Conrad in Context: Heart of Darkness and "The Man who would be King"

Rudyard Kipling's "The Man who would be King" and Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" are perhaps the two best known treatments of the nineteenth-century European imperial adventure, but, surprisingly, practically nothing has been written about the two stories together. There is really only one extended comparison: David Stewart's 1987 article, "Kipling, Conrad and the Dark Heart" in Conradiana. Stewart lists a number of parallels, but instead of exploring them, he is drawn into a general discussion of the idea that Conrad's story "does it better."

John McClure's Kipling and Conrad (1981) devotes only one paragraph to "The Man who would be King" and makes no connection with "Heart of Darkness." Perhaps the most interesting limited treatment of the two works occurs over several pages of Bruce Johnson's Conrad's Models of Mind (1971), in which he discusses the implications of Daniel Dravot, Peachy Carnehan, and Kurtz posing as gods. But there is no genuinely satisfying extended discussion of the relationship between Kipling's and Conrad's stories. The two beg for such a discussion.

The Conradist reading Kipling's story must be struck early on by the narrator's description of the Native States of India: "They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty" ("Man" 247). Charlie Marlow's first words in "Heart of Darkness" are "And this also [. . .] has been one of the dark places of the earth" (48). This echo was—to me at least—remarkable, and I began looking for additional parallels between Kipling's story and Conrad's.

Kipling's story is a serio-comic adventure yarn, and Conrad's is a brooding meditation on the nature and omni-presence of evil, but they share a remarkably detailed schema or Ur-story: It is a tale told by the survivor of a horrific, life-threatening experience (Peachy/Marlow), to a privileged listener with whom the teller feels some exceptional bond. The tale is then related to us by that frame narrator (Kipling's journalist/ Conrad's unnamed listener on the "Nellie"). The primary narrator is cast in the role of disciple or follower of the central character, a white man who travels with great difficulty into the heart of unknown, uncharted territory, beyond the bounds of Western exploration (Dravot/ Kurtz). There he encounters people who have little or no experience of Europeans. He gains mastery over them first with firearms, and then through rituals of loyalty and submission (Masonic ritual/literalworship).

They perceive him as a god, as a separate order of creation; they accept him as ruler and do his bidding. He forms them into a military force and uses them to extend his power and control. As his successes mount, his plans and his vision of himself become increasingly grandiose; he takes himself more and more seriously and becomes increasingly unbalanced. He dies. In Kipling's story the protagonist is found out by his people to be merely human and killed by them; in Conrad's story Kurtz is found out by the Europeans, or at least by Marlow, and dies of a fever which might be seen as the nominal cause of his insane quest for power. The narrator/ disciple/witness escapes—barely—with his life, carrying the literal and metaphorical baggage of the protagonist's degeneration and fall. He manages to seek out the frame narrator and, for the first and perhaps the only time, to tell his story.

"The Man who would be King" appeared in 1888. It belongs to a group of stories about characters going "worst mucker": transgressing against or failing to live up to what Zorah Sullivan calls "the multiple tyrannies and invisible structures of everyday colonial life" (78). "The 'worst muckers' in Kipling's tales," Sullivan says, "are sometimes those who transgress boundaries liberating themselves from their place in colonialist hierarchy, inverting the order of class, race and gender" (80).

Carnehan and Dravot are "Loafers," living happily beyond the pale of respectable Anglo-Indian society (Kipling 244). Late of the British army, they exist on un- and...