Conrad and Malraux: the white man’s madness

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) influenced the African novels of Joyce Cary, Graham Greene and V. S. Naipaul.  But Conrad had the most powerful impact on André Malraux’s The Royal Way (1930).  Malraux (1901-1976) is no longer very well known in the English-speaking world, but in his lifetime he was a heroic figure: not only a writer but a major thinker and Minister of Culture under De Gaulle.

Both novels are based on personal experience.  Conrad traveled to the francophone Belgian Congo in 1890, Malraux to Cambodia in French Indo-China in 1923.  Their fictional heroes took long sea voyages to Africa and to Asia.  Conrad inspired Malraux’s major themes: the psychology of the adventurer, the hero’s obsession with destiny and death, his sexuality and erotic life, his anguish and humiliation, and his mythomania.  Conrad’s solitary sea-captain Charlie Marlow travels up the Congo River with a single goal: to find the depraved and brutal rubber-baron Kurtz, who’s disappeared into the depths of the jungle.  Malraux’s novel has two quests and two heroes who trek through the jungle on foot.

In The Royal Way Claude Vannec, a young archeologist who resembles Malraux, wants to find, steal and sell the valuable Khmer sculptures in the temples of Angkor Wat.  His companion Perken has dominated a remote native tribe.  He wants money to buy machine guns in order to repel the punitive expedition of his Siamese enemy and to stop the construction of a railroad.  Both threaten to invade his territory and destroy his personal rule.  Perken  also wants to find a Kurtz-like adventurer, Grabot, who’s disappeared in the Cambodian jungle.

The Ukrainian-born Conrad, whose second language was French, called himself a “Polish nobleman dipped in English tar”.  Vannec, a Frenchman with a Dutch name, and Perken, an older German-Danish adventurer, are—like Conrad and Kurtz—“men of alien races” with mixed and indeterminate nationalities.  Perken’s surname hints at the tragic Perkin Warbeck (1474-99), a pretender to the English throne, who was executed by Henry VIII and became the subject of an eponymous revenge tragedy by John Ford (1634).  Perken combines Kurtz’s conquistador’s character with Marlow’s voyage of self-discovery to find Kurtz.

Vannec and Perken first meet in a Somali brothel in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, which foreshadows the appearance of African women and the erotic theme.  Vannec and Perken’s quest for the forbidden sculptures is obstructed by officials at the French Institute in Saigon, by hostile tribes, thick jungle, desertion of their ox-cart drivers and their fearful guide, and they must persist without a map or compass.

Halfway through The Royal Way, the focus shifts from Vannec’s successful theft of the sculptures to Perken’s search for the mysterious Grabot.  Like Kurtz, Grabot has inspired many rumors and does not appear until the end of the novel.  He is an adventurer, who has dominated remote and primitive tribes, and has disappeared among the Mois.  Perken finds that Grabot, far from being a powerful chief, has been captured, tortured and enslaved by the natives he once had conquered.  Both men achieve their goal.  Vannec steals the sculptures and “would go on living”; Perken-Marlow rescues Grabot-Kurtz.  But Perken falls on a pointed war-spike and his leg becomes severely infected.  He, not Grabot, dies from a septic wound on the journey out of the jungle.

In Heart of Darkness Conrad describes—with incantation, repetition and menace —the river, the jungle and the darkness: “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.  An empty stream, great silence, an impenetrable forest.”  Marlow feels threatened by “all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.”  He confesses that “this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.”  He compares his wretched tin-pot ship to a creeping insect: “hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle.”  “The darkness of an impenetrable night” both incites and obscures evil.  Even the tame and familiar Thames “seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness”. Marlow observes that as “the brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness . . . he penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.”  Darkness appears both in the Congo and inside the men who are destroyed by its insidious power and by the “treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart.”  Marlow travels mostly by river, but also by land when he has to bypass the impossible cataracts.  He says, “I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for a two-hundred mile tramp.”

As if using theme and variations in a musical composition, Malraux closely follows Conrad’s setting, plot, characters and ideas.  But as his novel progresses, he reimagines and transforms these fictional riches into his own intriguing and impressive novel.  Malraux emphasises Conradian “darkness”, l’obscurité africaine, more than 15 times.  “The dark immensity of Africa” occurs on the first page, and he later writes with a nod to Kurtz, of “this colloquy of madmen in the heart of darkness”.  In Malraux, as in Conrad, “soundlessly the ponies moved ahead, with lolling necks; the young guide led the way slowly but unfalteringly.”

Malraux’s narrative style has the same drumbeat as Conrad’s.  A village, covered by the overarching canopy of the thick jungle, is “lost amid the universal disintegration of all things under an unseen sun. . . . The lowering sky and the impenetrable tangle of the leafage, teeming with insect-life, affirmed their silent menace.”  Conrad’s river, jungle and darkness also reappear in Malraux. “Under their eyes the river wound in a hairpin bend.”  Marlow’s boat crawls up the river like an insect; “Vannec felt himself transported into an insect-world.”  The jungle, which terrifies Vannec, is an active force, almost like another character in the novel. “Motionless yet never quite at rest,” the jungle is “a ferment of virulent malignity.”  As “the great sea of vegetation sweeps from hill to hill . . .  the forest once again began to assert its domination. . . . The veiled but active malevolence of the vegetation made the place seem so uncanny.”

The fiercely anti-colonial Conrad emphasises the Europeans’ cruelty to the Africans and moral degradation of the white rulers.  He declares, “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away” from those who own it, “is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. . . To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”  The diseased rubber workers in the Grove of Death “were dying slowly . . . lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.”  Marlow’s boat is attacked: “Arrows, by Jove!  We were being shot at.”  A naked African, Kurtz’s mistress, mysteriously appears: “along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman. . . . She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress.”  Marlow is impressed but also frightened, and does not try to contact her.  In Kurtz’s compound, skulls, obscure at first sight, gradually emerge: “half-a-dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round curved balls.”  These pathological garden decorations are the skulls of the victims Kurtz had killed and may have served up in a cannibal feast.

Vannec’s theft of the Khmer sculptures deliberately breaks the law and defies colonial rule.  Perken opposes the Siamese invasion and the civilizing influence of the railway.  Malraux—who was convicted of precisely this theft and pardoned through influence in Paris—is also bitterly anti-colonial.  He alludes to the Grove of Death and to Kurtz’s morbid collection by noting, “there was something sinister about the glade.  Half of it was already submerged in darkness . . . burying year by year a little further on the corpses of their pioneers.”  Perken sees a litter of dry bones, curved ribs, and human skulls with grinning death-head teeth “polished clean by sunlight and the ants.”  The two adventurers also face hostile Cambodian tribes, experience “the menace of an unknown weapon” and see “a medley of thick-lipped faces and scintillating war-spears.”

The image of Kurtz’s mistress recurs in Malraux’s Somali brothel, where the body of the “straight-nosed” (Nilotic, not Hamitic) whore “is poised there in its black nakedness.”  The  lascivious bodies of the prostitutes are “tense with a deep excitement that found its only issue in the unceasing tremor of their arrowy breasts and supple loins, rippling with sweat under the lamplight.”  Vannec is first drawn to Perken when he see him under “the outstretched arm of a gigantic negress”.  Their friendship begins with the meeting in the whorehouse and continues on the ship.  Perken agrees to join Vannec’s expedition and get half the profits when the valuable sculptures are sold.

We learn about Kurtz, one of Conrad’s most interesting characters, only by hearsay.  He is half-English and half-French: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”  All the Belgian officials whom Marlow encounters en route praise Kurtz’s extraordinary qualities.  They call him “a universal genius . . . a great orator who electrified large meetings . . . a prodigy,  an emissary of pity, and science, and progress

. . . with a higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose.”  He has the greatest “spirit of adventure that had ever ruled a human being.”  But his brilliance, his overarching ambition, have made him more vulnerable than ordinary men:  corruptio optimi pessima (“the corruption of the best is the worst of all“).  Kurtz was destroyed by the overwhelming power of the jungle, by “the fascination of the abomination. . . . The heavy, mute spell of the wilderness seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts. . . . The jungle consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.”

In Malraux’s novel Perken has a dual role.  He’s a Kurtz-like adventurer and at the same time searches for Grabot as Marlow searches for Kurtz.  Perken has a strange personality, “that fabulous aura of scandal, fantasy and fiction that hovers about the white man” in the jungle.  He, too, has a rebellious “dislike for all established codes,” and has been sent to live “amongst hostile tribes of the interior.”  Ruthless and brutal, he has a “mania for absolute power, for a savage mastery of men.”  A legendary figure like Kurtz, “he had lived amongst the natives, ruled over them in districts where many of his predecessors had been killed, and it was rumored that the methods by which he had achieved this were more strenuous than law-abiding”—since there were no laws to abide by.

When Marlow survives all the dangers and finally reaches Kurtz, that universal genius has regressed to the level of animals.  “He can’t walk—he is crawling on all fours”, not unlike William Blake’s horrific engraving of Nebuchadnezzar, the degraded and dying King of Babylon.  Kurtz’s last words — “The horror! The horror!” — condemn himself for the cruelty he’s seen and the crimes he’s committed.  Marlow tenderly holds Kurtz and says, “I had supported him, his bony arm clasped round my neck.”  Like the messenger in a Greek tragedy, an African then announces, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead.”  Marlow finally returns to Brussels, visits Kurtz’s fiancée and lies to her to protect her from the unbearable truth about the idealistic man she once had loved.

Perken exclaims at the beginning of Malraux’s novel, “I’m going to try to find—to track down—a man for whom I once had much regard, and a good deal of mistrust,” his dark alter-ego.  Grabot, a deserter from an unnamed army (probably the French Foreign Legion), is “a man who’s absolutely alone.”  Like the maniacal Kurtz, he’s attracted by eroticism, power and the possibility of abusing it, and has “never given a thought to anything except himself.”  Courage distinguishes him, but the wilderness has overwhelmed him: “he’s gone native through and through . . . has become another man, in fact . . . and  has lost all semblance of humanity.”

Unlike Kurtz, who has dominated his tribe, Grabot has been blinded, enslaved and forced to walk on a treadmill that turns a grindstone: “The slave made as if to move towards them, but the thongs tethered him to the extremity of the shaft, and each movement he made followed the orbit of the slowly turning grindstone.”  After he’s rescued, “the blind man kept shambling round and round the hut as if he were still harnessed to the mill-stone.”  No anglophone or French literary critic has noticed that Malraux’s description of Grabot is based on the tragic fate of the Hebrew hero Samson in Judges 16:21: “the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.”  Like Samson in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), Grabot—who has “a great hulking body like a navvy’s . . . a  wrestler’s shoulders”—is “Eyeless in Gaza, at the Mill with slaves.”

The excellent translator of The Royal Way, Stuart Gilbert, recognised Malraux’s use of the biblical Samson, as dramatised by the blind Milton, and included three phrases from his poems.  “The blaze of noon” in Samson Agonistes alludes to the blind Samson’s lament on the paradoxical “dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.”  “The last infirmity of courage” echoes Milton’s “the last infirmity of noble mind,” the desire for elusive fame in “Lycidas.”  “Fallen on evil days” recalls Satan’s speech in Paradise Lost: “fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, / In darkness, and with dangers compassed round.”  Grabot, in the darkness of the jungle, has also “fallen on evil days”.  The natives, reversing the traditional colonial roles, now enslave the master who’d once dominated them.

Malraux, like Conrad, emphasises Kurtz’s crucial self condemnation.  Perken’s eyes were “misted with horror. . . .  There was horror in Grabot’s voice. . . . Grabot inspired him now with infinite horror . . . he looked more horrible than ever . . . there was a world of vaster horror . . . a tragic exaltation, savage ecstasy, swept over him.”  Kurtz is morally blind; Grabot is physically blind.  As W. M. Frohock writes, “the blinded derelict has become proof of the jungle’s power to dehumanize the human, and of the vanity of courage.”

Like Marlow, “Vannec, who would go on living, believed in life. . . . He passes his arm round Perken’s shoulders” and sees him die as Marlow had witnessed Kurtz’s death.  The dominant theme of both Heart of Darkness and The Royal Way is pronounced by Malraux’s native chief: “He was awaiting with resignation the disasters which the white man’s madness brings ineluctably, sooner or later, in its train.”

Author’s Note: When I traveled to Angkor Wat in 1966 the jungle was invaded by a biblical plague of locusts that swarmed into my shirt and plate of food during dinner.  People ran around collecting the locusts in plastic bags and frying them.  I sealed the doors and windows of my room, but the locusts flew through the hole in the sink and were splattered around by the revolving ceiling fan.  When I jumped out of bed my bare feet hit their crunchy crust on the concrete floor.

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