How does Conrad present the other in A Heart of Darkness?

Throughout human history, the concept of the other, that which is distinct and alien to the known, has defined the
frontiers of our identity. Concepts such as nationality, race, and ethnicity have sprang to better explain and
categorise our peculiar fascination they exist so we can easily categorise the alien and the familiar, explain our
occasional sense of belonging, and perhaps even foster identity. For the Roman Empire, for instance, there
existed three types of races; the civicus romanus, the modern, civilized man, the barbarian races who although,
almost identifiable as human, through their engagement in social activities, such as war and trade, were
undoubtedly inferior, and far beyond even their lands, the monstrous races the unknown, and therefore the
most dangerous. As the Christian fever swept through Europe, the trichotomy of the civilized, barbaric and
monstrous became the religious trichotomy of the faithful, the redeemable and the infidel, whose souls were
irrevocably lost, and to whom the label of the monstrous fell. Medieval carvings show people with their faces in
their belly, with many arms or legs, with only one eye on the forehead, or, in general, with features very close to
those of animals; the other was a mysterious, exotic concept, which sometimes thrilled and sometimes terrified
with its strangeness. Even as the myths began giving way to actual fact, the inherent ethnocentricity of all
nations, countries and empires prevented even the idea that there was more than one kind of society from
occurring. Whilst, without a doubt, the post-colonial writers began to stumble upon the notion of distant kinship
with the colonised peoples, their complete humanity had not yet been established.
In A Heart of Darkness, certainly, the other is either little more than a pitiable, passive victim of the colonizers an incapable savage, possessed of little in the way of society or culture or presents the darkest element of the
human mind, which the enlightened European had long since abandoned, and with which the prospect of sharing
any kind of kinship is as terrifying as it is enthralling. It is the starting place from which Europe had evolved; the
primitive barbarian, by whose savagery the progress of the enlightened could be measured. As Achebe has said,
the west seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for
constant reassurance by comparison with Africa.
In fact, the strongest impression which runs throughout the story is that everything, and everyone for that matter
belongs in a certain place, where they are happiest, and this is perhaps that notion which fundamentally
separates the narrator of a Heart of Darkness from the other. Whilst Conrad makes no pretence that the
colonizers belong in the Congo, seeing their attempts as rather ridiculous, the natives are savages, who belong
in the jungle, and to see either out of place is remise of, as Marlow describes the savage who was a fireman, a
dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs. The black fellows paddling their own
boat were a great comfort to look at, in their wild vitality, taken out of their environment they sicken and died.
Similarly, the European efforts to shape Africa in their own efforts are almost comic; Marlow describes even the
attempt to christen the settlements with new names as farcical.
Even though, or perhaps because Marlow is a narrator aimed at debunking the myth of the idea as a great and
wonderful cause, one of our first images of the natives of the Heart of Darkness is pitiable indeed; black shapes
who are crouched, clinging to the earth nothing but black shadows in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment
and despair. They are no more than the emotion they portray simply a grotesque image to horrify the
sensibilities of European intellectualists, the image which got the cause of progress started in the first place, and
even to that there is little intricacy beyond simple suffering. These beings, who are undoubtedly people, are
portrayed with no emotional complexity; they pass by Marlow with the deathlike indifference of unhappy
savages, as if their own unhappiness was beyond their understanding. These moribund shapes are, in fact,
more akin to work animals than people, and that connotation is strong throughout the text; they are imported
from all recesses of the coast and they sicken, because of uncongenial surroundings and unfamiliar food,
rather resembling an animal, dying because it was taken from its natural habitat. They are expendable once they
lose their functionality, and all permitted crawl away, and die slowly in the shadows.
What is more, the highly diverse nature of the colonized peoples is nowhere to be seen, and its value nowhere
near acknowledgement. Perhaps because little was known about cultural norms in the Congo, but perhaps more
certainly, that there was thought to be no culture whatsoever in the Congo, they are given little mention beyond
being presented as a lurid spectacle. Take, for one, the instance of Marlows predecessor, Fresleven, who had
been killed in a quarrel which arose from the misunderstanding about some hens. Yes, two black hens, Marlow
repeats with the horrified astonishment the reader is possibly intended to share. An issue which was undoubtedly
serious enough is trivialised for lack of context and understanding, drawing attention to the fragmented
knowledge the colonizers have of the colonised. All of the vast and varied nations of Africa are blended into one,
homogenous people, labelled the savage. This making of a mythical One out of many, as John Frow remarks,

really draws attention to the status of the other as complementary to the subject; by presenting the other as a
uniformly wild, uncultured and mystifying, it gives to the colonizers a sense of the unity of his culture.
Not only is the other uncultured; he lacks any vestige of society whatsoever. Inhabitants of the heart Congo
present an image of an earlier humanity a barbaric and inferior. We are told that the going up that river was like
traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world. The native man is primitive; man in a natural state, and as
Thomas Hobbes wrote in a state of nature, the life of man would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The
Congo becomes the background for all kinds of atrocities, which are attributed to the 'savage' nature of the
natives. The other becomes a mirror for the subject to see the most primeval part of their own humanity, like
yours ugly.
Oddly enough, this belief that the other is a primative being, makes the other somehow pure in ignorance. It
reminds one of Tacitus' complaint thatthe Gauls that their valour perished with their freedom as, although they
lived ignorance prior to being conquered, ignorance is here a surer defence than any prohibition. Similarly,
Rousseau argued that so much more profitable to these [primitives] is the ignorance of vice than the knowledge
of virtue is to those in society in some odd way, the other is oddly pure, lacking some of the finer vices of
civilized men. It is from this reasoning, rather remise of the reasoning which drove the early Christians to convert
the pagans; the other is savage because he is ignorant, never having access to knowledge. If only he were
offered that access, he would immideatly see the error of his ways. It is therefore the 'white man's burden', the
Christian's duty to birng that knowledge to the ignorant; the mission of conversion therefore is a noble one,
because it offers the oppertunity of enlightenment.
The other, in short, is the antithesis of Europe; everything is rduced to a set of dichotomies black and white,
civilized and savage, the crib of the enlightenment and the heart of darkness. The other complements and
completes the subject, and enables him to better define his identity.