The Foreign Correspondence

Joseph Conrad's “Wild Story of a Journalist”

Bibliographic Data

ID23657697
AuthorsMatthew Rubery (0000-0002-1545-8896, corresponding author)
Year2009
Pages141-158
Publication date2009-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueThe novelty of newspapers (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195369267.003.0006
OpenAlexW2501409285
ISBN9780195369267
LanguageEN
References cited105

This chapter investigates the deep kinship between Conrad's Heart of Darkness and foreign correspondent Henry Stanley's dispatches describing the search for Dr. Livingstone in the New York Herald and the London Daily Telegraph. Stanley's correspondence about Africa led Conrad to distrust the newspaper as a mode of discourse and to ask how accurately readers can know events when not present, like Marlow, as a witness. The relevance of the press to this fictional narrative is evident in a 1902 letter from Conrad describing Heart of Darkness as a ”wild story of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages.” This context gives new meaning to the fact that Kurtz writes about his “moral ideas” in the newspapers. Hence Conrad's “wild story of a journalist” is as concerned with the media through which Kurtz represents his experience in the Belgian Congo as with that experience itself, for it is the newspaper that brings Kurtz's voice out of Africa.

Art · Context (archaeology) · Distrust · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Media studies · Narrative · Newspaper · Political science · Sociology · Witness · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Law · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Philosophy

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