Light in The Heart of Darkness
“We live, as we dream—alone. . .”
reflections on Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness
I first read this novella in AP English at the tender age of seventeen. I remember little of that first encounter—only hazy images of a man on a boat on a river in an African jungle. Perhaps my perspective was disrupted by the oppressive heat of standardized tests, which buzzed around my head like a swarm of mosquitos, and the heady thrill of my impending escape to college. In his commentary, Hemingway says he could never re-read Conrad; I may now agree with him. Although I did re-read the novella, it was as though I was reading it for the first time, and I would hesitate to venture into that darkness again.
As a teenager I think did not appreciate the novel in part because I was unable to comprehend the depths that Conrad plumbs. I had not the emotional and existential tools to process such a story about the horror of human life, our immense capacity for corruption, and the illusion of progress to which we cling as if to a vine swinging over an abyss. Twenty more years of life experience certainly make me no sage, but these ideas resonate now, and I am awed at the author’s ability to express so concisely and eloquently that which is so difficult even to conceive.
I also could not appreciate the strong historical undercurrent—the legacy of exploration and colonialism and the promotion and rejection of Romantic ideals—that so powerfully ripple through the narrative. Upon this second read, after having taught history and literature for over a decade, I greatly enjoyed Conrad’s references to the inexorable march of civilization that spreads—along with its sanitation, education, and commerce—an intoxicating amnesia, which nearly erases the memory of a time before its existence. In the first pages, the narrator reflects on the distant and illustrious history—“the great spirit of the past”—of the Thames, which had borne the “greatness” of “the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires” in faithful service. Marlow’s first words, which are to be the vehicle for the rest of the tale within the tale, remind us of what is too easily forgotten, that “this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth.” With that single breath Marlow links the mighty yet obedient Thames to that more sinister river to which his memory transports us.
Indeed, the land and its waters play an integral role in the narrative. It was the seas that enabled the exploration and colonization of his time, which brought two cultures, two eras, face to face in a deadly dance that neither fully understood. Marlow’s first views of the African continent are of ships firing blindly into silent, absorbent jungles—a picture of futility. The climate of Africa soon becomes an antagonist in the novel, which kills indiscriminately and continuously. Conrad refers repeatedly to the interior of Africa as a more primitive, untouched version of the world, though not uncorrupted. Marlow recalls, “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.” Yet there is not a hint of the idyllic visions that so many writers of his era superimposed upon their depictions of “virgin” landscapes. No, Conrad writes not of an Eden but rather of a fallen wilderness, a jungle yet untamed by civilization that simmers with an unnamed evil: “There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine . . . 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.”
Marlow feels that he is travelling into a nightmare, but one more real than waking. The hidden truths, the “inner truth,” with which the jungle confronts him he calls “reality.” And so one must ask, which is the real nightmare? The horrors of his trip up the river or the illusion under which we live when “safe” in our artificial, ephemeral civilizations? Marlow ultimately considers them both nightmares and knows he must choose which he will inhabit.
Marlow feels the “mysterious stillness” of the land “watching [him] at [his] monkey tricks,” and he senses the thinness of the barriers we have erected between our civilized selves and the beasts that we are when our costumes have been stripped away: rapacious, reckless, and amoral. Costumes are removed literally in the novel: Marlow’s bloodied shoes, the more proper clothes of the “patched man,” Kurtz’s clothes when we first see him, borne on a stretcher by the “savages.” The loss of clothing represents the loss of illusion, of delusion, which brings these characters closer, physically and mentally—indeed, morally—to the nearly naked natives. Or rather, the characters are brought to realize that they already are, underneath their pathetic suits of armor, essentially akin to the savages they sought to subdue. In a twisted reversal of Adam and Eve, they realize that they are fundamentally naked, once they stop pretending otherwise—only, for them, their nakedness reveals their essential corruption rather than any kind of innocence. Though there is an element of honesty in their “naked” condition, it is by no means pure.
Through this physical journey into the most primitive part of the earth, Marlow journeys into the most primitive part of the human soul, a place he finds unbearably dark. The human heart, as he sees through Kurtz’s voyage into death, is characterized by “impenetrable darkness.” Stripped bare, Kurtz’s “ivory face” bares an “expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair.” And Kurtz, who had inhabited in life the most extreme levels of depravity by the narrator’s standards, cannot bear what he sees in that “supreme moment of complete knowledge” and cries out, “The horror! The horror!”
His dying words are a pronouncement on the entire human race, on the mechanisms of colonialism that fed like a parasite on the entrails of other cultures, on the delusions of grandeur that fuel the steam engine of civilization that boils human greed like an alchemist until it resembles charity, and on the human heart that betrays itself with every beat.
There is no God for Kurtz because he has become his own god. He marched into the jungle to collect ivory—in itself a symbol of cruelty and wastefulness, a trophy collected by slaying the earth’s grandest creature valued only as an exotic embellishment by the decadent cultures of Europe who prized it—and in the process he became, and was destroyed by, that which he coveted. His “ivory face” had become a deity for the natives, and as Conrad implies, for himself as well. He was seduced by the power of his deification and became “irretrievably lost,” trapped by the “heavy, mute spell of the wilderness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions.” The jungle may have cast the spell, but the magic consists only lifting the “veil” so that man sees himself as he truly is, unencumbered by his lofty yet futile delusions. Yet the human soul, as we see through Kurtz, proves incapable of facing this truth without becoming overwhelmed by it. Kurtz is, as the reader learns more fully later, an exceptional human being: one of the best and brightest. So if he could not resist this seduction, we are to believe that none of us could. This rawness of passion and instinct “had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations.”
It was his hubris that had beckoned him into the jungle in the first place—his belief that he could do some good for the savages, alter them in some essential way. And it was, also, his avarice—for ivory, wealth, esteem. Conrad sees them as one and the same: both are the lust for power, whether to alter another man’s destiny through a change in his customs or to alter one’s own destiny through the acquisition of wealth. These twin designs fueled the machinery of colonialism and led, over and over, to the destruction of both the object and the subject.
What remains is the land, the rivers, the sea. The earth alone persists unchanged, indifferent to our “monkey tricks.” Marlow seems to think that the land and rivers humor us, helping here and there, hindering more often, but that ultimately they are implacable and that we swarm over their surfaces like so many ants, busily building our castles of sand.
Marlow is unique in that he glimpses the truth that civilization has worked so hard to obscure, the truth that destroyed Kurtz, and yet he is able to pull his foot back from the precipice. He lived Kurtz’s nightmare for a few days, in the world behind the veil, and he understood its horror. But he is able, miraculously, to turn back. In the final pages, when he speaks with Kurtz’s intended, his choice becomes clear to the reader. She asks him to share Kurtz’s final words, words that have burned themselves indelibly on Marlow’s memory as well as that of the reader, and Marlow decides to lie, telling her instead that Kurtz’s final words were her name. In that moment, his path becomes certain. He has chosen to inhabit the artificial world of civilization, to hide behind facades once more, to accept society’s delusions and even to help build them. He has chosen his nightmare.
Yet he will never forget the glimpse into the other world, the reality that smolders just under the surface, beneath our costumes of propriety and morality. His will be a kind of enlightened delusion, made all the more terrible by his knowledge and yet simultaneously more poignant. With every breath he hears Kurtz’s last words—“The horror!”—ringing in the air, shattering the illusion of innocence, but he will struggle on in the maintenance of the illusion, for it is “too dark—too dark altogether” for him to do otherwise.
This ending, and indeed the entire novella, reminds me of the last line of one of my favorite novels, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which reads, “So we beat on, like boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Marlow, like Nick in The Great Gatsby, has chosen to beat on, against the current, aware of the fact that the flow of the world will ultimately overwhelm his efforts and that history is doomed to repeat itself. No matter how hard we paddle, how much we thrash, our "monkey tricks"—whether with cannons and slavery as in Conrad or with clothes and cars and mansions in Fitzgerald—we change nothing, not really.
When I read this book in high school, my eyes were still closed, the veil still in place, so the meaning of the novella washed over me without penetrating. I had no way of processing these truths, as I had not yet faced this choice in my own life.
Today, I face this decision almost daily, but I face it not quite alone. Rather, I face the horror of this world with God by my side, though I am often unable to sense that comforting presence. Conrad’s novella is by no stretch of the imagination a Christian story, but for me, it is not antithetical to a Christian worldview.
Though Conrad himself would not have seen it this way, a Christian reader might interpret his portrait as a bitterly accurate representation of the fallen world without Christ. In a sense, that is precisely what Conrad was trying to portray; his world was ruled by human ambition and passion, and it was without Christ because Christ simply did not exist. While a Christian would not agree with this last statement, he or she might appreciate the brutal honesty of his depiction of a world without Christ—not because Christ does not exist but because such a depiction allows us to see why He is necessary.
Only by recognizing darkness can we hope to comprehend light. Conrad’s vision is one of despair, of the meaninglessness of life, of the futility of our attempts to improve the world or ourselves. However, my experience of the novel is one of sadness, yes, but also of profound hope, for his vision resonates with my experience of the world as it is, and I am convinced it can only be altered, not by our blind, selfish groping, but by God. This novella inspires with me overwhelming hope because, without God, I know we are horribly, irrevocably lost, like Kurtz. And like Marlow, I can bear neither the artificial life of civilized delusion nor the impenetrable darkness of the reality beneath. But I believe we have another option: to trust that God will redeem us and that this jungle through which we struggle is not all there is.
Indeed, perhaps that is precisely, in a way, what Marlow discovered. He was pulled back from the heart of darkness by a power beyond himself. He was given the terrible gift of opened eyes that saw the horror of the world along with a heart that still longed for something better. And that, I would argue, is the most terrible thing of all, and the most beautiful.
