“Successful texts explore timeless concerns” Explore this statement with reference to

Heart of Darkness.

● Greed
● Exploitation
○ Widespread inefficiency and brutality in the Company’s stations
○ Real life Congo: Conrad’s experiences in the Congo became the outline for HOD
○ Their act of knitting black wool suggests the exploitation of the African people.
○ Marlow stumbles into a grove of slowly dying African men who are being slowly
worked to death. The men are described as ‘black shadows of disease and
starvation.’
○ He sees the settlement as the ‘weak eyed devil of pitiless folly’. The metaphorical
reference to the devil clearly positions the reader to see the evil of the colonial
exploitation of Africa and the brutality of the European powers.
● Colonialism/Imperialism
○ No longer a thing that happens, but has had a huge impact on the cultural
identities of the countries colonised
○ By the 1890s, most of the world’s “dark places” had been placed under European
control
○ Cracks were beginning to appear in the system
○ Aunt: Sees imperialism as a charitable activity that brings civilisation and religion
to savages
○ European powers comforting themselves with notions of European moral
supremacy and a false belief in the philanthropic nature of colonialism. (Marlow’s
aunt)
○ The Europeans have cruelly attempted to apply European laws in a completely
alien environment, and paying no respect to the cultural values of the indigenous
inhabitants
○ Europe is the origin of the colonial enterprises that bring death to white men and
to their colonial subjects; it is also governed by a set of reified social principles
that both enable cruelty, dehumanisation and evil and prohibit change.
○ In the passage, Matthew describes ‘whited sepulchres’ as something beautiful on
the outside but containing horrors within (the bodies of the dead); thus, the image
is appropriate for Brussels, given the hypocritical Belgian rhetoric about
imperialism’s civilising mission.
● White supremacy/racist attitudes
○ Ties into exploitation
○ Language used
○ Attitudes different to today but racism is still an issue
○ Marlow talks with Kurtz, is entrusted with documents including letter with a
scrawled message to “exterminate all the brutes”
○ Marlow shares European prejudices, but is skeptical of imperialism.
 ○ Pilgrims: Treat natives like animals, despite being beastial themselves.Our post-
colonial context makes us sensitive to the racial elements of the text and leads
the contemporary reader to profoundly question the attitude towards Africans
presented by Conrad
○ The Eurocentric attitude is clear, as is the imagery that infantilises the Africans
and positions them as intellectually and morally inferior.
○ The text projects the image of Africa as ’the other world’, the antithesis of
Europe, and therefore, the antithesis of civilisation, a place where man’s
intelligence is mocked by triumphant beastiality.
○ It is significant that Conrad asserts that Britain has triumphed over its darkness
and that Africa is transformed into a mere prop
○ Dehumanisation of the African people. Racist terms predominate in the novel and
Achebe argues that Conrad can only acknowledge a remote ‘kinship’ with the
African people.
○ While the novel does ridicule Europe’s ‘civilising mission’, it does so in a way
which diminishes and degrades the African people and the African continent.
○ The men who work for the Company describe what they do as ‘trade’ and their
treatment of native Africans is part of a benevolent project of ‘civilisation’. Kurtz,
on the other hand, is open about the fact that he does not trade but rather takes
ivory by force, and he describes his own treatment of the natives with the words
‘suppression’ and ‘extermination’
○ Africans in this book are mostly objects: Marlow refers to his helmsman as a
piece of machinery, and Kurtz’s African mistress is at best a piece of statuary.
○ Africans become for Marlow a mere backdrop, a human screen against which he
can play out his philosophical and existential struggles. Their existence and their
exoticism enable his self-contemplation.
○ Only twice are their words actually quoted. Most of the time described as
incomprehensible grunting.
○ “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking away from those who
have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves…”
○ Note the voicelessness of natives, the impact of colonisation, alienating, note the
connection to the land and the ignorance of the dominant race.
● Universal human condition
○ This is what ‘timeless concerns’ ties into
○ Dark hearts will always be a problem
○ HOD suggests that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate
outside a social system of checks and balances: power, especially power over
other human beings, inevitably corrupts
○ Juxtaposing the incongruously neat and ‘starched collars’ of the chief Account
with the ‘great demoralisation of the land’, Conrad implies that colonialism is
based on an inhuman oblivious unconcern for the suffering of others.
○ Darkness is the inability to see: this may sound simple, but as a description of the
human condition it has profound implications.
● Bridge between traditional Victorian values and modernism. Anticipates the figures of
high modernism while also reflecting his Victorian predecessors
● As much about alienation, confusion and profound doubt as it is about imperialism
● Wasn’t seen as controversial at first, rather a condemnation of a certain type of
adventurer who could easily take advantage of imperialism’s opportunities, or a
sentimental novel reinforcing domestic values
● These reactions enforce the novella’s central themes of hypocrisy and absurdity
● Civilisation provides a cloak or a protective veneer that shields humanity from its
essential darkness.
● ‘He lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts’. Values of Victorian times,
when restraint was valued.