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Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad: A Review

Article · April 2015

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Where is the Heart
of Darkness?
A Review of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Siddhant Kalra
April, 2015
Siddhant Kalra 1

Joseph Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness was written in 1899 and was published the same year.
The novella is often considered to be a part of the Conrad trio of Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim
(1900) and Youth (1902). Incidentally, Marlow, the protagonist of the novella, has also
featured in several other works of Conrad. According to his Congo Diaries, Conrad travelled
to Congo in the 1890‟s, which was at that time the site of the Belgian King Leopold‟s
genocidal atrocities. Heart of Darkness is also set within the same civilizational rift between
Europe and the colonies. It voyages from the heart of the colonial empire in London to
Brussels and finally to the African continent. Autobiographical readings of the text have been
extremely popular owing to Conrad‟s possible alter ego in Marlow and the concurrence of the
setting of the novella with Conrad‟s own voyage. However, in the context of the story (rather,
stories), Conrad‟s placement of himself within it is of little consequence. In the Author‟s note
to the 1917 edition of the volume that of which Heart of Darkness was on story, Conrad
separates himself from Marlow as his creator. Furthermore, Conrad described Heart of
Darkness as a story from experience, but wherein experience is stretched beyond the actual
facts (Conrad, 4). While a completely autobiographical reading of the text will prove to be
reductive, there is undoubtedly one similarity between Conrad and Marlow. Both were
seamen and neither was „typical‟. For both of them, “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” (Conrad, 12).

The experiences in the text, like in Conrad‟s life, pertain to a period of particular relevance to
the present. The age of Imperialism was at its peak and at the same time, European
civilisation bore witness to the coming of modernity. The Victorian and Georgian
sensibilities were giving way to the disillusioned modern man. While Imperialism, within the
limits of its worldview, was a system of excessive material benefits and civilising the world,
modernism was emerging as a critique of its ailments. In the verse of the Metaphysical poets,
of Walt Whitman in America, of T.S Eliot in Britain, the modern man had begun reflecting
on the futility of Imperial purpose. Ironically, while one facilitated the other, they were very
often antithetical of each other. At such a time, Conrad situated Heart of Darkness as
civilizational critique of the Imperial worldview. His characters embody both the
predisposition to the said worldview and the ability to question its assumptions, even if it was
so after an overwhelming voyage to an alien land.

Furthermore, it is not only in his epistemological treatment of the issue that Conrad displays
his modernist sentiment, but also in his craft. His narrative is of the nature of a „frame
narrative‟; a narrative within a narrative. Breaking away from Victorian storytelling,
Conrad‟s innovation marks the cusp of the Victorian and the Modern Era. The primary
implication of this employment for the story was that the narrative is relegated to the mercy
of the experiences of the characters that are narrating. Conrad composed a discursive
narrative, in line with the exceptionalism that modernism ascribes to the subjective
experience of every human mind. This notion resonates with the aesthetics of the French
symbolists that warranted the indefinite and infinite nature of symbolic meaning. Ian Watt
termed Conrad‟s technique as fundamentally impressionist (Watt, 169). At the same time,
Conrad‟s characters synthesize reality for their audience and consequently, the reader,
Siddhant Kalra 2

through their psychological temperament and their epistemological predispositions; a trope

identifiable with a sensibility of expressionism, which was emerging around the same time in
Europe.

Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness tells the story of a voyage from colonial Europe to the bare and
untamed African continent. While the story unveils what is, in fact, a journey through sea and
land, it is also a journey through time. As Marlow himself remarks upon setting his sight
upon the African wilderness, it is indeed, “a journey to the beginnings of time” (Conrad, 53).
In traversing the physical distance between Europe and Africa, Marlow and his crew also
traverse the civilizational distance between the two. Marlow‟s identification of the separation
between Europe and Africa as temporal alludes to the heart of the discourse that emerges as a
narrative reflection on human epistemology itself. This discourse is of man‟s relationship
with his environment; of the relationship between nature and history; and by extension, the
relationship between him and his fellow man. Inherent in this discourse is the subliminal
criterion for progress and consequently, for civilisation. The association between subversion
of nature and progress has plagued the real world and Conrad‟s Universe alike. In the African
wilderness, the European colonizers see „unutilized‟ wilderness; infinite potential for
resources and in the African man, they see an „uncivilised‟ savage.

Interestingly, there is no prominent voice of the colonized in the story and yet, the novella
condemns the colonizer‟s worldview. One dimension of Conrad‟s writing that serves to
allude to this notion is its gloomy and ominous tonality that Conrad maintains throughout.
However, this tonality serves not only to elicit a particular response from the reader, but
primarily to create the subjective experience of one of the two narrators. In his composition
of the frame narrative, Conrad achieves a lingering sense of epistemological uncertainty for
both the narrators and the reader. It is made clear right at the outset that the reader is at the
mercy of two storytellers aboard the Nellie: The unnamed narrator and Marlow. If we are to
believe their realities, we may also be internalising their convictions. As human narrators, the
veracity of their accounts must be under scrutiny. This is not so only in the sense of
fabrication of events by them, but in the sense that they – particularly Marlow – create the
only reality that exists and as he himself points out time and again, it is impossible to feel the
events without experiencing them.

Marlow‟s account is the only source of reality for the events that took place in Africa. He is
by no means an objective and detached narrator. He is a unique seaman in that he resides on
the fringes of the Imperial system, partly interpolated by its perceptions of Africa and its
people and partly in denial of them. His narrative is pregnant with the inflections of his own
temperament and convictions. The tonality of his narrative frequently sees the „darkness‟
throughout his voyage, never identifying where it comes from. Seemingly, the only site of
this lingering darkness is his mind, torn between Imperialist assumptions and a growing
empathy for the „savages‟. Through second hand accounts, he contrives a myth around Kurtz
before seeing him. He finds admiration for his conviction and at the same time, proclaims
him a mad man. Throughout his narrative, the idea of Kurtz traverses several trajectories: of a
great political leader to one character and a humanist and genius to another. Marlow‟s
Siddhant Kalra 3

judgement of him as a mad man driven to madness by somehow transcending the Imperialist
ideology, the permitted aspirations acquires the illusion of reality. All other perceptions of
him seem misconstrued. But one must remember that the meaning of an episode lies outside
the narrative, and herein lies the ingenuity of Conrad‟s frame narrative.

The narrative of the first unnamed narrator is a spectator to Marlow‟s act of storytelling.
From the vantage point of this narrative, the narrator in Marlow is humanized and his subtle
disillusionment with the Imperial system becomes more evident to his audience that it ever
was to him in his own narrative. Upon completion of Marlow‟s story, the unnamed narrator is
left to ascertain where the Heart of Darkness truly lies. In the beginning, this narrator had
indulged in the Imperial rhetoric of lauding London as the greatest city and his/her
apprehension towards the African continent was palpable. Marlow‟s story only serves to
exacerbate the epistemological uncertainty that he himself had invoked upon the Nellie.
Neither does Marlow abhor the Imperial flag, nor does he embrace it. In fact, that wasn‟t the
purpose of his story. There probably was none. What‟s left is the uncertainty in the heart of
the unnamed narrator. In a sea of uncertainty that questioned the very assumptions that the
four crew members boarded the Nellie with, the binary of good and evil became as fractured
as the narrators‟ conviction in the paradigm of their age. Ironically, without a subaltern voice
in either narrative, the worldviews of the narrators are shaken and their assumptions,
questioned, entirely within their paradigm. The voyage to inner station of Kurtz undoubtedly
induces the reflection, but there is little, if any, catalyst to advocate for the worldview of the
colonized. The arguments for this worldview are made through différance.

Conrad wrote a letter to his friend R.B Cunninghame Graham the same year that The Heart of
Darkness was first published. In it, he tells his friend that the instalments that would follow
the first would be so enshrouded in secondary notions that even Graham may not see through
them! (Chantler, 1). Conrad‟s narrative transcends the facile mechanics of linear, directly
referential storytelling. In doing so, it elicits the epistemological uncertainty and
incommunicability that the dialectics of human history are actually synthesized by. In doing
so, he humanised the act of storytelling and unleashed a plethora of readings of his novella. It
is no surprise then, that while many consider Heart of Darkness to be an austere
condemnation of Imperialism and the materialist worldview, prominent African critics such
as Chinua Achebe – widely considered to be the father of the African novel - have
condemned it as a grossly racist text.

The ambivalence towards the colonizers is a continuity that still exists in the mind of the
post-colonization reader. In fact, there still exist varied readings of the text. Is the Imperial
crown inherently demeaning and oppressive or was it the people at the time who betrayed
their humanity? There exist multiple perspectives to this question. In fact, if the world‟s
postcolonial history has taught us anything, it is that they are all „true‟. In that sense Heart of
Darkness reflects the collision of worldviews that Marlow and party narrate, in the
postcolonial reader‟s placement of his/her own, „real‟ history. In retrospect, the novella
questions our assumptions of progress, relegating both the opportunistic colonizer‟s and the
native‟s worldviews to an arbitrary battlefield, where history is still under construction;
Siddhant Kalra 4

where the colonial conception of progress and civilisation hasn‟t consolidated itself to the
level of a self-evident truth.

Kurtz‟s madness is still resounding. The postmodern world has witnessed the modernization
of the Imperial process itself. New-age imperialism, while still thriving on material wealth, is
one of military preponderance and democracy. The trajectory that Conrad so skilfully
embossed in the literary consciousness of history has come a long way ever since. In the age
of the military industrial complex, Francis Ford Cappola‟s Apocalypse Now (1979) displaces
the context seamlessly and in doing so, attests to the friction between the two civilizational
worldviews at war. It is this friction that perhaps manifests itself as madness in Kurtz, both in
the text and the film. It is the unrelenting angst accompanied by this friction that begs the
question, „Where is the heart of darkness?‟
 Siddhant Kalra 5

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Chantler, Ashley. Heart of Darkness: Character Studies. Bloomsbury Academic. Paperback –
May 27, 2008. Print.
2. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Rupa & Co. 4th January 2001. Print.
3. Wasserman, Jerry. Narrative Presence: the Illusion of language in "Heart of Darkness".
Studies in the Novel. Vol. 6, No. 3 (fall 1974), pp. 327-338. Studies in the Novel, University of
North Texas. Web. JStor. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29531671
4. Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1979. Print.

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