Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

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“In Heart of Darkness one major theme, if not the ruling theme, is that civilization depends for its conquest of the earth on a combination of lies and forgetfulness.”(Eloise Knapp Hay)

Conrad’s works, Heart of Darkness in particular, provide a bridge between Victorian values and the ideals of modernism. Like their Victorian predecessors, these novels rely on traditional ideas of heroism, which are nevertheless under constant attack in a changing world and in places far from England. Women occupy traditional roles as arbiters of domesticity and morality, yet they are almost never present in the narrative; instead, the concepts of “home” and “civilization” exist merely as hypocritical ideals, meaningless to men for whom survival is in constant doubt. While the threats that Conrad’s characters face are concrete ones—illness, violence, conspiracy—they nevertheless acquire a philosophical character. Like much of the best modernist literature produced in the early decades of the twentieth century, Heart of Darkness is as much about alienation, confusion, and profound doubt as it is about imperialism.

Heart of Darkness explores the issues surrounding imperialism in complicated ways. As Marlow travels from the Outer Station to the Central Station and finally up the river to the Inner Station, he encounters scenes of torture, cruelty, and near-slavery. At the very least, the incidental scenery of the book offers a harsh picture of colonial enterprise.

The impetus behind Marlow’s adventures, too, has to do with the hypocrisy inherent in the rhetoric used to justify imperialism. The men who work for the Company describe what they do as “trade,” and their treatment of native Africans is part of a benevolent project of “civilization.”

Kurtz, on the other hand, is open about the fact that he does not trade but rather takes ivory by force, and he describes his own treatment of the natives with the words “suppression” and “extermination”: he does not hide the fact that he rules through violence and intimidation. His perverse honesty leads to his downfall, as his success threatens to expose the evil practices behind European activity in Africa.

However, for Marlow as much as for Kurtz or for the Company, Africans in this book are mostly objects: Marlow refers to his helmsman as a piece of machinery, and Kurtz’s African mistress is at best a piece of statuary. It can be argued that Heart of Darkness participates in an oppression of nonwhites that is much more sinister and much harder to remedy than the open abuses of Kurtz or the Company’s men. Africans become for Marlow a mere backdrop, a human screen against which he can play out his philosophical and existential struggles. Their existence and their exoticism enable his self-contemplation. This kind of dehumanization is harder to identify than colonial violence or open racism. While Heart of Darkness offers a powerful condemnation of the hypocritical operations of imperialism, it also presents a set of issues surrounding race that is ultimately more troubling.

Madness is closely linked to imperialism in this book. Africa is responsible for mental disintegration as well as for physical illness. Madness has two primary functions. First, it serves as an ironic device to engage the reader’s sympathies. Kurtz, Marlow is told from the beginning, is mad. However, as Marlow, and the reader, begin to form a more complete picture of Kurtz, it becomes apparent that his madness is only relative, that in the context of the Company insanity is difficult to define. Thus, both Marlow and the reader begin to sympathize with Kurtz and view the Company with suspicion. Madness also functions to establish the necessity of social fictions. Although social mores and explanatory justifications are shown throughout Heart of Darkness to be utterly false and even leading to evil, they are nevertheless necessary for both group harmony and individual security. Madness, in Heart of Darkness, is the result of being removed from one’s social context and allowed to be the sole arbiter of one’s own actions. Madness is thus linked not only to absolute power and a kind of moral genius but to man’s fundamental fallibility: Kurtz has no authority to whom he answers but himself, and this is more than any one man can bear.

“Kurtz is a personal embodiment, a dramatization, of all that Conrad felt of futility, degradation, and horror in what the Europeans in the Congo called progress, which meant that exploitation of the natives by every variety of cruelty and treachery known to greedy man.”                                                                                                             (J. W. Beach)

This novel is, above all, an exploration of hypocrisy, ambiguity, and moral confusion. It explodes the idea of the proverbial choice between the lesser of two evils. As the idealistic Marlow is forced to align himself with either the hypocritical and malicious colonial bureaucracy or the openly malevolent, rule-defying Kurtz, it becomes increasingly clear that to try to judge either alternative is an act of folly: how can moral standards or social values be relevant in judging evil? Is there such thing as insanity in a world that has already gone insane? The number of ridiculous situations Marlow witnesses act as reflections of the larger issue: at one station, for instance, he sees a man trying to carry water in a bucket with a large hole in it. At the Outer Station, he watches native laborers blast away at a hillside with no particular goal in mind. The absurd involves both insignificant silliness and life-or-death issues, often simultaneously. That the serious and the mundane are treated similarly suggests a profound moral confusion and a tremendous hypocrisy: it is terrifying that Kurtz’s homicidal megalomania and a leaky bucket provoke essentially the same reaction.

Heart of Darkness has several themes.  There is the theme of self restraint, then there theme of working of the subconscious mind of man. There is the theme of exploration of a little known continent.  There is theme of the influence of barbarian and primitivism on a civilized man when he is cut off from civilized society.  And there is of course, the obvious theme of the imperialist exploitation of a backward country.

Conrad’s treatment of the theme of white imperialism was influenced by his own visit to Congo and his exploitation of that dark country.

The keynote of the theme of imperialism is struck at the very outset of Marlow’s narration.  Marlow speaks at the very beginning of the ancient Romans, says Marlow, grabbed what they could get.  Their conquest of Britain was “robbery with violence”; and violence in this case meant murder on a large scale.  Such a conquest is unpardonable. What Marlow here wishes to say is that conquest can be excused only if the conquerors perform some constructive work in the backward country which they have command.

Marlow’s experiences in Congo clearly show that the while man there had failed to perform his functions.  Instead of civilizing the savages, the white man who went there became exploiters, pure and simple.  The chief commodity which these Belgians found worth their pain was ivory.  Ivory dominates the thoughts of the manager of the central station, the thoughts of brick maker, the thoughts of the several white agents who liter around the central station and to whom Marlow gives the name “faithless pilgrims”.

The manager of the central stations tells Marlow that Mr. Kurtz collects more ivory than all the other agents.  Mr. Kurtz had threatened to kill him if he did not surrender to Mr. Kurtz a small quantity of which the Russians had received as a gift from a native tribal chief.

Ivory symbolizes the while man’s greed and the while man’s commercial mentality.  Ivory becomes a source of revenue to the trading company which can therefore, afford to invest a lot of money in sending its agents into Congo.

“To tear treasure out of the bowels of the earth was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking in a safe.”                                               (Leo Gurko)

Marlow sees a lot of black people, mostly naked, moving about like ants. Later he sees half a dozen men chained to one another and each wearing an iron collar on his neck.  These men are criminals who have violated the laws and are being punished with hard labor under the orders of the white rules of the country.

These sights have been described by Marlow in order to convey to us the callousness of the white man towards the native.

There is a project to build a railway line in this region but Marlow sees that rock is being blasted with gunpowder even though this rock does not stand as an obstruction in the way of the railway line.  It is sand commentary on the efficiency of the white man that Marlow should not able to get any rivets to repair the wrecked ship for weeks when these are needed badly.

The futility of the while man’s endeavors in the dark country called Congo becomes even more evident when we meet certain employees of the trading company which has sent Marlow here.  Marlow’s description of the brick maker is equally satirical and critical.

Conrad conveys is strong disapproval and disapprobation of these white men to us most effectively so that we begin to look upon these white men with greatest possible contempt.

“Heart of Darkness is by, common consent, one of Conrad’s best things an appropriate source for the epigraph of the hollow men.”                                                                             (R. R. Leavis)

Heart of Darkness conveys to us, in a nutshell, the deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave trading, and general policy of cruelty of the Belgian rule in the Congo.  The portrayal of the company’s chief accountant is in itself a grim commentary upon the white men.  Who can afford to dress flawlessly when the natives around are disease-stricken and starving.  Marlow of course admires this man but to us.  Indeed, in this novel, the brutal futility of the Belgian imperialist rule is memorably captured in image after image.

We can say that Conrad is here not only exposing the hollowness and weaknesses of Belgian imperialist rule over the Congo but also indirectly reminding us of British imperialism in various countries of the world of his time. 

Today while imperialism has crumbled; and most of the countries of Asia and Africa have become independent.  But in Conrad’s time, all the African countries were still a part of the Dark Continent and most of countries being governed by their white rulers, chiefly British. Conrad’s denunciation of imperialist rule in Congo had a valuable message for both the exploiter and the exploited.

Heart of Darkness is replete with symbolism.  This very title of the novel has a symbolic meaning in addition to its literary meanings.  Literally, Heart of Darkness means the interior of dark country, namely Congo.  Symbolically, the title means the depths of the human mind or the human consciousness.  The book describes not only Marlow’s exploration of Congo but also his exploration of deeper layers of his mind.

There are other symbols in the novel also. The woman knitting wool, symbolizes the fate of ancient classical mythology.  Mr. Kurtz who is dominating character in the novel, is a symbol of modern western man’s lust for power and pelf.   The darkness of the jungle symbolizes the darkness in the heart of man.

Marlow gains a great deal of information by watching the world around him and by overhearing others’ conversations, as when he listens from the deck of the wrecked steamer to the manager of the Central Station and his uncle discussing Kurtz and the Russian trader. This phenomenon speaks to the impossibility of direct communication between individuals: information must come as the result of chance observation and astute interpretation. Words themselves fail to capture meaning adequately, and thus they must be taken in the context of their utterance. Another good example of this is Marlow’s conversation with the brickmaker, during which Marlow is able to figure out a good deal more than simply what the man has to say.

Comparisons between interiors and exteriors pervade Heart of Darkness. As the narrator states at the beginning of the text, Marlow is more interested in surfaces, in the surrounding aura of a thing rather than in any hidden nugget of meaning deep within the thing itself. This inverts the usual hierarchy of meaning: normally one seeks the deep message or hidden truth. The priority placed on observation demonstrates that penetrating to the interior of an idea or a person is impossible in this world. Thus, Marlow is confronted with a series of exteriors and surfaces—the river’s banks, the forest walls around the station, Kurtz’s broad forehead—that he must interpret. These exteriors are all the material he is given, and they provide him with perhaps a more profound source of knowledge than any falsely constructed interior “kernel.”

“In Heart of Darkness, he mediates between the light of civilization and the darkness of primitivism, between colonializing Europe and exploited Africa.”                                (Leo Gurko)

Darkness is important enough conceptually to be part of the book’s title. However, it is difficult to discern exactly what it might mean, given that absolutely everything in the book is cloaked in darkness. Africa, England, and Brussels are all described as gloomy and somehow dark, even if the sun is shining brightly. Darkness thus seems to operate metaphorically and existentially rather than specifically. Darkness is the inability to see: this may sound simple, but as a description of the human condition it has profound implications. Failing to see another human being means failing to understand that individual and failing to establish any sort of sympathetic communion with him or her.

Fog is a sort of corollary to darkness. Fog not only obscures but distorts: it gives one just enough information to begin making decisions but no way to judge the accuracy of that information, which often ends up being wrong. Marlow’s steamer is caught in the fog, meaning that he has no idea where he’s going and no idea whether peril or open water lies ahead.

The “whited sepulchre” is probably Brussels, where the Company’s headquarters are located. A sepulchre implies death and confinement, and indeed Europe is the origin of the colonial enterprises that bring death to white men and to their colonial subjects; it is also governed by a set of reified social principles that both enable cruelty, dehumanization, and evil and prohibit change. The phrase “whited sepulchre” comes from the biblical Book of Matthew. In the passage, Matthew describes “whited sepulchres” as something beautiful on the outside but containing horrors within (the bodies of the dead); thus, the image is appropriate for Brussels, given the hypocritical Belgian rhetoric about imperialism’s civilizing mission. (Belgian colonies, particularly the Congo, were notorious for the violence perpetuated against the natives.)

Both Kurtz’s Intended and his African mistress function as blank slates upon which the values and the wealth of their respective societies can be displayed. Marlow frequently claims that women are the keepers of naive illusions; although this sounds condemnatory, such a role is in fact crucial, as these naive illusions are at the root of the social fictions that justify economic enterprise and colonial expansion. In return, the women are the beneficiaries of much of the resulting wealth, and they become objects upon which men can display their own success and status.

The Congo River is the key to Africa for Europeans. It allows them access to the center of the continent without having to physically cross it; in other words, it allows the white man to remain always separate or outside. Africa is thus reduced to a series of two-dimensional scenes that flash by Marlow’s steamer as he travels upriver. The river also seems to want to expel Europeans from Africa altogether: its current makes travel upriver slow and difficult, but the flow of water makes travel downriver, back toward “civilization,” rapid and seemingly inevitable. Marlow’s struggles with the river as he travels upstream toward Kurtz reflect his struggles to understand the situation in which he has found himself. The ease with which he journeys back downstream, on the other hand, mirrors his acquiescence to Kurtz and his “choice of nightmares.”

Heart of Darkness is a remarkable book by virtue of its imagery.  Conrad here gives us ample evidence of his descriptive powers.  The imagery in this book is remote and wild; but it is described in such a graphic manner that we begin actually to visualize it.

There are, first of all, the sights, which Marlow witnesses along the coast as he sails by a French steamer. We can never forget the boiler lying uselessly in the grass, the sleep path, the several pieces of decaying machinery and the rusty rails, the blasting of the rocks, the clanking of the chain gang criminals, etc.  This description includes the picture of people dying slowly, dying of disease and starvation.  

The description and imagery continue throughout the novel, punctuating the action and the dialogue and greatly enhancing the interest.

“He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath.”                                                                                            (F. R. Leavis)

Heart of Darkness has an unusual kind of structure.  Conrad was an innovator so far as the structure of the most of his novels was concerned.  The structure of Heart of Darkness is very complex. In the first place, there are two narrators in this novel.  The first narrator appears before us at the beginning of the book who tells us about the boat “Nellie.”  It is this first narrator who introduces to us second narrator. The second narrator’s name is given as Marlow.  It is really puzzling and irritating that the first narrator soon becomes the listener of the second narrator. 

Secondly there are shifts in time and these shifts also confuse the reader.  Finally the division of this novel is arbitrary.  There is no planning or design in the division of the novel into three chapters. Thus we cannot claim that Heart of Darkness is a well-organized novel.

“He is freed by Kurtz’s death; but when he returns to Europe he finds it shrouded in the darkness symbolized by African and the mean and greedy phantoms battering on it.”                                                                                                                                       (Walter Allen)

Imperialism is nevertheless at the center of Heart of Darkness. By the 1890s, most of the world’s “dark places” had been placed at least nominally under European control, and the major European powers were stretched thin, trying to administer and protect massive, far-flung empires. Cracks were beginning to appear in the system: riots, wars, and the wholesale abandonment of commercial enterprises all threatened the white men living in the distant corners of empires. Things were clearly falling apart. Heart of Darkness suggests that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate outside a social system of checks and balances: power, especially power over other human beings, inevitably corrupts. At the same time, this begs the question of whether it is possible to call an individual insane or wrong when he is part of a system that is so thoroughly corrupted and corrupting. Heart of Darkness, thus, at its most abstract level, is a narrative about the difficulty of understanding the world beyond the self, about the ability of one man to judge another.