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 categ
orise our peculiar fascination – they exist so we can easily categorise the alien and the familiar, explain our occas
ional sense of belonging, and perhaps even foster identity. For the Roman Empire, for instance, there existed thr
ee types of races; the civicus romanus, the modern, civilized man, the barbarian races who although, almost iden
tifiable 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 religiou
s trichotomy of the faithful, the redeemable and the infidel, whose souls were irrevocably lost, and to whom the la
bel of the monstrous fell. Medieval carvings show people with their faces in their belly, with many arms or legs, w
ith only one eye on the forehead, or, in general, with features very close to those of animals; the other was a myst
erious, 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 wri
ters 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 h
uman 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 pr
imitive barbarian, by whose savagery the progress of the enlightened could be measured. As Achebe has said, ‘t
he west seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constan
t 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 separate
s 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 t
o 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 Euro
pean efforts to shape Africa in their own efforts are almost comic; Marlow describes even the attempt to christen t
he 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 shape
s’ who are ‘crouched’, ‘clinging to the earth’ – ‘nothing but black shadows’ ‘in all the attitudes of pain, abandonm
ent and despair.’ They are no more than the emotion they portray – simply a grotesque image to horrify the sensi
bilities of European intellectualists, the image which got the ‘cause of progress’ started in the first place, and eve
n to that there is little intricacy beyond simple suffering. These beings, who are undoubtedly people, are portraye
d with no emotional complexity; they pass by Marlow with the ‘deathlike indifference of unhappy savages’, as if th
eir own unhappiness was beyond their understanding. These ‘moribund shapes’ are, in fact, more akin to work a
nimals 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 anim
al, dying because it was taken from its natural habitat. They are expendable once they lose their functionality, an
d 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 ne
ar acknowledgement. Perhaps because little was known about cultural norms in the Congo, but perhaps more ce
rtainly, that there was thought to be no culture whatsoever in the Congo, they are given little mention beyond bein
g presented as a lurid spectacle. Take, for one, the instance of Marlow’s predecessor, Fresleven, who had been
killed in a quarrel which ‘arose from the misunderstanding about some hens. Yes, two black hens,’ Marlow repea
ts with the horrified astonishment the reader is possibly intended to share. An issue which was undoubtedly serio
us 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 p
eople, labelled the ‘savage’. This ‘making of a mythical One out of many’, as John Frow remarks, really draws at
tention to the status of the other as complementary to the subject; by presenting the other as a uniformly wild, un
cultured 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 prese
nt an image of an earlier humanity – a barbaric and inferior. We are told that the ‘going up that river was like trave
ling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.’ The native man is primitive; man in a natural state, and as Thom
as Hobbes wrote ‘in a state of nature, the life of man would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ The Cong
o becomes the background for all kinds of atrocities, which are attributed to the 'savage' nature of the natives. Th
e 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 remi
nds one of Tacitus' complaint thatthe Gauls that ‘their valour perished with their freedom’ as, although they lived i
gnorance 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 t
o those in society’ – in some odd way, the other is oddly pure, lacking some of the finer vices of civilized men. It i
s 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, h
e 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 oppertun
ity of enlightenment.

The other, in short, is the antithesis of Europe; everything is rduced to a set of dichotomies – black and white, civil
ized 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.