conrad's stays in England between 1891 and 1895 as likely times for him to have read discussions of imperial expansion in the papers ("Conrad and Imperialism," The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. Stape [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996], 179-202);
36. Gérard Jean-Aubry (The Sea Dreamer: A Definitive Biography of Joseph Conrad, trans. Helen Sebba [Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1967], 154)
37. and Zdzislaw Najder (Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, trans. Halina Carroll-Najder [New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983], 117) propose that sensational news coverage of Stanley's Emin Pasha Relief Expedition renewed Conrad's interest in African travel.
38. Stanley is a familiar name in Conrad scholarship. Albert Guérard (Conrad the Novelist [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958], 34)
39. and Molly Mahood (The Colonial Encounter: A Reading of Six Novels [London: Rex Collings, 1977], 4-36)
40. propose Stanley as one model for Kurtz, as does Ian Watt, who points to the founding of the Congo Free State by Leopold and Stanley as a historical model for Conrad's narrative (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979], 145);
41. Sherry sees Stanley as a model for the managing director in "An Outpost of Progress" (127);
42. Eloise Knapp Hay suggests Stanley's search for Livingstone may have been the basis for the Russian's relationship with Kurtz (The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963], 112);
43. Jacques Darras argues that Marlow's quest for Kurtz tells in reverse order the story of How I Found Livingstone (Joseph Conrad and the West: Signs of Empire, trans. Anne Luyat and Darras [Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982], 63-69);
44. and Mary Golanka describes Marlow as a fictional version of Stanley ("Mr. Kurtz, I Presume? Livingstone and Stanley as Prototypes of Kurtz and Marlow," Studies in the Novel 17 [1985]: 194-202).
45. For Livingstone's life and history, see Tim Jeal (Livingstone [London: Heinemann, 1973])
46. Meriel Buxton (David Livingston [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001])
47. and Andrew C. Ross (David Livingstone: Mission and Empire [London: Hambledon and London, 2002]).
48. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1890), 51. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated L.
49. See Peter Knox-Shaw, The Explorer in English Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).
50. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 180-88.
51. Conrad, Last Essays, 16.
52. See the descriptions of Livingstone's visual images in David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1996).
53. After Livingstone's death followers carried the body to Zanzibar, wrapped in bark and sailcloth and lashed to a pole. The arrival of the body at Southampton, England, was memorialized by a full-page engraving in the Illustrated London News, and the famed explorer's death was given over three columns in the Herald. Stanley held an honored position as pallbearer at a commemorative ceremony in which Livingstone's remains were installed in Westminster Abbey. See N. R. Bennett, Jeal, and Ross on the press coverage of Livingstone's death.
54. A press statement for the joint Herald-Telegraph expedition (1874-1877) announced Stanley as "the ambassador of two great powers, representing the journalism of England and America, and in command of an expedition more numerous and better appointed than any that has ever entered Africa" (quoted from N. R. Bennett, xxviii).
55. Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 132.
56. Guérard and other commentators have pointed out that Livingstone, Pasha, and Kurtz had no intention of being rescued from Africa. For the story of the Emin Pasha expedition, see Iain R. Smith, The Emin Tasha Relief Expedition, 1886-1890 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
57. and Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1994).
58. Quoted from N. R. Bennett, xxxvi.
59. See Beau Riffenburgh's discussion of the role of newspapers in creating explorer reputations in The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 5.
60. Margaret Beetham discusses "the rescue" of ephemeral print genres like the newspaper. See "Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre," in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (London: Macmillan Press, 1990), 25.
61. Watt, 145.
62. See Conrad's letter of 10 April 1902 to Henry-Durand Davray: "Histoire farouche d'un journaliste qui devient chef de station à l'intérieur et se fait adorer par une tribu de sauvages" (in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 2, ed. Davies and Karl [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988], 407).
63. Conrad, Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd edition (New York: Norton, 1988), 71. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated H.
64. Frederick Greenwood, "The Newspaper Press. Half a Century's Survey," Blackwood's Magazine 161 (1897): 719.
65. The phrase belongs to Ivan Kreilkamp ("A Voice Without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness," Victorian Studies 40 [1997]: 211-43).
66. See Pierre Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 1.
67. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 88, 89.
68. Discussions of Conrad in the context of Benjamin's essay can be found in Brooks, 238-63;
69. Kreilkamp, 212-14;
70. Edward Said, "Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative," Novel 7 (1974): 116-32;
71. and Allon White, The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (London: Routledge, 1981), 108-29.
72. Brooks writes, "Kurtz is he who has already turned experience into Benjamin's 'wisdom,' turned story into well-formed narrative plot, matter into pure voice, and who stands ready to narrate life's story in significant form" (246-47).
73. Brooks, 238.
74. Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 169-83.
75. Conrad, "An Outpost of Progress," in Tales of Unrest, ed. Anthony Fothergill (London: J. M. Dent, 2000), 73.
76. Like Kayerts and Carlier, Stanley and Livingstone received newspapers in Unyanyembe: "Our doors were crowded with curious natives, who looked with indescribable wonder at the enormous sheets. I heard them repeat the words, 'Khabari Kisungu' - white man's news - often, and heard them discussing the nature of such a quantity of news" (Stanley, 476). Explorers read about home events as well as about themselves in the newspapers. Livingstone originally became aware of his fame while recovering from illness in Angola, where he transcribed into his diary a Times article describing his journey as "one of the greatest geographical explorations of the age" (quoted from Victorian Encounter, 35).
77. More on the contemporary responses to Stanley's journalism can be found in Driver, who argues: "It was the campaign against Stanley's 'Congo atrocities' in 1890 which marked the turning point in liberal England's attitude towards Leopold's state" (143).
78. The following sources discuss Conrad's relationship with Roger Casement: Jeffrey Meyers, "Conrad and Roger Casement," Conradiana 5 (1973): 64-69;
79. Benjamin Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976);
80. Hunt Hawkins, "Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, and the Congo Reform Movement," Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981-1982): 65-80;
81. and Jane Ford, "An African Encounter, A British Traitor and Heart of Darkness," Conradiana 27 (1995): 123-34.
82. Conrad writes on 13 June 1980 in the "Congo Diary": "Made the acquaintance of Mr. Roger Casement, which I should consider as a great pleasure under any circumstances and now it becomes a positive piece of luck. Thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic" (in Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, ed. Najder [New York: Doubleday, 1978], 7).
83. Conrad would write to Dent on 27 March 1917, "But journalists can't speak the truth, - not even see it as other men do. It's a professional inability, and that's why I hold journalism for the most demoralizing form of human activity, made up of catch phrases, of mere daily opportunities, of shifting feelings" (in Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad Life and Letters, vol. 2 [Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1927], 186-87).
84. Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875-1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), 293.
85. Greenwood, 714.