Heart of Darkness, Conrad, and Cultural Myopia

An Introduction

Conrad’s dense prose in Heart of Darkness, mixed with his thoroughly disorienting narrative structure, recreates the shifting uncertainty of the times in which he wrote, a pre-modern society that had begun to examine the reality behind a glorified rhetoric of its own advancement. Such idealism for the reader belies the barbarity of “aggravated murder” perpetrated in the name of empire, a notion that in many ways was used to justify the apparent immorality of the enterprise that was beginning to surface in Europe. The text, therefore, comes to embrace a deep exploration of man’s innate capability for primitive atrocities, a tribal quality formerly associated to the “savages” being colonized. However, in order to articulate for his conservative readership what this darkness constitutes, Conrad’s own enduring vision of Africa as a setting for this self-inspection is clouded by regressive biases itself, oftentimes propagating the racially-fuelled ideas of his era that sought to deny this alien culture a voice amidst the colonisation of its own people.

Onwards and Upwards

In the opening sentences of the text characterising the Nellie as “being bound down the river”, Conrad immediately undermines a Western sense of immutable societal progression, thereby challenging liberal humanist assumptions of man’s inexorable ascension. The “cruising yawl” becomes an image for a pre-modern reader of a stagnant, if not at times cyclical, reality of European empire, only able to idly “wait for the turn of the tide” and thus constrained by the shifting views of its time. The ship, including the “Director of Companies” and the other crewmen on board, as a piece of the capitalistic machine of empire, is therefore representative of an unsettling inefficacy of late-Victorian colonialism, an entity unable to deliver on its presumptions of spiritual and cultural development. Indeed, despite the openly reverent tone of the primary narrator here, his panegyric is subtly eroded by a setting that resonates from sinister unease, the “mournful gloom” that blankets itself across the “haze” of dusk. Contrasted against a romantic-era views of Europe possessing a universal truth and clarity in its endeavours, Conrad’s purposefully dark and ambiguous landscape gives way to a linguistic tension between more traditional notions of Western certainty in their civilising mission and a moral uneasiness that lurks beneath. This discord is similarly evoked in Conrad’s layered narrative structure itself, a complex rhetorical device which, in one way, opens the possibility for presenting the reader with a multiplicity of contradicting viewpoints, but also – perhaps because of this – a novella that at times is rendered inconclusive and almost indecipherable, a direct upending of more reassuring forms of classical European literature that promised a sense of closure for its readership. Conrad’s text, therefore, in all its equivocal ruminations, stands as a challenge towards comforting perceptions of the endeavour of empire and the West’s ontological insistence of an intrinsic moral validity to this enterprise. To a contemporary reader, Conrad, the self-professed modern author, and his text dispute the rhetoric of a clear social advancement and enlightenment, thus broaching the elusive concept of an objective truth common to a pre-modern world. Unlike the tenet of liberal humanism foregrounded in Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory, that a “literary text contains its own meaning within itself”, even when detached from socio-political considerations, reality for both Marlow – and by extension, Conrad – is a murky and uncertain “glow” that comes to us in the fading light of “moonshine”. Through such an upending, Conrad rises to the avant-garde of late 19th century literature and its destabilisation of former perceptions of Europe and its empire.

A Civilising Mission?

Writing in a society still marred by a Eurocentric ambivalence towards the destructiveness of colonial hegemony, Conrad’s disruptive novella thus compels the reader to comprehend the “robbery with violence” enacted under the pretence of the mission civilisatrice. Marlow’s use of blunt consonants throughout his contemplations on empire – “brute force”, “aggravated”, “robbery” – lend a far more bitter tone to the proceedings, one at odds with the “sacred fire” which one can “bow down before” in veneration. Though Marlow here is admittedly trying to capture the rapacious brutality of Roman empire “nineteen hundred years ago”, the qualifier of “the other day” captures for Conrad the ultimately cyclical nature of imperialist history. This wilfulness to distance oneself from this depravity is thus representative of a dishonest attempt to initially ignore Marlow’s own culpability in the colonial machine, akin to the “men going at it blind”. Given the pecuniary wealth thought at the time to be lying untapped in the continent of Africa, such myopia to the avarice proceedings around them becomes all the more problematic, as empire seemingly becomes morally justified by the gluttonous “squeeze” of capitalistic gain. It is this reductive lens of sweeping hegemonic expansion that Conrad therefore attempts to dismantle in Marlow’s journey, fittingly encapsulated in Kurtz’s “small sketch in oils” that Marlow sees at the station. Being in the process of travelling up river and thus exploring Europe’s and his own collective darkness, he is at least cognisant, if not condemning of, the regressive lie of a civilised West and a barbarous Congolese. Largely dismantled in the reader’s eyes by the ominous quality of Marlow’s experience, the redeeming light spread forth by the “torch” of empire is a motif throughout the text for the ironic veneration to a cultural ideology that celebrated white superiority and thus reduced Africa as a whole to a dark continent of barbarity. Here, however, the Roman goddess of justice, Astraea, though still carrying the “lighted torch”, is blindfolded, rendered unaware and ultimately confined by the “sombre” backcloth of the painting itself. Conrad’s evocation of this Roman deity – in all its connotations of classical epistemological belief systems - thus becomes a critique of conventional visions of a spiritually cultivated Europe, which brings only a prejudiced ethnocentric form of justice and civility to the colonized.

Circularity

Yet in order to expose these intrinsic contradictions, Conrad at times depicts many of the odious tropes of empire, thus perpetuating the relegation of the African and his culture to a state of ‘otherness’ and inferiority. In Marlow labelling the “savage who was fireman” as an “improved specimen”, his almost scientific handling of this “fine chap” rings from the heart of the industrial colonising machine, a system which sought to relate the progression of the colonized to their perceived benefits as links in the chain of imperialism. Undoubtedly, Conrad intended to synthesize the distancing of the Indigenous man under colonialism through such apathetic, dehumanising language. Nonetheless, in simultaneously hinting at an ability for the Congolese to ascend towards European ideals of betterment, he plays into the notions of hybridity, a state of the West upholding its conceived racial hierarchy, yet still electing to view the supposed ‘inferiors’ through their own lens. Writing at a time when such a degrading plight was a normalcy under imperialist racism, Conrad’s portrayal of this “savage” therefore draws from the late-Victorian reserve of prejudiced cultural blindness. Even the setting of Africa as a backdrop for the novella’s journey into man’s heart of darkness is problematic for a 21st century readership, since it too becomes subsumed and consequently deprioritised by an ethnocentric interest in Western society and its morality. To travel up the Congo River is like “travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world”, a troubling return to a primordial self. The implication for Conrad, here, is likely that the waterway, in its confounding sombreness, forces a European coloniser to recognise his own untapped potential for primal savagery, yet his conscious decision for the African landscape to be the vessel of this dark uncovering, evokes the retrograde notion of the ‘dark continent’ being merely the stage for the central act of Western progression. Indeed, this “empty stream” contrasted against the opening panegyric to the Thames, “the beginning of an interminable waterway”, further embellishes the lack of authorial interest in the Indigenous culture, leaving it blank to be filled by the central narrative line of the colonisers. It must be said, that for Conrad, as a European himself, to attempt to capture the subtleties of this foreign culture would mean risking becoming even more insular, as his subsequent depiction would become defined through his own experiences and perceptions of the world he aims to capture. Ultimately, whilst he does indeed destabilise the conventional interpretations of both Africa and empire in his text, as author Caryl Phillips posits, “in order to expose European fragility, Conrad pandered to a certain stereotype of Africa that, at the time, was accepted as norm”. Despite offering a largely progressive summation of the horrors of colonialist hegemony and Western rhetoric, Conrad’s insights inevitably reflect his own cultural blindness.