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"A Choice of Nightmares": The Ecology of Heart of Darkness
Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 55, Number 3, Fall 2009, pp.
620-648 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.0.1624
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620 The Ecology of Heart of Darkness
"A CHOICE OF NIGHTMARES":
f THE ECOLOGY OF HEART OF
DARKNESS
Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy
Nature is at the heart of Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad's

1899 novel dramatizes modernity's destructive alienation from the
natural world against the backdrop of the Congo's ecological collapse.
More intimately, Heart of Darkness uses the competing constructions
of nature in turn of the century Britain to haunt readers with a new
vision of themselves. In 1899, British readers encountered nature
in two primary roles: the passive object of imperial commerce and
evolution's meritocracy of fitness. This essay will show these distinct
attitudes shaping the novel, and then reveal a third role beyond
them both, through which the novel destabilizes the framework of
Victorian self-fashioning. Specifically, Conrad's novel offers a vision
of landscape that challenges the colonizing subject's confidence, and,
simultaneously, forecasts the brewing storm of ecological catastrophe.
My reading parses the tangled relation between modern Europe's
unfolding knowledge of nature and its changing knowledge of itself.
In this sense Heart of Darkness is about the cultural boundaries that
separate person from place, and more significantly about reposition-
ing human beings within a new understanding of nature.
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 55 number 3, Fall 2009. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
McCarthy 621
Ivory
Heart of Darkness shows us a link between the moral and
ecological limits of imperialism. A defining background issue for any
reading of Heart of Darkness is that the Congo's ecosystem—the ob-
ject of all this blasting and toting—had become an ecological disaster.
Marlow's economic setting is focused on ivory, and just as the land
has become "a vast artificial hole" under this European regime (16),
the Congo basin's ecology has been disrupted by the compounded
exploitation. Ivory is the resource in question for this novel. From
1875 to 1905, Europeans extracted 70,000 tons of ivory from the
Congo every year. It decorated Victorian life from the billiard balls and
walking sticks at the club, to the piano keys and chess pieces in the
parlor, to the combs and crucifixes in the bedroom. And if ivory was
everywhere at home, it's on everyone's lips in Marlow's Congo: "The
word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would
think they were praying to it" (23). But the elephant in the room, for
all the novel's talk of ivory, is the distinct lack of elephants. There are
shipments of ivory and commissions to be made, piles of ivory and
dreams of ivory generated riches, but not a single elephant. Indeed,
though Conrad mentions elephants in a letter home from the Congo,
in the novel the word appears to have been hunted to extinction.
Thus Conrad declares an absence. The work obsessively repeats
one element to foreground the lack of its complement. The reader
knows there is no ivory without elephants, but is led to imagine a
landscape chosen for its bounty and at the same time lacking its
originary force. When Marlow reaches the Inner Station, there is so
much ivory that he wonders if the whole country has been emptied:
"Ivory! . . . Heaps of it, stacks of it. . . . You would think there was
not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole
country" (48). So Marlow describes an economy whose fructifying
power is extinct, and thereby renders an environment tipping toward
collapse. In the actual Congo where Conrad worked for eight months
in 1890, the ivory trade was already beginning to expire.1 Traders
turned to digging for fossil ivory, and the ambitious were forced ever
deeper into wild areas to find elephants. It seems one of English
literature's grandest characters, Mr Kurtz, makes his fateful voyage
to the Inner Station and all that rich country thanks to an ecological
catastrophe occasioned by a culture of exploitation.
Ivory is the text's most important and most contradictory
symbol; it is the novel's objective-correlative of a western logic that
shapes all relations between the human and nonhuman world into
relations of profit.2 Moreover, ivory demonstrates the epistemology of
separation that interprets human beings (and especially white ones)
as separate from the world around them. But there is a wrinkle in this
smooth picture of separation, and it has to do with Kurtz and with
ivory and with the ideas Marlow brings home after shadowing Kurtz
into another way of thinking. Heart of Darkness also features ivory
as the image of Kurtz's identification with the wilderness.
By the time Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, the Congo's
economy had exhausted ivory and turned to a very profitable resource
that modern industry needed and that literally grew on trees—rubber.
But why would Conrad focus on ivory as the novel's symbolic center
instead of rubber, when rubber was the commodity that dominated
the news and dominated the emerging protest movement against
imperial abuse?3 Congo rubber was wild. Unlike sustainable planta-
tion rubber, its gathering generally involved the killing of the rubber
vine and thus occasioned an expanding circle of jungle searching. The
character of this prospecting was yet more inhumane than the ivory
trade, and Conrad would have known all about the Belgian system
of quotas and hostage taking where men and women were forced to
collect rubber at the threat of their children's limbs. If he did not read
about it in the papers, he would have heard it from his friend Roger
Casement, who became an activist on behalf of the Congo. But the
novel passes over rubber entirely, to concentrate its symbolic force
on ivory instead. Why? Because ivory represents the wild land's heart
of profit and its steady colonization, but it also represents the wild
land's colonization of the colonial body.
In a book where nature is steadily anthropomorphized as "dark-
faced and pensive" (59), "frowning," and "inviting" (13), this descrip-
tive logic reverses when a central character is ascribed the attributes
of nonhuman objects. Kurtz becomes the symbol of a human body
transformed into nature through his obsession with ivory. Ivory begins
as a symbol of Europeans exploiting the African environment but is
ultimately reconstellated as a symbol of connection to that environ-
ment. In a colonial structure buttressed by commodification ivory is
certainly an object to be taken, and the wilderness a place to take it
from. Kurtz clearly incarnates that mindset. But with Kurtz ivory also
points us toward something rich and strange. Consider, for example,
one of Marlow's first descriptions: "The wilderness had patted him
on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it had ca-
ressed him and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him,
embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed
his soul to its own" (48). Here Kurtz is figured in transformation—his
head transformed into an ivory knob—and in the Faustian moment
Kurtz becomes the ivory object of greed. Kurtz is possessed by the
familiar European greed for ivory, yes, but in his case the process
breaks down the separation between the European and the wild land
McCarthy 623
when he is reborn as ivory. "Wilderness" is obviously an important
term for Marlow's explanation of Kurtz, and with that term he pres-
ents readers with competing constructions of nature: one, wilderness
is Europe's symbol of an other that begs to be developed; and two,
wilderness is nature in its direct and unmediated form.
The trope of Kurtz becoming ivory is repeated when he is carried,
ill, to the steamer: "It was as though an animated image of death
carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces" (59).
Again Kurtz has become ivory, but why? Partly it symbolizes greed;
ivory represents the unclean wish of every flabby devil in the Africa
Conrad contemplates. Jeffrey Myers writes that ivory is "a symbol
for the commodification of African ecology" (101), and he points us
in the right direction. We can go one step further though to say ivory
also represents the possibility of a transformation linking person to
place.4 Kurtz becomes ivory, in the end, because his voyage has been
toward identification with the African interior. Many treatments of the
novel present Kurtz as a convert to African tribal society, but I think
his relation to ivory insists we understand him as also a convert to
the wild land itself. Kurtz is identified with wildness to indicate the
contested subjectivity that leads Europeans to understand themselves
sometimes as part of nature and sometimes as nature's masters. In
the crucial death scene the figure of Kurtz as carved from ivory is
emphasized again: "I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber
pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless
despair" (68). Even though his motive for a deeper knowledge of the
land was exploitation, Kurtz's transformation into ivory can be read
as an image of the human being becoming part of the natural world
he inhabits—an image at first minatory, but ultimately promising.
Understanding ivory in this way brings me to my title, Marlow's
"choice of nightmares." Against the novel's ground of exploitation
and commodification there are images of an alternative existence
that embraces nature.5 Kurtz models two modes of living with na-
ture for Conrad's Victorian audience: the first is an unsustainable
exploitation, and the second is an even more worrisome identifica-
tion with it. These two modes present Marlow with what he calls "a
choice of nightmares" (62). That is, Marlow is uniquely positioned to
recognize exploitation's failings in his experience of imperialism and
the Congo and at the same time to register identification's dangers
in his dealings with Kurtz. Behind these alternatives is a Cartesian
dualism that separates humans from nature and shapes the inter-
actions between people and the environment from the Thames to
the Congo.6 But Heart of Darkness is full of challenges to that sepa-
ration, and in patterns of attraction and resistance to nature the
novel betrays anxiety about modern Europe's commodification of
the natural world. Kurtz and the Russian trader both exemplify the
attraction to nature in that each is a "white man turning his back . . .
on thoughts of home—perhaps; setting his face towards the depths
of the wilderness" (32). Therefore, each is perceived by the pilgrims
to be mad. However, Marlow's own judgments are less pointed and
leave open the possibility that their choices to eschew the civilized
in favor of the natural may be good choices. In fact, because this
embrace of the wild is disfavored by the scurrilous representatives
of civilization—the Manager, the brickmaker—Marlow's allegiance to
Kurtz and the Russian declares his choice of nightmares. That choice
generally gets read as Marlow's difficult choice between a hypocriti-
cal civilization and an honest savagery, but another reading is that
Marlow chooses between a destructive separation from nature and
an unsettling connection to it.
Ecological Collapse
Heart of Darkness illustrates a catalogue of detrimental relations
between people and nature. For most of Conrad's novel the characters
experience the land, the jungle, the river, and the animals either as
threats or as objects to exploit: "We called . . . all along the formless
coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to
ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose
banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime,
invaded the contorted mangroves that seemed to writhe at us in the
extremity of an impotent despair" (14). And later, "the forest, the
creek, the mud, the river—seemed to beckon us with a dishonouring

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" (33). Across Marlow's journey, nature is a physical and moral
threat—the river is rebarbative, and the trees are treacherous.
There is an English tradition of natural description that expects
nature to please, a tradition that lives in the word "landscape" and
its associations with painting and the picturesque.7 Marlow delivers
a very different vision of landscape, and in it expresses deep anxiety
about the land's status in relation to human beings: "this land, this
river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky appear to me so
hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so piti-
less to human weakness" (55). This is more than prosopopeia—this
is a realm beyond the aesthetic traditions of landscape appreciation,
where land is both resistant to human penetration and strangely dan-
gerous to human connection. Heart of Darkness defines itself against
the familiar nature writing of the nineteenth century. The dominant
McCarthy 625
nineteenth-century cultural abstractions for approaching nature—the
sentimental, the sublime, the picturesque, and the pastoral—are
undone by "slime" and contortions and "hidden evil." For instance,
Heart of Darkness spurns the Romantic wanderer's nature of sublime
sights and morally uplifting vistas. Kurtz is the central wanderer, and
Marlow imagines him journeying into nature with all the decisiveness
of Wordsworth or Thoreau: "It was a distinct glimpse: the dugout,
four paddling savages, and the lone white man turning his back sud-
denly on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home perhaps."
This romantic decisiveness, however, takes a dark turn; the sentence
continues: "setting his face towards the depths of the wilderness,
towards his empty and desolate station" (32). Ultimately, Kurtz is
the antithesis of any Romantic hero cheered and uplifted by nature,
because for him the "depths of the wilderness" are threatening and,
finally, corrosive. Kurtz follows the pattern of the Romantic voyager,
but Marlow concludes that those days in nature have not delivered
Thoreau's humanity. Instead what one encounters is an excess of
bestiality. Marlow argues that the deep jungle—European civiliza-
tion's symbol of otherness—causes Kurtz's excess: "But his soul was
mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and,
by Heavens I tell you, it had gone mad" (65). Kurtz inhabits a nature
redefined as foreboding and pernicious. We must acknowledge the
Eurocentric presumption of mislabeling the African homes of African
societies "wilderness," while at the same time we can recognize that
Conrad methodically deploys the contested and unfolding category
of "wilderness" to dramatize his character's transformation.8 So, the
Romantic tradition that views nature as the font of goodness, as
the last refuge of a "better self" where humanity is best when most
distant from civilization, is here drowned under the weight of an ir-
retrievably threatening jungle.
In Conrad's literary moment, readers encountered beneficent
nature in the works of Richard Jeffries, A. E. Housman, and W. H.
Hudson, along with the many who penned appreciations to the ben-
efits of rural life.9 Popular literature of the late nineteenth century
represented nature in established patterns that elicited customary
emotional responses to the point of sentimentality. In such writing
the countryside cued feelings of relief, freedom, and rejuvenation.
Consider A. E. Housman's blossom-viewing Shropshire Lad who, upon
reaching twenty, heads outdoors:
And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung in snow. (5)
In this 1896 poem, the speaker engages nature as a space for relief
from time and a place of contemplative beauty. Raymond Williams
expertly debunked aestheticized representations of rural life as
obscuring both rural hardships and the material factors that kept
Britain's "things in bloom" owned by the few and worked by the
many. But Heart of Darkness does something different: it challenges
the familiar representations of nature with a natural world that is
anything but comforting. Take, for example, Marlow's initial foray
into Africa's landscape. Many of Conrad's popular contemporaries
exoticized foreign landscapes, like W. H. Hudson did with Venezuela
in Green Mansions. Hudson's 1904 novel imagines the jungle as a
refuge where trees and vines protect good characters and punish
malefactors. In comparison, Conrad gives his readers the Grove of
Death, where Marlow heads for respite only to find a horrific anti-
pastoral of despair. Pastoral conventions deliver happy rustics in
green repose, but Marlow's experience is pastoral's sardonic echo,
and country figures lounging in the shade become incarnations of
doom. While other writers pronounced nature's restorative power in
poems and novels of Romantic confidence in a benevolent natural
world, Conrad offers a savage alternative to Victorian sentimentalism
and thereby thrusts his novel into a formative debate for modern
discourses of nature.
When nature is not threatening in Heart of Darkness, it is be-
ing plundered. Heart of Darkness is often read as an indictment of
hypocrisy in general and, in the last twenty years, as an indictment
of imperial ethics in particular. My reading adds a layer of conscious-
ness about nature and insists we take seriously the actual landscape
within which these characters perform. The European exploitation of
native peoples follows the same logic as the European exploitation
of nature. Consider Marlow's description of the Eldorado Exploring
Expedition and his disdain that they "tear treasure out of the bowels
of the land" like "burglars breaking into a safe" (29). Like the ill-
fated Eldorado Exploring Expedition, the imperial adventure in Africa
betrays its fundamentally abusive character in its profligate abuse
of nature, and thus Conrad's Africa tells the story of imperial exploi-
tation and also anticipates that imperialism's disastrous ecological
consequences. When Marlow criticizes his helmsman and Kurtz both
for having "no restraint," he is also pointing a finger at the colonial
enterprise's environmental attitude toward Africa (51).
A measured consideration of waste shapes Marlow's first walk on
African soil. There, at the outer station, he finds a pattern of abusing
nature that will be repeated across the continent:
I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a

path leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders
McCarthy 627
and also for an undersized railway truck lying there on its
back with its wheels in the air. The thing looked as dead
as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces
of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty nails. . . . A horn
tooted to the right and I saw the black people run. A heavy
and dull detonation shook the ground, a puff of smoke came
out of the cliff, and that was all. No change appeared on
the face of the rock. They were building a railway. The cliff
was not in the way of anything, but this objectless blasting
was all the work going on. (19)
Marlow walks on, mystified by his first steps in the imperialized land,
and presents another scene to reinforce the first: "I avoided a vast,
artificial hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose
of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn't a quarry or a sand-
pit, anyhow. It was just a hole." There is treating the environment
as a resource, and then there is this "wanton smashup" abusing the
land in pointless excess. 10 Marlow is no proto-environmentalist, but
he does value "restraint," and in these scenes Europeans show no
restraint toward the landscape that houses them. The "objectless"
devastation of the land corresponds with what Marlow calls "a flabby,
pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly" (20).
This adjective string comes in the midst of his description of point-
less holes in the land and purposeless blastings on the cliff, and it
associates the weakness of European character with the practices of
ecological depredation.11
Conrad presents these images of abuse to the land precisely
because his own voyage to Africa observed a moment of ecological
exhaustion occasioned by feverish exploitation. Heart of Darkness
measures two bright threads in the modern loom—one a consideration
of exploited nature, and the other an examination of imperialism
in practice—and weaves them together to expose both what Louis
Menand calls "the venality of the whole colonial enterprise" (106),
and the less discussed perils of understanding nature as a passive
object for human exploitation.
The pattern of "objectless blasting" is one prefigured on Marlow's
shipboard journey to Africa when the continent is itself subjected to
bombardment. Throughout Heart of Darkness it is as though the white
imperialists have declared war on the Africa land itself: "In the empty
immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible,
firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small
flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a
tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened"
(17). This haunting image of "incomprehensible" bombing of the
land sets the pattern of European enmity toward the environment.
When, for instance, the pilgrims do shoot their guns, it is described
as "squirting lead in the air" (64) and as "a fusillade burst[ing] out
under my feet. The pilgrims had opened with their Winchesters and
were simply squirting lead into that bush" (46). Their shooting is like
the French gunboat firing into a continent, making the natural world
an enemy and a target.
The idea that nature is itself imperialism's target sounds over-
wrought, but it actually captures the received wisdom of nineteenth-
century science. Popular scientific views of humanity's place in nature
influenced Conrad's work.12 Much has been made of Charles Darwin's
influence on modern literature, but behind Darwin was the imposing
presence of geology. Reading scientists like Charles Lyell, Conrad
found the belief that nature could be a Hobbesian realm of eternal
"war of all against all."13 Lyell authored Principles of Geology and The
Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man (1863), and emphasized
an ecological model of violent, fierce competition between species
for space and food. The natural economy was inherently unstable for
Lyell, and all beings battled rivals into extinction over all available
shelter and sustenance. Lyell was the nineteenth-century's preemi-
nent geologist, and his theory of geological time was expressed in his
magisterial Principles published in eleven editions between 1830 and
1872. In those influential pages Lyell advanced "uniformitarianism,"
which is the belief that the world we inhabit is still being shaped and
changed by the very forces that shaped and changed it in past ages.
Thus, for the uniformitarian, no place (or culture) is ever safe from
the deep history behind it. This "uniformity of state" and "uniformity
of change" (Lyell, vol. 2: 66) sounds calm and rational, but across the
pacific scene of strata and sediment Lyell envisioned teeming life in
constant conflict for scarce resources. In Volume II of Principles, Lyell
wrote of all species in violent competition: "The most insignificant
and diminutive species, whether in the animal or vegetable king-
dom, have each slaughtered their thousands, as they disseminated
themselves over the globe" (84). Lyell describes a world of species
in motion, expanding into new territories, or receding as conditions
become more or less favorable to their propagation. It is worth noting
his use of the word "kingdom" here, as that word suggests both the
benevolent God his view supplants, and the century-old taxonomy
of Linnaeus his view likewise undoes. Most discussions of Linnaeus
focus on the eighteenth-century botanist's systemization of flora and
fauna. Equally important is the premise behind the Linnaean system—
nature expresses a kindly God's graceful arrangements for all beings
on this Earth. Hence, each creature has "an allotted space" where
it can thrive, and all accounts are balanced in what Linnaeus's 1749
essay called God's own "Oeconomy of Nature."
McCarthy 629
A century later, Lyell sketches the Earth as a setting of constant
conflict between species "disseminat[ing] themselves over the globe"
and extinguishing competitors or being extinguished by them accord-
ing to climatological factors beyond their control. Conrad's 1899 novel
proposes a similar vision of imperialism, and his characters inherit
a nature where beings struggle to survive in a Godless mechanism
and where forces unfold in competition with men. These people do
not stay in their allotted spaces, but cross boundaries and borders
pursuing profit. The imperial mindset described in Heart of Darkness
knows nature as a soulless mechanism, and, simultaneously, clings to
the conceit of European exceptionalism. Thus both place and people
are subject to analogous unrestrained economic exploitation. In his
daily reading, Conrad confronts a nature heartlessly unfolding; in
his fiction, Conrad invents a character who attunes himself to that
heartless ticking and thereby gathers more ivory than any other
character.
Evolution and Identification

Marlow's choice of nightmares hangs on an understanding of
evolution central to turn of the century conversations about humanity.
The popular understanding of evolution maintained cultural preju-
dices about exceptionalism and progress—an inexorable mechanism
endlessly rocking toward the survival of the fittest European male.
This understanding is found in the Kurtz who says, "My Intended,
my ivory, my station, my river." But buried within evolution was a
complication for social Darwinists and Cartesians alike because evo-
lution placed people not outside, but rather inside the mechanism.
Thus when Kurtz says "My," "my," "my," note that Marlow expects
"the wilderness to burst into a prodigious peal of laughter" at Kurtz's
claims (48). A crucial part of Marlow's nightmare is that evolution
suggested to some nineteenth-century thinkers a challenging "kin-
ship" that would include both Marlow's native neighbors and also
the hippos in the river and the monkeys in the trees. For instance,
Conrad's peer Thomas Hardy wrote, "the most far-reaching conse-
quence of the common origin of species is ethical," and so we must
readjust our morals "from the area of mere mankind to that of the
whole animal kingdom" (qtd. in Worster 185). In this novel's flirta-
tion with wildness, we see the protagonist move beyond Hobbesian
ecological imperialism to something else when Kurtz, and Marlow
in his wake, tremble toward knowing themselves as part of nature.
The evolutionary perspective as popularly construed readily excuses
ecological destruction by interpreting exploitation as survival of the
fittest. But Heart of Darkness follows evolution's implications away
from European exceptionalism and toward the radical position of hu-
man identification with nature.
The novel uses familiar textual forms like "going native" first
to emphasize Kurtz's power, and second to measure his full trans-
formation from emissary of social Darwinism into a part of nature.
Conrad's society feared the explorer who has "gone native," and
there is ample literature demonstrating this anxiety.14 One plausible
model for Conrad's Kurtz is the historical figure of Arthur Hodister
who went deep into the Congo basin to amass great stores of ivory,
but appalled Belgium with his harem of African women and his small
army of native warriors. In a striking turnabout, Conrad deploys the
recognizable features of the explorer "gone native" to intensify Kurtz's
physical and moral preeminence: Kurtz has the African woman, Kurtz
has the small army of lake tribes, Kurtz has the heads on posts, and
Kurtz has the courage to transcend hypocrisy. By way of contrast,
in Conrad's 1896 story "An Outpost of Progress" the wild setting
causes moral dissolution that ultimately disempowers the two traders
Kayerts and Carlier. In 1899, when Conrad invents Kurtz, he actu-
ally empowers him through the same wild that caused these earlier
characters to fail so miserably. By associating Kurtz with wildness,
Conrad disrupts the comfortable fallacy that evolution favored white
men as somehow beyond and above nature's machinations. So, at
the heart of Kurtz's transformation is an identification that extends
beyond "going native" to "going nature," and thus the European
colonizer finds himself in closer relation to the land than his culture
had thought possible.
If Kurtz's story is the story of a man "going nature," what makes
that transformation possible is a seamlessness between nature and
culture where Europeans had presumed fixed boundaries. W. H.
Hudson responded to evolution in 1901 by saying "We are no longer
isolated . . . surveying life from the outside; but are on a level with
and part and parcel of it" (306)15 Clearly Hudson sees a change in
the boundaries between people and nature. In his well-known ap-
prehension of the Congo's "prehistoric man" clapping and stamping
on the riverbank, Marlow pierces the border between European and
African humanity, while just as powerfully suggesting that the border
between past and present is atropthied:
We could not understand because we were too far

and could not remember because we were traveling in the
night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving
hardly a sign—and no memories.
The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to
look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but
McCarthy 631
there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.
It was unearthly and the men were. . . . No they were not
inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it—the
suspicion of their not being inhuman. (35–6)
For most critics, Marlow's attention suggests a vestigial "kinship" be-

tween the civilized and the savage and thus flips the precarious binary
upholding many excuses for the imperial enterprise.16 But Marlow's
extended consideration is also about time and, in particular, the po-
rous boundary between past and present ages; Marlow's connection
between time and earth and inhumanity indicates his civilization's
unresolved position in the physical world. Marlow's journey into the
Congo's less-explored regions is cast as a journey into time where
the steamship travels back into "the night of the first ages": "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 possession of an accursed inheritance" (35). The text's
insistence on a "prehistoric earth" does various work. On one hand,
this version of time insists that Africans are themselves savages
with no indigenous culture to respect. On the other hand, time was
also the crucial factor in nineteenth-century science's discussions of
humanity's situation in nature. Natural selection needed much more
than the Bible's six thousand years for evolution to explain the gradual
transformation of species. This is where the geologists were so im-
portant to Darwin. In their studies of terrestrial features and their
paleontological exploration of the growing fossil record, geologists
affirmed a vast time span in the hundreds of millions of years, thus
giving the familiar earth "the aspect of an unknown planet."
To recognize time's centrality to debates about human relations
to nature is also to recognize a new reading of Heart of Darkness.
Although they are important to modernism, I am not talking about
the time of Bergson or the time of the Fordist shop floor or even
the encroachments of Greenwich Mean Time we see in The Secret
Agent. I am talking about time linked to nature; in Conrad's day,
creationist and catastrophist geological thinkers both sketched time
as directional, traveling like an arrow from one place to a particular
end. In contrast, Lyell's geological work insisted time was uniform,
revolving in one big cycle or great year. This latter understanding
removes humanity from any confident ascent and proposes instead a
constant revolution. In Stephen Jay Gould's summary, "we may see,
Lyell argues, an advance in design from fish to ichthyosaur to whale,
but we view only the rising arc of a great circle that will come round
again, not a linear path to progress" (104). This is a harrowing vision
of nature joining time, but without progress. For most Europeans,
temporality was a way of measuring cultural progress. The dominant
note is the affirmative voice of, for instance, Sir James Frazier who in
1900 wrote of time as "the long march, the slow and toilsome ascent,
of humanity from savagery to civilization" (xxv). This "long march"
and "ascent" are surely the fantasy behind his Aunt's vision of Marlow
weaning ignorant millions of their ways. Cultural confidence in the
ascent model is undone by Lyell's geology where all beings occupy
the same time unbounded, shifting forms according to climate.
Marlow's actual experience of Africa asserts that time and
geography do not combine to enable "progress," but in fact display
the contingency and fragility of progress as a cultural construction.
Lyell is again useful to underline Conrad's hints that Victorian self-
fashioning is a fabrication. Thus in Volume I of Principles, Lyell imag-
ines a change in climate returning Europe to the dinosaurs who once
ruled it: "Then might those genera of animals return, of which the
memorials are preserved in the ancient rocks of our continents. The
huge iguanadon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur
in the sea, while the pterodactyle might flit again through umbra-
geous growths of tree ferns" (123). Lyell's vision of iguanadons and
pterodactyls in London has moral resonance for a writer like Conrad
who was wrestling with the consequences of a change in climate on
his European characters. In Conrad's vision, the change of climate
is the metaphorical and material revelation that European identity
is as contingent as Lyell's vision of iguanadon and ichthyosaur. In
Lyell's uniformitarian view, the strictures of civilization are not part
of some confident progress, but are instead contingent on climate
and context, as readily unclothed by change as they were buttoned

up by circumstance. Nothing, it seems, is permanent or purposeful.
In other words, if the Thames—and the Nellie upon her—were trans-
formed by a climatological shift, then it would become again "one of
the dark places of the earth" (5). There is, in Lyell's striking vision,
no essential identity for geography or culture or individual, but only
a constant flux of species and qualities according to conditions.17
Heart of Darkness uses race to underscore the speciousness of
European claims to exceptionalism. When Marlow says of Africans,
"No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of
it" (36), he deploys racist rhetoric to acknowledge a kinship where
Europeans prefer to see themselves as exceptional and separate.
Equally, when Marlow feels he travels back in time to an African na-
ture that is not "shackled" but "free," the text's African nature shows
readers that humanity is just one part of nature's bubbling stew,
and European exceptionalism is the frailest of illusions. The point is,
Marlow's "suspicion of their not being inhuman" extends from the
people of the Congo to all life. The findings of nineteenth-century
McCarthy 633
science indicate humanity's interdependence with other beings—first
in the pageant of natural selection, and second in the cycle of time
and climate that can return even civilized Europeans to "the night
of first ages." This insight is "monstrous" to Marlow, but also subtly
attractive, and that attraction's full implication for humanity's role in
nature is developed by Mister Kurtz.
Kurtz's fearsomeness and his success are complementary results
of a deepening relationship to the natural world staged as the essence
of wildness. Consider the various depictions of Kurtz's relation to a
wilderness that by turns empowers him and undoes him. First, Kurtz
symbolically, and physically, turns his back on civilization, "after com-
ing three hundred miles [Kurtz] suddenly decided to go back, which
he started to do alone in a small dugout with four paddlers." Marlow
overhears this story from the Manager and his uncle:
The two fellows there seemed astounded at anybody at-

tempting such a thing. They were at a loss for an adequate
motive. As for me, I seemed to see Kurtz for the first time.
It was a distinct glimpse: the dugout, four paddling savages,
and the lone white man turning his back suddenly on the
headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home perhaps, set-
ting his face toward the depths of the wilderness, towards
his empty and desolate station. (32)
Marlow differs from this unwholesome pair through his sympathy

for Kurtz's embrace of wilderness. The thing that distinguishes this
"prodigy" (25), this product of all Europe, is his close relationship
with the environment of central Africa that the novel consistently
dramatizes as wild. The Uncle's anecdote of wilderness fixes Kurtz
in Marlow's mind where he can see him "for the first time." And this
image of "turning his back suddenly" is the image of a man commit-
ting himself to nature.
Reading Kurtz as a study of human relations to nature makes
terrestrial the moral claims of Conrad critics like Roussel and J. Hillis
Miller, who treat Kurtz's intimacy with wilderness in terms of human-
ity's situation in an uncaring universe.18 In my environmental read-
ing, Kurtz's intimacy with the wild symbolizes the breakdown of the
comfortable evolutionary misreading that placed white men above
and beyond nature. Instead, Kurtz embodies the Lyellian view that
natural selection is a level playing field where species do not progress,
but only adapt and either flourish or suffer according to changes in
their environment. For Conrad, it is important that Kurtz's dramatic
transformation happens deep in the forest and far up the Congo. The
novel's rhetoric consistently twines Kurtz into wilderness and wilder-
ness into Kurtz. Again, it is clear that Conrad employs the contested
category of "wilderness" to highlight Kurtz's profound changes. Heart
of Darkness transports Victorian strivers to Africa where in fantastic
struggle with their own constructions of wilderness, they discern that
they too are part of the leveling processes of nature. This means that
Kurtz's immersion in wild spaces presents the colonizer being colo-
nized in a narrative Marlow delivers to the representatives of imperial
capitalism—the Director, the Accountant, and the Lawyer. From this
perspective, Marlow's first words could be directed at the European
body—"And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth"
(5). Thus the Thames's intimacy with the wild Congo anticipates the
imperializers' intimacy with the imperialized; in other words, just as
the novel breaks down the dark/light binary separating wildness from
civilization, the novel breaks down the dark/light binary separating
colonized from colonizing body.
The key point here is that the text restages contemporary
discourses of wilderness and whiteness to develop the characters'
ontological intimacy with nature into an even more distinct sense of
identification between European explorer and wild setting. For in-
stance, in lines I have already used to discuss Kurtz's transformation
into ivory, we see Kurtz redefined by his intimacy with wilderness:
"The wilderness had patted him on the head, and behold, it was like
a ball—an ivory ball; it had caressed him and—lo!—he had withered."
Thus far we have the recognizable Victorian anxiety that wild nature
is a dangerous competitor in the arena of natural selection, but in the
next lines a new dynamic of connection comes out of the closet. The
wilderness "had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his
veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the incon-
ceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and
pampered favourite" (48). This is a relation of overlapping intimacy
between person and wild, and this is the relation that makes Kurtz
especially attractive and especially powerful. Marlow feels the pull
of nature too, but Kurtz appears to have stepped across the narrow
social line dividing person from place and established a kinship with
nature that at once distinguishes and destroys him.
In contrast to Kurtz's identification with nature, the Manager is
the hollow man who personifies the tradition of exploiting a separate
nature. He is so far from nature that it never touches him, even while
others "die so quick . . . that I haven't the time to send them out
of the country" (33). Of course he finds Kurtz's methods "unsound"
because Kurtz has forsworn hollowness in favor of living in nature as
a part of nature, not an observer of moving parts, but a participant
in the life of wild being.
But is it not troublesome to this environmental reading that
in the end the Manager triumphs? After all, capitalism appropriates
McCarthy 635
nineteenth-century science's logic of exploitation, mingles it with
confidence in Progress, and proves too powerful a force for Kurtz's
identification with nature, or Marlow's febrile sympathy to Kurtz,
sympathy to the Africans, or sympathy to the disempowered con-
tinent itself. And yet those sympathies have been raised. Into the
1899 context of unsettling questions about imperialism, humanity,
and European exceptionalism, Conrad's novel tracks the fault-lines
beneath the modern construction of nature. The Manager triumphs
and Kurtz dies, but the questions Kurtz's life raises about humanity's
place in the natural world survive, and even multiply, in Marlow's com-
pulsive telling. Thus Heart of Darkness delivers a parable of modern
environmental history: the exploiting force remains hegemonic, but
we have learned to regret.
Deep Ecology
There are ways to understand Kurtz's kinship with the wild that
literary critics have not yet considered. Deep ecology is a twentieth-
century philosophical movement that theorizes the possibility of a
lived kinship between human beings and the world they inhabit. This
philosophical worldview presents an alternative to anthropocentric
humanism, and its central tenet is that authentic human beings cul-
tivate identification with the nonhuman world. Philosopher Warwick
Fox defines deep ecology as "the idea that we can make no firm
ontological divide in the field of existence: that there is no bifurca-
tion in reality between the human and non-human realms" (qtd. in
Devall 66). Into a world shaped by beliefs of human exceptional-
ism and Cartesian dualism, deep ecology insists that there are no
boundaries; everything is interrelated. Similarly, Heart of Darkness
is full of anxiety about allegiance to "wild" forces that undermine the
construction of a confident, imperial, and civilized subject. Kurtz's
wandering deep in the forest and his propensity to "forget himself"
(56) are terrible for his peers precisely because of nature's strong
pull toward what the deep ecologists call "identification." Marlow's
ambivalent response outlines the cultural systems of resistance to
nature's pull and the powerful repression of any feelings associated
with identification.
Deep ecology's primary theorist has been the Norwegian phi-
losopher Arne Naess, who pushes us to see existence as a gestalt
where people exist in a totality that includes their natural environ-
ment, so the person/milieu is a network of interpenetrating and
interdependent relations. Naess calls this the "relational" or "total-
field" model, and writes, "The total-field model dissolves not only
the man-in-environment concept but every compact thing-in-milieu
concept" (Naess 28). There is no person without place. Thus the
person cannot change without changing the environment, and the
environment cannot change without changing the person. Naess
borrows the term "gestalt" from the psychology of perception to
emphasize two ideas that are also important to interpreting Heart of
Darkness: first, being and understanding emerge from a network of
relations between person and place that define an interdependent
unity; second, a gestalt is a pattern of seeing or knowing that can
change dramatically when any one element changes (the so-called
"gestalt switch" in Escher's images of fish that become birds). So
Naess describes nature as part of humanity and not just the setting
for humanity's dramas.
Imperialism prospers within a positivist tradition that makes
each subject the ruler of all natural objects—and in Heart of Dark-
ness we see this enacted on landscape and people. Kurtz and Marlow
share a shift in self-comprehension when immersed in the milieu of
the Congo, and their experience hints to both of them that their very
being is not firmly rooted in individualism, but is, instead, a conse-
quence of their setting. Therefore, Kurtz's experience, which insists
on interdependence between person and place, and foregrounds
the inseparable connection of subject and object, and emphasizes
context, is a revolution both for epistemology and ontology. This is,
I believe, the revolution in identification between person and place
that can reshape the way we read Heart of Darkness.
Deep ecology's identification is different from ecocriticism's old
friend phenomenology. For many ecocritical treatments, Merleau-

Ponty's sense of an intermingling between person and place is the
starting point for close readings that illuminate a text's intimate rela-
tion to nature.19 My application of deep ecology to Heart of Darkness
is different because it does not linger on the reciprocity of sensory
process between person and place as an end. Rather than those
phenomenological insights, my criticism aims to analyze the tangled
relation between a culture's unfolding knowledge of nature and its
distinct, painful process of reinterpreting the human condition. Heart
of Darkness is partly about the dissolution of boundaries between
person and place, but it is even more about the repositioning of hu-
man being within a new way of knowing nature.
Heart of Darkness models deep ecology's identification in its
narrative technique. The novel's reorganization of perception through
context is enacted through the formal dynamics of literary impres-
sionism. Interestingly, Conrad's impressionist form enables the very
identification a deep ecologist might find in Kurtz. The key is that
both identification and impressionism work by blurring the boundar-
McCarthy 637
ies between setting and perceiver. John Peters writes that in Conrad
"blurred boundaries usually occur such that it becomes impossible
to tell where the margins of subject end and those of object begin"
(51). Examples of this transition from epistemological to ontological
uncertainty recur throughout Heart of Darkness. At a crucial mo-
ment on the steamer, the fog joins all objects and subjects in a hazy
uncertainty; where once clear outlines pertained, now water and
boat, watcher and watched mingle. The blurred boundary between
subject and object is fundamental to impressionist knowing, and that
blurred boundary is at the heart also of the challenge Kurtz presents
to the modern conception of the human position in nature. Given
the insights of deep ecology, it is as much an ecological insight as
a formal one when Peters says, "No clear distinction exists between
self and other for Conrad" (4). Impressionists focus on the interaction
between human consciousness and the objects of that consciousness.
Past theorists of impressionism have argued over the extent to which
that device pulls attention toward object or toward consciousness;
in contrast, my ecocritical reading identifies the interaction—the
mingling—of person with place as the key. Marlow experiences little
sticks that are later transformed into missiles —"Arrows by Jove!"
(44)—and then sees first a cane that becomes a spear. For Ian Watt,
these are examples of "delayed decoding" (176), and thus examples
of the contingency of all knowing where each conclusion is subject to
a revision that depends on a revaluation of context. So that which in
London can only be a cane must, in Africa, become a spear. It's not
that a cane is superior to a spear, rather that each meaning emerges
from its context. Likewise, humanity's natural setting and humanity
itself are tied together in one interpretive gestalt where a change
to one element necessitates the reinterpretation of other elements.
Thus literary impressionism is the formal expression of perception by
a relational self. In my estimation, impressionism is a formal choice
that in Heart of Darkness directs the narrative's ambivalence away
from an unsustainable exploitation of nature as other, toward an un-
settling recognition of foundational identification between character
and setting.
Deep ecology's "identification" and congruent notion of a "re-
lational self" offer the tools to reinterpret striking moments in Heart
of Darkness. On the steamer's last night at the Inner Station, Mar-
low awakens to find Kurtz gone. Following this "moral shock" (64),
Marlow tracks his crawling form through long grass and halts Kurtz
just short of the jungle. The episode is interpreted by critics as a
contrast between temptation and resistance, with Marlow as a walk-
ing super-ego to remind Kurtz of his duties. Deep ecology guides us
to recognize this episode first as evidence of the power of relational
fields, and second as the rush to repress any acknowledgment of
identification with nature:
He rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct like a vapour

exhaled by the earth, and swayed slightly, misty and silent
before me while at my back the fires loomed between the
trees, and the murmur of many voices issued from the
forest.
I tried to break the spell, the heavy mute spell of the
wilderness that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast
by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the
memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone,
I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the
forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb
of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had
beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted
aspirations. (65)
Here Kurtz is drawn out into nature, and it is his immersion that
threatens prevailing depictions of nature values precisely because
immersion reveals humanity to be a product of a nonhierarchically
structured context. First, the details all associate Kurtz with nature:
he is "indistinct, like a vapour exhaled from the earth," and he is
drawn not only by drumbeats, but also by "the murmur of many
voices [that] issued from the forest." Kurtz is the image of humanity
recognizing its home in the natural world and crawling away from
the artificial separation of the steamboat and the established roles
it has come to uphold. It does not matter whether he is crawling to
real wilderness or, more accurately, the package of meanings pasted
upon Africa by European need and fear of a wild Other—the point
is Kurtz steps from his culture's context and allies himself with the
alternative order of nature.
Second, the contest between Marlow and Kurtz emphasizes
nature's power as a shaping context. Marlow says, "I tried to break
the spell, the heavy mute spell of the wilderness" (65). Kurtz lives
deep ecology's premise that there is "no firm ontological divide in the
field of existence," and that instead of the old "man-in-environment"
paradigm, identity is constructed by a relational field. Marlow is him-
self tempted toward this recognition: as he pursues Kurtz his fevered
mind wanders into insight, "I saw a row of pilgrims squirting lead in
the air out of Winchesters . . . I thought I would never get back to
the steamer and imagined myself living alone and unarmed in the
woods to an advanced age" (64). He contrasts the image of perni-
cious and misinformed hostility to nature with himself in the woods,
which now become the incarnation of Romantic peace in nature.
McCarthy 639
This image is destabilizing, and Marlow quickly dismisses the idea—
"such silly things— you know"—and remembers himself to remind
Kurtz, "You will be lost" (65). The terms of Kurtz's bewitching reveal
that Kurtz has conceived of himself as identified with nature, and
that recognizing humanity's ontological situation as part of nature
has made Kurtz peculiarly attractive and threatening to Marlow as
he himself chooses between the nightmares of imperial abuse and
Kurtzian abandon.
In my reading, Kurtz represents the potential power of identify-
ing with nature, and Marlow underlines identification's consequence
by refusing to accept it. Marlow reports Kurtz's identification as the
threat to civilization's self-regard that deep ecology truly is: "the edge
of the forest . . . the bush . . . this alone had beguiled his unlawful
soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations." At this dramatic
moment, Marlow casts the crisis as not a physical contest, but a
moral one between ways of knowing humanity's role. But instead of
valuing Kurtz's allegiance to the web of nature, or acknowledging his
own gravitation toward the natural world, Marlow uses this episode to
deflect any recognition of identification. He looks at Kurtz drawn by
nature, shaped by wilderness, and crawling on the very ground, and
misunderstands: "There was nothing either above or below him —and
I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man!
He had kicked the very earth to pieces" (65). Why this misprision?
Marlow comforts himself by removing Kurtz from nature—"nothing
either above or below him"—at the exact moment Kurtz is obviously
drawn to it, and Marlow also comforts himself by dissolving the earth
itself just when the earth makes him daydream of "living alone and
unarmed in the woods," and Marlow blames Kurtz—"Confound the
man!"—for the gestalt-switch to identification he perceives and then
represses. In Marlow's care, Kurtz's crawl to nature becomes a story
of nature demonized and then repressed altogether, and this dual
dismissal indicates the power of modernity's fear of identification with
nature and its commitment to identification's opposite, exploitation.
Marlow enacts modern Europe's unwillingness to understand nature
as anything beyond a passive object that an imperial self is entitled
to exploit.
The Horror and the Lie

This final section will test my claims for Naess's deep ecology
and Lyell's deep time against close readings of the novel's famous
conclusion. Deep ecology helps interpret Kurtz's life in this novel, but
does not offer an uplifting explanation for his death. Kurtz occupies
Victorian England's primary subject positions vis-à-vis nature: ideal-
ist improver, vigorous commodifier, evolving identifier. I read his last
words as a comment on those positions, and I read Marlow's lie as
the novel's final word on human relations to nature.
Both Kurtz's valedictory "The horror!" and his heads on stakes
reveal Conrad's fundamental pessimism applied to nature.20 To re-
prise my reading, the Congo's ecological setting illuminates human-
ity's uneasy place in the natural world. At the turn of the nineteenth
century, the listeners aboard the Nellie are rocked by the insights of
geology, the claims of ecology, and the presence of alternative cul-
tural patterns. These listeners and Conrad's readers in Blackwood's
are discovering the limits not only of European exceptionalism, but
also of human exceptionalism itself. Conrad wrote from a moment
consumed by competing definitions of nature and humanity, and upon
considering the implications, drew the gloomiest of conclusions.
One sticking point for any ecological reading of Heart of Dark-
ness is that Kurtz represents exploitation of nature as Other, and he
represents identification with what I have been arguing is nature's
leveling force, but in both cases he's imposingly predacious. When, for
example, Kurtz "forgets himself" amongst the lake tribes and is most
clearly identified with the jungle wilderness, he is also accumulating
more ivory than all the other traders combined. But when Kurtz is
borne by stretcher from station to steamboat, and is, presumably,
less wild and more civilized, he is presented as equally rapacious:
"I saw him open his mouth wide—it gave him a weirdly voracious
aspect as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth,
all the men before him" (59). Thus the friendly green reading that
Kurtz discovered an eco-subjectivity deep in the forest is barred by

the fact that he is in all cases a voracious consumer of the earth and
its imperial subjects. Likewise barred is the green reading that "the
horror" signifies an ecofeminist protest against imperialism's linked
oppression of landscape and people. Others would like to see Kurtz
as a perceptive "prodigy" (25), newly acquainted with an alterna-
tive understanding of nature to arrive at what Jeffrey Myers calls an
"ecological consciousness" (107). Those readings are comforting,
but I don't think they are true. It seems much more likely that "The
horror" is something more anthropocentric. In his trajectory across
alienation from nature to immersion in nature, Kurtz recognizes that
civilization can come and go, just as Lyell said prehistoric creatures
could return with a change of climate, and that each European exists
primarily as a product of nature positioned to "exterminate all the
brutes" in competition with other beings. In that case, civilization is
all very well, but it is a set of clothes as patched and bedraggled as
the Russian trader, obscuring the naked truth.
McCarthy 641
When Kurtz rasps "The horror! The horror!" it is Marlow's mo-
ment of uncertain insight, and Kurtz's own valedictory epiphany:
"It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the
expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an
intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail
of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment
of complete knowledge?" (69). The "complete knowledge" Kurtz has
gained from his identification with nature is that humanity's path is
not toward progress, not upward in Frazer's "Ascent of Man"; it is
something very different. "The horror" is that human beings are not
privileged within nature's economy, and human beings can evolve
backward into lust and greed as readily as they can evolve forward
into peace and sympathy. If a steamer can travel back in time, and
if a man of the highest principles and attainments can become again
savage, all confidence is lost in the cloak of civilization Europeans
wrapped around their simian forms.
The lesson of the wilderness is the lesson of Lyell's nature:
existence is a chaotic scramble for shelter, for sustenance, and for
another creature's throat. But this is not the horror some felt at Dar-
win's ape ancestors. Kurtz's horror is broader for his discovery of a
nature beyond the established construction of sentimental beauty or
sublime wilds—Kurtz encounters something closer to Lyell's cyclical,
deep time, where nature, far from manifesting civilization's priority,
shows instead humanity as an unsettled and incidental wanderer
across nature. Nature's lesson is that guided neither by Heaven nor
Progress, human existence is conditioned by a context beyond any
coherent control. Marlow admires Kurtz for facing nature's truths and
calls his last words a victory. At the same time, this ecological reading
explains the breadth of Kurtz's dismay—"that wide and immense stare
embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe" (73)—since his
insight must dissipate the confident, unified self of European civiliza-
tion into a universal proposition of flowing, provisional identities. I
think that Kurtz struggled against this insight—as we will see Marlow
struggle—and one measure of his resistance is the heads on stakes
around his compound. These "shrunken dry lips showing a white line
of teeth" are generally read as emblems of Kurtz's transformation from
civilized to savage. A striking detail that gets lost in these readings
is that the heads face inward: "They would have been more impres-
sive, those heads on stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the
house" (57). The heads face in because what's required for Kurtz's
germinating, unsettling, ecological sensibility is the admonition to stay
in the house and away from the forest. Marlow expects the heads
to threaten those who approach, but this fence operates inward so
that Kurtz can warn himself. Looking at the heads, Marlow muses on
Kurtz's new self: "the wilderness had found him out early, and had
taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think
it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know,
things of which he had no conception until he took counsel with this
great solitude" (57–58). Thus the heads manifest Kurtz's recognition
that the forest is stronger than the clearing, and that he'd be safer in
the house. Ultimately his own intellectual courage tempts him back
from the house to the forest—as the forest dragged him from the
steamer with its whispers and "heavy mute spell"—but the heads
remind us that Kurtz saw and feared the "complete knowledge" his
immersion in nature delivered.
Reading Kurtz's horror through his culture's unfolding knowl-
edge of nature also explains Marlow's lie. Notwithstanding Marlow's
statement, "I hate, detest and can't bear a lie" (27), at the end of
this novel it is nature that makes lying necessary. Marlow's interview
with Kurtz's Intended is inflected by wilderness. Her home is the
most urban setting in the novel—"between the tall houses" and into
"a lofty drawing room" with a "tall marble fireplace"—and into this
civilized place Marlow is pursued by specters not only of Kurtz but
also especially of a triumphant nature.
The vision seemed to enter the house with me . . . the gloom

of the forest, the glitter of the reaches between the murky
bends, the beat of the drum regular and muffled like the
beating of a heart, the heart of a conquering darkness. It
was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading
and vengeful rush which it seemed to me I would have to
keep back alone for the salvation of another soul. (73)
What haunts Marlow across Belgium is wild nature, and in particular

the intimation of nature's ubiquity. This ubiquity is the darkness from
which he alone can save this woman, and so Marlow's lie is tied to
a European self-delusion of humanity's place atop the natural order,
just as much as it is tied to a need to cover Kurtz's tracks of blood-
shed and infidelity.
At the decisive moment, when the Intended has murmured
"repeat them" of Kurtz's damning last words, Marlow attributes "The
horror!" not to Kurtz but to the natural world: "The dusk was repeat-
ing them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that
seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind"
(76). Nature knows a truth here in Brussels too, and communicated
it first to Kurtz and then to Marlow in the African night. It is exactly
nature's threat that Marlow's lie conceals when he turns the conver-
sation away from that natural horror and plants it instead in civilized
conventions: "your name."
McCarthy 643
Her name—a name we never read, but one that stands for
constancy and propriety—works here to redeem Kurtz as a faithful
voyager and to maintain the comforting illusion that civilization exists
above and beyond nature. Civilization, Heart of Darkness tells us, is
based on a necessary falsehood that shields smug Belgians from the
two things that Kurtz's end made plain: first, humanity's intermingling
with nature; and second, the anguish that this nature is not some
European fabrication of sublime beauty or human exceptionalism, but
an uncertain unfolding of forces bathed in bloody conflict. This horror
is too much for Marlow to recount because the Intended represents
the idealizing impetus that makes existence bearable amidst these
hard facts. And thus Marlow bows to something he tellingly calls
"unearthly"—not to propriety and kindness, but to "the faith that
was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an
unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness" (75).
In sum, Marlow's lie is the necessary complement to Kurtz's horror
because the lie acknowledges to his audience the dark insights of
Kurtz's life, while affirming those cultural superstructures that mask
the painful rubbing of humanity against hard new ways of knowing
nature.
One way to conclude this conversation about nature and Heart
of Darkness is to notice its parallels with Achebe's influential insights
about Conrad and imperialism. Readers assign great weight to Kurtz
having "gone native." But they could as easily say he's "gone nature."
Just as Achebe observes that the novel offers no distinction between
the diverse groups of peoples Marlow would have encountered on the
Congo, there's no distinction between the particular landscapes or
trees he encounters either. Nature is a backdrop, transformed from
the spellbinding abundance of river delta, tropical forest, or highland
life into "a place of negations" (Achebe 783) and a direct symbol of
lurking evil. Many critics have echoed Achebe's charge that "Conrad
was a bloody racist" (790);21 should we also say "Conrad was a bloody
anthropocentrist"? After all, the issue for Achebe is that Conrad's
reification of all Africa into a dumb, brute Other generates as litera-
ture a story in which the humanity of black people is questioned.
The analogous issue for environmental critics is that Conrad's story
might reify all African landscape into one dark symbol, and thus set
up the environment—a continent's varied and remarkable life—as
a cave wall for humanity's shadows. This is the anthropocentrism
that haunts Heart of Darkness, and I believe Kurtz's story is partly
the story of a man working through his culture's understandings of
humanity in nature and finally pushing beyond the boundaries his
anthropocentric community has established to define itself in op-
position to nature.
Heart of Darkness emerges from a moment when differing con-
structions of nature jostled for precedence, and the intellectual world
was moved to consider the consequences of ecology's insights. That
is why Heart of Darkness is a novel balanced across the troubling
distance between people and nature, and the fearful implications of
closing that gap. This is an environmental novel for three reasons.
First, Heart of Darkness is set in a place and time of ecological di-
saster, and it is part of the text's acute sensitivity that it manages
to connect the logic of imperialism with the practice that generates
crushing ecological exploitation. Next, Heart of Darkness engages
competing definitions of humanity in nature, and in these definitions
explores the possibility of a man empowered by identification with his
wild context. The novel thus figures an escape from the discursive
feedback loop by which a modern society defines itself against a false
image of nature, and by which that false image of nature is enforced
by the power of society. Finally, Marlow's and Kurtz's journeys through
ecological extinction in the Congo occasion "that supreme moment
of complete knowledge" wherein civilization is known as just one of
many possible outcomes for a humanity shaped by goalless nature.
To read Heart of Darkness we should think not just about culture, but
also about nature because the text enacts, examines, and anticipates
modernity's conflicted attitudes toward itself on this earth.
Notes
1. King Leopold issued an edict against killing elephants without special

permission in July 1889, just months before Conrad himself arrived
in the Congo.
2. Clearly this relation was written in the chains and etched on the backs
of the African workers who found themselves in near slavery, and
it is a tenet of ecofeminism that the logic of domination that claims
land is the same logic that presents women and people of color as
incomplete and wanting development.
3. For a full and harrowing treatment of the rubber trade and its op-
position, see Hocschild's Leopold's Ghost.
4. I am much indebted to Myers's "The Anxiety of Conflunce" not only
for its treatment of ivory, but also more broadly for offering an early
ecological reading of Kurtz and Marlow. For Myers the voyage to
Africa imposes some unwelcome insights from Darwinian evolution,
and presents a missed opportunity for "ecological consciousness."
5. While African nature has carried a meaning of danger and foreboding
in the novel, and we have seen that African nature is a ground for
McCarthy 645
exploitation, the term "nature" carries also the Romantic associa-
tions of an innocent and wholesome countryside. In my reading, the
term "nature" is what Raymond Williams called "the most complex
word in the language" (Keywords 219), precisely because it is pulled
constantly between these uses and a third fundamental use which is
the material world of undomesticated plants, animals, and places.
6. Descartes's cogito presented the human mind as a monadic unit dis-
tinct from the physical world it must use to thrive. Indeed, Descartes
went on to cast all nature as senseless, with animals as machines
feeling neither pleasure nor pain. That is the Western philosophical
tradition that separates humans from nature, and allows for nature's
exploitation.
7. See Schama's Landscape and Memory, and Williams's The Country
and the City, among other treatments linking landscape aesthetics
to social power.
8. William Cronon's essay, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back
to the Wrong Nature," argues that wilderness is a human creation.
Specifically, Cronon locates the cultural construction of wilderness
in two nineteenth-century forces, the sublime and the primitive. For
Cronon, wilderness is the contested invention of privileged white men
who generated a false alternative to their cities and towns. My point
is that in Conrad's generation wilderness is an uncertain discursive
territory, pulled back and forth between threat and promise.
9. Sentimental nature writing surrounded Conrad and sold well for
writers as diverse as Frances Hodgson Burnett and Rudyard Kipling.
For treatments of Victorian nature and literature, see Eagleton's
Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Cooper's chapter "The Regime of
Unrest," and Williams's chapter "The City and the Future."
10. Critical treatments of the novel hold that these images of point-
less work sketch a backdrop of absurdity in Africa, against which
the sensible Marlow will find one other forthright soul. See Peters's
discussion in chapter 2 of currency and contingent values in Conrad
and Impressionism.
11. The railway Marlow observes under construction was built from Matadi
to Leopoldville, and was one key to making King Leopold's Congo
a profitable empire. The Congo River was an enormous highway to
the interior of Africa with countless navigable branches and tributar-
ies to use for further development. Indeed, Leopold's minion Henry
Stanley called it "the grand highway of commerce to West Central
Africa" (qtd. in Hochschild 55). The problem for the developers was
the series of cataracts and canyons that closed off the last 200 miles
of the river to Atlantic shipping. Thus Marlow's "two-hundred-mile
tramp" (23)—which mirrors Conrad's own walk of 1890—is not only
an inconvenience for our narrator, but also an enactment of this
colony's limitations where all goods must be carried downriver by
hand, and all the engines of empire—steamships included—must be
disassembled and carried upriver by hand.
12. Mark Wollaeger writes that "Conrad's letters reveal familiarity with
contemporary science unusual for a literary man" (8), and that scien-
tific reading engendered deep skepticism about humanity. For more on
this discussion, see Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism.
13. On Lyell's relation to Darwin, see Worster. Also, critics have long
connected Conrad with Darwin, and the many treatments of Con-
rad's relation to Darwin's influential ideas include: O'Hanlon's Joseph
Conrad and Charles Darwin, Hunter's Joseph Conrad and the Ethics
of Darwin, Beer's Darwin's Plots, Henkin's Darwinism in the English
Novel, Myers's "The Anxiety of Confluence," and Firchow's Envision-
ing Africa.
14. See Torgovnick, Gone Primitive. Singh also offers a related alterna-
tive when he says "Kurtz's tribalization, therefore, can be seen as a
rejection of the west in favor of a simpler and more honest way of
life" (65).
15. I have noted that Hudson's oeuvre is full of sentimental naturescapes,
and it is also interesting that Hudson was one of the writers Conrad
and Ford discussed as notable for his popularity and financial suc-
cess.
16. See, among others, Fothergill's "Cannibalising Traditions."
17. Lyell's uniformitarianism is contrary to his day's catastrophism and
our day's "punctuated equilibrium," to use Stephen Jay Gould's term.
Also of interest is that Lyell argues against those who saw evolu-
tion bringing advancement because he denied that the fossil record
showed increasing complexity through time.
18. See Roussell's Metaphysics of Darkness and Miller's Poets of Real-
ity.
19. See, for example, Westling's Green Breast of the New World and
Scigaj's Sustainable Poetry.
20. On Conrad's pessimism see, for instance, Guerard's psychoanalytic
reading, Conrad the Novelist. Guerard quotes Conrad's uncle writ-
ing the depressed Conrad on his return from the Congo: "with your
melancholy temperament you ought to avoid all meditations which
lead to pessimistic conclusions. . . . Cultivate cheerful habits" (qtd.
in Guerard 48). For Guerard this is an ironic reminder that Heart of
Darkness is "one of the great dark meditations in literature, and one
of the purest expressions of a melancholy temperament" (48).
21. See, for instance, Said and Singh.
McCarthy 647
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"A Choice of Nightmares": The Ecology of Heart of Darkness

Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

[157.193.0.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-18 16:22 GMT) Universiteit Gent

"A CHOICE OF NIGHTMARES":

f THE ECOLOGY OF HEART OF

Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy

Nature is at the heart of Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad's

creek, the mud, the river—seemed to beckon us with a dishonouring

And since to look at things in bloom

I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a

Evolution and Identification

We could not understand because we were too far

For most critics, Marlow's attention suggests a vestigial "kinship" be-

and context, as readily unclothed by change as they were buttoned

The two fellows there seemed astounded at anybody at-

Marlow differs from this unwholesome pair through his sympathy

friend phenomenology. For many ecocritical treatments, Merleau-

He rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct like a vapour

The Horror and the Lie

Kurtz discovered an eco-subjectivity deep in the forest is barred by

The vision seemed to enter the house with me . . . the gloom

What haunts Marlow across Belgium is wild nature, and in particular

1. King Leopold issued an edict against killing elephants without special

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