• 1 Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978.
• 2 Readers may refer to the many answers to Achebe’s accusations, among which Padmini Mongia’s “Why I (...)
• 3 “[T]hinking in terms of race […] was so widespread and so ‘normal’ in developed countries like Engl (...)

4Classics are rarely “unproblematic,” as the case of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness shows. When the novella was first published in 1898, it earned Conrad the reputation of an anti-colonialist. Edmund D. Morel, founder of the Congo Reform Association called it “the most powerful thing ever written on the subject” (Simmons 2003, 101). In the mid-20^th century, New Criticism reigned supreme and F.R. Leavis peremptorily defined the novella as “one of Conrad’s best things” (Leavis 1954, 212) and presented Conrad as one of the few “novelists in English worth reading” (9) but at that point the interest in European imperialism in Africa had been replaced by a focus on style. In 1958, A.J. Guerard saw Heart of Darkness as “one of the great dark meditations in literature” (Guerard, 48) and as a “night journey” into the unconscious. Both more or less ignored the anti-colonialist dimension of the novella, or at least saw it as a minor aspect. In 1977, a period that corresponded to the beginning of a revaluation of European imperialism and its influence on culture,1 Chinua Achebe called Conrad a “bloody racist,” contending that “a novel […] which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can[not] be called a great work of art” (Achebe 1978, 9). He also suggested that it should be removed from curricula. I do not intend to start again the debate on Conrad’s alleged “racism,” which has raged ever since with Conradian scholars eager to defend him against such accusations.2 I would just like to take this case as an example of the need to contextualise texts and their reception, as Achebe’s use of the term “racist” shows. Interestingly, Achebe does not bother to define what “racist” means, thus implying that the definition of the word is unproblematic. But as Peter Edgerly Firchow has shown, “at the time Conrad was writing his novel, the word racism did not exist”3: “racialism”, “[t]he first word with [such] negative connotations” was first listed in the OED in 1907 and “racism does not occur in English until 1936” (Edgerly Firchow 2006, 234). Edgerly Firchow also underlines that the word race was not limited to ethnic groups but also referred to family, tribe, and nation (Edgerly Firchow 2000, 235) and therefore

• 4 A similar well-documented case can be found with the word “negro,” with many changes of positive or (...)

5The choice of this word, its explicit and implicit connotations have repeatedly been modified4 and have necessarily influenced the way successive generations have read the novella. This does not invalidate Achebe’s argument that “Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization,” (338) but should certainly lead us to consider why he chose to ignore this aspect of the problem.

• 5 Among which the more recent Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by Peter Kuper (2020). See also the e (...)

7In spite of such heated debates, Heart of Darkness has remained a popular novel, with a large readership, apparently confirming J.M. Coetzee and Italo Calvino’s common idea that a classic is a text of which “we cannot afford to let go” (Coetzee 2001, 16) because it “has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers” (Calvino 2000, 5). But the difficulty may well come from the identification and interpretation of “what it has to say” and to what extent our postcolonial culture “relate[s]” to it. Achebe’s indictment has not resulted in Heart of Darkness being banned from universities and libraries but it has left its mark, as its repeated adaptation as a graphic novel in recent years shows. In fact, the novella has remained a source of inspiration for contemporary writers and illustrators willing to re-examine its most problematic sides from a different perspective. Although there are other adaptations of the novella,5 I would like to concentrate on two examples published in the same decade: one is a British adaptation, Anyango and Mairowitz’s Heart of Darkness (2010), the other a French one entitled Au cœur des ténèbres. Librement adapté du roman de Joseph Conrad, by Stéphane Miquel and Loic Godart (2014).

• 6 Although the Congo was colonized by King Leopold and then taken over by Belgium, the fact that the (...)

8Both give us an image of the reception of Heart of Darkness in Europe at the beginning of the 21^st century and provide an interesting insight into the ideological debates concerning the novella in two former colonial powers.6 I would like to insist on four points:

• 7 “Blurred, indistinct contours, silhouettes fading into the dim background; unrecognisable figures; (...)
• 8 Baetens identifies Art Spiegelman’s Maus as the starting point in this process.

91. First, aesthetic choices in the two works are extremely different. Au cœur des ténèbres is very traditional, respecting the 9-panel grid, apart from the occasional double panel that contributes to emphasizing important, striking episodes. The choice of tones (greyish for the scenes in Europe and sepia for what takes place in Africa) for its part contributes less to creating an atmosphere of darkness than to associating the images with the photographs that were taken at the time and that document what took place in the Congo Free State under King Leopold’s rule. Anyango uses techniques borrowed from the cinema (unusual framings, scenes seen from above, superimposition, and juxtaposition), associating multiple panels with a single illustration on a double page, privileging very dark tones and a monochrome palette for her pencil drawings and watercolours, thus disorienting the readers and drawing them into the suffocating atmosphere of the novella.7 Both works testify, though, to the recent revaluation of the media’s hierarchy and of graphic novels’ newly acquired “legitimacy in dealing with genocides” (Baetens and Frey 2015, 2) and in “memorializing the past.”8

• 9 According to Hochschild, it started in the late 1890s (Hochschild 1999, 158-60).
• 10 Edmund D. Morel, George W. Williams and Roger Casement are mentioned.

12Miquel and Godart’s Au cœur des ténèbres is followed by a “Carnet des ténèbres” (Miquel and Godart 2014, 99-103) in which the authors gathered “notes, reflections, quotations,” in other words considerations that guided them in the elaboration of the graphic novel. In this “notebook” (fig. 4), they speak of the Berlin Conference (1884-85), ivory and – significantly – rubber, whereas in Heart of Darkness, there is no mention of rubber as the rubber boom had not yet started when Conrad went to the Congo.9 Said’s reading of Heart of Darkness in Culture and Imperialism, Achebe’s “An Image of Africa,” as well as Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) and David Van Reybrouck’s Congo (2010) are mentioned as essays “one must read without delay,” (101) as is Peter Bate’s film, Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death (2003). They also insist on exploring the many blogs and websites that “shed light on this darkness” (101) and on acknowledging the role of all those who denounced and fought King Leopold’s rule over the Congo.10 In both cases, the influence of postcolonial theory appears as a guideline for the authors, suggesting that there is a similar approach to colonial questions in former colonial powers and that the specificities in each case correspond to individual choices rather than cultural differences that could be attributed to national particularities.

• 11 Marlow uses the biblical expression in the novella to refer to Brussels (Conrad, 2006, 25; Matthews (...)
• 12 See Véronique Bragard on this question. She speaks of a “process of spatialization and historicizat (...)
• 13 This is Bragard’s contention in her 2013 paper.

133. In the graphic novels, we are also guided with a degree of precision in our (re)-interpretation of Heart of Darkness as both include geographical and historical information that is absent from the novella. At the beginning of Miquel and Godart’s Au cœur des ténèbres, the young boy on board the Nellie points his finger at the Congo territory on a map (3), the director of the company in the “sepulchral city”11 mentions Klein as the man Conrad was sent to convey back from the centre of the continent (11), and the steamer’s name, Le Roi des Belges, is indicated (35). Anyango and Mairowitz’s version is even more explicit: a map is provided in an introductory preface (fig. 3), the name of the river Congo is explicitly quoted, as is the “Colonie belge du Congo” and the “Société anonyme belge pour le commerce du Haut Congo” (12-13). Dates are provided (borrowed from Conrad’s diary), thus making the historical reference very clear.12 In Anyango’s version, Marlow is given Conrad’s facial features; as a consequence, the distance between fiction and experience is almost non-existent. Not only does the historical context of the novella take pride of place in the graphic rewritings, as their authors endeavour to remind the general public of events most of them have forgotten or never heard of, but it seems that the novella has become a sort of pretext for revisiting the colonial past in a period of constant reassessment of Western responsibilities in the economic and political situation in Africa. In a way, such contemporary transpositions serve to “memorialize” the past and Heart of Darkness has become a “paradigm”13 in the process: “Heart of Darkness was a sort of homage to the victims of the Congolese occupation” Anyango declared in an interview, meaning that her version was a form of homage – not the novella (Ferguson 2015).

• 14 Then in the fourth panel on page 3, the black sun on a luminous sky has become a whitish moon on a (...)

144. Then, the association of text and image may look like a paradox when dealing with a text in which one is never sure of seeing things properly. Because only a small part of the original text is kept, a considerable part of what the novella deals with is transferred into the images, especially the descriptions that contribute to the atmosphere that is so characteristic of Heart of Darkness. In Anyango’s version, the first and last page represent the setting sun, a black sphere emerging from the fog, an image highly reminiscent of the frame narrator’s very famous comment in Conrad’s novella that for Marlow “the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine” (Conrad 2006, 5). The narrator’s warning on how to read the novella (obliquely) is here transferred into the image (fig. 5), with this black spot that sheds no light - and significantly, the quotation has not been included in the graphic novel.14

• 15 Cf. Fresleven’s skeleton with grass growing between his ribs.
• 16 There are two accountants in Conrad’s novella: one on board the Nellie, one in the outer station in (...)

15Heart of Darkness is a text wrapped in mists and fogs in which Marlow asks his listeners “Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?” and the frame narrator retorts: “we listeners could hardly see one another” (Conrad 2006, 27). Changing medium allows effects that the text does not: images and layout take over and make it possible literally to see things as Anyango’s drawings convey the fogginess of Marlow’s experience. Her framings also force us to concentrate on elements that might have passed unnoticed otherwise, like the dominoes at the beginning of the story, when Marlow and his friends are waiting for the tide (fig. 5). At the very beginning of Heart of Darkness, the frame narrator tells us that a member of the group, the accountant, “had brought out already a box of dominoes and was toying architecturally with the bones” (Conrad 2006, 3). Of course, the fact that Marlow calls the dominoes “bones” is not coincidental, considering the importance of ivory and the number of dead bodies in the novella.15 Significantly, the graphic novel starts with these dominoes, an element that may have remained unnoticed by a number of readers of the novella. Anyango devotes three panels out of five to them on page 2, and focuses on them again on page 7, thus underlining their significance forcefully. Besides, the dots on the dominoes are similar to the setting sun over the Essex marshes, a choice that refers to the association between Europe and Africa, and warns us from the start that details are essential. Similarly, in Au cœur des Ténèbres, images clarify what Marlow, a master of understatement, had suggested about the second accountant16 he met in the outer station:

• 17 The fact that Marlow’s description of the man’s “impeccably starched collar” (Conrad 2006, 18) is p (...)

16The graphic novel leaves no doubt about the way he “taught” the woman, as she appears in two panels, an iron collar around her neck and his starched linen on her arms17 (Miquel and Godart 2014, 26). The original ambiguity is lost, the graphic novels’ authors choosing almost systematically to make the “horrors” of colonisation explicit for 21^st-century readers thanks to the images. This takes place, as Jarniewicz underlines about Anyango’s version, because, contrary to texts, there is a “synchronicity in images that makes it possible for the readers to perceive ‘at one glance’ what their juxtaposition on a page implies” (Jarniewicz 2018, 48):

• 18 In the novella, he does not see elephant tusks at that point.

17Another illustration of such “visual analogy” conveying meaning “at one glance” can be found on pages 75 to 77 of Anyango and Mairowitz’s graphic novel, when Marlow uses his binoculars to look at Kurtz’s compound and first makes out heaps of elephant tusks18 and then, looking up, sees the spikes planted among the tusks, and then shrunken human heads. Once more, there is no doubt on what it means: the murders that resulted in these heads on spikes find their origin in the greed of Europeans.

• 19 Or from Ian Watt’s reading of Conrad’s technique.

18In Au cœur des ténèbres, Loïc Godart does not play only on synchronicity and juxtaposition, but also often on “delayed decoding,” a method he may have borrowed from Conrad,19 as we have seen with the episode of the accountant. Other instances may be more taxing for the reader, as panels that should be associated are placed dozens of pages apart (9 and 75). When Marlow is sent to the doctor in Brussels, his office is filled with skulls on spikes, proleptically preparing Marlow’s confrontation with the heads on spikes around Kurtz’s compound and therefore drawing a clear parallel between Europe and Africa again.

• 20 It had become a practice for the Congo Free State officials to chop off the hands of natives that h (...)
• 21 Simmons, however, suggests that, because of the inconsistencies in Conrad’s declarations, “the unsp (...)
• 22 Possibly those mentioned in the “Carnet des Ténèbres” at the end of the graphic novel.
• 23 A number of them are reproduced in the Norton edition of Heart of Darkness.

20Miquel and Godart, on the contrary, choose not to include any text, probably considering that the power of images is such that no text is necessary to convey the sensation of “absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt” Marlow experiences (Conrad 2006, 27). In that case, the emotional power of the text has been appropriated by the images. In this scene, Miquel and Godart also underline the fact that the historical context has become as important (if not more) as the fiction itself in the way we read the novella today: at least one native is represented with his hands cut off, a mutilation that was common in the Congo at the time and that is nowadays well documented,20 even though it was never mentioned in Heart of Darkness. Conrad said he had never witnessed anything of the sort himself21 (Conrad 2008, 95). This makes it clear that the source is not the novella, not even Conrad’s Congo Diary but more probably the recent historical essays consulted by the authors,22 some of which are filled with photographs of the atrocities committed by the colonial administration.23 Not only do the graphic novels make facts and situations more explicit, but they also add information, thus slightly transforming our reception of the novella’s intentions. At times, they also choose to make what was only suggested in the text entirely explicit, as is the case on page 77, when Marlow accuses the manager of the Central Station of wanting to kill Kurtz – a confrontation that does not exist in the novella.

• 24 “The wilderness had found him out early and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic (...)

21The insistence on the factual aspects of the “horror,” i.e., on colonialism, does not mean that the “voyage inside” and the “metaphysical” dimension are totally absent. But they have become a consequence rather than the central element, a side effect of the colonial enterprise, as is the case on pages 78-79 in Anyango and Mairowitz’s version, when Marlow is confronted with the heads on spikes around Kurtz’s compound. This evolution is revealing of today’s priorities (fig. 7). First, we see the heads in Marlow’s binoculars. Then, Anyango chooses to place a close-up of one of those heads side by side with Marlow’s own head on a double page, thus underlining “their humanity, like yours” (Conrad 2006, 36). The text, on the other hand, refers to Kurtz,24 thus also associating him with the shrunken head, and therefore with Marlow, finally looping the loop, linking the meditation on self-discovery (Kurtz’s, but also Marlow’s self-discovery) with colonial violence and savagery.

• 25 See Pijcke (2020, 197).

24And the close-ups on elephant tusks carried by black hands, with a white man holding a rifle in the background, confirm that his “feeling of oppression” is due, not to the jungle itself, but to the fact that he is taking part in the colonial enterprise. The “metaphysical quest” of mid-20^th century readings which left colonial “horrors” largely out in favour of the inner “darkness” of the characters – a darkness that remains largely mysterious in the novella, as Kurtz’s “unspeakable rites” are never explicitly described by Marlow – has been replaced by a constant emphasis on what colonization really meant. Images in that case work as a correction of the text’s ambiguities, showing what the text does not tell and therefore insisting on its ambivalence.25 As Pijcke puts it, “the choices made in terms of showing mean that images convey their own vision of the text; they are no longer a mere ornament, they have something else/more to say. Which is why we speak of dissonance/discordance” (Pijcke 2020, 200).

• 26 “Soit il reste immobile et observateur, soit il est en mouvement, fuyant du regard les conséquences (...)

25There is however a major difference between the two works, which reflects how differently the two graphic novels problematize the distance between fiction and reality. In Anyango and Mairowitz’s version, underlining the ambivalence and ambiguities of the novella is also carried out through a significant feature, the presence of the novelist, Conrad. Such presence could be seen as quite unsurprising in our postmodern era in which authors haunting their own works or those of others abound (Bragard 2013, 54). Yet, it means something else in terms of reception: for one thing, Marlow is given Conrad’s facial features. Then, passages from Conrad’s Congo Diary are included in the graphic novel, juxtaposed with the selected passages from the fiction itself, thus blurring the line between the fiction and what Conrad did see in Congo. As a consequence, Heart of Darkness is no longer perceived as a classic, detached from its context of production. The historical context and the way Conrad himself responded to it26 are, on the contrary, presented as essential since conflating Conrad and Marlow erases the distance between fiction and reality and puts the emphasis on historical facts.

• 27 In the scenes including the steamer, however, he becomes unsurprisingly more central in the image a (...)
• 28 It is not the case in the novella, as, within the text, there is no encouragement to equate Marlow (...)

26Conrad’s presence in the graphic novel is asserted from the beginning, as Mairowitz equates his narrator with him in the preface (“Marlow (Conrad),” Anyango and Mairowitz, n.p.). And the novelist can be identified in the first double page (fig. 5, panels 5 and 11), significantly positioned on the side of the image more as a witness than a participant27 (pages 2 and 3, panel 5, pages 4 and 5, and page 120 at the end of the graphic novel). Anyango underlines his eyes, as well as the binoculars carried by Marlow which enable him to see and identify things (like the heads on spikes, 75-77, 81, 91, 96, 113). In these scenes, it becomes impossible to differentiate Conrad from Marlow, author from narrator, reality from fiction.28 Conrad’s position as a witness, the man who “saw and heard” is therefore underlined and the testimonial value of the novella becomes central, showing how raw the memories of colonisation remain.

• 29 I am translating the expression “devoir de mémoire,” commonly used to refer to the world wars and t (...)

29In other words, such juxtapositions point out that the novelist has moved from self-centred preoccupations in the Congo Diary to more universal concerns in the novella, reinforced by the narrative choices that contribute to its ambiguities. From that point of view, Anyango and Mairowitz’s Heart of Darkness is itself ambivalent, hesitating between a revisiting of the colonial past and the acknowledgement of its necessary transmutation into something else that goes beyond plain realism and beyond a perspective centred on the “duty of remembrance”29 only. In their case, changing medium therefore complexifies the approach to the source text as it also proves a way of raising vexed questions about the role of literature and the role of art: what the graphic novelists make clear is that neither literature nor art should be equated with denunciation only, as there is always a surplus which allows for re-interpretation.