Literary Criticism
Another Look at Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness
By Harold O. Wilson
In her book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley says, “Heart
of Darkness is a good example of how the best-intentioned most
respected piece of fiction can develop into a social document when
attitudes change and history overtakes the thematic material of a
given work of art. A hundred years after publication, Conrad’s
repeated images of the Africans Marlow meets in his journey up the
Congo River seems racist and inhumane.”
She concludes her analysis with, “My own view, however, is
that because the novella is artistically flawed—because the balance
between thematic material and narrative material is off—Heart
of Darkness will remain an interesting historical document but a
bad work of art.”
When Smiley says the balance between thematic material and narrative
material is off, she is referring to her statement that, “Conrad
substitutes eloquence for details and incidents.” She wants more
particulars and argues that Conrad is more interested in making a
point than telling a story.
Well, every fiction writer worth reading has a point to make—it’s
called “the theme” of the work and the story is laid open to expose
the theme it expresses. Smiley is wrong—Conrad has done a brilliant
job of telling a story that exposes what I find to be a significant
theme. I do not mean to suggest that this is the only theme one
could explore in Heart of
Darkness, there are many others. I will argue, however, that the
following is a major theme and perhaps the dominant one in the
novella: The Victorian concept
of the manifest destiny of “civilized man” based on individual
will-power and a hubris of social progress
is rational, intelligent and clear, but at its heart it is mad. Kurtz is
the mirror of this society, “his intelligence was perfectly clear,”
Marlow says,”—concentrated, it is true upon himself with horrible
intensity, yet clear;… But his soul was mad. Being alone in the
wilderness, it had looked within itself, and by heavens! I tell you,
it had gone mad…. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that
knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly
with itself.”
Smiley focuses her critique on Marlow, then tells us, “And then
there is Kurtz,” but goes on to recount not what she thinks of Kurtz
but to analyze Marlow’s relationship to Kurtz. Kurtz is the key to
this novella, however, and even though what we know about him we
learn from Marlow, there is enough to send our minds whirling.
“The horror! The horror!” are Kurtz’s last words. “True, he had made
that last stride,” Marlow says, “ he had stepped over the edge,
while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And
perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom and
all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that
inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of
the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have
been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry—much better. It was
an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by
abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a
victory!” What does
Kurtz see as he peers over the threshold?
What does he understand that
elicits such terror? And why
does Marlow consider his cry, “The horror! The horror!” a victory?
Eric Fromm’s existential dichotomies might provide a helpful lens
through which to examine Kurtz’s discovery. In his book,
Man for Himself, Fromm
suggests that humans are faced with three existential
dichotomies—existential because they are rooted in the very nature
of our existence. In contrast Fromm also suggests that there are
historical dichotomies which we can control and change. These
historical dichotomies are interesting but needn’t concern us in
this analysis. The three existential dichotomies are basically as
follows: (1) The most fundamental dichotomy is the one between life
and death. The fact that we have to die is incompatible with the
experience of life. It is like an insolent slap in the face. To
avoid this contradiction we create ideologies and illusions that
deny the reality of death. (2) The second dichotomy is that we are
full of all human potentialities but the short duration of our lives
does not permit their full realization. We are not going to achieve
all that we feel we can or need to accomplish. (3) The third is the
fact that we are alone and yet related to others at the same time.
We are ultimately alone but we cannot know ourselves apart from
others and we cannot develop our full potential without them.
These dichotomies result from the fact that our self-awareness,
reason and imagination have separated us from the rest of nature. We
are in fact the aliens in the universe. Fromm suggests, “There is no
‘innate drive, for progress in man; it is the contradiction in his
existence that makes him proceed on the way he has set out. Having
lost ‘paradise,’ the unity with nature, he has become the eternal
wanderer….He must give account to himself of himself and the meaning
of his existence.”
This heavy existential view of life was decidedly not the general
concept of human existence in Victorian England when Conrad was
writing Heart of Darkness
or when it was published in 1902. Belief in “progress” was the
dominant characteristic of the period. Conrad is writing in a day of
unprecedented peace, prosperity and economic expansion. It had its
counterpart in Europe called the belle-époque. Victorian optimism
was encouraged by
the unprescidented expansion of human power in material,
intellectual, and spiritual areas and the
prosperity and growth it generated confirmed for the Victorians the
nobility of “civilized” man and the power of his will. It formed the
psychological underpinnings of both the colonialist and imperialist
expansions of the time and contributed significantly to the creation
of the British Empire. Freud was the first to give the lie to this
concept of unbridled will and then the whole idea of progress and
the nobility of civilized man came crashing down in the very real
horror of 1914—for Europe anyway. We are hard learners, however, and
Vietnam was an unfortunate American replay of the hubris of that
Victorian period. With that in mind it’s easy to see how Francis
Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse
Now is a remake of Heart
of Darkness.
It is with the confidence of the Victorian mindset, however, that
Kurtz goes to the Congo to engage in the ivory trade. What happens
to him? Marlow tells us that Kurtz stepped over the edge and looked
into the invisible. Marlow looked as well, but he was permitted to
draw back his foot. “Perhaps all the wisdom and all truth, and all
sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of
time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.” I would
suggest that Kurtz looked into the face of his own deterioration and
death and found nothing inside but an invisible emptiness. He is
shocked, and dismayed. Marlow tells us, “I saw on that ivory face
the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven
terror—of an intense hopeless despair.”
All his work, all the ivory stacked in the boat that he argues is
his, all the killing, all, was for nothing and finally means
nothing. Thus his hopeless despair rests also in the second
dichotomy—he has not achieved his great “idea” and because he cannot
hope to turn again as T.S. Elliott says in
Ash Wednesday, “And place
is always and only place / And what is actual is actual only for one
time / And only for one place…” he experiences his finitude in an
intense hopeless despair. He is confronted with the utter futility
of his work and the reality of his solitude. “Alone in the
wilderness, his soul had looked within itself and gone mad.”
Kurtz has written an insipid
pamphlet on civilizing the natives declaring the benefits of
benevolence and good treatment. At the bottom of the pamphlet he has
scrawled “Exterminate the brutes!” a last attempt to escape the
great contradictions by destroying the universe. “Confound the man!”
Marlow says, “He had kicked the very earth to pieces.”
Kurtz ends up a man alone with no illusions, no pretense, no faith,
and no fear, struggling alone with his soul. So why does Marlow
consider this a victory?
I would suggest it is because Kurtz had the courage to look over the
edge and confront the invisible nothingness he saw. Unfortunately,
all Kurtz experiences is the horror. He sees nothing positive or
creative in this loss of illusion. He remains defiant. “On his
face,” Marlow says, “ is the “expression of somber pride, of
ruthless power,…” Kurtz faces the horror but does not come out on
the other side and Conrad appears ambivalent about any positive
aspect to Kurtz’s shattered illusions.
Freud exposed the illusion of Victorian “progress” and the
fallacy of self-righteous will-power only to come down on the side
of determinism. It took existentialist philosophers like Camus and
Sartre after the carnage of two world wars to reveal the liberating
aspects of Kurtz’s “horror.” For the present analysis, however, let
the words of Elliott suffice, “Because I cannot hope to turn again /
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something / Upon which
to rejoice…”
Marlow struggles mightily with his encounter with Kurtz but
he doesn’t get it either. He was close, but he truly drew back his
foot. In the final analysis, Marlow opts for an illusion he knows is
not true and he lies to the Intended. “Who was not his friend who
had heard him speak once,” she says. “He drew men towards him by
what was best in them.” And Marlow, “’Yes, I know,’ I said with
something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the
faith that was in her, before that great and saving illusion that
shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant
darkness from which I could not have defended her—from which I could
not even defend myself.” Then he told her that the last word Kurtz
spoke was her name.
Because she does not grasp the heft of Heart of Darkness, Jane
Smiley chooses to bicker over small things and is generally wrong
about these as well. She
argues that “Conrad’s habit of individualizing whites and
generalizing blacks, arrogating consciousness and intellect solely
to Europeans no longer rates the respect it once received…”
She accuses Conrad of being a
sentimentalist, that is rather than observe, he projects his own
fears and wishes onto an object then reacts to it as though it were
real. Her example of this is the way he treats women in the novella.
Now, two things need to be said here. First, Conrad generalizes
whites; the “pilgrims” are one example, and he does individualize
indigenous people in the novella. Examples include the man dying in
the shadows under the trees with the “bit of white worsted round his
neck” to whom Marlow gives a biscuit. Another is the magnificent
ambiguous woman parading on the bank at Kurtz’s station who, ”walked
with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed clothes, treading
the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous
ornaments…She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent;
there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress.”
Then there is Marlow’s
helmsman who dies from the spear thrust. “He steered for me,” Marlow
says, “I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies,
and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became
aware when it was suddenly broken.”
Finally, there are the cannibals who serve as crew on the
boat. They are starving to death and Marlow marvels at their
restraint in not killing the rest of the crew in order to eat.
Second, concerning Marlow’s attitude toward women, there is a subtle
point to be made here. Marlow comments about his aunt, “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….”
Smiley says of this, “Such a remark could be made only by a man who
had never actually listened to a woman or observed any of the women
around him on any street in any city in Europe.” Not necessarily.
This remark could have been made by any man in Victorian England.
Women were held in a special position at that time. They did live in
a world of their own. Compressed into a small box, they were
considered inferior to men except morally, brought up sexually
ignorant, and kept under the watchful eye of their mothers. In this
“world of their own” they were trained to have no opinions and
educated to be submissive to authority (men). The role they were
assigned in life was to marry and have children. So Marlow’s comment
about his aunt and his need to “protect” the Intended by lying to
her marks him as a man of the Victorian era. Even though Marlow
cannot be equated with Conrad, it might be true that Conrad shared
this view of women. But one would have to make a search of his
literature to see if that is the case.
So it is in fact Smiley who is the sentimentalist; projecting her
own feelings and values on a fictional character playing out the
role assigned him by another era; then goes further and projects
these views on the author as well.
Heart of Darkness
is not about the role of women in society, it is not about racism,
it is not about civilization versus nature, and finally, it is not a
historical document as Smiley contends. If
Heart of Darkness can be
characterized at all, it is a picture of the psychological sickness
Conrad saw at the core of Victorian society exemplified by the
shattering disillusion of one of its products when confronted with
the darkness of his own mortality. Its best analogue today, remains
in fact the hubris that powered the Vietnam War. Francis Ford
Coppola was correct to equate Vietnam with Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness.
“I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint,
no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself….,” could
well be said about 1967 America.
NOTE: For more information on Freud and will-power in Victorian
England, see Rollo May’s Love
and Will.