Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary (3 page)

III

During its composition,
Heart of Darkness
developed like ‘genii from the bottle' in ways that seem to have surprised Conrad himself, prompting him later to feel that its last two instalments were ‘wrapped up in secondary notions' (
Collected Letters
, vol. II, pp. 146, 157). One sign of its changing character is that Marlow, predominantly a detached figure in Part I, becomes with his journey upriver an involved participant, increasingly excited, feverish and panic-stricken. Simultaneously, he is obsessed by the charismatic voice of Kurtz, a spectral figure who actively dominates the later part of the story. With these developments, the pattern of the quest becomes more insistent. Marlow conceives of his journey as culminating in a meeting with Kurtz, who is himself engaged in a quest into unexplored regions: when the two make contact late in the story, they become, in effect, agents in each other's lives.

Successive generations of critics have been impelled to testify to the nature of the elusive developments following upon Marlow's upriver departure, and there is now virtually an interpretation of the story to suit every predilection–the psychoanalytic, philosophic, political, post-colonial and gender-based. Each generation has also thrown up a major dissenting critic. In the immediate post-1950 period, F. R. Leavis was highly influential with his claim that the story was marred by an ‘adjectival insistence upon…inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery'.
⁷
Later generations have been overshadowed by the Nigerian novelist and critic Chinua Achebe, whose angry polemic of 1975 accused Conrad of virtually betraying his subject by eliminating ‘the African as a human factor', lamented his ‘preposterous and perverse arrogance in reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind' and condemned the author as a ‘bloody racist'.
⁸

Traditionally, the most immediate problem for readers has been that of adjusting to the tale's dramatically changing character. Although Part I anticipates some of the terms of Marlow's coming quest, it hardly foreshadows the ambitious symbolic method to be brought into play. In part, Marlow himself becomes an active symbol-maker, constantly seeking a figurative equivalent for his feelings. But in addition, the obscure nightmare in which he is embroiled increasingly determines the character of the story and embraces Kurtz as a significant part of its structure: everywhere felt but only occasionally glimpsed, the latter emerges as a strangely protean presence, forming and re-forming like the genie from a bottle. Achebe regards the story as involving a single ‘petty European', but the symbol of dark nightmare also has a strenuously generalizing effect in suggesting that
all
Europeans are involved in the breakdown of the imperial dream.

Symbolic method also brings with it a new, and in some ways, problematic range of ‘secondary' interests. In moving away from the symptoms of colonial rowdyism in Part I, the tale is not thereby always less topical, but it now devises markedly wider tests in order to probe the credentials of the European mission in Africa. As a compendium of decadent excesses, the figure of Kurtz is obviously central to the tale's free-wheeling and–as some readers have felt–erratically widening scope. His is the most comprehensive test and the most spectacular fall; in one of his many guises, he offers access to what might be called Europe's political unconscious–into the underlying obsessions and needs that both fostered and found relief in the imperial project. And finally, when Marlow returns to Europe, he brings with him a Kurtzian legacy that helps to shape an even wider vision of Western civilization and its discontents.

Early in Part II, with the beginning of Marlow's journey to the interior, the tale signals that the narrator's own inherited British traditions will be the first to come under scrutiny. The terms of this ordeal would have been familiar to late-Victorian readers, since what is on trial is a principle at the very basis of their culture and underpinning its ‘mission' in the colonies–the work ethic as an agency of order and progress. In Britain, the gospel of work was associated with the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle, in whose writings the principle gathered numerous moral, religious and philosophic resonances. As a British merchant seaman, Marlow's tradition is a seamanly in-flexion of the Carlylean gospel. Marlow spells out the tonalities of this humanistic ideal: ‘I don't like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others' (35). For him, the notion brings with it a view of the seaman's life as involving the pursuit of an honourable vocation, the performance of a social obligation in the cause of human solidarity and the restraining of individuality by the collective ethic. Translated into the context of colonial ‘work', the ethic also involves a tough, no-nonsense pragmatism–the ability, as Marlow puts it, to bury dead hippo without being too bothered by the smell.

But even an immunity to noxious smells cannot defend Marlow from being challenged on several fronts. He is quickly made aware, when he becomes ‘one of the Workers, with a capital' (14), that a wider political machinery can itself be found to exploit the superficial rhetoric of the Carlylean work ethic to legitimize its ultimately criminal purpose. (In 1898, Leopold had required of his agents that they ‘accustom the population to general laws, of which the most needful and the most salutary is assuredly that of work'.)
⁹
Once in Africa, he quickly learns that his work efforts are either rendered futile by a lawless inefficiency or part of a process ultimately devoted to base ends.

Even though Marlow tries to attend to practicalities involved with the job in hand–the problem of acquiring rivets, tracking river obstacles and efficient steering–he is increasingly forced to question how far the job-sense is a necessary avoidance of a painful knowledge of the self and world. At a crucial point in the narrative, two documents serve to bring home his crisis of choice: on the one hand, the clear seamanly purpose he finds in Towson's nautical manual, a symbolic reminder of his inherited traditions, or, on the other, the searing self-contradictions of Kurtz's pamphlet, a signpost to the possibility of different kinships and allegiances.

In more senses than one, Marlow loses navigational clarity and purpose. The pressures put upon him reflect more widely on a tradition of liberal humanism that, when faced by the flinty actualities of wider colonial politics, has commonly suffered painful defeat and been left with a legacy of nervous irritation, panic, hysteria and frustrated silence. At the point where Marlow's panic sets in, Kurtz becomes a more material presence; as the narrator begins to share empathically in Kurtz's ordeal, their crises intermesh.

From a point of hindsight, Conrad himself seems to have been aware of the dangerous risk involved in the treatment of the tale's presiding symbolic figure: ‘What I distinctly admit is the fault of having made Kurtz too symbolic or rather symbolic at all' (
Collected Letters
, vol. II, p. 460). Even in the first part of the tale, the Kurtz who emerges through hearsay and gossip is a bewildering medley of possibilities–now universal genius, now noted ivory-hunter, now confirmed solitary with ambitious plans for Africa and now threatening spectre. The problem of Kurtz's shifting metamorphoses becomes more formidable as the tale progresses, since this figure will become part of the tumultuous content of Marlow's nightmare, shaping its form and providing its climax. With each of his metamorphoses, moreover, Kurtz also contributes to a shifting sense of the nature and location of the ‘heart of darkness'. How various and plural are his main incarnations, and how are their meanings registered in Marlow's narrative?

One of Kurtz's symbolic identities memorably extends the ‘dark' evidence of European rule in Part I. Several descriptions focus upon his extreme deformity and grotesque, puppet-like movements in order to bring home the sense in which, as Europe's offspring, he enacts the logic of its expansionist and acquisitive drives. In his restless energy as an explorer, conqueror and self-styled hero of Empire, he is a powerfully iconoclastic caricature. To the extent that he casts aside the need for any hypocritical pretence and unashamedly acts out the will to acquire vast amounts of ivory, he embodies a brute economic imperative as well as an unnatural idolatry of the material object.

Where some nations tended high-mindedly to regard overseas expansion as an organic extension of their destiny,
Heart of Darkness
can suggest a powerfully alternative vision: of imperialism as a historical deformation, whose working out involves an inevitable principle of degeneration. Central to this version is the presentation of Kurtz as a malformed seven-foot-long puppet-creature, who enacts a grotesquely choreographed ceremony. Kurtz has become so enthralled to the commodity he seeks that he is himself commodified, as though ‘an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand' (74); or he is imaged as a grimacing open mouth, giving him ‘a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him' (74). He also acts out with psychopathic intensity the urge towards an autocratically governed empire–“‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—” Everything belonged to him' (60)–in which, as the veritable Antichrist of its making, he exacts complete submission from his subordinates and can envisage a policy of what nowadays would be called racial cleansing: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!' (62). The iconoclastic power of this portrait depends upon our recognizing that the ‘heart of darkness' has its roots firmly in Europe and that Kurtz, as its malformed outgrowth, strikes Marlow as a symbol of present and active degeneration.

But overlaying this incarnation is another one, the object of Marlow's most excited and unspecific fears–the spectacle of Kurtz as a ‘lost soul'. This version presses us to attend to the fact that Kurtz has a pre-history. There had, it seems, been an ‘original Kurtz' (no mere trader, but a person of considerable idealism and with talents as a painter, poet, musician, philosopher and orator), who in Africa has been exposed as a ‘hollow sham' (85). This transplanted European, originally the product of a cultured society and identifying himself with the high-minded mission of bringing ‘light' to Africa, has been betrayed by a naive belief in imperial watchwords and, with his inherited assumptions exposed as fictions, stands revealed as a morally bankrupt cipher. The image of Kurtz as a greedily devouring mouth is now replaced by one of inner vacancy: he was, says Marlow, strikingly, ‘hollow at the core' (72).

But for Marlow, the spectacle does not end there: it carries with it the added implication that Kurtz has undergone a spectacular ‘fall' in Africa–brought about by a hollowness so profound as to have resulted in his invasion by the dark atavistic forces of the land. Though the narrator has previously shown himself to have a healthy disrespect for potential obfuscation, he himself seems to acquire a taste for the
frisson
of metaphysical melodrama in describing how Kurtz's ‘soul' has become a battleground for the competing forces of good and evil. Marlow's heated imaginings offer two possibilities: that Kurtz has been captured, as if in some illicit and vampirish love affair, by a ‘wilderness' that had ‘taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation' (59).

Alternatively, he pictures Kurtz's fall as involving a Faustian pact, in which the man has virtually sold his soul in order to enjoy ‘a high seat amongst the devils of the land—I mean literally'. However, in the absence of substantiating evidence, the impact of the word ‘literally' remains muted, and attention is instead re-focused on Marlow's horrified sense of the ‘creepy': ‘Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over' (60).

There is some force in Achebe's objection that the Africa to emerge in parts of the story belongs to a conventional picture of the ‘dark' continent, a place of ‘creepy' horrors and the traditional site of the ‘white man's grave'. Certainly many of Conrad's first reviewers, overlooking the disturbing implications of Kurtz's hollowness, could comfortably regard the story as a version of a familiar type of late-Victorian novel, in which Africa's strange ‘devils' bring about the decivilization or ‘going native' of a European colonist, who finally descends into madness.

To Marlow's excited imagination, Kurtz simultaneously metamorphoses into yet another symbolic incarnation, that of a charismatic, oracular ‘voice' (58), whose utterances will eventually help to shape the spreading nightmare into significant form. Several problems accompany this fascination, not least the fact that Marlow is at such an early stage of his journey fugitively haunted by the sensation that its culmination will necessarily entail a redeeming ‘talk with Kurtz' (58) and confirm the rightness of his unconscious loyalty to him. Further, it is not entirely clear why Kurtz's powerful voice–the grandiloquence of which is often the object of Marlow's suspicion–should be so quickly valued as an unambiguous gift. There is often some confusion in Marlow's mind about whether he has actively chosen a commitment to Kurtz's voice or whether he is its fated victim. If the latter is true, then Marlow is possibly nearer than he thinks to The Harlequin, whom he regards as being dangerously captive to the power of Kurtz's charismatic eloquence: “‘We talked of everything,” he said, quite transported at the recollection. “I forgot there was such a thing as sleep'” (69).