‘Heart of Darkness’: A Journey into the Abyss

A review of ‘Heart of Darkness’, by Joseph Conrad; 1899.

‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.’ So said Nietzsche. That line, from his Beyond Good and Evil, has special relevance to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which deals with the human capacity for evil, the corrupting impact of power, and the consequences of confronting the moral void. On the surface, the story is about a voyage into the Congo River basin. Its true landscape is the human soul.

The story begins on a boat moored on the Thames. Charles Marlow is recalling his time as a steamboat captain in the service of a European trading company. Some years before, he explains, he was tasked with going deep into the African jungle to retrieve the company’s most accomplished agent. The man’s name was Kurtz, and he had established himself as a near-mythical figure.

On the surface, the story is about a voyage into the Congo River basin. Its true landscape is the human soul.

The narrative revolves around Kurtz, an ivory trader who has shed his European origins and become something primal and unsettling. Marlow’s journey upriver to find him mirrors his descent into a place where human fictions of order and morality are stripped away. ‘Droll thing life is,’ Marlow says. ‘That mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of inextinguishable regrets.’

The Europeans subject the native population in the Congo to brutal exploitation, and as Marlow proceeds upriver, he encounters more and more chaos and moral decay. The hypocrisy of the ‘civilised’ Europeans is increasingly laid bare. They claim to bring progress but exact only violence and destruction. Marlow hears contradictory accounts of Kurtz, who is depicted as brilliant and charismatic. But he is feared as much as he is revered. Indeed he has taken on the standing of god among the local people.

The hypocrisy of the ‘civilised’ Europeans is increasingly laid bare.

The central theme is the emptiness of the ‘civilising mission’. European colonialism is no enlightened project but an exercise in greed and violence. The vast, impenetrable jungle is a metaphor for the darkness lurking deep inside every human soul. The further Marlow travels, the more the gloss comes off. European morals recede, and the rotting core that lies behind such grandiose ideals is made plain. Kurtz embodies this. The veneer of civility and sophistication has come off to reveal the lust for power underneath.

Conrad’s prose is elliptical, atmospheric. His sentences twist and turn like the river down which Marlow travels. Descriptions evoke a choking unease: ‘A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness,’ he writes near the start, setting the tone for a tale that feels perpetually shrouded in fog. The dialogue is sparse, and what is said tends to matter less than what is left unsaid. This is a novel of suggestion rather than declaration. Conrad is the great poet of the obscure.

The dialogue is sparse, and what is said tends to matter less than what is left unsaid.

He was also, according to Chinua Achebe, a ‘thoroughgoing racist’, due to his depictions of the Africans in Heart of Darkness. They are written less as people than as nameless, voiceless parts of the scenery, an ‘other’ against which the corruption of the Europeans is set. Conrad’s great critique of colonialism is not free of the bigotry of the time: however much he condemns the European project in Africa, he still depicts those Europeans as agents, that is, people with a say in how things go. This shows how thoroughly the propaganda of racism succeeded. Achebe writes of how racism increased after the slave trade was established. The dehumanisation of Africans was driven by the want of profit: by calling people ‘savage’ or ‘subhuman’, Europeans had a moral and intellectual framework for exploitation.

Solzhenitsyn, in his Gulag Archipelago, argued that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Conrad paints a far bleaker picture, scarcely entertaining the capacity for good, suggesting that human beings are always dancing on a knife edge, standing on the verge of an abyss that seems to be beckoning them to let go and tumble in. Civilisation, far from being a noble human bid to find and make order out of chaos, is a mere patina, a thin gloss that dignifies and ennobles—or hides and obscures—darker human motives. There is no order to be found in this chaos, Conrad says. And there is no respite to be found in the company of others. The world, he once said in a letter, ‘knits us in and knits us out’. ‘We live as we dream,’ he writes in Heart of Darkness, ‘alone …’ This is an unsettling little book, but a very good one.