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Chapter – 4

Cultural Enigma Entitled Heart of Darkness: An Evaluation

Africa, the second largest continent in the world, is depicted in Western canonical

works as an enigmatic place devoid of meaning. It is represented in the Western

fictional world as a land of black slimy creatures appeared to be existing before the

origin of the universe. These European misrepresentations distorted Africa and placed

her and her people subordinate to the Europeans, denying identity to them. Western

motion pictures also have distorted the concept of Africa. In Western perspective,

Africa is depicted as a Dark Continent with Bushmen, witch doctors, mysterious

landscape and yellow fever. This horrible and negative picture of Africa frightened the

people of other continents and labelled Africa, the Dark Continent. Africa captured the

European imagination right from the time of Price Henry, the navigator in the fifteenth

century. Joseph Conrad, the spokesperson of glorious Victorian England has narrated

the African expedition at the end of the nineteenth century and described the landscape

of Africa in Heart of Darkness (1899) as:

Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the

world, when vegetation rioted on earth and big trees were Kings, an empty

stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heave,

sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of

the waterway ran on… And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a

peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable

intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. (H.D 90)

The landscape image given by the Westerner in Euro-centric works was so negative

that it tarnished the identity of Africa and Africans. The black water fever, sudden

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sunsets, thick forests, beating of drums, tribal dance forms and primitive customs of

Africa prompted the European mind to dismiss Africa as a trackless wilderness devoid

of meaning. (HD 90)

The native population and the landscape of the Congo basin are represented in

Conrad’s novella as projection of the European self, as a forgotten, pre-historic past, out

of which the European man and civilization have emerged. The representation of

Marlowe about the Congo basin reminds us of contrastive evaluation of the civilised

Europe and the under developed Africa in the Conradian novella as follows:

We were wanderers on 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, to be subdued at the cost of profound

anguish and excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend,

there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of

yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of

bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless

foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and

incomprehensible frenzy. The pre-historic man was cursing us, praying to

us, welcoming us – who could tell? We were cut off from the

comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms,

wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an

enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we

were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the

night of first ages, of these ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and

no memories. (H.D 68 – 69)

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The landscape in the novella is anthropomorphized by Conrad as the European might

and its inhabitants delineated as something less than human, a ‘living’ part of the

jungle. In the above passage, the African native is restricted into a European

representation. He is the sane looking at ‘an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse’ and

he has the authority, the power to represent, to be himself only who speaks about the

native, incorporating these representations into a colonial discourse which, in turn,

produces the idea of the European being at a more advanced state of intelligence and

ability than the African since the latter has not emerged yet from pre-history. At the

same time, the primitive native symbolizes a past phase of the historical evolution of

Western civilization and in a sense he can be seen as a living evidence of the process of

this evolution.

Joseph Conrad, the Polish-born English novelist, secured employment in the Belgian

Congo of Africa as the captain of a yacht named Nellie and it was the same year that the

action of the novella took place. Owing to ill health, after a short while, Conrad was

forced to leave Africa and eight months later, on reaching England, he composed the

novella. The picture of the colonial occupation in Africa was so short and acute that it

remained on his mind, and these distorted images show the colonial atrocities prevalent

in the time which were unbearable and heart-rending. It can also be assumed that

Conrad’s acquaintance with Africa is only for a short duration and his personal opinions

of the natives and the descriptions about Africa are an incredible one.

The colonial novel Heart of Darkness was set in the Belgian Congo where Conrad's

own experiences had taken place. Conrad visited the Belgian Congo not as a picnicker

or an anthropologist but as a businessman or a trader to carry ivory to Europe. Conrad’s

description of Congo in the novella is not a picturesque one rather he narrated the story,

based on his prejudices about the Africans, given by the other traders and travellers of

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his time. He visited Congo as part of his sea journey and to fulfil the most haunting

ambition which had been unfulfilled since his childhood. Joseph Conrad, the

ambassador of the Victorian England was not an English man by birth but a Pole who

had longed to visit Africa in his childhood and his European identity remained with him

only for a short duration. Marlow’s narration about the continent seems to be Western

in perspective, uplifting and highlighting Western characters with their cultural motives

like language, dress code, attitude, behavioural patterns, and education and asserting the

supremacy of the West over the East. The story is narrated by Conrad’s alter ego,

Marlow to his fellow mariners, who are also Europeans, creates the narration more

Western in perspective.

At the time when Heart of Darkness was written, the British Empire was at its peak

and Britain was controlling her colonies and dependencies all over the world. Owing to

her power and wealth, England had the notion that all the other colonies were

subordinated to her. England is represented as a powerful nation in the novella, the

epicenter of Western civilization, where the yacht Nellie is anchored and was the

pinnacle of English society as well as the literal and symbolic source from which

civilized progress issued forth to the rest of the world. The popular saying is that ‘the

Sun never sets on the British Empire’ needs emphasis in this context. Marlow, the

spokesperson of Conrad however, points out that the Roman conquest of Britain

stranded Britain in wilderness and the English people are mere uncivilized nomads like

the African natives. The only distinction between the Romans and the English

according to Marlowe is, Romans ‘rule’ ‘was merely a squeeze… They grabbed what

could get for the sake of what was to be got,’ and of the Europeans he says, “What

saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency” (H.D 50). Marlow concludes as

follows:

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The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from

those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than

ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it; not a sentimental

pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can

set up, and bow down before, and offer sacrifice to. (H.D 50 – 51)

The above mentioned passage is contradictory in nature as Marlowe’s aim is

enigmatic in nature whether he has to accept colonialism or reject colonialism. Based

on what occurs later in the novella, it seems that this idea is the idealistic goal of

improving the non-Western world through the dissemination of Western culture. The

colonial motive of the Westerner was mainly on two levels. One was to civilize the

country, especially the natives on the altruistic attempts to improve life of the colonized

and secondly the commercial colonial trade, the ivory trade from Africa to Europe. The

character named Kurtz in Heart of Darkness says: “Each station should be like a beacon

on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing,

improving, instructing.”(H.D 91) Invariably, the colonial endeavor ultimately became

exploitation and the same exploitation is highly prominent in Conrad’s novel Heart of

Darkness.

In Heart of Darkness the place of setting the novella shifts from Belgium to Africa

and Africa to Belgium. Belgium and Africa more than physical places represent and

symbolize opposing value systems. In Belgium, the ideal is measured in masculine and

pragmatic terms and the people of Belgium highly emphasize the importance of

efficiency and civilization. To the people of Belgium, Africa is a very primitive,

beautiful and exotic place, and it has many valuable natural resources that Europe does not

possess. The enigmatic nature of Congo has lured many Europeans to explore its untouched

boundary, and here Marlow is not an exception. In Culture and Imperialism(1993), Edward

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Said, the cultural theorist explains Marlow's motive and enthusiasm in the novella as, “he

always felt a passion to fill in the great blank spaces on the map - remains the

overwhelming reality, a constitutive reality, in the culture of imperialism" (201). The

Europeans perceive the natives of Africa as superstitious and gullible as most of them

do not have an opportunity to receive education and learn about Western civilization. In

Heart of Darkness, Marlow shows his enthusiasm to explore King Leopold's Congo as:

Under the rule of Belgium's King Leopold, the Congo was subjected to the

worst excesses of modern European colonialism. Beginning in the 1870's

and1880s, Leopold schemed his way to dominance over the Congo basin

through a maze of European challenges and Central African uncertainties.

He secured his tropical holding by a combination of diplomacy, warfare,

and sheer bull duggery. Between 1885 and 1908 he governed the Congo as

a private fiefdom known as the Congo Free State. In those years, he stripped

the area of much of its exposed natural resources and conscripted scores of

thousands of Africans into a monstrous system of forced labour. For more

than two decades Leopold's role over Congo unleashed deterioration in the

conditions of daily life, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands,

possibly millions. Under Leopold, the Congo became the heart of imperial

darkness. (Scott B 33)

Heart of Darkness centers around Marlow, an introspective sailor, and his journey up

the Congo River to meet Kurtz, reputed to be an idealistic man of great abilities.

Marlow takes his job as a riverboat captain with the Company, a Belgian concern

organized to trade in the Congo. When Marlowe starts his trip to Africa and then up to

Congo, he encounters widespread inefficiency and brutality in the Company’s stations.

The native inhabitants of the region have been forced into the Company’s service, and

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they suffer terribly from overwork and ill treatment at the hands of the Company’s

agents. The cruelty and inhuman attitude of imperial enterprise contrasts sharply with

the impassive and majestic jungle that surrounds the White man’s settlements, making

them appear to be tiny islands amidst a vast darkness.

Marlow is represented throughout the novella as the spokesperson of Conrad and

appears to be a typical hybrid character. Marlowe’s mind is represented as a typical

abode of both hatred and liking for the Empire. At the beginning of the novella, his

liking is remarked by the upliftment of the glory of the Empire, referring to the

superiority and ancestry of the national river of the empire, Thames. According to

Marlowe, England ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth’ (H.D. 5) which is

‘incomprehensible’ and ‘detestable’ for the civilized people but now it has grown into a

vast civilization. Marlowe’s satirical and ironical expression about the black guard,

‘After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings’

highlights the humiliating and detestable behaviour of the Whites towards the blacks.

Marlowe’s act of offering a biscuit to one of the dying niggers in the novella also shows

his hybrid personality. He sees the dying native Africans with sympathy and seems

pungent, when after seeing the dying black men he says, “The work was going on. The

work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die”

(H.D. 12). Marlowe’s sympathies shared between both colonised and the coloniser,

where he seems to sympathise with the natives in their plight on one side and admires

the clean, up to date and civilized appearance of the European representative, the Chief

Accountant of the company, whose appearance, dress code and other behavioural

patterns on the other.

However, for Marlow as much as for Kurtz or for the Company, Africans in this

novella is mostly objects. Marlow refers to his African Helmsman as a piece of

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machinery and Kurtz’s African mistress is at best a piece of statuary. It can be argued

that Heart of Darkness participates in an oppression of non-Whites that is much more

sinister and much harder to remedy than the open abuses of Kurtz. Africans become for

Marlow a mere backdrop, a human screen against which he can play out his

philosophical and existential struggles. Their existence and their exoticism enable his

self-contemplation. This kind of dehumanization is harder to identify than colonial

violence or open racism. While Heart of Darkness offers a powerful condemnation of

such hypocritical operations of imperialism, it also presents a set of issues surrounding

the race that is ultimately troubling.

Ania Loomba, the noted postcolonial theorist and cultural critic mentions in his

seminal work Colonialism/Post Colonialism that the Europeans often refer to native

people of a colonised land in the massive term ‘they’ rather than as individual

characters. Loomba again points out ‘they’ are swarming hordes … drowned in an

anonymous collectivity’ – ‘they are all the same.’ (Loomba 137)

Ania Loomba points out the West’s stereotyping of the East in a vivid and lucid

manner as:

Despite the enormous differences between the colonial enterprises of

various European nations, they seem to generate fairly similar stereotypes

of ‘outsiders’ . . . Thus laziness, aggression, violence, greed, sexual

promiscuity, bestiality, primitivism, innocence and irrationality are

attributed by the English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese colonists

to Turks, Africans, Native Americans, Jews, Indians, the Irish and others.’

(Loomba 107)

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In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz represents all of Europe. He is portrayed as a hybrid

character whose mother is half-English, his father, half-French. All Europe contributed

to the making of Kurtz (Conrad 127). Every corrupt and strategic quality that Kurtz

portrays is a reference to the same corruption that the European imperialists practised in

Africa during the colonial time. The colonizers first reached Africa in the civilization

mission to improve the African natives; however, their motives turned to gain power

over the natives and accumulate ivory and gold which were abundant in Africa.

Commenting on nineteenth century imperialism, David Papke writes, “This grotesque

political and economic phenomenon not only controlled and exploited non-European

people but also left empty and deranged the agents of imperialism” (Papke 16). He also

explains how Europe attempts to colonise other nations and obtain dominance not only

destroyed other cultures, but also engaged the Europeans in activities that compromised

their moral values.

Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism describes the attitude of the coloniser

towards the colonised in Western literature. In Western writings on Africa, India,

Australia and the Caribbean, one can always come across descriptions of ‘the

mysterious East’, the stereotypes about the African, Indian and Chinese mind, the

notions about bringing civilization to primitive or barbaric people. ‘They’ were not like

‘us’ and ‘for that reason deserved to be ruled’. (Said 11) Said believes that the gulf

between ‘us’ and ‘them’ lies in the differences of culture. In Culture and Imperialism,

Said looks at the novel as a cultural form which is immensely important in ‘the

formation of imperial attitudes, references and experiences.’ (Said 11) He points out the

problems posed by culture in the relationship between the ‘Other’ and the ‘Self’. He

suggests that when people view culture as a sense of identity and associate it with the

nation and state, they tend to feel that they have to appreciate and be loyal to their own

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culture. In this sense, culture can be combative and aggressive as in upholding one’s

own culture, one tends to undermine the culture of the others and clings to the notion

that ‘we are number one, we are bound to lead, and we stand for freedom and order, and

so on.’ (Said 19)

In the essay, Interior Colonies Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification, Diana

Fuss explains the similarity of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon’s theory:

"Edward Said's enormously influential theory of Orientalism, which posits

the Muslim "Orient" as a phobic projection of a distinctly Western

imaginary, echoes the elements of Fanon's own theory of colonial

psychopathology in which the black man is subjugated to the white man

through a process of racial Othering: for not only must the black man be

black; he must be black in relation to the white man". Assigned the role of

embodying racial difference within colonialist metaphors of representation,

the black becomes for the white man the repository of his repressed

fantasies, the mainstay of his pre occupations and desire’ Under

colonialism, Fanon contends, "the real Other for the white man is and will

continue to be the black man"( 20 )

In the above argument Fanon suggests that under the colonial rule the black man is

put in the position of the ‘other’ and the White man is unable to recognize the foil

equivalent subjectivity of ‘the other’, and consequently exhibits a tendency to

dehumanize and objectify that other. Fanon comments on the cultural stereotypes in

imperialist thinking, and he advocates Said's theory ‘the other’ is defined in terms of

polarized oppositions.

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In the essay, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the critics, Ian Watt highlights the

question of Conrad's attitude to racism and colonialism. Regarding the notion of racism,

he claims that "Conrad was influenced by the general attitudes to Africa in late nineteenth

century Europe, an attitude which had replaced the enlightenment's sympathy for 'noble

savages' brought down to slavery, with a Post-Darwinian view that the African indigenes

were primitive savages but not noble" ( Watt 86 ). In Conrad's novel, it may be also noted

that the writer concentrates on the native's physical appearance and attribute "you could

see from afar the White of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies

streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks— these chaps, but they

had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and

true as the surf along their coast" ( H.D 61 ).

In Conrad's novel, Marlow's experience in the Congo invalidates his belief that

civilization equals progress. Kurtz embodies all the accomplishments of civilization.

Kurtz is a poet, painter, musician, journalist, potential leader, and a man equipped with

moral ideas of some sort. However, when Kurtz arrives at Congo forest, he gradually

neglects the moral obligation that he learnt from the West, he slowly succumbs to his

brutal instincts.

In the essay, Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the myth of the Dark

Continent, Patrick Brantlinger suggests that the myth of the Dark Continent was a

Victorian invention, and this discourse was shaped by political and economic pressures.

In the novella, Heart of Darkness, Marlow narrates the ambiguous conceptualisation of

Africa. The European arrives in Africa, bearing the darkness within their hearts. To the

European, Africa is a place which allows them to release their restraint of human

weakness and brutal instinct. As Brantlinger explains:

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Kurtz is a product of this painful division. But not even Marlow sees Kurtz's

going native as a step toward the recovery of a lost paradise; it is instead a

fall into hell, into the abyss of his own darkness. For modern Europeans —

Levi Strauss again comes to mind — as for the romantics, the association of

primitive life with paradise has once more become possible. But for the

Victorians, that association was taboo; they repressed it so much that the

African landscapes they explored and exploited were painted again and

again with the same tar brush image of pane monism. But as they penetrated

the heart of darkness only to discover lust and depravity cannibalism and

devil worship, they always also discovered, as the central figure in the

shadows. Kurtz an astonished white face staring back. (215)

Throughout the Heart of Darkness, Marlow assumes a stereotyped, prejudicial tone

that displays the racist sentiments felt by imperialistic Europeans. Initially, Marlow

conveys a general racist and stereotypic sentiment, with comments such as “with them

it’s hard to tell” the difference, and after a while, “one comes to hate those savages—

hate them to the death” (H.D 113, 116). Marlow assumes here as a racist, prejudicial

being because he “attempts to deny the power of the darkness he fears by resorting to

stereotypes” (Kaplan 3). While Marlow is sailing down the river into the heart of the

Congo, he observes the ‘pre-historic men’, who were “cursing at them, praying to

[them], welcoming [them] — (H.D 134).

In Heart of Darkness the native Africans are stereotyped as relentless, harsh and

pervasive throughout the novella. Their attitude and approach towards the Europeans is

vividly portrayed by Marlow in his Western perspective. Marlow says: they “move

about like ants” (H.D 11) and pass Marlow “without a glance, with that complete,

deathlike indifference of unhappy savages” (H.D 11). According to him, the black

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natives of Africa seem to have no quality, value and life. The Western oppression

snatched all their identity and in turn gave them an ambiguous, detestable and

stereotyped identity. Africans are not human beings, they are not individuals but

fragments of flesh fitted with eyes, hands, and legs and nothing more than “black

shadows of disease and starvation” (H.D 12). They haven’t been given any names like

Europeans, no personality, dignity, and individuality. The only identity given to them is

niggers or Bushmen that astonished Marlow when he first stepped into Africa and saw

them: “When I stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees,

and went off on all fours towards the river to drink.” (H.D 12) These horrible stereotype

images of African natives evoke pity and pathos together with hatred for the hegemonic

imperial Othering of the natives which was carried out during the colonial era.

Considering the cultural actions of the native African society etched in the novella,

Marlow represents a white, patriarchal, Eurocentric view of late nineteenth century

history. (Kaplan 9). As the novel progresses, Conrad develops a comparative motif, as

Marlow frequently compares the African ‘savages’ to animals. First, Marlow describes

the Africans as ‘one of those creatures’ and looking at their behaviour, observing that it

‘went off on all fours to the river to drink.’ He says of the black man, “that animal has a

charmed life, but you can say this only of brutes in this country” (H.D 126). Later,

when travelling on the yacht with other Europeans what Marlow can only assume to be

‘cannibals,’ he is surprised none of the natives “[ate] each other before [his] face,” and

subsequently calls them ‘fine fellows” (H.D 133). He becomes increasingly pensive of

their reason for not revolting and eating him, and he finally decides that they are

exercising “restraint,” although he “would just as soon have expected restraint from a

hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield” (H.D 140). While Marlow

commends the natives for their restraint, the observation “does nothing to mitigate his

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racist view; these Africans are an anomaly, an exception to what he considers the rule”

(Lackey 5). Racism is reinforced when Marlow has a “suspicion of their not being

inhuman” (H.D 134). Similar to this situation, Marlow speaks finely of his African

Helmsman, stating that he was ‘an improved specimen.’ But, he quickly follows the

statement thus “to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches

and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs” (H.D 135). The ‘improving’ knowledge is

not a praise of the black man; but “that which makes Africans an effective instrument of

a White European” (Lackey 4). When the helmsman dies in the novella, Marlow is most

concerned that he lost a fine instrument. Thus, while Marlow’s descriptions about the

African characters sometimes appear kind or praising and on other occasions as

stereotypic and racist. His prejudiced views come throughout the novel to represent a

common view held by most Europeans of the early-nineteenth century.

Analysing Heart of Darkness in the light of theories framed out by the French

philosopher Michael Foucault, we can identify that how the power centres of an epoch

of history manifest the cultural motifs of society. Foucault’s concept of episteme is

introduced in his book The Order of Things, which refers to the orderly 'unconscious'

structures underlying the production of scientific knowledge in a particular time and

place. It is this ‘episteme’ which forms the conditions of possibility for knowledge in a

given time and place. In The Order of Things, Foucault employs his method of

archaeology to demonstrate how scientific knowledge is dependent on the prevailing

episteme of a culture in particular epoch of history and thus scientific knowledge shifts

and changes as the dominant episteme shift and change throughout time and space.

Following such Foucaultian model of discursive analysis, we find that how the

power structure which Foucault calls ‘episteme’ controls the various historical,

political, cultural and economic aspect of society. In the case of Heart of Darkness, we

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can read the novel to see how the colonial power manifests the various cultural motifs

that underlie the society. As it is known, Foucault brought to the discipline of literary

studies an emphasis on the function and condition of texts within a network of power

relations. The study also focuses on how literary texts circulate with other texts in a

particular period to construct and shape the power relations of that society. Africa

represented in the Western colonial narratives is entirely different from the native

perspective. In this new cultural reading of Heart of Darkness, we can explore the

relationship between literature and colonialism – the dominant ideology of the time in

which Conrad wrote his text. Through such an exploration, we can also recognize the

degree to which literature participated in forming the dominant ideological assumptions

of that particular epoch of history.

Heart of Darkness thus is seen to represent and reflect the ideologies of colonialism,

a reading which could be fortified by comparing the views expressed in Conrad’s text

with other colonialist writings such as Henry M. Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent

(1878), J. A. Froude’s English in the West Indies (1888) and Mary Kingsley’s Travels

in West Africa (1897). All these texts were written and circulated during the colonial

expansion of England and together they form a powerful set of colonial representations

and stereotypes. It can also be assumed that the similarities between such an array of

texts form a discourse, which inevitably shapes and determines the views, values and

actions of the society and culture in which it is fostered. Mary Kingsley’s Travels in

West Africa, like Froude’s English in the West Indies, is a part of the European colonial

discourse. The text contains Kingsley’s account of her travel experiences in West

Africa. She also explained to her English readers the cultural practices and social

customs of the tribes she had encountered on her journeys. Kingsley (1993) wrote:

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To my taste there is nothing so [as] fascinating as spending a night out in an

African forest, or plantation; but I beg you to note I do not advise anyone to

follow the practice. Nor indeed do I recommend African forest life to

anyone. Unless you are interested in it and fall under its charm, it is the

most awful life in death imaginable. It is like being shut up in a library

whose books you cannot read, all the while tormented, terrified and bored.

And if you do fall under its spell, it takes the entire colour out of other kinds

of living. Still it is good for a man to have an experience of it, whether he

likes it or not, for it teaches you how very dependent you have been, during

your previous life, on the familiarity of those conditions you have been

brought up among, and on your fellow citizens; moreover it takes the

conceit out of you pretty thoroughly during the days you spend stupidly

stumbling about among your new surroundings. (Kingsley 33-34)

Another important thing to be noted in this context is that there is a possible

subversion of European colonial discourse in Heart of Darkness. As it is known, Conrad

was writing the novella at a time of expanding colonisation, a period when imperial

activities were more celebrated than questioned. Though written during the expansion

of imperialism, Heart of Darkness contains subversion of imperialism and colonialism.

Throughout the novella, we find the implications of this subversion to show that Conrad

did not see the events in the same way as the majority of the British, or Western

Europeans did. While such cultural artifacts as historical writings and travel narratives

reflected and supported the ideological assumptions behind the idea of Empire and the

glories of imperial adventure, Heart of Darkness involves a different perspective from

these concepts which were taken for granted and which permeated the attitudes of

historians and the writers of travel narratives because Conrad had personal experience

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of what Europeans were actually doing to Africa and of what the dark continent did to

them. In order to create this new perception, as Spittles (1992) points out, “Conrad

needed a different form, a novel that required the reader to actively think about rather

than just passively accept the text”. (Spittle 63) Conrad himself detached his novel from

the other cultural artifacts whose function is just to reflect reality.

The most perplexed and enigmatic character in the novella is Kurtz whose

language is modelled on the colonial motif of Europeans’ behaviour. His behavioural

pattern, attitude, dress code and the overall philosophy of life reflect the European

ways. He was educated in England and worked as an ivory trader who has been alone in

the jungles of Africa for a long time. When Marlow first sees Kurtz, he was seated on a

stretcher with his arms extended toward the natives and his mouth wide open as if to

swallow everything before him and he appears to be about seven feet tall. Though

gravely ill, Kurtz has an amazingly loud and strong voice and commands attention.

Kurtz, previously known to Marlow by reputation and through his writings on

‘civilizing’ the African continent, is revealed upon acquaintance to be a dying,

deranged, and power-mad subjugator of the African natives. His fall is one of the

crucial points which prove inability to catch his within. He used to say that he will take

light in the darkened African land. But after all what he really did is the exploitation of

African people in the field of economy, society, relation, and policies. He affected to

almost all aspect of African society. But when he died, he spoke the sentence

‘Exterminate all the brutes’ as a request to his company and falls. Marlow remarks that

all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz. Kurtz’s fall is the result of colonial

conduct of European society. He is a made up man whose mentality has been

influenced or imposed with the colonial motive of European conduct but he doesn't

know all these reality. He only thinks about his intention, positions and superiority in

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112 

 

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113 

 

blast away at the rock face in order to build a railway, but the rock is not altered by the

blasts and the cliff is not at all in the way. The Company's Manager is presented in the

novella, who has a duty to run his business efficiently, but he cannot keep order and

although he is obeyed, he is not respected. The Foreman, however, earns Marlow's

respect for being a good worker. Marlow also admires the way the Foreman ties up his

waist-length beard when he has to crawl in the mud beneath the steamboat to do his job.

In Heart of Darkness African natives are referred as ‘niggers,’ ‘cannibals,’

‘criminals,’ and ‘savages.’ European colonizers see them as subordinate species as they

were chained, starved, robbed, mutilated and killed to the whim and fancy of the

colonized without any fear of punishment. The novella presents a damning account of

imperialism as it illustrates the white man's belief that it is his innate right to come into

a country inhabited by people of a different race and pillage it to his heart's content.

Kurtz in the novel is writing a treatise for the ‘International Society for the Suppression

of Savage Customs.’ This implies the existence of a worldwide movement to subjugate

all nonwhite races. Kurtz created a friendly relation with the African natives and made

the impression upon the natives that the white people appeared in Africa as saviours and

represented them as super natural beings. The natives in return slowly recognized the

same policy and started worshipping the whites equal to God. Kurtz is also considered

as a God and for pleasing him they even offered human sacrifices.

The cruelty and violence shown by the colonizer in the novella to the colonized

natives of the Belgian Congo are ‘unspeakable’ and ‘undescribed’ Kurtz is represented

as a model of European imperialism who has systematically engaged in human plunder

in Africa. The native people of Africa are seen as chained in iron collar around their

necks, starved, beaten, and consuming rotten hippo meat while on the other side the

Europeans eat sandwiches and bread which embodies civilized Western ways of life.

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They are doomed to live as slaves by the Europeans and are forced to do soul crushing,

rigorous labour for the benefit of the colonizer and ruthlessly murdered at the end of the

novel. There are also implications in the novella where Kurtz is performing human

sacrifices for himself and its evidences are presented with the sight of severed human

skulls impaled on posts leading to Kurtz’s cabin. It can also be deduced that all these

violence and cruelty are the end result of absence of law and order and autocracy, which

ultimately ends in the reversal of civilization, clearly envisaged in the twentieth century

novel Lord of the Flies. Kurtz’s greed and the status of God conferred upon him made

him amok in the African land without law and order. As a result, anything is possible,

and what Conrad sees emerging from the situation is the profound cruelty and limitless

violence that lies at the heart of the human soul.

Education helps to manifest perfection that is already inherent in man. The

Western educational system and its perfection are highly evident in the European

characters in the novella. Kurtz and Marlowe are portrayed as Western characters who

had their education in England. In the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria was reigning

over England and scientific determinism, adventure and national prosperity were the

prominent characteristics of the time. Analysing the novella in the perspective of

education, Europeans were not serious about imparting education to the native Africans.

Even though the colonial aim was to civilize the natives, they concentrated on trading

ivory from Africa to Europe. Marlow’s Fireman is an example in this context. His

education is merely an expedient one for the colonial officials. They make no real

attempt to improve him. They simply play upon his beliefs and replace them with

similar ones, and so Marlow refers to it as “the philanthropic pretence of the whole

concern” (H.D 78). The company was interested only in cheap labour, not in educating

the native Africans about Western values and beliefs. In this way Kurtz is a kind of

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blind- folded man with the colonial motive of European conduct. He himself has so

much lustfulness. He achieves power, joy and labour but his fall in that situation in

which he himself is not known about what actually darkness is and who has possessed

the real darkness. His fall has been shown without any kind of realization. What he did

before his fall only served the holistic European colonial motive designed by Marlow

and at last he is presented as the scapegoat of his lust in different fields which was

designed by European colonial conduct.

Conrad also uses other cultural motifs in Heart of Darkness to convey the racist

ideals and exploitations of the native people of Congo. A primary example is a religious

motif, in which Marlow and civilization are generally portrayed on the side of God,

while the ‘savages’ and Kurtz are depicted as satanic. Conrad chose to use the serpent

imagery in the novella that revolves around the main character’s moral dilemma. In

Conrad’s earlier works as well, the animal imagery is clearly linked to motifs such as

“disorder, regression and value-inversion.” (Palmer 41). Depending on social and

cultural contexts, the serpent can represent negative aspects of existence such as

destruction, evil, death and poisonous behaviour, as well as temptation and deceit. Upon

departing from the European continent, Marlow divulges that he has a “heavenly

mission to civilize” for the “cause of progress” (H.D 103). He ultimately, and perhaps a

little ironically, arrives at the conclusion that he is a “lower sort of apostle” (H.D 108).

These themes run concurrently with imperialistic views, which used ‘morality’ as a

“vacuity that dominant political powers can manipulate in order to justify crimes

against humanity” (Lackey 2). Upon arriving in the Congo, he describes the area as a

“God-forsaken wilderness” which contained “strong, lusty, red-eyed devils” (H.D 109,

112). He finally concludes that he had “stepped into the gloomy circle of some

Inferno,” alluding to Dante’s description of a sort of hell (H.D 113). As Marlow travels

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farther into the darkness, he describes fellow Company members as “a lot of faithless

pilgrims” that were, in a sense “praying to [the ivory]” (H.D 120). At last, when he

reaches the center of the Congo, the ‘heart of darkness,’ he meets Kurtz, who has a

“high seat amongst the devils of the land” (H.D 148). Kurtz, along with “his last

disciple,” participate in ‘unspeakable rites,’ which are analogous, in this sense, to

religious rites, and at night, “Kurtz’s adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil,” which is

similar to a religious event (H.D 158, 164). When Marlow left with Kurtz on the

steamboat, the natives “faced the river, stamped their feet, and nodded their horned

heads,” completing their depiction as fiendish in what Marlow could only describe as a

“satanic litany” (H.D 167). Upon hearing the drums of the natives, however, Marlow

wondered if they had as “profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian

country” (H.D 116). This final thought concludes the dichotomies, “blurring the

distinction between colonists and conquerors, between savagery and civilization”

(Kaplan 8). Marlow realizes that the imperialist policies are innately evil, just as

everything else in the heart of darkness, and is forced to admit that “this [England] also

has been one of the dark places of the earth” (H.D 116). His use of the perfect tense

brings the observation into the present; concluding that the racist sentiments felt and the

pervasive exploitations of the native peoples of the Congo are all the result of the

darkness of civilization.

The Dress code also plays a vital role in the culture of society in the epoch of

history. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad portrays Western characters with their, attire,

style and mannerism which is the remarkable cultural identity of the colonial era. Chief

Accountant is a character whom Marlowe meets in the company office, sometimes

referred to as the Clerk. He is a White man who has been in the Congo for three years

as a company employee. Marlow was highly delighted at the entry into the company

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office as he had a warm hand-shake from the Accountant which is a mode of greeting to

the Europeans to create intimacy. The Accountant appears in such an unexpectedly

elegant outfit when Marlowe first encounters him and is shocked by seeing his

personality and paraphernalia thinking that ‘he is a vision’. Both the chief Accountant’s

dress and clothes are visualized in the novella in an excellent order. He is mainly

devoted to do book keeping in his office and it is evident from his conversation that he

is fatigued with tedious and sedentary desk-life in his office. When he comes out of his

office, he says to Marlowe, ‘Get a breath of fresh air’. Marlowe respects the fellow as

his dress seems to be elegant and formal, marked by the customs of the colonial era.

Marlow is fascinated by the Accountant’s attire, his vast cuffs, his collars, and the way

he brushed and combed his hair. The overall appearance of the Accountant seems to be

that of a hair dresser’s dummy. Marlowe also appreciates the starched collars and got-

up shirt-fronts, remarkable achievements of his character and hesitantly asks him how

he managed to sport such linen to maintain the perfection. Marlowe appreciated him for

the reason that amidst the demoralization of the land, he kept up his appearances which

is the hall mark of western culture; Marlowe calls it ‘backbone’.

The Doctor of Physique is a character who represents the Western embodiment of

culture. When Marlowe steps into the company office, as his usual customary practice,

Marlowe has to undergo a medical examination. The Doctor appears to be an old man

who checks Marlowe’s pulse, and measures the dimension of his cranium or skull with

an instrument like calipers from various sides, and notes it carefully in his hand-book.

Marlowe describes him, unlike the chief Accountant, the doctor seems to be a dull

fellow, unshaven little man in a thread bare coat like a gabardine, with his feet in

slippers. The Doctor asks Marlow whether there's any madness in his family and warns

him of the hidden dangers and illness which are so common in Africa. The interaction

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between Marlowe and the Doctor depicts the professional commitment and dedication

to the work which Europeans pursue in their official life in the colonial period.

The Manager is represented in the novella as a man of average size with ordinary

built up body and blue cold eyes. Conrad’s description of the company Manager is the

description of a hybrid personality: ‘He was neither civil nor uncivil’. Being a white

representative of the colonial authority, he is not supposed to let a Negro insult other

white people nor expected to be uncivilized. It seems that he has adapted certain

characteristics of native culture and has become a hybrid personality. He is represented

throughout the novella as an enigmatic character who lacks the ordinary common

etiquettes. It is reverberated in the first meeting between Marlowe and the Manager

where Marlowe was not offered a seat to sit on after a long exhausted twenty-mile walk.

He is a talkative smart fellow but cannot keep order. Marlow considers him ‘a

chattering idiot’. On the other side, his uncle, a short, paunchy man whose eyes have a

look of ‘sleepy cunning,’ is the leader of the group of white men who arrive at the

Central Station wearing new clothes and tan shoes. The group calls itself the ‘Eldorado

Exploring Expedition,’ and uses the station as a base from which to travel into the

jungle and plunder its inhabitants. Marlow observes that they steal from the land ‘with

no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.’

The Manager's Uncle and the Manager refer to Kurtz as ‘that man.’

Conrad is a very skilled artisan who carefully designed the Western characters

with their manners, mannerism, dress code, language and the other cultural

components. The native characters in the novella, even though they are the trusted

employees of Westerners, portrayed in a negative and inhuman manner. Conrad, the

spokesperson of Queen Victoria and the gospel reader for England, obfuscates the

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values of the native characters uplifting and highlighting the European ways of life and

Western culture.

The Fireman is an African born native who is referred to as’ an improved

specimen’. The native innocence is embodied in the acts of the Fireman who believes

that there is some demon or spirit within the boiler that makes it work and his job is to

keep the boiler from getting thirsty. The Western atrocities towards the natives are

evident as he possesses three ornamental scars on each cheek and teeth filed to points.

Conrad gives general professional titles to his characters as Boiler, Fireman, Helmsman,

Doctor, Manager and individual identity like personal or proper names are denied to

them. According to Marlowe, the company’s Foreman is a boiler maker by trade and

good at his business and his hobby is pigeon flying and performing a dance named ‘jig’,

a folk dance in triple time, especially one with kicking or jumping steps, and getting

Marlowe to dance with him. It reminds of the pas-time of Europeans, the inhuman

attitude towards the natives and the brutalizing life of the interior of Africa and their

bizarre behaviour patterns. The intensity of the atrocity is reflected in the brutal murder

of Captain Fresleven, a Danish Captain, and Marlowe’s predecessor on his sea

journeys. Fresleven was killed by the chief’s son as a revenge taken against killing his

father battering over the head with a stick. Fresleven appears throughout the novella as

a quiet and gentle man but his European power makes him omnipotent and that leads to

his unexpected and sudden death.

The African Helmsman in the novella is subordinated as an employee of the West

and is assigned with the job of steering Marlowe’s boat. He sported a pair of brass

earrings, wore a blue cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles and thought all the

world of himself. Marlowe has little respects for him whom he calls, ‘the most unstable

kind of a fool’ because he swaggers in front of others but becomes passive when he is

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left alone. Marlowe was not moved by the death of the Helmsman though his blood fills

Marlowe’s shoes. Helmsman acted as a janitor or guard to protect the people inside the

ship. Marlowe was not even concerned about him and even after his death, his body lay

in the pilot house for a couple of days. Marlowe neither performed any after-death rites

or rituals or burial ceremonies for the salvation of the Helmsman’s soul nor did he bury

his dead body in a decent manner. Helmsman was appointed by the company for two

reasons of which one is, he knows the African Congo well and secondly as part of

slavery. Here the insincerity and selfish attitude of the Europeans in the African

continent is vividly portrayed. Marlowe also comments about his deceased Helmsman

that he was a kind of second rate Helmsman and a good subject for fishes in the seas to

kill their hunger. The Pilgrims are the European traders who accompany Marlow into

the jungle. They fire their rifles from the hip into the air and indiscriminately into the

bush. They eventually come to look with disfavour upon Marlow, who does not share

their opinions or interests. When they bury Kurtz, Marlow believes the Pilgrims would

like to bury him as well. The Pilgrim is represented in the novella as a fat White man

with sandy hair and red whiskers. He wears his pink pyjamas tucked into his socks.

Marlow tells the Pilgrim that he must learn to fire a rifle from the shoulder.

Conrad’s encounter with an alien life-style causes him to lose his conviction in

the beliefs and values of his own culture. Hence, the dissolution of emotional and

ethical bonds with his own group causes him to be doomed to failure. Conrad's

representation of the Congo and the Malay Archipelago as Otherness is typically

European and his depiction of the Whites is tinged with Anglophilia. In addition to this,

Conrad's description of the women plays upon a familiar Imperial trope, a marginalized

woman. Conrad’s ambivalent attitudes to colonialism can be explained through a survey

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of the social context and his personal experience. Though Conrad is ahead of his times,

he is not entirely immune to the infection of the beliefs and ideas of his day.

When we analyse Heart of Darkness from the perspective of advancement,

progress and civilization to Africa, Europeans did nothing to the upliftment of Africans.

The colonial power episteme dominates throughout the novel. Western civilization does

not improve Africa or Africans, and their representation only strengthens from the

beginning till the end of the story. In Marlow’s perception, it neither benefits Africans

nor Europeans. Consistently, he observes that Western values and morals have little to

play in the lives of Europeans working in the Congo. Instead, Marlow finds, “a flabby,

pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly” (H.D 65). Observing a

‘devotion to efficiency’ (H.D 50) or centers ‘for humanising, improving, instructing’,

the Europeans seem generally devoid of Western values. There are numberless

occasions where the same phenomenon is reflected. One of the Europeans in the novella

observes that Western morality does not come into play in Africa, as when the uncle of

the Central Station Manager says, “Anything – anything can be done in this country”

(H.D 91). Marlow here recognizes the dearth of morality and emphasizes that without

external restraints in the form of public opinion and law enforcement, the Europeans do

whatever they want. They have no ‘inborn strength’ (H.D 97) to fight unchecked

desires. As a result, Europeans appear more uncivilized than the Africans whom the

Europeans consider savages. Marlow underscores this point in the incident with

cannibals. Marlow’s view is that cannibals are in the beginning more rational than the

European employers and later more moral than them.

Stereotypic representation of women is given by Conrad vividly in Heart of

Darkness. Kurtz’s Intended is the personification of the whole continent and is

described as follows:

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She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed clothes,

treading the earth proudly with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous

ornaments. She had brass leggings to the knees, brass wire gauntlets to the

elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek and innumerable necklaces of glass

beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men that hung about

her glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of

several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and

magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate

progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful

land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious

life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image

of its tenebrous and passionate soul. (Conrad 101)

Here the African woman is symbolized as a barbaric magnificence. She is

majestically alluring yet with a gaudiness which is gratuitously repellent. She is

represented and symbolized throughout the novella as the ivory which beckons fortune

seekers. Her vitality is as seductive as it is sinfully corrosive. It is part of that sexuality

hinted at by the words ‘passion, mysterious,’ and ‘fecundity,’ but a sexuality which is

demonic and therefore morally dangerous. Later in the narrative, Kurtz is said to have

been part of unspeakable sexual deeds of a lurid and debauched nature. As one of the

critics on Conrad claims that her ‘demanding display of sex’ is provocatively tempting

but fatal to the likes of Kurtz, who lacks restraint. She is the darkness which awakens

the primeval instincts in Kurtz and as such, part of the black peril which casts a dark

menacing shadow across the width and breadth of the whole land. In a way she

becomes an African version of the legendary femme fatale, the proverbial temptress of

the African wilderness.

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Marlowe’s first meeting with Kurtz’s Intended in her apartment is a picturesque and

astonishing one. Marlow says, “She came forward, all in black, with a pale head,

floating towards me in the dusk. She was in mourning” (H.D 106). The strange choice

of vocabulary given in the novella is an explanation in Marlow’s description of her

physical appearance. “This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed

surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance

was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful” (H.D 106). There can be no doubt by

now that Conrad wants to describe an ethereal being, an angelic creature with a halo.

Throughout the novel Marlow denigrates and over estimates women. The

comparative and contrastive description of women is given at the beginning of the

novel itself. When Marlowe steps into the Belgium shipping company for an interview,

Marlow continues his description by saying that “one fat and the other slim” (H.D 73),

one young and one old, “knitting black wool as for a warm pall” (H.D 74). At the same

time, they are oddly “uncanny and fateful” (H.D 74) and Marlow after his encounter

with Kurtz observes, “The knitting old woman with cat obtruded herself upon my

memory as a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair” (H.D

142). Conrad enhances his perception of women as dependant persons when he

emphasises the shame that Marlow feels about having to ask his aunt for help. Marlow

exclaims, “… I tried the women. I, Charlie Marlowe, set the women to work – to get a

job! Heavens!” (Conrad 8). To Conrad and Marlowe, the idea of a man who needs

women to gain access to work is so repulsive that it brings with it inevitable

embarrassment. Conrad exhibits a similar ambiguity in the novella in depicting

Marlow's confrontation with the female principle embodied in Kurtz' mistress, who

symbolizes both a matriarchal female goddess as well as a sensuous temptress

associated in the English male mind with `savage' races. But Conrad goes beyond

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conventional colonial stereotypes of 'natives' and we can agree with Marianna

Torgovnick who argues that the African woman is the crux of heart of darkness...the

representative 'native' the only one fully individualized and described in detail, except

for the Helmsman, who also dies in the story. She is, the text insists, the symbol of

Africa. (Gone Primitive 154-155)

Mariana Torgovnick again shares her observation saying that the women in Heart of

Darkness are constant symbolic representations of death. She suggests that Kurtz’s

African mistress is made to embody the ‘dead’ African landscape. When this character

is introduced, Marlowe states, “ The whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the

colossal body of the mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had

been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul” (Torgovnick 403).

African mistress is the stooge who is explicitly mirrored in the landscape that Marlowe

consistently illustrated as the ‘White man’s grave’, ‘lurking death’, and a ‘profound

darkness’ and thus she personifies the element of death. Andrew Robers, a notable critic

on Conrad opines that both Marlow and Conrad are the European representatives from

the patriarchic world as they have an inborn instinct for cultural superiority compared to

the African natives. In this cultural context, men were the sole occupiers of positions of

power as Roberts comments, “… a whole matrix of inter-male relationships involving

competitiveness, desire, bonding, the sharing and appropriation of power and

knowledge… functioned in Western society” (Roberts 458). Maintaining this system,

women are mainly used as sexual scapegoats by European men and revered as a ‘shared

desire’ or common goal. As a result women are prohibited from attaining ‘positions of

power, knowledge and desire’. Due to this dominant social and cultural constructions,

women in Heart of Darkness are shown as hopelessly weak, ignorant and irreversibly

subservient to men.

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The African woman who is represented throughout the novella lacks individual

identity. It must also be noted that they haven’t given any name which embodies

Conrad's inherited notions of the savage female ‘other’ popularized most notably by

Rider Haggard. She is portrayed as seductive like Africa and also deadly. African

woman is identified in the novella as African mistress which Marlowe personifies as the

embodiment of loose culture. It is interesting to note that standard critical

interpretations of Heart of Darkness have focused on Marlow and Kurtz as two sides of

the same self, while no one can suggest the African woman to be Marlow's divided

psyche. In fact, except for Torgovnick's and Gilbert and Gubar's, no studies of Conrad

pay attention to her as an aspect of Conrad's doubts about Imperialism or his

identification with her.

The African woman in Heart of Darkness, functions as a silent symbol, who can be

reduced neither to a one-dimensional other, nor understood and hence assimilated into

Marlow's world-view the way Roland Barthes has outlined. Furthermore, she is

depicted as speechless. Conrad places her at the center of issues of colonialism. Frantz

Fanon, in a somewhat different yet related context argued, “I ascribe a basic importance

to the phenomenon of language...one of the elements in the man of color's

comprehension of the dimension of the other. For it is implicit that to speak is to exist

absolutely for the other”. (B.W 17-18). Fanon further argues that Existence is language,

and language is always a matter of politics. (B.W 18) Thus, existence is a product of

language and the colonized must learn the master's language in order to be human. By

portraying the woman as mute, Conrad makes her less than human and powerless to

engage in a dialogue with her master, Kurtz, except through her sexual power.

The most powerful and bizarre images in colonial discourse in the novella is that of

the black cannibals. The best part of Marlow’s crew on his African journey consists of

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natives whom Marlowe calls cannibals to help him in his mission up the Congo river.

Marlow recalls:

I don’t pretend to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she

had to wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing.

We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fellows –

cannibals – in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am

grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face:

they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat, which went rotten, and

made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my nostrils. (H.D 67)

But in reality, Marlowe did not witness or experience the cannibals or man eaters

throughout his journey in Congo. Marlow was frightened when he grounded to a halt on

the bank of the river and says these cannibals are hungry and why do they not attack the

whole crew: “I might be eaten by them before long” (H.D 71) He interprets the native’s

gestures, looks and murmurs as signs of their cannibalistic intentions but this

interpretation is not based on clear evidence. It seems that cannibals are defined not by

the practices and customs which they have been observed performing, but by their own

deeds and representations of European travellers and colonists. This cannibalistic

representation is highly evident in Henry Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent, a,

travelogue written during the colonial period. In his account of the experiences in

Congo Stanley writes:

Evidences of cannibalism were numerous in the human and "soko" skulls

that grinned on many poles, and the bones that were freely scattered in the

neighborhood, near the village garbage heaps and the river banks, where

one might suppose hungry canoe-men to have enjoyed a cold collation on

an ancient matron’s arm. As the most positive and downright evidence, in

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my opinion, of this hideous practice , was the thin forearm of a person that

was picked up near a fire, with certain scorched ribs which might have been

tossed into the fire after being gnawed. It is true that it is but circumstantial

evidence, yet we accepted them as indubitable proofs. Besides, we had been

taunted with remarks that we would furnish them with meat supplies – for

the words ‘meat’ and ‘to-day’ have but slight dialectic difference in many

languages.

Foucault mentions in The Archaeology of Knowledge that ‘madness’ does not exist

as an idea or concept until a discourse of madness is formed and is produced as the

object of study. Cannibalism, in this way, is used by colonial discourse in order to

define the native as savage and hence to justify the idea of European civilization,

enlightenment and progress.

In response to the colonial representation of Africa in Heart of Darkness, the doyen

of African literature Chinua Achebe responded so harshly and blatantly that his fury

provoked him to call Conrad ‘a bloody racist’. In his essay An Image of Africa: Racism

in Heart of Darkness Chinua Achebe defended Conrad’s colonial attitude towards

Africans in the novella and labelled Africa as an ‘other world’, an antithesis of Europe.

Achebe has highlighted Conrad’s sense of kinship with Europeans and the same is

exemplified by Marlowe’s claim in the opening chapter about London which is one of

the dark places of the Earth (H.D 5). To Achebe, Conrad chose the role of purveyor of

comforting myths in his portrayal of the natives. Another bone of contention raised by

Achebe is Conrad's portrayal of the African woman and Kurtz's ‘Intended’. He suggests

that Conrad endows one with language and the other without, one's status is lover the

others is mistress. The African woman fulfils a structural requirement of the story, a

savage counterpart to be refined, European woman who will step forth to end the story.

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This reflects the essence of Conrad's failure to deal with the inequalities between Blacks

and Whites.

Achebe then turns his attention to an obvious criticism of his argument, one that

Wilson Harris himself takes up in his own defence of Heart of Darkness. It might be

argued as follows:

The attitude to the African . . . is not Conrad’s but that of his fictional

narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be

holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly Conrad appears to go to

considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the

moral universe of his story. . . . [However,] he neglects to hint, clearly and

adequately, at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the

actions and opinions of his characters. . . . Marlow comes through to us not

only as a witness of truth, but one holding those advanced and humane

views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all

Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by atrocities in Bulgaria or the

Congo of King Leopold of the Belgians or wherever. (7)

Achebe’s point is that “Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist”, a ‘simple truth’

which is ‘glossed over in criticism of his work’ because “White racism against Africa is

such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked”

(I.oA 8). The Africa constructed by Conrad is as given below:

Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human

factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable

humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can

nobody see preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to

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the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is

not even the point. The real question is the dehumanisation of Africa and

Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in

the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this

dehumanisation, which depersonalises a portion of the human race, can be

called a great work of art. My answer is: No. (8 – 9)

Achebe criticizes Conrad’s vague and inaccurate portrayal of Africa and thinks that

Conrad has set Africa as a foil to Europe to manifest Europe’s own state of spiritual

grace. He also cites many examples to prove that Conrad is very much prejudiced

against Africa. Achebe takes Conrad’s metaphorical references to the two rivers as an

example to illustrate the writer’s contempt for Africa. Achebe considers the antithesis

between River Thames and River Congo as putting Africa down. The images of the two

rivers are obviously different: River Thames is depicted as tranquil, resting peacefully

‘at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks’.

Whereas on the other hand River Congo is depicted as, ‘like traveling back to the

earliest beginning of the world.’(Achebe 4) As for the people of Africa, Achebe finds

Conrad’s description of Africans blatantly racist - ‘What thrilled you was just the

thought of their humanity – like yours . . . Ugly.’ In the Achebe’s point of view, the

black people are ‘savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet’. Achebe thinks

that Conrad has dehumanized African people and it is preposterous for Conrad ‘to

reduce Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind.’

(Achebe 12). Achebe wonders how the novella Heart of Darkness depersonalizes a

portion of the human race and be called a great literary work of art. (Achebe, 12)

Achebe also asserts that Conrad has not done anything for the upliftment of Africa and

its natives and the dehumanization of Africa is an age- old attitude of the Europeans.

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Achebe finds Heart of Darkness ‘an offensive and deplorable book which parades in the

most vulgar fashion, prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has

suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways

and many places today.’(Achebe 15) According to Achebe, Africans are people who

possess pristine culture which is very much valued to the Africans and as a matter of

fact, they are the world’s greatest masters of the sculptured form. Therefore, Conrad’s

depictions about the Africans and Africa are grossly inadequate and distorted. Achebe’s

idea here is that the Western world should rid its mind of old prejudices and begin to

look at Africa ‘not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystifications but quite

simply as a continent of people – not angels, but not rudimentary souls either – just

people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with

life and society.’(Achebe 19).

The Palestinian-American writer Edward Said finds Conrad both progressive and

reactionary towards Imperialism: He accuses Conrad of writing as a man whose

‘Western view of the non-Western world is so ingrained as to blind him to other

histories, other cultures, other aspirations.’ (Said 19) He acknowledges the fact that

Conrad can see the wicked power of the Imperial West but criticizes him for his

inability to see Africa as an independent culture. What Conrad fails to see in Africa is

an alternative to this cruel tautology. He could neither understand that India, Africa, and

South America also had lives and cultures with integrities not totally controlled by the

gringo Imperialist and reformers of this world, nor allow himself to believe that anti-

Imperialist independence movements were not all corrupt and in the pay of the puppet-

masters in London or Washington.’ (Said 20)

Edward Said criticizes Conrad for being Eurocentric in attitude, failing to see African

as an individual culture with its own values. He states that, Conrad’s works seem to

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suggest that the source of the world’s significant action and life is in the West and the

Third World is mind-deadened. The outlying regions of the world have no life, history,

culture, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West. Hence West is

the life blood of the Third world in all parlours of life. Cedric Watts, in a critical essay on

‘Heart of Darkness’, discusses the views of some other Third World writers such as

Ngugi Wa Tiong’o, Wilson Harris, Frances B. Singh, and C.P. Sarvan. (Stape 55) Like

Achebe and Said, these writers also do not appreciate the depictions of Africans in Heart

of Darkness. However, they argue that though Conrad is vague on racial matters, Heart of

Darkness is progressive in its satiric accounts of the colonialists. They agree that Conrad

is ahead of his time in his attitude towards Imperialism. (Stape 56)

Cedric Watts quotes C. P Sarvan, a Third World writer, who comments that Heart of

Darkness was written in the heyday of Victorian Imperialism and should be judged

relative to the standards of the 1890s. Heart of Darkness was indeed progressive in its

criticism of Imperialist activities in Africa, and implicitly, of Imperialist activities

generally. Conrad was writing at a time when most British people, including many

socialists, would have regarded Imperialism as an admirable enterprise and did not see

the need to consider issues such as exploitation and inequality. (Stape 56)

The major cultural contrast between Conrad and Marlow’s attitudes is clearly seen in

the way the narrator Marlowe speaks of what he sees as England’s glorious past.

According to him, the Thames, the national river of England, has served the nation in

both trade and exploration. Conrad finds glory and pride in his nation’s past, assured in

his knowledge that ‘knight-errant’ of the sea have brought ‘sparks from the sacred fire’

of civilization to the most remote corners of the earth. Marlowe knows the men and

their ships and speaks of them in a reverential tone that Europe’s past is the history of

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brave adventurers, conquering the unknown, and, in the process, transforming ‘the

dreams of men’ into ‘the seeds of commonwealths’ and ‘the germs of empires.’

Considering the above propositions, we may conclude that Marlow’s perspective of

Africa and the Africans in Conrad’s novella is ambiguous and contradictory,

reaffirming imperialist and racist stereotypes, sometimes transcending and even

subverting them. The way Marlow constantly criss-crosses the epistemological

boundaries set by Imperialist ideology has been recognized, even though somewhat

resentfully, by recent critics. While Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, claims

that Marlow’s Africa and his Africans come ‘from a huge library of Africanism, so to

speak’, he nevertheless alleges that, because of Joseph Conrad’s own position as a

cultural hybrid, he manages to endow Marlow with the self-consciousness of an

outsider, which allows him to ‘comprehend how the machine works, given him and

fundamentally not in perfect synchrony or correspondence’. In her influential study

Conrad and Imperialism, Benita Parry, also starts off by noting how Marlow’s

epistemology is determined by Imperialist ideology. She also notes that what Marlow

observes on his journey ‘belongs not to history but to fantasy’, and this is in fact a

mythological cosmos, an invention essential to Imperialism’s rationale, which

fascinates Marlow and as the lurid images from colonialism’s gallery take possession of

his vision, these, in the absence of a dissenting discourse, come to occupy the fiction’s

space. Later on in her study, however, Parry comes to the conclusion that Marlow

responds to ‘the dislocating effects of a foreign mode on a mind formed by the Western

experience and devoted to its forms’, thus recognizing ‘intimations of other meanings

manifest in a landscape he can only perceive metaphorically’. Although Marlow is

often on the very ‘threshold of new ways of seeing’ he ‘draws back from the dangers of

too much reality to the boundaries of that restricted consciousness he had ventured to

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criticize’. In this way, both Benita Parry and Edward Said appear to support the

argumentation that Marlow’s relationship to Imperialist ideology is uniform. On the one

hand, he manages to overcome its epistemological boundaries through his willingness

to engage sympathetically with an unknown African reality, which is partly the result of

his shock at colonialist practice in the Congo. On the other hand, he seeks the

comforting shelter of an Imperialist world-view when he is under psychological

pressure and fears the dissolution of his identity.

In short the way that Marlow neither manages to completely transcend the

Imperialist perspective nor wholly submits to it would confirm the theories of critics

such as Raymond Williams or Edward Said, who underline the perniciousness and

ubiquity of ideology, nevertheless admitting possibilities for critique and subversion.