Heart of Darkness
Summary and Notes
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THE
PLOT
On
a boat anchored in the Thames River outside London, a sailor by the name of
Marlow observes to several friends that this land was once a place of darkness,
an uncivilized wilderness. This reflection leads him to remember an incident in
his past, when he commanded a steamboat on the Congo River; his story forms the
remainder of the novel.
In
his tale Marlow is a young man eager to see the unexplored African jungles. An
influential aunt in Brussels secures him an appointment as captain of a Congo
steamer. But when he reaches the Company's Outer Station in Africa, he's
confronted with a spectacle of black slavery and white greed. In a shady grove
he discovers a crew of sickly African workers who have crawled away to die. He
also meets the Company's very proper chief accountant, who mentions a certain
Mr. Kurtz- a remarkable agent who has sent more ivory back from the jungle than
the other agents combined. Marlow's interest in Kurtz will grow eventually into
an obsession and become the focus of the story.
After
a difficult overland trek, Marlow arrives at the Company's Central Station,
where he learns that the steamer he was supposed to command has been wrecked. He
meets the local manager, an unlikable and unfeeling man, who mentions that Mr.
Kurtz is rumored to be ill at his station upriver and that it's essential to get
to him as soon as possible.
One
night as the others are fighting a blaze in one of the sheds, Marlow talks with
one of the agents at the station, a brickmaker, who speaks of Kurtz with
admiration but also resentment at the talents that make him such a likely
candidate for promotion. Kurtz, he says, is one of those men who have come to
Africa not merely for gain but with the noble idea of spreading enlightenment
across the backward continent.
Dozing
one evening on the deck of his steamer, Marlow overhears a conversation between
the manager and his uncle, an explorer. It's obvious that the manager despises
Kurtz- partly for his high ideals and partly because, like the brickmaker, he
resents Kurtz's abilities.
After
three months of repairs, Marlow, the manager, and a crew of three or four whites
and some 30 Africans begin the tedious voyage upriver to Kurtz's station,
through a jungle that strikes Marlow as weird, foreboding, and gigantic. Fifty
miles below the station they come upon a reed hut with wood stacked for the
steamboat and a message for them to approach cautiously.
A
couple of mornings later they awaken surrounded by a thick fog through which
they hear a tumult of threatening cries. Once the fog lifts they set sail again.
Suddenly they're assailed by a shower of arrows. As the white men on board fire
hysterically (and ineptly) into the brush, Marlow steers close to the shore to
avoid a snag, and his African helmsman gets a spear between the ribs. Marlow
jerks at the steam whistle, and as it screeches the attackers flee in terror at
the noise. He casts the dead helmsman overboard in order to keep the hungry
cannibal crew from being tempted by such a meal.
Soon
they arrive at the Inner Station, where they're greeted enthusiastically by a
young Russian sailor who has been nursing Kurtz through a grave illness; it was
he who left the pile of wood and the message. The wilderness, we learn, preyed
on Kurtz's nerves, and he began to go mad; he participated in "unspeakable
rites" and scrawled at the end of a high-toned, idealistic report about
improving the savages through benevolence, "Exterminate all the
brutes!" Although the Russian is a fanatical admirer of Kurtz's brilliance,
he admits that Kurtz seized his ivory from the Africans through violence,
brutality, and intimidation. Even as he's chattering, Marlow notices that the
posts in front of the station house are crowned with heads.
Mr.
Kurtz finally appears, borne on a stretcher. Marlow, well aware that Kurtz
doesn't really want to leave the jungle where he's treated as a god, knows that
with a word to his African army Kurtz could have them all slaughtered. But Kurtz
allows himself to be carried aboard the steamer, although a magnificent and
ferocious African woman seems ready to lead another attack.
The
manager tells Marlow he disapproves of Kurtz- not because of his brutality, but
only because his methods have made further plundering of the district
temporarily difficult. The young Russian visits Marlow and discloses that the
earlier attack on the steamer was ordered by Kurtz; then he steals away into the
jungle. He fears the manager who hates the Russian because his ivory trading
gives the Company competition.
Late
that night Kurtz escapes and crawls ashore, but Marlow discovers his absence and
cuts him off before he reaches his followers' camp. They make a tense departure
the next day, surrounded by warriors who seem ready to attack under the
leadership of the barbaric woman. But Marlow sounds the whistle and frightens
them off.
As
they steam back downriver, Kurtz's life slowly ebbs away. On his deathbed he has
what seems to be a moment of illumination, of complete knowledge, and he cries
out, "The horror! The horror!" before he dies.
Then
Marlow too is taken by the fever and very nearly dies. But he survives and
returns to Brussels, where, more than a year after Kurtz's death, he pays a
visit to Kurtz's Intended, the woman he was engaged to marry. She's still in
mourning, heartbreakingly devoted to the memory of a man she thinks was noble
and generous to the end. When she pleads that Marlow repeat Kurtz's last words
to her, he can't bear to shatter her illusions: "The last word he
pronounced was- your name," he lies. She cries out and collapses in tears.
THE
CHARACTERS
Through the first two thirds of Heart of Darkness, our
curiosity about Kurtz is raised to such a pitch that we may realize only
afterward, in thinking about the novel, that the main character isn't Kurtz at
all, but Marlow. We find out less about Kurtz than about his effect on Marlow's
life. Heart of Darkness tells the story of Marlow's spiritual journey- a voyage
of discovery and self-discovery.
It seems safe to assume that Marlow is Conrad's
stand-in. Marlow was born in England, not Poland, and he never gave up sailing
to write; but otherwise the differences between the two men aren't striking. And
we know that Heart of Darkness, especially in its first half, is heavily
autobiographical.
Marlow tends to keep his own counsel: he's always
observing and judging, but his politeness covers up the harshness of his
judgments and encourages others to speak their minds. The brickmaker and the
manager both speak frankly to him because his mask of courtesy hides his
contempt for them. (Later, when his experiences have so upset him that he's on
the verge of a breakdown, Marlow does speak sarcastically to the manager, and
he's never forgiven for it.)
We don't learn much about Marlow's life before the
Congo voyage, beyond the simple fact that he is an experienced sailor who has
seen the world. But we do get to know Marlow quite well. He is a man of modesty
and courage. We know about his modesty from his embarrassment at his aunt's high
praises. And we see many examples of his courage, most notably during the attack
on the steamer and at Kurtz's escape. At such times Marlow always keeps a cool
head; but in telling the story he never emphasizes his own daring or heroism.
Marlow is obviously an excellent sailor, devoted to
his work; he enjoys remembering, and making us attentive to, the technical
details and difficulties of getting an old steamboat up a shallow river. His
fondness for work is at the very base of his system of values. Although you may
not like work- nobody does, he admits- it's what keeps you sane, just as it
keeps Marlow sane in the jungle. It provides a structure for your life, and if
you concentrate on the details of your duties, you won't be tempted by the call
of madness, the "darkness" of the unknown that surrounds us.
Marlow is the moral grounding point of the novel, the
only white man in the Congo who recognizes the evils of colonialism in Africa.
The spectacle of death and enslavement there is overwhelming, so Marlow's
responses (as he would probably argue) aren't extraordinarily moral, just
normal, the only normal ones we see amid the demented greed of the traders. But
Marlow is also the everyman of the novel, the basically decent and intelligent
character who stands for all of us. The ugly truths he confronts are truths we
all have to face. Marlow learns that he has to acknowledge his own heart of
darkness, the call of the primitive in his own nature. (Conrad puts this
symbolically when, late in the story, Marlow confuses the pounding of the savage
drum with the beating of his own heart.) And this is the lesson he tries to
impart to his listeners- and to us.
Almost from the moment Marlow arrives at the Outer
Station he starts hearing about Mr. Kurtz- from the accountant, the manager, the
brickmaker, and finally from the Russian. And he tells us a lot about Kurtz
himself, especially during the long digression that comes just after the attack,
a few pages before the end of Chapter II. But Kurtz himself is on the scene for
only a few pages, and we learn less about him from observation than we do from
what these other characters say about him. In fact, after all the build- up, his
appearance may even seem a little disappointing: he never turns out to be as
exciting as the "unspeakable rites" we're told he participated in. But
Kurtz is more important for what he represents than for what he does- we don't
get to see him do much of anything. Although he isn't the subject of the novel
(Marlow's spiritual journey is), you could call him the focus, the catalyst to
whom the other characters react. He's more present in his effect on others than
in himself. Some characters, such as the Russian and the Intended, are defined
almost solely by their relationship to him.
But though he isn't strongly present as a personality,
as a symbol he's a figure rich with meaning. Kurtz is a microcosm- a whole in
miniature- of the white man's failure in Africa: he goes equipped with the
finest technology and the highest philanthropic ideals and ends up injuring
(even killing) the Africans and stealing their ivory. He reduces technology to
the guns he uses to plunder ivory.
Kurtz also shows us the consequence of inadequate
self-knowledge. He journeys to Africa eager to do good, and completely unaware
of the dark side of his nature, the side that will respond to the call of the
primitive. (It's Marlow who comes to know this side of himself.) Kurtz points up
one of the morals of Marlow's tale: if you aren't aware of the darkness within
you, you won't know how to fight it if you ever need to.
If Marlow stands for work, Kurtz represents the
opposite value, talk. Before meeting him, Marlow can imagine him only talking,
not doing; and when Marlow does finally come face-to-face with him, Kurtz is so
thin from disease that he seems to be little more than a strong, deep voice. His
influence on people (the Russian, the Intended, even the accountant and the
brickmaker) comes through his eloquent words. He is, fittingly, a journalist (a
profession for which Conrad seems to hold little regard: Marlow is disgusted by
the "rot let loose in print" in the Belgian papers). One of his
colleagues thinks he would have made a fine radical politician: after all, if he
could sway individuals by his words, couldn't he sway masses as well? Conrad was
conservative in his own politics; he would have disapproved of Kurtz the
demagogue, the radical orator.
Actions, Marlow seems to be saying, can't lie; but
words can and do. And Kurtz is associated with lies. After explaining that Kurtz
(kurz) is German for short, Marlow tells us: "Well, the name was as true as
everything else in his life- and death. He looked at least seven feet long"
(Chapter III). Kurtz's ideals turn out to be lies when he drops them to become a
devil-god in the jungle. In fact, there is something contaminating in the aura
of lies that surrounds him. Thus, as Marlow is drawn to him, he finds himself
almost irresistibly lying (to the brickmaker), and he continues lying even after
Kurtz's death (to the Intended).
But Kurtz has one quality that even in his degradation
places him on a level above most of the other whites Marlow encounters in
Africa. That quality is consciousness. Kurtz recognizes the evil of his actions;
in fact, as the Russian informs us, he suffers from that knowledge. The other
whites in Africa commit acts (the enslavement and massacre of huge numbers of
people) that they don't even recognize as wrong. So when Marlow talks about the
"choice of nightmares" represented by the manager and Kurtz, he puts
his loyalty with Kurtz, who at least isn't petty, though he is brutal. The
manager, on the other hand, is a talentless nobody who in his pettiness still
brings suffering to others. The depths to which Kurtz sinks is a measure of the
heights he could have risen to.
When Marlow finally arrives at Kurtz's Inner Station,
he encounters a young Russian sailor whose outfit is so colorfully patched that
he reminds Marlow of a harlequin, the traditional Italian clown who dresses in
motley. And he's as simple-minded and almost as ridiculous as a clown- a
startling instance of innocence in the midst of depravity, and a peculiar
contrast to Kurtz. (He also serves as a plot device, filling us in on details
about Kurtz we need to know.) Though he is "Kurtz's last disciple" and
apparently even witnessed the "unspeakable rites" Kurtz participated
in, he's too childlike to have taken part himself. Marlow even admires his
adventurous spirit, though he disapproves of his devotion to Kurtz.
But even his devotion makes him sympathetic. He nursed
Kurtz through two serious illnesses without medical supplies, and he received
little gratitude in return. (Kurtz even threatened to shoot him to get his small
hoard of ivory.) In addition to loyalty, his character is marked by "the
glamour of youth" and "the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical
spirit of adventure." He has wandered the jungles for two years, mostly
alone; and he makes his exit headed for more lonely wanderings. He is full of
self-doubt, he has no great thoughts and no abilities, he tells Marlow. No
wonder such an impressionable youth is mesmerized by "Kurtz's magnificent
eloquence."
But the Russian sailor is also a fool. Marlow tells us
that a fool is safe from madness in the jungle: you can be "too dull even
to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness" (Chapter II).
The Russian is so awed by Kurtz's ideas ("That man has enlarged my
mind," he exclaims) that he becomes morally blind to the evil Kurtz does.
Yet he is not malicious himself; in fact, he's one of the very few whites along
the Congo who isn't a scoundrel. So it's appropriate that he doesn't work for
the odious Company. (His free-agent status, in fact, is what makes the manager
want to hang him.)
If Heart of Darkness has a villain, it's the manager
of the Company's Central Station, who accompanies Marlow on the steamboat to the
Inner Station. But he's a villain in a rather general sense, standing in
Marlow's eyes for all the bloodless bureaucrats who calmly oversee the Company's
mass enslavement of the Africans. He has no moral sensibility, just a business
sensibility: Kurtz's foulest crimes are, to his mind, "deplorable"
only because "the trade will suffer" on account of them (Chapter III).
The manager is a talentless nobody with no special
abilities. His Central Station is a chaotic mess. The only claim he has to his
position is his hardy constitution: he doesn't catch the tropical diseases that
overwhelm other whites (including Kurtz and Marlow). That gives him staying
power.
Practically the first thing Marlow says about the
manager is, "He was commonplace in complexion, in feature, in manners, and
in voice" (Chapter I); and the long description that follows emphasizes his
commonness. In this he is certainly the opposite of his rival, Kurtz, of whom
Marlow remarks, "Whatever he was, he was not common" (Chapter II). He
resents Kurtz so much that he seems to be willing to let the trade suffer by
sabotaging him. Marlow hints that he intentionally sank the steamer so that
Kurtz, already ill, would die before help reached the Inner Station.
So his blandness conceals a deeper malignancy, which
becomes most apparent as he watches Kurtz's slow death with satisfaction:
"the 'affair' had come off as well as could be wished" (Chapter III).
He half-starves the boat's African crew by refusing to stop to let them trade
for food on shore. (He has plenty of his own.)
Unlike Kurtz, he can exercise restraint: "He was
just the kind of man who would wish to preserve appearances. That was his
restraint" (Chapter II). He cares a lot more about the appearance of being
an upright manager than about the actual wrongs he commits. His crimes have the
approval of society- most of them just involve carrying on the business of the
big bureaucratic death-machine known as the Company.
Incidentally, the manager is based on the real-life
Camille Delcommune, manager of a Congo trading station at which Conrad was
stationed in much the same capacity as Marlow. He wrote to his aunt (September
26, 1890): "The manager is a common ivory-dealer with sordid instincts who
considers himself a merchant though he is only a kind of African shop-keeper.
His name is Delcommune.... I can hope for neither promotion nor increase of
salary while he remains here." The dislike was mutual, so we can be sure
that the portrait of the rotten manager is at least partly an act of revenge.
The brickmaker of the Central Station takes Marlow
aside and tries to pump him for information under the mistaken impression that
Marlow has highly influential connections in Europe. He would seem like more of
a villain if he weren't so pathetically ineffective- as Marlow observes, he
can't even manage to make bricks. (His attempt to get information from Marlow is
so obvious and incompetent that it's comical.) He is a young aristocrat who
toadies shamelessly to the manager, doing his menial secretarial tasks. The
alliance has brought him a few special privileges, and also the dislike of the
other pilgrims, who think he's the manager's spy.- He's capable, as he
demonstrates with Marlow, of fawning one minute and making veiled threats the
next. Like his ally the manager, he resents Kurtz because he fears that if the
highly efficient Kurtz is promoted to general manager, his own position will be
endangered. The brickmaker is typical of the malaise that cripples all the
Company's trading stations. Instead of a "devotion to efficiency"
(which Marlow says early on is the saving grace of colonialism), he's devoted to
himself. Trade and progress concern him a lot less than a possible promotion.
On first arriving at the Outer Station, Marlow becomes
acquainted with the Company's chief accountant for Africa, a man who, in his
"devotion to efficiency," is the very opposite of the brickmaker and
the other pilgrims of the Central Station. His books are in "apple-pie
order," and he really does care about his job, just as he cares about his
appearance, which is immaculate. Marlow admires him. Further, the accountant
thinks highly of Kurtz. After all, such an efficient worker would have no reason
to fear for his job (unlike the manager and the brickmaker) if Kurtz were
promoted, which he calmly predicts is what will happen. He holds the rest of the
agents of the Central Station in little regard, and even suggests that to send
Kurtz a letter through there would be imprudent because the agents there might
snoop into it.
However, the accountant's devotion to efficiency
blinds him to the sufferings of both whites and blacks in Africa. When a sick
agent is brought into his office, he complains that the groans distract him from
his work; he is not particularly concerned that the man is dying. He hates the
Africans "to the death" simply because they make noise. Perhaps Conrad
is suggesting- though not explicitly- that even at its best the Company is
inhumane, caring more about numbers than about people. When Marlow last sees the
accountant, he tells us he is "bent over his books,... making correct
entries of perfectly correct transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I
could see the still tree-tops of the grove of death" where a group of
exhausted natives have crawled to die (Chapter I). "Perfectly correct
transactions" is an ironic way of phrasing it. How could transactions that
lead to wholesale death be perfectly correct?
Marlow meets the woman Kurtz was engaged to marry, his
Intended (it is always capitalized), after Kurtz has been dead for more than a
year. She is living under the delusion that Kurtz was generous, kind, and noble
to the end, and Marlow doesn't choose to enlighten her. He lies that Kurtz died
with her name on his lips. (Proper Victorian that he is, Marlow thinks it
fitting and just that women be relegated to the world of "beautiful
illusions.") But he pays a price for his dishonesty. The sudden recognition
of how intimately goodness and lies are mingled in the world almost drives him
to despair.
Though there's something saintly about the Intended,
there's also something slightly repellent in the intensity of her delusion.
She's linked by a gesture to Kurtz's savage mistress. And just as that woman
represents the soul of the jungle in all its cruelty, the Intended is the soul
of civilization, a civilization woven partly of truth and partly of the lies we
need to go on living. The Belgian public needs the lie of the Company's high
ideals and philanthropic intentions in order to stomach the colonization of the
Congo; likewise, the Intended needs the lie of Kurtz's ideals and intentions to
believe that he died for a worthwhile cause. But as Marlow perceives how
necessary it is to lie, Kurtz's final judgment- "The horror! The
horror!"- rings in his ears, and it suddenly seems like a judgment not just
on Kurtz's own life and the darkness of Africa, but a judgment on even the best,
the most beautiful parts of civilization- including the drawing room of this
loyal, tragic woman.
·
KURTZ'S MISTRESS
Talking of Kurtz, Marlow says that the wilderness had
"loved him, embraced him" (Chapter II), and Conrad gives us a vivid
symbol of that embrace in Kurtz's savage mistress. Marlow calls her the soul of
the jungle- "wild and, gorgeous," "savage and superb," and
like the jungle, dangerous. She seems to be a leader of Kurtz's army; at least,
she's the most fearless of his followers, the only one not petrified by the
shriek of the steam whistle. As the boat departs, Marlow reports she
"stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the sombre and glittering
river" (Chapter III); and it's this gesture that reminds Marlow of her when
he sees the Intended "put out her arms as if after a retreating figure...
across the fading and narrowing sheen of the window" in her drawing room.
One woman represents the civilization that loses Kurtz; the other symbolizes the
jungle that destroys him.
The "pilgrims," as Marlow sarcastically
calls them, are the 20 or so agents at the Central Station who carry long staves
like actual religious travelers and talk so much about ivory that "You
would think they were praying to it." Lazy and self-satisfied, they
represent the worst of the whites in Africa: "as to effectually lifting a
little finger- oh, no" (Chapter I). At one of the Congo trading stations
Conrad visited, he recorded in his diary: "Prominent characteristic of the
social life here; people speaking ill of each other." He must have been
remembering this behavior when he wrote that the pilgrims "beguiled the
time by backbiting and intriguing against each other in a foolish kind of
way" (Chapter I). Although he despises them, Conrad uses the pilgrims for
comic relief, especially on the trip upriver. (Three or four of them accompany
Marlow and the manager.) During the attack, their terror and their wild gunfire
are incongruously funny. But the pilgrims are also bloodthirsty; they enjoy
massacring Africans. "Don't! don't you frighten them away," they cry
when Marlow scares off their human targets with the screech of the steam whistle
(Chapter III).
On the trip upriver Marlow enlists a crew of about 30
cannibals to do the boat's manual labor. In contrast to the idiotic pilgrims,
Conrad portrays the cannibals with dignity. They grow increasingly hungry on
board, especially after the pilgrims throw their provision of stinking hippo
meat overboard and the manager refuses to stop to trade for food on shore.
Marlow tries to imagine why they don't eat him and the pilgrim, and the only
answer he can offer is the restraint he values so highly in civilized people:
"Restraint! I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena
prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing
me" (Chapter II). Marlow respects them: "They were men one could work
with, and I am grateful to them." Work is one of Marlow's highest values,
and the pilgrims, we know, are terrible workers. In fact, the pilgrims are
always behaving on a level beneath what you would expect of civilized men, while
the cannibals keep acting on a level above what you would expect of savages.
The fireman is an African who has been trained to
operate the boat's vertical boiler. Marlow says, ironically, that through
instruction he's an "improved specimen," but he doesn't really
understand the machine- he thinks there's an evil spirit inside who gets angry
if you don't give him enough water. The fireman is an expression of Conrad's
pessimism about civilizing the jungle. It can be done- perhaps- but it will be a
long, slow process, much more difficult than all the glib, idealistic talk about
"weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways" (Chapter I)
takes account of.
The African helmsman who steers the boat is an
"athletic black belonging to some coast tribe" who dies from a spear
wound during the attack on the steamer. He's a poor worker, swaggering and
undependable, and Marlow (who calls him a fool) has to watch over him
constantly. His death is largely his own fault, since he abandons his post to
stand at the window and shoot wildly at the attacking tribe. "He had no
restraint," Marlow comments, "no restraint- just like Kurtz"
(Chapter II). Nevertheless, Marlow clearly values him. A subtle bond has grown
between them through working together (Marlow is always thinking about the
rewards of work), and he doesn't think getting to Kurtz was worth the death of
his helmsman.
The manager's uncle arrives at the Central Station
while Marlow is delayed there repairing his boat. He's a short, fat man who
heads something called the Eldorado Exploring Expedition- a group pretending to
be interested in geography but really just out to get rich. Marlow compares them
to burglars. He also overhears a conversation between the manager and his uncle
in which the uncle proves to be particularly bloodthirsty, urging his nephew to
exercise his authority and hang whomever he wants to.
Marlow's foreman is a mechanic at the Central Station,
a boiler-maker by trade. His rough manners make him an object of disdain to the
pilgrims, but he appeals to Marlow because of his capacity and enthusiasm for
work. He makes only a brief appearance, just after Marlow's long talk with the
brickmaker. His simple bluntness is a relief after the brickmaker's caginess,
and his unrefined, working-class bearing forms an effective contrast to the
brickmaker's effete, upper-class smugness.
Marlow's aunt is based, at least in part, on
Marguerite Poradowska, who was related to Conrad by marriage. (She was not a
true aunt, but he addressed her that way in his letters.) Like Marlow's aunt,
Poradowska lived in Brussels and intervened on Conrad's behalf to secure him an
appointment as captain of a Congo steamer.
If Conrad was trying to depict Marguerite Poradowska
realistically, the portrait was not a very flattering one. The aunt has been
swayed by all the "rot let loose in print and talk just about that
time," and she prattles about the high (and false) ideals she's been
hearing about- civilizing the ignorant masses, and so forth- until finally
Marlow has to remind her that the Company is run for profit. Her chatter prompts
the first of several passages on "how out of touch with truth women
are" (Chapter I)- a reflection that comes home during Marlow's encounter
with Kurtz's Intended at the end of the novel.
We learn very little about the actual narrator of the
novel, the man who, aboard the Nellie anchored at the mouth of the Thames, hears
Marlow spin his yarn and later reports it to us. But we can see that he has been
affected by what he hears, as the change in imagery from the beginning to the
end of the book indicates. At the outset he's impressed by all the light on the
Thames, and he thinks about English nautical history in terms of light- for
instance, "bearers of a spark from the sacred fire." By the end, his
imagination is full of darkness. If Marlow intends his tale as a warning that we
need to pay more heed to the "darkness"- the incomprehensible, the
opposite of civilization and progress- then in the case of the narrator, at
least, he's made his point.
Although
most of the action in Heart of Darkness is set in the jungles of the African
Congo, the tale itself is narrated by a sailor aboard a pleasure boat at the
mouth of the Thames River outside London. Both the time of day and the spot are
significant. It's sunset; as the tale turns gloomier, images of darkness get
more and more pervasive. The evening grows gradually darker, so that by the time
Marlow finishes, late in the night, his listeners have literally been enveloped
in darkness. The setting right outside London would put them next to the great
seat of civilization (for an English novelist, at least)- a strategic place from
which to hear a tale of the wilderness. In fact, for an English sailor the mouth
of the Thames would mark the point between the light of civilization and the
unknown ends of the earth. But by the end Marlow has made it clear that the
"darkness" he is talking about has almost as much to do with the city
as with the jungle.
Marlow's
adventure takes place in the Congo Free State, an area that at the time was the
personal property of Leopold II, king of the Belgians. There had been a lot of
empty talk about Leopold's philanthropic and civilizing activities in the Congo,
but by 1899, when Heart of Darkness first appeared, the grim conditions that
actually prevailed there and the grotesquely inhumane treatment of the African
natives were becoming widely enough known to create an international scandal.
Conrad, who served as skipper of a Congo steamer himself in 1890, knew the true
conditions, and much of the gruesome detail is drawn from observation. But he
exaggerated a few points for literary purposes. Specifically, the Congo was
already far more tamed by Conrad's time than the novel suggests. The river was
dotted with active trading stations, and the station that would have been the
equivalent of Kurtz's Inner Station had a number of company agents, not just
one. Conrad's departures from the reality serve to emphasize the isolation of
his characters, and thus to intensify the theme of solitude.
THEMES
The
darkness of the title is the major theme of the book, but the meaning of that
darkness is never clearly defined. On the whole it stands for the unknown and
the unknowable; it represents the opposite of the progress and enlightenment
that dominated the 19th century. Not many years before, it had been widely
believed that science was eventually going to cure the ills of the world; but by
the end of the century a deeper pessimism had taken hold, and the darkness is
Conrad's image for everything he most dreaded. Science had turned out to be a
sham, at least as a route to human happiness- the world wasn't getting any
better. Was the darkness something that was simply a part of the universe,
something that could never be defeated? Or did it come from within human beings?
The "heart of darkness" stands for many things- the interior of the
jungle, the Inner Station, Kurtz's own black heart, perhaps the heart of every
human being.
Conrad
leaves the meanings of this darkness hazy on purpose. As the narrator tells us,-
for Marlow "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but
outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze" (Chapter I). He also calls the story "inconclusive." In
other words, you can't easily reduce the meaning to a couple of sentences.
Conrad doesn't declare- he hints and suggests. This quality sometimes makes it
difficult to put your finger on exactly what it is about a passage that disturbs
or moves or excites you, and it makes it difficult to explain the full meaning
of certain symbols- especially the darkness. But it's exactly this quality that
makes the book so creepy and unsettling that it lingers in the mind.
There
are several running subthemes that you should note. Foremost among these is the
notion of work. Whatever the darkness is, the best way to fend it off, and to
stay sane, is by working. Conrad doesn't pretend that work is enjoyable, but it
strengthens your character and makes you less likely to lose your grip in
difficult situations. (One reason most of the white characters in the novel are
so unattractive is that they don't do their work.) Another value he holds in
esteem is restraint. Self-restraint takes determination, but it may save you
from the grim consequences of thoughtless action. Conrad shows us two unsettling
examples of individuals who lack restraint. One is the black helmsman on
Marlow's boat; his inability to restrain himself leads to his death. The other
example is Mr. Kurtz, whose lack of restraint is to a large degree the subject
of the plot.
Another
running theme could be called the unreliability of high ideals, or simply of
words. (This is surprising from a novelist who's so verbose himself.) Conrad and
his alter ego, Marlow, don't trust words. Actions are what you have to judge
people by: actions can't lie, but words can. A related topic is the theme of
illusions, and of delusions. Conrad believes that some illusions are necessary,
especially for his women characters. But how necessary? And is a lie excusable,
or even commendable, when it supports such an illusion?
STYLE
Since
Marlow's tale is told aloud, Conrad makes his prose resemble a speaking voice.
Thus we get pauses, hesitations, repetitions, digressions- all of which we
normally associate with a speaker, not a writer. You get the sense of Marlow
being at times completely absorbed by his memories, at others becoming
abstracted and letting his mind wander; of his constantly trying to understand
the meaning of his own tale. He is remarkably (sometimes painfully) wordy,
testing a formulation, then backing off and trying another, until he's reached
one he feels satisfied with. It's almost as if he wants to trap his worst
memories in a soft cocoon of words.
Conrad's
so-called impressionist method lets us experience Marlow's sensations along with
him. The author mounts detail on detail before finally putting them all together
to find their significance. For example, at the Inner Station where Marlow has
gone to retrieve Kurtz, he spies six posts with ornamental balls on top and
assumes that they must be the remainder of some kind of fence. Later, looking
through a telescope, the balls come into focus and he realizes they're human
heads. We experience his misperception as well as his sudden revelation, and
even the revelation comes in stages: first his surprise- "its first result
was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow" (Chapter III)- and
then his deduction. So we take part in the mental process. This kind of
immediacy, this emphasis on sensation, makes the jungle seem very real, and it's
particularly effective during such episodes as the attack on the steamer.
But
it has a further implication. The emphasis is on what you can know with your
senses- these facts are reliable. Marlow, of course, is constantly examining his
sensations to find the meaning in them, expressing opinions and doubts, but
seldom coming to firm conclusions. Marlow's experiences, as the narrator tells
us (Chapter I), are "inconclusive," and for such inconclusiveness
Conrad's impressionist style is appropriate.
OTHER
ELEMENTS
POINT OF VIEW
Marlow
is clearly Conrad's alter ego; his opinions don't differ significantly from what
we know about the author's own. But Marlow has tremendous importance as a
literary device. By using an actual speaking sailor to tell the story, Conrad
goes just about as far away as you can get from the typical 19th- century
novel's omniscient narrator- the all-knowing voice of an impersonal author who
told you not only what happened to the characters but also what went on in their
minds. We're never allowed to know more than Marlow himself, and Marlow knows
only what he perceives through his senses. Thus, we're never directly told what
motivated, say, the manager or Kurtz. Instead, we get Marlow's speculations on
what their motivations might have been.
What's
most unusual about the point of view in Heart of Darkness isn't the use of
Marlow as narrator, but that his tale is framed by the narration of another,
nameless observer. As a result, Marlow's whole story appears somewhat
cumbersomely enclosed in quotation marks. Why couldn't Conrad just make Marlow
the primary narrator and drop the nameless voice at the beginning and the end?
One
reason is that by having Marlow in front of us on the cruising yawl Nellie, we
feel the immediacy of his speaking voice, we get the actual sensation of a
crusty sailor spinning a yarn before us. If Conrad had written the whole novel
in the first person, dispensing with the primary narrator, he'd have ended up
with a more "writerly" book, in which Marlow's hesitations and
digressions- which are such an important element in the style- would have no
place. We would also miss the feeling that Marlow was working out the meaning of
his tale as he went along, and that we were a part of that process. A writer,
unlike a talker, usually has things worked out beforehand.
The
meaning of the novel lies not only in what happened in Africa, but also in
Marlow's conviction that he has to tell others about these events as a kind of
warning. The representative Victorians aboard the Nellie need to be told about
the threat of the darkness, the threat to progress and enlightenment, because
for the most part the Victorian world hadn't acknowledged that threat. By
putting his audience, especially the primary narrator, on the deck of the Nellie
with Marlow, Conrad emphasizes this warning aspect of Marlow's tale- and its
effect on his listeners.
OTHER
ELEMENTS
FORM
AND STRUCTURE
Heart
of Darkness is structured as a journey of discovery, both externally in the
jungle, and internally in Marlow's own mind. The deeper he penetrates into the
heart of the jungle, the deeper he delves within himself; by the climax, when
Kurtz has been revealed for the disgrace he is, Marlow has also learned
something about himself. And he returns to civilization with this new knowledge.
Formally,
Heart of Darkness looks forward to many of the developments of the modern novel-
most notably the fracturing of time. Marlow doesn't tell his tale straight
through from beginning to end; he'll skip from an early event to a late event
and back again. Thus, we get several pages about Kurtz- Marlow's impressions and
evaluation of his behavior- close to the end of Chapter II, but Kurtz himself
doesn't appear on the scene until some way into Chapter III. Nor would a typical
19th-century narrator interrupt a buildup of suspense like the depiction of the
boat waiting to be attacked in the fog with a lengthy digression on cannibalism
and self-restraint. But Marlow does. He's describing the fog and the fright of
the white pilgrims on board, which leads him to recall the reactions of the
black Africans on board, and suddenly he's off on a tangent about cannibalism
that brings the development of the action to a complete halt. In a more
traditional novel this passage would have been reserved for a more appropriate
place, for example, when the author first introduced the cannibals. But Marlow
imparts his thoughts as they occur to him. Conrad was trying to find a form that
more closely followed the contours of human thought- a less artificial form than
the traditional novel. (Later novelists notably James Joyce and William
Faulkner, took these experiments with fractured time and space much further.)
Hence the forward and backward leaps, the interruptions, the thoughts left
dangling.