Heart of Darkness is the most famous of Joseph Conrad’s personal novels: a pilgrim’s progress for a pessimistic and psychological age. After having finished the main draft of the novel, Conrad had remarked, “Before the Congo, I was just a mere animal”. The autobiographical basis of the narrative is well known and its introspective bias obvious. This is Conrad’s longest journey into self.
The novel thus has its
important public side as an angry document on absurd and brutal exploitation.
In the characters of Marlowe and Kurtz, we see one of the greatest of Conrad’s
many moments of compassionate rendering. Significantly, all that narrated has
been gathered from the hinterland of Conrad’s own experiences during his Congo
exploration.
Heart of
Darkness is a record of things seen and done. But also Conrad was reacting
to the humanitarian pretences of some of the looters precisely as the novelist
today reacts to the moralism of cold propaganda. Then it was ivory poured down
from the heart of darkness, now it is uranium. Conrad shrewdly recognized an
institution amply developed in Nostromo – that deception is most sinister when it
becomes self-deception and the propagandist takes seriously his own fictions.
The conservative Conrad speaks through the journalist who says that Kurtz’s
proper sphere ought to have been politics on the popular side. But the book as
we all know has been almost a fictionalized real life experience of the
novelist with a strong didactic note imbibed rather positively in it.
Conrad, like many other
novelists today, was both drawn to idealism and repelled by its hypocritical
abuse. He shows Marlow committing himself to the yet unseen agent partly
because Kurtz had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort. Later, when
he discovers what has happened to Kurtz’s moral ideas, he remains faithful to
the “nightmare of my choice”. In Under Western Eyes, Sophia makes a distinction
between those who burn and those who not and remarks that it is sometimes
better to burn. Kurtz who had made himself literally one of the devils of the
land and who in solitude had kept himself loose of the earth, burns while the
others not. This clearly indicates that ‘Heart of Darkness’ combines a
Victorian ethic and late Victorian fear of the white men’s deterioration with a
distinctly catholic psychology. Marlow believes that we are protected from
ourselves by society with its loves and watchful neighbours and in their
different degrees. The pilgrims and Kurtz share this hollowness.
In any event, one has
to recognize that the story is not primarily about Kurtz or about the brutality
of Belgian officials but about Marlow and its narrator. To what extent it also
expresses that Joseph Conrad, the biographer, might considerably recover; it is
doubtless and insoluble question. However, the autobiographical slant is clear
from the fact that Conrad did visit Congo in 1890 and this belated enactment
was itself profoundly disapproved by his own uncle and guardian. Yet Conrad
hoped to attain command of the expedition ship even after he had returned from
the invigilatory voyage dramatized in the novel. Thus the adventurous Conrad
and Conrad the moralist may have experienced collision. Substantially and in
its central emphasis, ‘Heart of Darkness’ concerns Marlow and his journey
towards and through certain facets of the self. Marlow, the Conrad surrogately
reiterates often enough that he is recounting a spiritual voyage of self
discovery. He remarks casually but crucially that he did not know himself
before setting out and that he likes to work for the chance it provides to:
“find yourself … what one other man can ever know”.
At the material and superficial
level, the journey is through the temptation of atavism – a remote kinship with
the “wild and passionate uproar” of a trace of response to it, of a final
rejection of the “fascination of the abomination”. Marlow’s temptation is made
concrete through his exposure to Kurtz, an idealist who has fully responded to
the wilderness: a potential and fallen self. At the climax, Marlow follows
Kurtz ashore, confounds the beat of the drum with the beating of his heart and
goes through the ordeal of looking into Kurtz’s ‘mad soul’. The late Victorian
reader and possibly Conrad himself who take this more seriously, than we could
literally believe at merely in Kurtz’s deterioration and also in the sudden
subversion of the heart of materialistic fiction. Certain circumstances of
Marlow’s voyage, looking through these terms resemblances Conrad’s maritime
experiences. Here, we have presumably entered an era of unconscious creation,
the dream is true but the tiller may have no idea why it is so. Possibly a
psychic need as well as literary tact compelled Conrad to defer the meeting
between Marlow and Kurtz for some three thousand words after announcing that it
took place.
The incorporation and
the alliance between Marlow and Kurtz became material in the end as the identification
of the self. Hence, the shocks Marlow experiences when he finds Kurtz’s cabin
empty, his secret sharer gone a part of himself, had vanished, “what made this
emotion so overpowering was – how shall I define it…”He follows the crawling
Kurtz through the grass, comes upon him – “long, pale, indistinct like a vapour
exhaled by the earth”. When Marlow finds it hard to define the moral shock he
received on seeing the empty cabin or when he says he does not know why he was
jealous of sharing his experience we can take him literally, and in a sense be
thankful for his uncertainty. ‘Heart of Darkness’ takes us into a deeper region
of the mind, quite similar to the psychic union between Legatt and his secret
sharer in Conrad’s short story, “The Secret Sharer”. We ought to share F.R.
Leavis, who emphasizes the fact that Conrad was probably staring at the devil
when he transmuted his experiences into fictionalized form.
