It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over (p. 48).
Precisely the sorts of ugly truths that women are allegedly incapable of stomaching are what Marlow will be subjected to in the Congo. Upon his arrival he is struck by the perfidiousness of the white company agents, whom he terms “pilgrims” in order to underscore the hypocrisy of the quasi-religious rhetoric that masks their criminal conduct. They are ruthless schemers who view Marlow (as they do Kurtz) with mistrust, as he has been represented to them by his aunt’s friends as one of “the new gang—the gang of virtue” (p. 62); that is, they believe him to take seriously the civilizing propaganda associated with the company’s endeavors and thus worry that he may impede their ability to generate profits. Marlow is also appalled by the condition of the indigenous workers. In one episode a chain gang of Congolese laborers overseen by an African collaborator with a rifle passes by:
Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain... (p. 51 ).
In a spectacle that he likens to something out of Dante’s depiction of Hell in the Inferno, he subsequently sees what the fate of such men is when they become too exhausted and sick to work:
Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.... [T]his was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.
They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom (pp. 52-53).
During the several months that Marlow spends in the Central Station (modern Kinshasa, then named Leopoldville), he becomes intrigued by the reputation of the one company agent who appears to be a genuine humanitarian. The chief of the Inner Station (modern Kisangani, then Stanley Falls), Kurtz is, moreover, an accomplished painter, poet, musician, and essayist; in short, he is a consummate example of the best that European civilization has to offer. As Marlow sets out on his thousand-mile, two-month-long steamship journey upriver to retrieve Kurtz, the spectacle of rampant hypocrisy among his colleagues has led him to be curious to see how someone fortified with what appear to be genuine “moral ideas” (p. 69) has fared under these circumstances. Toward the end of the journey, when the ship comes under native attack, Marlow assumes the violent episode to indicate that Kurtz must be dead, but he subsequently finds that this is not the case. (Later, Kurtz’s young Russian worshiper will confide in him that it was actually the great man himself who ordered the attack on the ship.) By the time Marlow reaches the compound and sees human heads displayed on stakes, he realizes that Kurtz is not at all the enlightened altruist he had been hoping to meet. These impressions are confirmed later when Marlow learns of the appalling circumstances of Kurtz’s rule, which have included “midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites” (p. 92) over which he has presided.
Marlow becomes acquainted with Kurtz in person during the brief remainder of the emaciated ivory trader’s life (he presumably has dysentery, an illness that Conrad himself contracted while in Africa) and concludes that he has undergone a reversal of the instinctual renunciations upon which civilization is based: “the wilderness,” Marlow observes, “seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts” (p. 111). What Marlow finds particularly illuminating in documenting this reversal is the manuscript of an essay that Kurtz has entrusted to him. Before coming to Africa, Kurtz has been asked by “the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” to write up “a report, for its future guidance.” (Conrad appears to have drawn the title of this organization from L‘Association Internationale pour l’Exploration et la Civilisation en Afrique—the International Association for Exploration and Civilization in Africa—which was headed by King Leopold.) The essay, which he has evidently written before his breakdown, describes how Europeans, allegedly further along in the evolutionary process than members of other races, “can exert a power for good practically unbounded” by presenting themselves to non-Europeans as “supernatural beings.” It continues for seventeen pages that are “vibrating with eloquence” but ends startlingly with a phrase that has been “scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand... : ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’” (p. 92). By devolving from expansive, refined eloquence into terse, primal utterance, the document thus reflects the atavistic transformation of this paragon of European civilization that ironically renders him more savage than the so-called savages. A major theme of Conrad’s writings generally is the notion that the fallibility of human nature leads idealistic people to fall short of their aspirations—in fact, to fall a distance that is directly proportional to the loftiness of those aspirations. This principle is exemplified in the career of Kurtz, whose airy idealism is represented as equal and opposite to his bestial cruelty, a tension neatly captured in the disparity between his eloquent report and its barbaric postscript.
Marlow reflects on the significance of Kurtz’s career while recounting the moments preceding the latter’s death, which occurs as they are making their way back downriver:
Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—
“The horror! The horror!” (p. 115).
Although Marlow himself does not offer a definitive interpretation of this deathbed scene, especially compelling among the broad range of readings this famous passage has received is the suggestion that it sums up Kurtz’s Conradian insight into the basic depravity of human nature as he briefly returns to lucidity before his death. Conrad’s friend the great mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell observed that Heart of Darkness “expresses... most completely [Conrad‘s] philosophy of life”: “he thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths” (The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, p. 321). Kurtz has evidently fallen through that thin crust.
Yet as poignant as the collapse of Kurtz may be, and while in some respects he may rank with Oedipus or King Lear as a tragic figure, it is nonetheless reasonable to ask why Marlow (or we) should care about either the sufferings or the insights of an individual who has committed what might well be termed crimes against humanity. Indeed, in the single most influential critical essay on the novella, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (first delivered as a lecture in 1975), the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe takes issue precisely with the text’s uneven representation of Africa and Africans relative to Kurtz:
Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrog
ance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? (p. 12).
Imputing this emphasis to the fact that “Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist” (p. 11), Achebe adduces such scenes as the following, in which Marlow likens himself and the other white men to “wanderers on prehistoric earth” and the Africans to “prehistoric man”:
No, they [the Congolese] were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend (p. 76).
To some extent Achebe is right to identify Conrad’s outlook (which, it is true, is essentially in accord with Marlow’s when it comes to matters of race) as reproducing the prejudices characteristic of his historical era, and it is clear that this passage, in which Marlow affirms the “remote kinship” of his European listeners with Africans, is intended primarily as a spirited dare; that is, it is designed not to elevate the status of Africans but rather to lower that of Europeans. Yet while Achebe had intended his essay to relegate Heart of Darkness to the ash can of history by concluding that a text that thus “depersonalizes a portion of the human race” cannot constitute “a great work of art” (p. 12), it actually has had the opposite result by making readers all the more intrigued by Conrad’s book. Nonetheless, it served Achebe’s end in an important respect by transforming a work that had generally been viewed as progressively anti-imperialist and antiracist into one that now was suspected of being Eurocentric and racist. And the dispute over how to assess the novella has shown no signs of abating in the more than quarter of a century since the essay first appeared.
In addition to the controversy over how we are to understand the way Heart of Darkness represents race, an important related issue is that of how to view the way it represents history. All techniques of reading create specific sorts of attention as well as specific sorts of inattention, and many of those methods used on Heart of Darkness have obscured the historical setting to the point of virtual invisibility. At the far end of the spectrum the story can be read and taught—and often is read and taught—as abstractly and ahistorically as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), another famous tale of a seaman burdened by knowledge acquired on a perilous water journey that he feels compelled to impart to others in the form of a vivid narrative. This tendency, in fact, provided Adam Hochschild with an impetus for writing his historical account of the Congo Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998). As Hochschild observes,
High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and one place (p. 143).
It is no doubt the case that a Euro-American amnesia about the atrocities in the Congo working in combination with prevalent techniques of reading that are predisposed to filtering out historical information have contributed to making Heart of Darkness so readily detachable from its historical setting. Yet this is not the whole story. We must also recognize that the book has tended to be read in an ahistorical manner because, to some extent, that is how Conrad deliberately wrote it. The Congo is never named; Brussels is identified only as “the sepulchral city,” Leopoldville as “the Central Station,” and Stanley Falls as “the Inner Station”; and Kurtz cannot be identified with a single country: “His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (p. 92); as Conrad would affirm in a 1903 letter, “I took great care to give Kurtz a cosmopolitan origin” (Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 94). Conrad thus, while clearly indicating that the setting is Leopold’s Congo, also invites readers to view the events of the tale as a microcosmic reduction of European imperialism in Africa generally. It is consistent with this equivocating tendency that, in revising the manuscript, he excised a passage that clearly alluded to King Leopold (in the original version of the prologue Marlow refers to a “third rate king” who directs an allegedly philanthropic organization that furthers his own imperial ambitions), yet he nonetheless preserved the identity of his chief polemical target in the name of the steamship Marlow captains (the Roi des Belges-King of the Belgians), which was, in fact, the name of the ship on which Conrad served while in the Congo. Further, in describing the setting Conrad minimized the degree of colonial development along the Congo River (there were actually numerous factories, trading stations, and missionary outposts as well as a substantial quantity of river traffic, not only Belgian but also English, French, and Dutch), thereby intensifying what Marlow represents as the alienating, primordial aspect of the landscape. Such alterations enhance the literary attributes of the text but at the cost of historical accuracy and specificity.
To gain perspective on the artistic license Conrad took, it is useful to contrast his novella with the writings of two men who were in the Congo at the same time he was. The first, an African-American lawyer named George Washington Williams, appalled by what he had witnessed, responded by immediately writing at Stanley Falls (Kurtz’s fiefdom) an open letter to King Leopold, dated July 18, 1890, several weeks after Conrad’s arrival in the region. In this lengthy document Williams enumerated the crimes of Leopold’s agents and roundly criticized their hypocrisies. The second, an Irishman named Roger Casement, whom Conrad befriended shortly after arriving in Africa, would subsequently dedicate much of his life to publicizing the human rights abuses, most notably in the form of a widely circulated report he published in 1904 that detailed the atrocities. Conrad’s sentiments were largely the same as both of these activists. As he wrote to Casement in 1903, railing against the “ruthless, systematic cruelty towards the blacks” and offering his “warmest wishes” for the success of the Irishman’s campaign, “It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago... put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State to day. It is as if the moral clock has been put back many hours” (Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 95-97). Nonetheless, Conrad consistently declined to write political pamphlets or to become directly involved in the protest movement in any other manner. As he sheepishly wrote of Casement’s cause several days later to Cunninghame Graham, “I would help him but it is not in me. I am only a wretched novelist inventing wretched stories and not even up to that” (Collected Letters, vol. 3., p. 102). Indeed, although some of Conrad’s contemporaries viewed Heart of Darkness as an expose of Leopold’s Congo (E. D. Morel, founder of the Congo Reform Association, praised it as such in his 1903 pamphlet The Congo Slave State), its political usefulness was ambiguous at best. For whereas the goal of politically engaged writing is to galvanize conviction, what Heart of Darkness mainly tends to elicit is moral indecisiveness. To recur to the primary narrator’s opening characterization of Marlow’s storytelling method, as the tale merely casts a glow on a haze, it steadfastly resists providing the reader with a kernel of truth of the sort that can serve as a basis for resolute action.
Perhaps the best illustration of how the text functions to blunt potential political effect is in the representation of Marlow’s rather perplexing allegiance to Kurtz, whom, notably, he first alludes to with the chummy phrase “the poor chap” (p. 42). Explaining why he has “r
emained loyal to Kurtz to the last,” Marlow says that his deathbed epiphany was “a moral victory,” albeit one that was obtained at the price of “abominable terrors” (p. 117). What is disturbing here is the way that Marlow’s telling of the story subordinates the “abominable terrors” (the enslavement and murder of Africans) to the “moral victory” (Kurtz’s apparent insight into his own depravity). Further, the term “loyal” is a euphemism, for what he specifically means is that he has suppressed the truth about Kurtz’s savagely criminal conduct. A well-known example of this practice occurs in the melodramatic closing scene, in which Marlow meets with Kurtz’s fiancee and falsely reports that her lover’s final utterance was her name. By withholding from her the knowledge of Kurtz’s breakdown, he thus acts on his earlier assertion that women inhabit a world of beautiful illusions and that it is the duty of men to keep them there. Yet this relatively inconsequential effort to spare an individual’s feelings is not the only act of insincerity in which Marlow has engaged with respect to Kurtz’s memory. During this meeting he comforts the grieving woman by affirming her consoling thought that Kurtz’s “words, at least, have not died” (p. 123), an apparent allusion to his published writings. On this matter Marlow has previously sanitized Kurtz’s reputation in a much more significant fashion. Having been “repeatedly entreated” by Kurtz “to take good care of ‘my pamphlet’ (he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career” (p. 93), Marlow has acceded by tearing off the damning postscript (“Exterminate all the brutes!”) before offering up “the famous Report for publication” (p. 119). This action tends to be overlooked in interpretations of the novella because Marlow makes only passing mention of it. We are, however, given to believe that the essay has been published as the magnum opus of a man whom the public at large continues to view as a great humanitarian, and, as such, it would no doubt have been used to further legitimize the imperial ravaging of the Congo. Indeed, while the text strongly hints that this is the case, regardless of how we interpret the possible impact of Kurtz’s report, what is certain is that Marlow has been complicit in the conspiracy of silence about the crimes this eminent figure has perpetrated. We thus encounter the deep irony that in this story whose chief purpose is ostensibly to disclose dark truths, Marlow confesses how he has declined his greatest opportunity publicly to do just that.
Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction Page 5