Heart of Darkness: Colonialism and Human Nature In this essay, Roger Moore explores the Heart of Darkness as a searing

indictment of European Colonial exploitation, and a symbolic journey into the deepest recesses of human nature. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is both a dramatic tale of an arduous trek into the Belgian Congo (the heart of darkest Africa) at the turn of the twentieth century and a symbolic journey into the deepest recesses of human nature. On a literal level, through Marlow's narration, Conrad provides a searing indictment of European colonial exploitation inflicted upon African natives. Before he turns to an account of his experience in Africa, Marlow provides his companions aboard the Nellie a brief history lesson about the ancient Roman invasion and occupation of Britain. He claims that the Romans were "no colonists" for "they grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was for robbery and violence, aggravated murder on a great scale" (p.8). The reader is initially encouraged to consider that enlightened European colonists of Marlow's day were motivated by objectives far loftier than those of the Romans. Thus, Marlow's aunt who arranged his commission with the Company proclaims that the white man's purpose in Africa is to wean the continent's ignorant savages from their "horrid ways." Marlow himself says that modern efficiency and the "unselfish idea" of conquering the earth, rather than some "sentimental pretense," is what "redeems" the colonial enterprise in which he has been enlisted (p.8). But when Marlow arrives at the mouth of the Congo River, it becomes immediately apparent that uplifting the natives from their savagery is not the driving force behind the European mission. At the Company's Outer Station, Marlow sees six black men yoked together and realizes that these pathetic figures "could not be called enemies, nor were they criminals" (p.25). They are, in fact, brutalized victims "brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient and were them allowed to crawl away and rest" (p.28). In its actual practice, the controlling value of efficient colonial administration consists primarily of working the natives until they die and then replacing them with still more victims. The European pilgrims that Marlow encounters are equipped with modern weaponry for the ostensible purpose of defending themselves against feral savages. In fact, the natives pose very little threat to the white conquerors. As Marlow's craft steams up the Congo River toward the Inner Station, they are attacked from the shore by a group of natives who shoot arrows and hurl spears at the craft. Yet as the narrator recalls this assault, "the action was far from being aggressive---it was not even defensive: it was undertaken under the stress of desperation, and in its essence was purely protective" (p.79). We later learn that the purpose of this attack was merely to prevent the party aboard from taking the tribe's "god," Mr. Kurtz, away from them. With the exception of a few "improved specimens" who are transformed into cogs in the machinery of exploitation, the European colonists are engaged in their own form of "murder on a great scale," showing no interest at all in bettering the lot of the Congo's inhabitants. Hypocrisy is a salient theme in Heart of Darkness. Marlow's account repeatedly highlights the utter lack of congruence between the Company's rhetoric about "enlightening" the natives with its actual aims of extracting ivory, minerals and other valued commodities. As one of the fevered pilgrims whom he meets on his overland trek tells Marlow, it is not a virtuous idea or even efficiency per se that moves the colonists to treat the natives as members of an inferior species: it is, instead "`to make money, of course'" (p.34). The colonial enterprise extends beyond the Company to an International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Marlow is told that this organization entrusted Kurtz to prepare a report for its future guidance. In it, Kurtz's dutifully acknowledges the importance of attaining maximum efficiency in the prosecution of the ivory trade, and he advocates creating the illusion that whites are supernatural beings in the minds of the child-like natives. As Marlow tells his listeners, while reading through Kurtz's proposal he found "at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, life a flash of light in a serene sky: `Exterminate all the brutes!'" (p.92). From Kurtz's perspective, the most efficient way of suppressing savage customs among the natives is to simply annihilate them. Upon his return to Europe, Marlow presents the deceased Kurtz's report to the Company's manager. The latter seems to be disturbed by the sheer brutality of its conclusion, saying that "`this is not what we had a right to expect'" (p.135). It is not, however, that the Company manager takes issue with Kurtz's opinion that the natives are entirely expendable; it is that he disagrees with and is offended by the candid expression of this view. The time is not yet ripe for the Company to disclose its true colors and the Company objections to Kurtz's barbarous methods are based on the damage that they might inflict upon its carefully crafted propaganda campaign about bringing Christian civilization to people who live in darkness. The Company and, indeed, all Europe, is engaged in a fundamentally hypocritical endeavor, rationalizing their savagery on the pretext of alleviating the natives of their amoral primitivism. The Central Station manager says to Marlow, "you are of the new gang---the gang of virtue" (p.44). By doing so, he directly implicates Conrad's narrator into the broader hypocrisies of European colonialism. Although it

is through his private account aboard the Nellie that the abominations being perpetrated against the Africans are detailed, Marlow is by no means virtuous in the active sense of that term. He is, at bottom, a paid employee of the Company. While he attempts to distance himself from the other pilgrims invading Africa through a muted, retrospective indignation, at no point in his story does Marlow make any effort to intervene in the crimes that he witnesses. Even upon his return to Europe, he consciously refrains publicizing what is actually occurring in Colonial Africa. He even goes so far as to safeguard Mr. Kurtz's reputation. Thus, Marlow lies to Kurtz's fiance, reporting that Kurtz's "`endwas in every way worthy of his life'" (p.144), and then adding that Kurtz's final words were her name. Kurtz's dying words were, of course, "The horror! The horror!" (p.130), and The Heart of Darkness is centrally preoccupied with the problem of horror, of unmitigated evil. Marked by successive stages from the outer to the central to the inner stations, Marlow's journey closely resembles the descent into hell that Dante undertook in his epic poem the Inferno, finding the beast Satan at the center of Hell. The manager of the Central Station apprises Marlow that Mr. Kurtz is "is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and the devil knows what else" (p.44). It is this last association that has some truth to it. Kurtz is a diabolical figure, a surrogate of the devil himself. When Marlow finally reaches the Inner Station where Kurtz presides, he finds that the "various rumors" of Kurtz's evil reign are, if anything, understatements. He sees a row of severed heads impaled on sticks and learns that they were taken from natives who rebelled against Kurtz's absolute dominion. Not only does Kurtz brook no dissent to his reign, the natives that have gathered around him worship Kurtz as if he were a god. Kurtz does not limit the scope of his monstrous actions to the natives. The misplaced Russian who has attached himself to Kurtz recounts that after Kurtz stole his ivory, his idol then declared that he would shoot him "because he could do so, and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on earth to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased" (p.104). Kurtz is a megalomaniac; he exerts life-and-death power for its own sake, he engages in evil simply because it is possible for him to do so. Marlow concludes that Kurtz is insane, but Kurtz himself insists on two separate occasions that he is perfectly conscience of his actions. Whether Kurtz can be equated with Satan is, however, another matter altogether. He is both fiendish and childish and, as Marlow comes to suspect, he may be "hollow at the core." In the words of the Company's chief accountant, Mr. Kurtz is "a very remarkable person" (p.31), yet, even before he meets Kurtz, Marlow observes that "I am not prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him" (p.93). When he finally comes face to face with Kurtz, Marlow finds an unnaturally elongated sickly figure stretched as "an image of death carved out of old ivory" (p.111). Not only is Kurtz a physically unimpressive being, he is not a genius nor was he ever an especially noble individual even when he had all of his mental faculties. Kurtz is both grand and pathetic. The disparity between the epic scale of Kurtz's evil and his seeming hollowness is but one example of the discordant notes that arise throughout Marlow's story. Ambiguity and contradiction abound in the Heart of Darkness. There are numerous instances in which seemingly inexplicable events occur. Before departing for Africa, Marlow undergoes a physical examination that has no real purpose. He then witnesses a European warship firing its guns into the bush along the African coast for no apparent reason and the pilgrims who accompany him on the overland segment of his journey routinely discharge their rifles along the way without aiming. The colonists are engaged in massive projects that alter the natural landscape for no rhyme or reason, digging a huge pit that seems to have no purpose. There is absolutely no explanation for the admiration that the Russian sailor extends towards Kurtz. The figure of the native woman (or queen) who appears along the riverbank as Kurtz is taken from his people is a complete enigma. Conrad's story is filled with unexplained details, and the reader gains the suspicion that they are may be meaningless and that this journey into the Heart of Darkness is, in fact, devoid of any lessons. Reinforcing this motif of ambiguity, doubt, and the meaningless, Conrad's text appears to challenge the very premise that human experience can be related in words. In a sense, Heart of Darkness is about the act of story-telling itself. The framing of the tale, with an external narrator describing Marlow sitting aboard the Nellie, highlights the status of his story as an act of narration. Although Marlow as narrator is competent to perform the task at hand, holding his audience in rapture, at several points in his story, he falters and appears to be at a loss for words, telling his listeners, for example, that it is "impossible" to convey the feelings that he experienced. Marlow says that Kurtz presided over "unspeakable rituals" (that he does not describe) and that in the Congo the "earth seems unearthly." At each of these junctures, Conrad suggests that words are inadequate, that normal communication is somehow futile, and that, at bottom, human experience itself is without meaning and, like Kurtz, hollow at its core. Like Marlow's listeners, at the conclusion of his story, the reader is apt to sit in silence, pondering what, if anything, has been revealed.

Historical and Philosophical Exploration of Heart of Darkness In the following essay, Kevin Attell explores how Heart of Darkness has been viewed as both a commentary on the evils of colonialism and a philosophical exploration of the human psyche. Attell argues that critics who argue that the novel is either historical or philosophical "misses Conrad's insight that the two are in fact inseparable." The original publication of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was a three-part serialization in London's Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It was subsequently published in a collection of three stories by Conrad in 1902. The date of Heart of Darkness should be noted, for it provides a historical context which illuminates the story's relation to both the contemporary turn-of-the-century world to which Conrad responds in the tale, and also the influential role Conrad plays in the subsequent progress of twentieth-century literary history. Traditionally there have been two main ways of approaching the interpretation of Heart of Darkness. Critics and readers have tended to focus on either the implications of Conrad's intense fascination with European colonialism in Africa and around the world, or they have centered on his exploration of seemingly more abstract philosophical issues regarding, among other things, the human condition, the nature of Good and Evil, and the power of language. The former interpretive choice would concentrate on the ways Conrad presents European colonialism (of which he had much firsthand experience, being a sailor himself), while the latter would primarily investigate Conrad's exposition of philosophical questions. Even a cursory reading of the tale makes it clear that there is ample evidence for both of these interpretive concerns. What is perhaps less obvious, but equally important, is the way the historical reality which Conrad takes as his subject matter and the philosophical meditation to which Kurtz's story gives rise are intrinsically connected to one another. The turn of the twentieth century was a period of intense colonial activity for most of the countries of Europe. Conrad refers to European colonialism countless times in Heart of Darkness, but perhaps the most vivid instance is when Marlow, while waiting in the office of the Belgian Company, sees "a large shining map [of colonial Africa], marked with all the colours of the rainbow. There was," he says, "a vast amount of redgood to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch. . . . However, I wasn't going into any of these. I was going into the yellow." These colors, of course, correspond to the territorial claims made on African land by the various nations of Europe: red is British, blue French, green Italian, orange Portuguese, purple German, and yellow Belgian. The map bears noting. On the one hand it establishes the massive geographical scale of Europe's colonial presence in Africa, but it also symbolically sets this presence up in relation to another central thematic concern of the novella: the popular conception of colonialism in Europe. Conrad links the colored maps to the childlike ignorance and apathy of the European public as to what really goes on in the colonies. Just a few moments before describing the map in the office in Brussels Marlow had recalled his childhood, saying: "Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there." Much of Heart of Darkness is then a grim and detailed exposition of the real "glories of exploration" which Marlow observes firsthand, but in these opening moments before Marlow has left for Africa Conrad has given his assessment of the perspective on the colonies from the point of view of the common European: on public display in the waiting-room of the Company office in Brussels, and in the imagination of the European public, the representation of European activity in Africa is as abstract and pleasant as a multicolored map. Another example of the distance between the popular conception of the colonies and their reality can be found in the frequent reference made to the purportedly civilizing aspect of colonial conquest. Marlow's aunt speaks of "weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways" and Kurtz's early pamphlet ominously claims that "by the simple exercise of [the colonists'] will [they] can exert a power for good practically unbounded." Marlow's direct experience of the trading stations in the Congo, and Kurtz's scrawled note "Exterminate all the brutes" at the end of the pamphlet put the lie to these European pretensions to civilizing charity. And to Conrad's British readers of 1900 these revelations may have been shocking. There was, it should be noted, a growing anticolonial campaign being waged by dissidents throughout Europe at the time, and Conrad's novella can be considered a part of that campaign. But in addition to the aggressive presentation of the grim conditions which existed in Europe's colonieswhich Conrad succeeds in making very vividHeart of Darkness also creates a theme from certain philosophical problems which become central to the dawning literary movement called Modernism. Conrad shows the way the European public is profoundly ignorant (perhaps willfully) of what goes on in their colonies, but he also suggests that that very separation reveals a problematic relation between belief and reality, between representation and truth, which can also be investigated as a philosophical question. Keeping in mind the way this problem has been introduced in the novella (ie. the specific relation between Europe and

its colonies), let us briefly sketch out the philosophical and literary attempts to address the problem of representation in Modernism. Roughly speaking, Modernism had its peak in the years between World War I and World War II. The great canonical Modernists include such writers as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others. In most accounts of the period what links the Modernist writers loosely together is their intensive formal experimentation with literary and linguistic techniques; that is to say, their experimentation with the actual modes of literary representation. Stein's experiments with syntax, Joyce's melding of languages and myths, Faulkner's endless sentences, can all be seen as various ways of working through difficult questions raised about the very nature of language and how it works. Language in Modernist literature is no longer seen as a stable vehicle for the communication of meaning, but rather it is put up for radical questioning in itself Modernist experimentation, one might say, arises out of the doubt that language (at least language as it has been used in the past) is able to communicate or sufficient to represent meaning or truth. And the seeds of this very doubt, to bring us back to Conrad, can be seen in Heart of Darkness. Some of the most illustrative examples of how Conrad introduces these Modernistic concerns can be seen at the points of Marlow's narration where the actual question of meaning explicitly arises. Clearly Marlow has no trouble narrating events; he is indeed quite a storyteller. Yet, at various times in the narration the flow of his speech is interrupted and he seems at a loss for words. If we pick one of these moments we can see the way Conrad is creating a theme from the very instability and inadequacy of language itself ("words," "names," the "story") to contain and convey what one might call "truth," "meaning," or "essence" (Marlow calls it all three). At a point well into his tale Marlow says: "At the time I did not see [Kurtz]you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dreammaking a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams. . . . " He sat silent for a while. No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existencethat which makes its truth, its meaningits subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dreamalone." Conrad has set up a clear opposition in Marlow's speech here: the opposition is between language on the one hand and truth or meaning on the other. In the quoted passage Marlow is exasperated because when faced with the task of communicating something deeper than just the narrative of events he is at a loss for wordsor more precisely, the words themselves fail him. His pronouncement that it is "impossible" for language to do certain thingsfor language to hold the essence of things as they existforeshadows the dilemma at the center of Modernist and indeed much of twentieth-century philosophical thought. But what he is trying to tell is not just "the Truth" in the abstract, but rather the truth about Kurtz, the truth of his experience of the European colonies. This suggests the way that the philosophical themes of the tale are intertwined with if not identical to the colonial themes. Conrad has the two coexisting in such close proximity that they in fact appear to be two sides of the same coin. The debate, then, over whether Heart of Darkness should be interpreted in terms of either colonial and historical or philosophical questions misses Conrad's insight that the two are in fact inseparable. As the complex textual fusion of the two in Heart of Darkness implies, the seemingly abstract philosophical problems concerning language and truth arise only out of concrete problems (such as colonialism) which exist in the social world, while at the same time the concrete problems of colonial domination at the turn of the twentieth century have extensive philosophical implications. Source: Kevin Attell, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1997. Attell is a doctoral candidate at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley.