"Self rather seedy": Climate and Colonial Pathography in Conrad's African Fiction

Upon first arriving in the Congo, Marlow, the narrator of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, discovers that the steamship meant to be his mode of travel is disabled. After obtaining the necessary tools and repairing it, he sets off on his journey to retrieve Kurtz. Marlow finds the climate oppressive: "Going up that river . . . The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine."¹ As the steamship nears Kurtz's camp, Marlow is advised by the manager to set anchor for one last night before proceeding up the final part of the river. The crew spends the night onboard and awakens at dawn, a scene which Marlow describes in a short passage rife with climatic imagery:

When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round you like something solid. At eight or nine, perhaps, it lifted as a shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees, of the immense matted jungle, with the blazing little ball of the sun hanging over it—all perfectly still—and then the white shutter came down again, smoothly, as if gliding into greased grooves.

(67-68)

In Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, Ian Watt links the "persistent image" of "mist or haze" in Conrad's work to his impressionistic writing style. As evidence, Watt cites Conrad's warning that "Marlow's tale will be not centered on, but surrounded by, its meaning; and this meaning will be only as fitfully and tenuously visible as a hitherto unnoticed presence of dust particles and water vapour."² Watt also argues that Conrad presents the world around his narrators filtered through their own consciousnesses.³ As appealing as Watt's reading may be, I argue that there is another key reason that "mist" is linked with a turning inward for Conrad's characters. Turn-of-the-century and earlier Victorian travelers thought tropical mist could make them sick; the omnipresence of thick and stifling mist in Heart of Darkness is not only a stylistic strategy, but also indicative of the characters' perceptions of climatic danger. They worry about the mist's insidious influence, and its presence inspires them to become more watchful of their interior state of health.

During the nineteenth century, the noxious gases, exhalations from decomposing organic matter, or damp night air that were thought to cause disease were often labeled "miasma," from the Greek "miainein," meaning "to pollute"; miasma, in turn, was thought to cause the disease "malaria," from the Italian "mala aria," or "bad air."⁴ During the mid-nineteenth century, "outbreaks of malaria, cholera, and fevers in general" were most commonly attributed to "miasma from open sewers, slaughterhouse offal, dumps, graveyards, and . . . stench-filled areas."⁵ In 1846, Edwin Chadwick, the most famous proponent of miasmatic theory, went so far as to tell a parliamentary committee, "All smell is, if it be intense, immediate acute disease; and eventually we may say that, by depressing the system and rendering it susceptible to the action of other causes, all smell is disease."⁶ Smell was not necessarily disembodied and invisible: mists, creeping vapors, smoke, and other fumes qualified as "miasma." Further, miasma was defined not only as "bad air," but also as "a pervasive influence or atmosphere that tends to deplete or corrupt."⁷ Of course, to label a place's "night air" inherently miasmatic and therefore inherently disease-causing has different rhetorical effects than to identify as unhealthy only certain kinds of mist, such as those which occur below a certain elevation.⁸ Many Victorian travelers to Africa depicted miasma as characteristic of only certain locations or elevations and then encouraged white people to relocate their African settlements in order to avoid disease. In contrast to this view, Conrad focuses on tropical heat and the ways in which it causes internal humoral imbalance within the white body.⁹ In his fiction, white characters have no failsafe measures that protect them from...