Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness

Srila Nayak

Conradiana, Volume 44, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 29-49 (Article)

Published by Texas Tech University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cnd.2012.0004

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/542238

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 Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness
SRILA NAYAK

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

In Frederic Jameson’s famous study, Joseph Conrad’s fiction is understood as

a contradictory construct of “imperfectly differentiated cultural spaces” (208)
and styles. Novels such as Lord Jim and Nostromo contain discontinuous
generic conventions split between literary structures of Romance and mass
culture and a highbrow “impressionist will-to-style.” In an important depar-
ture from Jameson’s argument, Patrick Brantlinger argues that Conrad’s
impressionist or modernist style in Heart of Darkness is identical to conven-
tions of romance narratives: “But the chief difficulty with Jameson’s argument
is that the will-to-style in Conrad’s text is also a will to appropriate and remake
Gothic romance conventions” (264). In his thesis, Brantlinger points to the
contradictions of Conrad’s impressionist style as it delivers a critique of
empire at the same time as it “submerges” the critique under the abstractions
of a “will-to-style” that incorporates older codes of racial representation.
Brantlinger’s essay assumes that Conrad’s tale outlines a familiar encounter
between self and the other that reproduces nineteenth-century racial binaries
and creates a dualism between the aesthetic moral vision of anti-imperialism
and the failure of this very vision in Heart of Darkness.
Despite the aforementioned point of difference, both Jameson and
Brantlinger’s assessments equally assume that Conrad’s critique of imperialism
is compromised by an aestheticism that either “derealizes” the material aspects
of imperialism or accommodates a racist ideology, which negates the anti-
imperialist text. Contra Jameson and Brantlinger, I argue that the complexities
that characterize Conrad’s literary modernism create a divided narrative in
which the relations among modernism, race and imperialism work in several
ways. Primary among these is the division between the modernist accounts of
Marlow’s subjectivity and Kurtz’s subjectivity, closely identified with each other
in Edward Said’s analysis (22), and their respective methods of registering the

Conradiana, vol. 44 no. 1, 2012 © Texas Tech University Press

30 Co nra d ia na

effects of empire and racial otherness. More recent readings of Conrad’s novella
mark a departure in the discussion of race from earlier critiques by Chinua
Achebe and Frances B. Singh, in which Heart of Darkness is seen to contain
“suggestions that the evil which the title refers to is to be associated with Afri-
cans, their customs, and their rites” (Singh 43). This solid localization of dark-
ness is contested in Hunt Hawkins’s argument, “The lasting political legacy of
Heart of Darkness, more than any confirmation of racism, has been its alarm
over atrocity” (375). Reading against the grain of the general formula of ana-
lyzing racism in Heart of Darkness, Paul B. Armstrong argues that Conrad’s
representation of the Other is not an act of racism as Achebe alleges, but a
daring and deliberate exploration of the difficulties in understanding “cultural
otherness”: “Conrad is neither a racist nor an exemplary anthropologist but a
skeptical dramatist of epistemological processes. Heart of Darkness is a calcu-
lated failure to depict achieved cross-cultural understanding” (23).
While most accounts of Conrad’s politics of representation in Heart of
Darkness tend to promote a singular reading of Conrad’s modernism as either
germane to an exposé of imperialism and genuinely anti-racist or racist and
weakly anti-imperialist, our understanding of the relations between the text’s
aesthetics and imperialism must take into account the diverse ways in which
various aspects of modernism are shaped by the colonial encounter. In her
essay, Benita Parry revisits Heart of Darkness through the critiques of Chinua
Achebe and V. S. Naipaul and finds them “inadequate to comprehending the
novel’s plural and contradictory discourses” (40). Against Achebe’s charge of
racism in Conrad’s representation of Africa and Naipaul’s defense of the novel’s
“totally accurate reportage” about the “world’s half-made societies” (40), Parry
asserts that the text does not accommodate such univocal readings. Parry, by
turns, recognizes the novel’s capacity for self-critique as well as its “racist
idiom,” (40) its “powerful critique of imperialism as historical undertaking and
ethos” (48) and its simultaneous “complicity with the imperial imaginary”
(47). Parry’s analysis is significant for its recognition of the novel’s unresolved
dialectics, and while I find her study of the novel’s indeterminacies very useful,
my essay focuses more closely upon how the text’s contradictory cultural con-
texts both affirm and deny the aesthetics of literary modernism. Thus, the
analysis that emerges from such a reading refuses an either/or stance with
respect to the relations between aesthetics and a critique of imperialism in
Heart of Darkness, and argues that the compromised nature of Marlow’s per-
ceptions does not nullify the radical and unsettling critique of imperialism that
emerges through the characterization of Kurtz. Nor does a transgressive alter-
ity or self-difference within Kurtz, central to the narrative’s attack upon impe-
n a ya k—Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness 31

rialism, dilute the structures of imperial ethnocentrism that are employed to

highlight the uniqueness of Marlow’s modern consciousness.
The first part of my analysis argues that Conrad delivers an implicit critique
of modernist style that unknowingly throws light upon the ideological under-
pinnings of Marlow’s putatively fragmented consciousness and opens an ave-
nue to critically explore this nature of the consciousness. Conrad’s critique of
impressionism as a mode that can only offer a curtailed understanding of the
world ultimately frustrates the aspirations of Marlow’s impressionist narration.
Marlow’s response to the Congo and her people is unrelentingly dramatized by
Conrad as trapped between a desire to articulate a new consciousness that is
free of all ideological commitments to a stultifying Western rationality and
wedded to the encapsulation of an acutely subjective impression, and his fail-
ure to do so. Thus, the cumulative effect of the explicit moments of rupture
between the familiar and the “ineffable” in the text, the latter often signified by
encounters between Marlow and a pathologized other, is to underscore the
confinement of a putatively modern/ist consciousness to oversimplified cate-
gories of inarticulate wonder and nightmare, what Jameson refers to as “the
naturalist psychic and narrative texts of daydreaming and nightmare” in Lord
Jim (212).
The second part of my analysis argues that anti-imperialism as a product
of literary modernism occurs in Conrad’s construction of a crisis in the
boundaries between self and other that leads to an anti-imperialist portrait
of Kurtz. While it has often been recognized that Conrad’s text exposes
the violent and mercenary nature of imperialism, an attack on the unitary
Western self as a means of imperial critique needs further attention. Thus, the
trope of Kurtz’s disjunctive subjectivity is shown to be the result of the social
and political relationships of imperialist capitalism. Kurtz’s altered identity is
a disruptive critical force that compels recognition of the culture of imperial
authoritarianism and rationalization and simultaneously seeks to subvert it.

Modernist Consciousness and Marlow

I would like to begin my analysis by offering a more complex account of the
relations between Marlow’s representation of self and colony and Conrad’s
modernist politics. Marlow’s subjective perception of the colonial world con-
stitutes the fundamental feature of his impressionist method. Conrad repeat-
edly suggests the limitations of an individual’s impression as Marlow’s
consciousness proves unequal to the task of grasping reality or truth that tran-
scends the bounds of the European mind. The representation of Marlow’s
32 Co nra d ia na

voice clearly indicates a gulf between his impressions of the Congo and her
people and his transformed perception of the world after he comes into con-
tact with Kurtz.
Below are the two narratives that encapsulate the distance between mere
visual perception and conceptual intelligence:

I. “There were moments when one’s past came back to one; but it came in the shape
of an unrestful and noisy dream remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelm-
ing realities of this strange world of plants and water and silence.” (34)

II. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end and to show my loyalty to
Kurtz once more. . . . ​If such is the form of ultimate wisdom then life is a greater
riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair’s breadth of the last oppor-
tunity for pronouncement and I found with humiliation that probably I would have
nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He
had something to say. (70)

In the former, Marlow presents his listeners with a text that does away with
the necessity for explanation and privileges a narration that only registers the
comatose mind’s perception of a preternatural landscape. In the second pas-
sage, the conceptual takes precedence over the language of psychic disloca-
tion, as retrospect and distance allow Conrad to interpret the significance of
his knowledge of Kurtz. Marlow’s narrative seems to be on the edge of a mod-
ernist “turn inward” towards a non-material identity. However, in his account
of the Congo, Marlow skirts the language of a new consciousness that would
surmount the limitations of the West’s experience of Africa. This projection of
a consciousness enfeebled by the colonial difference it encounters signals Con-
rad’s uncertainty regarding the radical nature of modernist identity, its limita-
tions and contradictions in the face of cultural difference. Conrad’s 1905 essay
on Henry James contains his clear affirmation of consciousness as the crux of
aesthetic value: . . . ​the demand of the individual to the artist is, in effect, the
cry, ‘Take me out of myself!’ meaning really, out of my perishable activity into
the light of imperishable consciousness” (“Henry James”13). In the same
essay, Conrad goes on to point out that the “light of consciousness” (13) would
help to “interpret the ultimate experience of mankind” (14). Conrad shows the
shrinking of the radical consciousness under the “pressure . . . ​of dreams and
nightmares” experienced by Marlow and yet also returns to Marlow’s con-
sciousness as a site of revelation and insight into the meaning of life after his
meeting with Kurtz.
Conrad’s self-critique of modernism shows up not only the difficulties of
n a ya k—Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness 33

achieving conceptual meaning when the consciousness is reduced to nullity by

its perceptions. The critique, more significantly, underscores Marlow’s willing-
ness to correlate an impressionist colonial representation with objective truth
and meaning that is in need of no further justification: “And this stillness of life
did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force
brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.
I got used to it afterwards. I did not see it any more. I had no time” (34). In his
famous “preface” to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Conrad states that fiction “if
it at all aspires to be art” must appeal through the form of “an impression con-
veyed through the senses” (ix). He asserts that this splinter of an impression
must arrest through the force of its particularity: “The task approached in ten-
derness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without
fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. It is to
show its vibration, its color, its form; and . . . ​reveal the substance of its truth”
(x). Yet Marlow’s narration is not impressionist in this special way of convey-
ing a particularized impression that ought to, as Conrad points out, “make you
see” (x). Describing his journey in the African continent, past the French colo-
nies, Marlow explicitly says that his consciousness is unable to grasp a particu-
lar visual impression: “Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized
impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon
me. It was like a weary pilgrimage with hints of nightmare” (14).
Although a correlation between Conrad’s hopes for impressionism in the
“Preface” and its operation in “Heart of Darkness” may not exist, it is necessary
to recognize that the conflict primarily centers on the relations between the
perceiving mind and the chosen mode of representation. In no uncertain
terms, Conrad attributes impressionist technique to the artist’s act of
“descend[ing] within himself,” and finding “in that lonely region of stress and
strife . . . ​the terms of his appeal” (viii). Geoffrey G. Harpham points out that
in this manifesto, “Conrad is clearly struggling to convert his own painful
experience of profound solitude into a basis for universal kinship: we are alike,
he says, in being totally alone” (19). Conrad’s literary doctrine of “the form of
an impression” marks a new terrain for the consciousness that tries to bridge
an individual subjective sense impression with an universalizable aesthetic
form which would convey the impression in a way that “would appeal primar-
ily to the senses” (“Preface”ix). In his brilliant study of literary impressionism,
Jesse Matz argues that the impression’s vagueness, ambivalence, and uncer-
tainty have been mistakenly interpreted by generations of critics as impres-
sionism’s “range of possibilities” and a “mediation” of opposites (18), whereas,
impressionism is “primarily indecisive” (18) and unresolved about the many-
sided nature of an impression: “We will understand Impressionism when the
34 Co nra d ia na

impression is for us what it was for them (impressionists): a mercurial meta-

phor for perception, one that inspires and endangers aesthetic effort” (18). Con-
rad’s statement that “an appeal” in fiction “to be effective must be an impression
conveyed through the senses” (“Preface”ix) accords the impression the status
of a worthwhile experience with profound implications for both literature and
the modern consciousness.
According to Matz, for writers such as Conrad, “the impression is nothing
less than a name for the aesthetic moment itself, a new sign for the old bridge
between art and life” (13). One can then say that Marlow’s narration is shaped
both by impressionism’s ability to facilitate a modernist narrative that rebels
against older forms of narrative imagination as well as its ability to undermine
“written words” (Conrad, “Preface” x). Conrad extols the virtues of an art of
the senses and its capacity to “disclose (its) inspiring secret,” (“Preface” x) but
Heart of Darkness underscores the inability of this aesthetic form to adequately
represent the narrative’s inspiring secret.
The “creative irresolution” (Matz 19) regarding the aims of impressionist
literature that is embodied in this text is also inextricable from the constraints
that govern Western colonial discourses of cultural differences. Conrad’s delib-
erate exposure of the inconclusive nature of impressionism ultimately results
in an aborted modernism, as Marlow’s consciousness centers radical percep-
tion upon a reiteration of conventional rationalizations about the Other, and
his desire to powerfully render the inarticulate chaos of an impression becomes
a symbol of the threat of an alien landscape and her people. As we shall see,
Conrad’s advocacy of a subjective impressionism whose aim is to afford a
“glimpse of truth” is thwarted by a consciousness that can no longer facilitate
articulation or verbal representation, but, instead, regards its Manichean battle
with the colonial other and the landscape as “unsayable.”
In short, Heart of Darkness can be seen to signal a distinction between the
ambitions for an idealized impressionism and its less than ideal workings in
practice. Marlow’s filtering consciousness is the chief medium for conveying
impressions and the conflicted relationship between a modern consciousness
and the impressionist mode indicates the complex dialectic that defines the
relations between various modernist tropes; Marlow’s narration insistently
identifies a novel consciousness that glimpses the truth beyond the “surface of
ordinary things,” at the same time this modern consciousness resists the desire
to represent an experience that goes beyond visible objects. Thus, modernist
style or impressionism is blunted, subdued or deflected because it is mediated
through a consciousness that is either overwhelmed by the world it confronts
or is unsure how far it ought to go to represent a radically different other. Ray-
n a ya k—Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness 35

mond Williams makes an important point about how the social and material
world of the Congo is submerged under an abstraction:

It is . . . ​astonishing that a whole school of criticism has succeeded in emptying

Heart of Darkness of its social and historical content. . . . ​The Congo of Leopold
follows . . . ​an endless substitution in which no object is itself, no social experi-
ence direct, but everything is translated into what can be called a metaphysical
language—the river is Evil; the sea is Love or Death. Yet only called metaphysical,
because there is not even that much guts in it. No profound and ordinary belief,
only a perpetual and sophisticated evasion. (145)

Thus, Marlow at various times, invokes the other, only to capture it in the
generalized terms of allegory or colonial ethno-geographic constructs and to
admit the impossibility of a form that would render the specificity or particu-
larity of this extreme experience. Marlow says that he avoided the temptation
of a “response to the terrible frankness” of the other because he had to pay
attention to the “surface-truth” of work, which would have been enough to
save a “wiser man” (36). Yet once again “the mere incidents of the surface”
rescue Marlow from discerning the “inner truth—luckily, luckily” of the
“implacable force” at the heart of darkness (34). Thus, the African subject, in
this context, is not the Romantic medium through which a break with older
forms of consciousness can be achieved; Marlow’s narrative of modernism
confronts the Other with a strenuous grip on the mind that refuses to see,
arresting the impressionist mode, until the other has been exorcized: “It
looked at you with a vengeful aspect . . . ​I did not see it any more” (34).
However, the narrative of modernism returns in a different guise when
Marlow commences his account of Kurtz. The complex intimacy between
them and Marlow’s pledged “loyalty” to Kurtz become the symbols of radical
forms of consciousness and a new genre of modernist fulfillment. Marlow’s
narrative text repeatedly announces a rupture between the new conventions of
modernism and the conventions of Romance and realism and identifies a
modern consciousness as the point of departure for a new aesthetic model.
Marlow’s self-reflexive subjectivity marks its difference from older forms of
consciousness, by highlighting its perception of a profound evil that is distinct
from Gothic and realist stereotypes of evil and horror that merely reflect emo-
tions attached to visible objects. Thus, Marlow frequently distinguishes the
conventional vileness of the trading outpost Manager from the “ineffable”
amoral force of the tropics and designates the sight of the severed heads on
stakes outside Kurtz’s compound as an experience of a tangible savagery that
36 Co nra d ia na

doesn’t affect Marlow’s consciousness to the same extent as other intangible

and “subtle horrors”: “After all, that was only a savage sight while I seemed at
one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle hor-
rors, where pure uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief . . .” (58).
A similar instance of a dramatized face-off between a banal pre-modernist
savagery and an ineffable modernist evil occurs when Marlow discovers the
disappearance of Kurtz from his cabin:

I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror, uncon-
nected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What made this emotion so over-
powering was—how shall I define it—the moral shock I received, as if something
altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul had been thrust
upon me unexpectedly. This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second and
then the usual commonplace deadly danger, the possibility of a sudden onslaught
and massacre, or something of the kind, which I saw impending was positively wel-
come and composing. (64)

The greater impact of an “inconclusive experience” upon the soul is contrasted

with a more “commonplace” perception of danger that is devoid of the moral
insight that corresponds to modernist subjectivity. Ian Watt points out that
the basis of “this narrative method is subjective moral impressionism” (355),
and Watt’s characterization is helpful in understanding how the narrative is
particularly marked by a self-referential modernism. One of the issues that
comes to prominence here is the rendering of a new aesthetics of experience
connected with an interiority and a moral perspective that strives to go beyond
conventional generic notions of villainy and heroism.
Towards the end of the novel, a preference for a modernist genre that cor-
responds to an exceptional subjectivity is announced with Marlow’s move to
foreground the more complex experience of knowing Kurtz, what he terms as
“the foundations of our intimacy” (65). The latter experience is opposed to
encounters with other ivory-hungry imperialists in the Congo who may appall
but do not bestow any significantly new moral insights: “I had never breathed
an atmosphere so vile and I turned mentally to Kurtz for relief ” (62). Marlow’s
revulsion, provoked by the manager’s criticism of Kurtz’s “unsound method,”
embodies, metaphorically, an intense desire to break away from the tradition
of the representation of a banal and ultimately uninteresting form of human
evil to focus on a subject who represents a new selfhood that can be under-
stood on a plurality of levels. Marlow’s attachment to Kurtz’s final declaration,
“the horror, the horror” is the insignia of modernism which marks the excision
n a ya k—Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness 37

of other European voices, constitutive of modern imperial culture and other

Western genres of imperial adventure tale and Romance.
At this point, I would like to return to Marlow’s colonial representation to
offer a more elaborate analysis of the relations between the latter and the larger
context of modernism. If Marlow’s narrative text functions as Conrad’s cri-
tique of modernism then it is imperative to approach the question of how the
politics of colonial representation overwhelms a modernist intention to cut
ties with older forms of consciousness. The latter itself indicates the complexity
of modernism as Heart of Darkness allows for a skeptical response to modern-
ism’s central trope of radical subjectivity and highlights the contradictions of
aligning the trope of an alienated consciousness with a colonial representation.
The philosopher Charles Taylor concludes Sources of the Self with an important
insight into the nature of modernism’s preoccupation with consciousness. A
conventional paradox of modernism, Taylor points out, has been its “slide to
subjectivism and an anti-subjectivist thrust at the same time” or the tendency
of twentieth-century art to “go inward” which simultaneously involves “a
decentring of the subject” (456). Through a study of the distinct differences
between a Romantic conception of self and modernist interiority, Taylor argues
that for post-Romantics “a turn inward, to experience or subjectivity, didn’t
mean a turn to a self to be articulated, where this is understood as an align-
ment of nature and reason or instinct and creative power. On the contrary, the
turn inward may take us beyond the self as usually understood, to a fragmenta-
tion of experience which calls our ordinary notions of identity into question”
(462). So, how do Marlow’s perceptions of colonial difference shape the self-
articulation of his identity?
In an important essay, Michael Valdez Moses asserts that “the Conradian
scene of the imperial encounter,” in contrast to Edward Said’s famous thesis
about Western colonialism’s construction of the Orient, testifies to the “disori-
entation” of the Western mind and its failure to ensure a “modern European
power-knowledge continuum that energizes, directs, and legitimates the impe-
rial project” (44). The Western mind “finds itself at a loss, overthrown, con-
fused . . .” and experiences “uncertainty and alienation, radical skepticism, and
intense critical self-examination” as the “categories of Western knowledge and
power are . . . ​unsettled and cast into doubt “(Moses 45). However, this frag-
mentation of the Western mind in the colony is only temporary and does not
defeat the ethnographic concepts of difference and imperial power structures
that aid European construction of the Orient. The modernist depiction of Mar-
low’s consciousness, as the latter narrates his encounter with the Congo,
emerges as an inadequate mode for a new kind of subjectivity. Marlow’s “pre-
historic” Congo resists modernism’s attempt to make it signify the Western
38 Co nra d ia na

subject’s new “epiphanic” consciousness. Conrad represents Marlow’s experi-

ence in the Congo in terms of a complex dualism, one that registers the “frag-
mentation” of the unitary Western self as it confronts an extreme otherness,
and at the same time is straitjacketed, due to an extremely narrow perception
of the other, within a state of “dream-sensation” (41). Marlow’s claims to have
achieved a greater insight into the non-visible realm are simultaneously under-
mined by a stereotypically elementalist description of his consciousness as
“wondering and secretly appalled” (35), or, “captured by the incredible which
is the very essence of dreams. . . .”(27). Thus, on the one hand, Marlow’s con-
sciousness is construed as modernist because he discerns hidden realities as he
penetrates “deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness” (35). On the other
hand, Marlow’s desire to inaugurate the epistemology of a new perception is
thwarted by a “counter-epiphanic” thrust of immobility, panic and
incomprehension.
Charles Taylor moves beyond an understanding of modernism according
to its “negative thrust” of anti-Romanticism and its rejection of the “expressive
self,” to explore modernism’s “opening toward epiphany” as the constitutive
mode of insight and illumination (488). In a penetrating critique, Simon
Gikandi points out that Taylor’s definition of modernism as an epiphanic
moment of “revelation and insight” (31), achieved through close contact with
the other, is inadequate to capture the complexities that emerge when the other
is the “primitive or barbarian . . . ​constitutive of the aesthetic ideology of mod-
ernism” (32). Taylor’s insight about modernism was that epiphanic mode
stemmed from modernism’s realization that “unmediated experience” was not
possible. Modernism sought to overcome this lacuna of European modernity
by directing its formal innovations to bridging the distance between represen-
tation and experience to achieve an epiphanic “retrieval of experience.” A
choice between forms best suited to recapturing epiphanic experience con-
fronts modernism: “What was needed was a distinction between forms which
gave us experience dead and etiolated, and those which brought it back vivid
and full” (473). Modernism’s close attention to the “relation of form to experi-
ence” produces forms of representation, including impressionism, which make
revelation and insight possible. The subjective impressionist narrative method
that Marlow employs to capture the hidden reality behind appearances is
bounded by imperial discourse on the difference between Self and Other. Con-
rad promotes the limitations of impressionism as a mode of unprecedented
insight and asserts its curtailed nature as an individualized perception of the
world. In his preface to The Nigger of The “Narcissus,” Conrad points out that
the inwardness of the true artist results in an impression that “creates the
moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time” (280). However, the
n a ya k—Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness 39

other world of colonized tropical space fractures the aims of impressionism by

rendering the paradoxical nature of Marlow’s consciousness that has both
reconstituted the material world of the Congo in terms of hallucinatory images
and is at the same time inseparable from the objective world of imperial dis-
course and its perceptions. Therefore, in this dramatic relation between form
and experience, Marlow’s subjective impressions can only lead to a recovery of
the older discourses of empire:

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of time. We
were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an
unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking posses-
sion of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and
toil. (35)

The above passage rehearses late nineteenth-century imperial discourse on the

perils involved in colonizing the tropics. Much of the medical and social dis-
courses on the colonization of the tropic highlighted the extreme difficulties
required to transform it into a disciplined colonial site and, the tropical sites
of Africa in particular were seen to present special challenges that undermined
mid-nineteenth-century evolutionary and eugenecist optimism about the pro-
gressive march of colonization and triumphant survival of European races
abroad. Marlow follows this “pathological atlas” by designating the colonial
site as a primordial “accursed inheritance,” that exacts terrible physical and
moral costs from the Western self.
At a related level, Marlow’s experience of extreme alienation does not
accord to the seminal modernist category of fragmentation of the unitary self.
According to Taylor, modernist fragmentation entails “the liberation of experi-
ence . . . ​to the flux which moves beyond the scope of integration and control”
(462). The paradigmatic modernist instances in which Marlow’s narration
expresses psychological distress, alienation and loss of epistemological certain-
ties encapsulates the gulf between self and the world of the Congo, and not the
“liberation” of self to the other. However, the modernist construction of differ-
ence is itself not an adequate critical model for understanding Marlow’s moti-
vations for recounting his experiences. The inscrutable wilderness of the
Congo that engulfs Marlow’s consciousness is in turn unsettled by the rational
powers of the Western self. Marlow’s description of the fragmentation of self is
at another level an account of the preservation of self in the farthest outreach
of empire. Thus, Marlow’s interpretation of the Congo and her people is also
an expression of the steady moral force of a form of anti-bourgeois Western
reason. The latter is also implicitly presented, in Marlow’s narration, as the best
40 Co nra d ia na

alternative to Western Europe’s late-nineteenth-century culture of ruthless

imperial greed. Fragmentation of the self in Heart of Darkness entails the rein-
forcement of “integration and control” as Marlow resituates himself in the
objective, rational and moral context of enlightenment Europe:

They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you was
just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship
with this wild and passionate uproar. Yes, it was ugly enough but if you were man
enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of
a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a
meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could com-
prehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything—because every-
thing is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear,
sorrow, devotion, valor, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak
of time. Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows and can look on without a
wink. But he must at least be as much a man as these on the shore. He must meet
that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. (36)

Marlow’s overwhelmed consciousness stops short of the quest for an “unme-

diated unity” or a “merging with the other” (Taylor 471) as he substitutes the
epiphanic possibility of a response to the humanity of those on the “shore,”
with a virtuous assertion of an “inborn strength” to confront the siren-call of
elemental and primitive passions. Marlow’s claims about self and other do not
signal a “liberation of experience” or a disintegration of the “boundaries of
personality.” Thus, for this text the signal event of modernist epiphany con-
sists in the unerring discernment of the path back to the center of Enlighten-
ment modernity through the mode of an allegorical imagining of the other.
In his famous essay on Henry James, Conrad characterizes James as “the
historian of fine consciences” and argues that such a fine conscience, in a work
of fiction, is the locus of epiphanic insight: “It is most visible in their ultimate
triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of renun-
ciation” (18). Even as Conrad raises tantalizing questions about Marlow’s “fine
conscience” through a multifaceted notion of an impression, at another level,
Conrad undoubtedly prizes Marlow as a morally consecrated self who can,
despite his lapses, deliver an “authentic report of human experience” to his
audience (Watt, Rise of the Novel 36). Thus, Marlow’s responses to the Congo
signal Conrad’s identification with Marlow and his moral distance from the
primitive. Marlow’s epiphanic consciousness in the context of a colonial
encounter largely consists of a reaffirmation of the moral status of Western
thought and reason which both penetrates the immorality of imperialism and
n a ya k—Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness 41

successfully disengages from an African landscape that threatens to submerge

all reason, restraint and tradition, as had been the case with Kurtz. Taylor
points out that as a modernist epiphanic mode, an impressionist exploration is
“precisely a retrieval of experience, which opens up to the easily hidden
appearance of things” (468). The surface details of Marlow’s narration “can be
seen as a veil hiding something more truthful or essential behind” (J. Hillis
Miller 465), thus, seemingly fulfilling the aspirations toward a modernist
epiphany: “The epiphany is of something only indirectly available, something
the visible object can’t say itself but only nudges us towards” (Taylor 469).
While Marlow’s narration is replete with instances that signal his insight into
the “hidden appearances of things,” an indirect experience is only represented
according to older forms and stereotypes of racial and cultural difference.
Thus, Marlow’s wish to highlight a more profound discrimination among a
“choice of nightmares” is compromised by his inability to find a mode of rep-
resentation outside an imperial system’s institutionalization of racial and cul-
tural difference. Marlow can only render the antagonist to his fine moral
scrupulousness in the terms of caricature (“You wonder I didn’t go ashore for
a howl and a dance”? [36]), and call upon normative Western categories of
work and restraint (“There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a
wiser man” [36]) to reinstitute boundaries of the self.
Although critics such as J. Hillis Miller have pointed to Conrad’s “radical
irony” that should prevent a “straightforward identification of Conrad and
Marlow” (“Foreword” 7), Conrad’s relationship with Marlow works on multi-
ple levels, encompassing both ironic distance between author and protagonist
as well as sympathy and identification with Marlow’s moral vision. Conrad
advances a matrix of relations between colonial geography and a Western phi-
losophy of self, and thus, nature in this Other place becomes symbolic of the
pre-modern, the pre-rational and of moral disease that both reinforces the
authority of the modern Western subject and intensifies division and differ-
ence between Marlow and other Western subjects. The latter aspect can of
course be observed upon Marlow’s return to Brussels as a changed man: “I
found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying
through the streets to filch a little money from each other . . . ​to dream their
insignificant and silly dreams” (70). Modernism’s claim to a distinctive treat-
ment of consciousness then comes to be encapsulated in this horror and revul-
sion from both the other as well as from characteristics of Western modernity.
Marlow’s self-preservation is a triumph over the dangers of “being alone in the
wilderness” and a much-vaunted inner change in Marlow is an implicit articu-
lation and validation of a different culture of pre-instrumentalist European
modernity and its moral truths:
42 Co nra d ia na

How could you—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neigh-
bors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher
and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—
how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammeled
feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—
by the way of silence—utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can
be heard whispering of public opinion. These little things make all the great differ-
ence. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon
your own capacity for faithfulness.” (49)

The passage is remarkable for the way it urges attention to a transition from
effects upon a Western self at home, fettered by the norms of a hollow modern
culture to the self’s unraveling when it encounters the “utter solitude” of a
“prehistoric earth.” It ends with the counterpoint of personal values (“your
own innate strength,” “your own capacity for faithfulness”) intrinsic to an
exceptional Western subjectivity that offers a surer guard against foreign inva-
sion than the one provided by an adherence to morally impoverished and
instrumentalist rules of conduct in bourgeois society.
Parry draws our attention to the paradox of Conrad’s conservative imperial
critique: “Yet having detached readers from spontaneous trust in imperialism’s
rationale, the fiction introduces themes valorizing the doctrine of cultural alle-
giance as a moral imperative which is independent of the community’s collec-
tive moral conduct” (39). But the foundations of Conrad’s “cultural allegiance”
are constituted by an idealized moral culture that is critical of late nineteenth
century bourgeois community’s notions of morality. The essence of modern-
ism in Heart of Darkness lies in this confrontation between self and the tropics
that restructures relations between self, other and Western modernity. In her
extensive analysis of the novel’s “imperial metropolitan perspective,” (22)
Laura Chrisman persuasively argues that Conrad effectively reveals the “pow-
erful material impact” Western instrumental culture has on subjectivity (24).
Chrisman’s study of the “interplay of the metropolis and imperialism” in Heart
of Darkness effectively connects Conrad’s attack upon imperialism to a critique
of the capitalist ethos of the metropolis: “The text also displays a rather elitist
tendency to detest bourgeois and petty bourgeois metropolitan subjects for
their social conformism, psychological superficiality and existential inauthen-
ticity” (35). The connection between metropolitan modernity and the global
scale of imperialist politics is also at the center of Stephen Ross’s analysis of
Conrad’s portrayal of imperialism. But Conrad’s critique of Western imperial-
ism is also nostalgic about pre-instrumentalist Western civilization, as Mar-
low’s character exemplifies an aversion to passions directed by Western
n a ya k—Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness 43

modernity’s instrumentalist power structures. In the aftermath of Marlow’s

triumph over the racial other, the division between self and the social forma-
tion of instrumental Western modernity is also profoundly accentuated. Kurtz’s
greatest fault, according to Marlow, is a lack of restraint that enables the “pow-
ers of darkness to claim him for their own;” an evaluation which can be set up
against the colonial judgment that Kurtz’s absolute disregard for sound method
had “ruined the district” (57). The distance between restraint and sound
method points to the division of Western modernity into two moral
universes.

Modernism and Kurtz

The representation of Marlow’s consciousness helps us think through the lim-
its of a new self that is valorized by modernism. Marlow’s alleged freedom
from Western ideologies and conventional instrumentalist modes of percep-
tion comes to constitute the other identity of Western civilization and its val-
ues which have, according to Conrad, avoided capitalist reification. The role of
Kurtz constitutes a radical and novel aspect of modernist critique of late nine-
teenth-century imperial capitalism. Interestingly enough, critics have mostly
regarded the character of Kurtz not as a compelling part of the novel’s critique
of imperialism but as an example of the novel’s complicity with the “imperial
imaginary” (Parry 47). Parry contends that Kurtz is portrayed as a “heroic
transgressor” whose indulgence in “material and psychic gratifications” is less
important to Conrad than “a fear of the concupiscent satisfactions believed to
be on offer to the European in a primitive environment” (47). In a similar
vein, Brantlinger points to Conrad’s “ironic” admiration for Kurtz: “For Con-
rad, Kurtz’s heroism consists in staring into an abyss of nihilism so total that
the issues of imperialism and racism pale into insignificance” (392). Thus,
both Parry and Brantlinger conclude that the figure of Kurtz encapsulates an
allegorical view of heroism which dilutes the novel’s excoriation of imperial-
ism’s “insatiable greed.” Analyzing the characterization of Kurtz as an integral
part of Conrad’s relentless exposure of imperialist capitalism, one recognizes
the subversive aspect to Marlow’s admiration of Kurtz. In his detailed study of
Conrad’s method of irony, Laurence Davies points out that “the compass of
(Conrad’s) praise is usually narrower than it first appears. Examples include
Marlow’s affirmation that, ‘Kurtz is a remarkable man’” (227). An outcome of
this irony is that the “economy of difference” that imperialism maintains
between Western self and non-Western other are challenged and dissolved by
the figure of Kurtz, ultimately resulting in the narrative’s rejection of modern
imperial culture’s exceptional Western agent. J. Hillis Miller has come closest
44 Co nra d ia na

to capturing the inextricable elements of Kurtz’s imperialist drive and his

belonging to the “powers of darkness:”

In Kurtz’s case, the millennial promise made by imperialist capitalism, since it is

hollow at the core, cannot be separated from the possibility or perhaps even the
necessity of invasion by the ‘it,’ what Conrad calls the ‘Heart of Darkness.’ Kurtz’s
case is exemplary of that, a parable or allegory of that necessity. No imperialist capi-
talism without the darkness. They go together. (473)

Although a penetrating analysis of Kurtz’s function in the novel, Miller’s study

largely revolves around the unstable signifying power of “it” or darkness, and
does not consider the critique of imperialism through the lens of Kurtz’s com-
plex identity.
Kurtz’s immersion in the “peculiar blackness” of his surroundings is shown
to be the inevitable result of his status within the imperial institutional struc-
tures of European modernity. The climactic scene in which Marlow discovers
Kurtz’s disappearance and follows his trail into the forest contains the most
radical representation of Kurtz’s identity, because it establishes a determined
relationship between Kurtz as claimant to the throne of darkness in the Congo
and his indisputable status as a subject of European modernity: “All Europe
contributed to the making of Kurtz” (49). By this point, Marlow’s narrative has
also asserted Kurtz’s renunciation of his Western self and a connection between
him and Marlow’s deceased African helmsman: “He had no restraint, no
restraint—just like Kurtz—a tree swayed by the wind” (51). The rife psycho-
symbolic overtones in Marlow’s description of his battle with Kurtz’s “wander-
ing, tormented Shadow” in the dark forest not only establishes the contrast
between Marlow’s heroic resistance to the “terrible vengeance” of the wilder-
ness and Kurtz’s irrevocable damnation, but also renders Kurtz’s Otherness the
formal product of the predatory ambitions of an imperial culture. The most
striking dialectic in the passage is of course the interplay of Kurtz’s profound
estrangement from forms of Western identity and civilization and his contin-
ued invocation of Western culture’s parameters of personal glory and success:
“I had immense plans,’ he muttered irresolutely. . . . ​‘I was on the threshold of
great things,’ he pleaded in a voice of longing with a wistfulness of tone that
made my blood run cold. ‘Your success in Europe is assured in any case,’ I
affirmed steadily” (65). Conrad’s imputation that the greed and ambitions fos-
tered by capitalist modernity offers a natural pathway to the primitive heart of
darkness is also vividly captured earlier in the novel when Marlow reports
overhearing a conversation between the corrupt Manager and his relative at
the ivory outpost: “I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture
n a ya k—Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness 45

that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river—seemed to beckon with a
dishonoring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to
the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart”
(emphasis added, 33).
The interrelation between pathologized tropical nature and corrupt colo-
nial self contributes to the theme of a gradual elimination of a “radical differ-
ence” between a particular form of Western subjectivity and colonial other,
that reformulates the limits and boundaries of nineteenth-century discourse of
the polarization of races. Achebe points out that Africa is represented as a
“metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the
wandering European humanity enters at his peril. Can nobody see the prepos-
terous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for
the break-up of one petty European mind? (344).” Achebe’s critique while cor-
rect in its identification of the novel’s racial ideology has also consolidated an
approach that does not pay sufficient attention to the complexities of a repre-
sentation that cannot be only captured in terms of cultural and racial binaries.
Conrad simultaneously endorses and disavows racial othering and employs a
particular perspective to propose a relation of identity and difference between
the West and Congo. The identity established between the “profound dark-
ness” of the other and the violent greed of instrumentalist imperialism, to
return to an earlier point of this essay, also institutes a radical difference
between late nineteenth-century Western culture as exemplified by Kurtz and
Marlow’s idealized Western civilization. The opposition between late-nine-
teenth-century imperial subjectivity and the humanist-European subjectivity
of Marlow “who had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes” is
negotiated through a representation of the Congo. The critical assumptions in
Said’s Orientalism are not challenged by the “Conradian scene” of the disorien-
tation of the Western mind upon its encounter with the other, but by an inter-
nally divided Western identity and a reconfigured dynamic of otherness. Thus,
Heart of Darkness’s dialectic of difference opposes Orientalism’s thesis about
the stark binary between a singular imperial Western identity and a racial and
geographical other.
Kurtz is both the arch-representative of a capitalist empire as well as its
antithesis “who ha(s) taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land” (49).
Voicing yet once again a fastidious reluctance to record a reality that would be
appalling to a “fine conscience,” Marlow angrily interrupts the Russian’s
account of Kurtz’s veneration by the Congolese: “I don’t want to know any-
thing of the ceremonies used when approaching Mr. Kurtz” (56). But in yet
another instance of disorienting irony, Conrad carries through the echoes of
Kurtz’s adoration by the “natives” of the Congo when Marlow tells us that the
46 Co nra d ia na

latter’s reputation also acquires cultic and fetishistic dimensions amongst

Europeans and fellow imperialists in Brussels and Congo. Kurtz is envisioned
as a politician commanding blindly adoring European masses: “But Heavens!
how that man could talk! He electrified large meetings. . . . ​He would have
been a splendid leader of an extreme party” (72). Not just an “initiated wraith,”
Kurtz is also Europe’s veiled identity enacting the dual roles of agent and out-
sider to Western imperial structures, an imperial subject who “had stepped
over the edge” (70) and plunged into an intoxicating power. Thus, Kurtz’s oscil-
lation between self and alien or between the heart of darkness and the “vision”
of “complete knowledge” ultimately comes to symbolize a modernist repudia-
tion of outworn and corrupt systems of Western material reality and rational-
ization: “He had kicked himself loose of the earth” (66).
Kurtz is Conrad’s cherished irreducible modernist subject who cannot be
constituted by a singular framework of imperial subject or the absolute other;
his whispered “horror” is itself an inarticulate sign of the effacement of the
boundaries between the “original Kurtz” and the “hollow sham,” as well as of
the effacement of any distinction between imperial trade and massacres. If
Kurtz’s avid hunger for “power and success” begins as a positive assertion of
imperialism, it culminates in a murderous absolutism or “savagery” that then
comes to threaten the rational framework of Western imperial rule and its
commitment to “sound method.” In the narrative’s acute perception of the jeal-
ous admiration and subsequent disparagement of Kurtz by fellow imperialists,
Conrad unerringly identifies the hollow and contradictory value-system of
empire. The conflation of imperial vices and primitive appetites produces a
trajectory of subjectivity that is of overwhelming interest to Marlow as he
repeatedly underscores the secret correspondence between a tropical wilder-
ness and a hollow empire: “It (the wilderness) echoed loudly within him
because he was hollow at the core” (56).
The dyad of imperial avarice and an ineffable primitivism that entraps
Kurtz’s soul is most effectively captured towards the end of Marlow’s narrative
as colonial rhetoric and the “conquering darkness” of the Congo are yoked
together in Marlow’s final summing up to his listeners, distinct from the lying
idealization of Kurtz that occurs during Marlow’s meeting with the Intended:

The vision seemed to enter the house with me—the stretcher, the phantom-bearers,
the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, . . . ​the heart of
a conquering darkness . . . ​I remembered his abject pleading, his abject threats,
the colossal threat of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous
anguish of his soul. And later on I seemed to see his collected languid manner when
n a ya k—Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness 47

he said one day ‘This lot of ivory now is really mine. The Company did not pay for
it. I collected it myself at a very great personal risk. I am afraid they will try to claim
it as theirs though. What do you think I ought to do—resist? Eh? I want no more
than justice. (73)

The passage’s climax constitutes a moral “inward knowledge,” the real fruit of
Marlow’s quest for Kurtz, of an intimate relationship between Kurtz the hol-
low and avaricious imperialist and Kurtz the high priest of primitive savagery.
The swift movement from memories of the veneration of Kurtz by the Congo-
lese to a remembered conversation about the primary fetish-object of imperial
trade does not immediately produce knowledge about the connection Conrad
wishes to draw between Western imperial desires and non-Western “rituals of
ascendance and power.” Nonetheless, the narrative at multiple points juxta-
poses Marlow’s dual impressions of Kurtz as rapacious colonialist and Kurtz
as presiding deity of “dark” ceremonies in a manner that draws the reader’s
attention beyond a generalized metaphysics of an incomprehensible and dis-
orienting otherness. Beyond the narrative’s overt statements of a metaphysical
or ontological darkness that encompasses the landscape of the Congo, her
people and Kurtz is the skein of meaning that employs Kurtz as a pivot to
achieve a correlation between imperialist capitalism and anti-civilizational
otherness. However, the ambiguity of meaning does not relate to Kurtz alone
but also extends to the Congo which enacts the role of a supplement as it
simultaneously functions as an inassimilable and unrepresentable other as
well as a signifier that gives substance to Kurtz’s final words: “the horror, the
horror.” The Congo acts as substitute, antithesis and supplement to Western
civilization depending on whether it is opposed to an essential core of West-
ern civilization and the Western subject’s (Marlow) vaunted values or whether
it is viewed as an ally of the dark desires of Kurtz.
In Heart of Darkness, as I have emphasized, the modernist contract of cap-
turing radical experience through a new relationship between representation
and consciousness is breached by the persistent presence of nineteenth-cen-
tury paradigms of knowledge of the other. Conrad’s frequent depiction of Mar-
low’s narrative, in terms antithetical and forgetful of his definition of
impressionism in “Preface to Nigger of Narcissus,” functions as a partial cri-
tique of modernism and the challenges of achieving an idealized collaboration
between consciousness and mode of representation. Besides this self-critique,
I have argued that the text also demonstrates that the formation of modernism
is filled with contradictions in its aspirations for new forms of consciousness
and identity, when placed in a colonial setting outside the ambit of European
48 Co nra d ia na

modernity. However, the characterization of Kurtz as a self that “can’t be

reduced to unity” emerges as a more radical modernist form as it furnishes a
new way of representing a critique of colonialism.

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