Heart of Darkness

Summary

There is a moment in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness when the narrator, a man named Marlow, is sitting on a boat on the Thames at dusk, looking at London, and he says something that reframes the entire story before it even begins. “And this also,” he says quietly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” He is reminding his listeners that England itself was once a savage wilderness, that Roman soldiers once sailed up this very river into an unknown darkness, just as Marlow himself once sailed up a river in Africa. The darkness, Conrad tells us, is not something that belongs to any one place or people. It is something inside us all.

Published in 1899, Heart of Darkness is one of the most influential and debated novels in the English language. It is barely a hundred pages long, but it contains within it a reckoning with colonialism, with human nature, and with the thin line between civilization and savagery. It is the story of a journey upriver, and it is the story of what happens to a brilliant man when all the restraints of society are removed and he is left alone with absolute power.

Marlow tells his story to a small group of friends aboard a yacht anchored on the Thames, waiting for the tide. He begins by explaining how he came to captain a steamboat for a Belgian trading company operating in the Congo. He had always been drawn to blank spaces on maps, and Africa was the biggest blank space of all, dominated by a great river that snaked across the continent like an immense serpent.

Through the influence of an aunt, Marlow secures the position. The previous captain, a man named Fresleven, had been killed in a dispute with natives over two black hens. Marlow travels to the company offices in Brussels, a city he describes as a whited sepulchre. In the waiting room, two women in black knit wool ceaselessly, like figures from a myth, guarding the entrance to something terrible. A doctor measures Marlow’s skull and asks, almost casually, “Ever any madness in your family?” He advises Marlow to avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun.

Everything about the departure feels ominous, ceremonial, as if Marlow is being prepared for something no one wants to name.

The voyage along the African coast is Marlow’s first taste of the absurdity and cruelty of the colonial enterprise. He passes a French warship anchored off the coast, its guns firing blindly into the jungle. “In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water,” Marlow says, “there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.” Nobody can explain whom or what the ship is fighting.

At the company’s outer station, the horrors become real. A chain gang of emaciated Black men in iron collars shuffles past. Abandoned machinery rusts in the sun. In a grove of trees, Marlow discovers dying workers who have crawled there to expire in the shade, “black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.” A young man looks up at him with enormous, vacant eyes. Marlow offers him a biscuit. He can do nothing else.

Amid this nightmare, Marlow meets the company’s chief accountant, an immaculate man in starched collars and polished shoes who keeps flawless books while people die outside his window. From this man, Marlow first hears a name that will come to define his journey: Kurtz. “He is a very remarkable person,” the accountant says. “Sends in as much ivory as all the others put together.”

Marlow treks two hundred miles through the jungle to the central station, passing an abandoned village and a corpse with a bullet hole in its forehead. At the station, he learns his steamboat has sunk, seemingly through sabotage. The station manager, a man with remarkably cold eyes who inspires nothing but uneasiness, makes vague excuses. Marlow suspects the delay is intentional, designed to undermine Kurtz, who is stationed deep upriver and who has been sending back enormous quantities of ivory.

Everyone at this station talks about Kurtz. He is described as a universal genius: painter, musician, writer, orator, a man destined for great things in the company. He wrote a beautiful report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, seventeen pages of eloquent idealism. But scrawled at the bottom, in a later, unsteady hand, are four words: “Exterminate all the brutes.”

Marlow spends months repairing his boat. During this time, Kurtz becomes less a person to him than an idea, a voice in the darkness. When the boat is finally ready, the journey upriver begins.

The river takes them deeper into wilderness. The jungle presses in from both sides, ancient and indifferent. Marlow watches the shore and thinks about the people who live there. “It was unearthly,” he says, “and the men were, no, they were not inhuman. What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity, like yours, the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.”

This is the heart of Conrad’s challenge to his readers. The darkness is not in the jungle. The darkness is what Europeans have brought to the jungle, and what the jungle, by stripping away the veneer of civilization, reveals about the Europeans themselves.

About eight miles from Kurtz’s station, a dense fog descends. At dawn, a terrible cry rises from the jungle, a prolonged wail of mournful fear and utter despair. Then arrows rain down from the undergrowth. Marlow’s helmsman is killed by a spear, dying at his feet with an inquiring look in his eyes. Marlow pulls the steam whistle and the sound sends the attackers fleeing.

They reach Kurtz’s station. Through his binoculars, Marlow sees what he initially takes for ornamental knobs atop the fence posts surrounding the compound. Then he adjusts the focus and the knobs resolve into something else entirely. They are human heads, dried and shrunken, all facing the house, all except one that faces outward, smiling endlessly.

A young Russian trader in a suit of bright patches, looking like a harlequin, greets them from the shore. He has been living near Kurtz for months, utterly devoted to the man. “This man has enlarged my mind,” he tells Marlow with genuine awe.

From the Russian, Marlow learns the full picture. Kurtz is desperately ill. He has raided the countryside for ivory. The native people worship him as a god. He presided over midnight ceremonies with unspeakable rites. He ordered the attack on Marlow’s boat because he did not want to be taken away.

Then Kurtz himself appears, carried on a stretcher. He is skeletal, at least seven feet long, an animated image of death carved out of old ivory. His voice, though, is still magnificent, deep and resonant, the voice of a man who once electrified audiences with his eloquence. He gestures at the gathered natives and they vanish into the forest.

On the boat, feverish and raving, Kurtz speaks as if everything belongs to him. “My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my…” Everything. The wilderness, Conrad writes, had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception until he took counsel with this great solitude. And the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

That night, Kurtz crawls off the boat toward the drums and fires in the jungle. Marlow follows him and finds him in the grass, barely able to stand but drawn irresistibly back toward the darkness. Marlow confronts him and brings him back, understanding now that Kurtz’s soul has gone mad, that being alone in the wilderness with unlimited power had broken something fundamental in him.

They start back downriver. Kurtz deteriorates rapidly, though he never stops talking, never stops planning, never stops believing in his own greatness even as his body fails. One evening, Marlow brings a candle into his cabin and sees on Kurtz’s face an expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of intense and hopeless despair.

Then Kurtz cries out, in a voice barely above a whisper: “The horror! The horror!”

And he dies.

These are perhaps the most famous last words in English literature, and they have been debated for over a century. Is Kurtz condemning what he has done? Is he condemning what he has seen? Is he describing a vision of the universe itself, stripped of all comforting illusions? Marlow believes it was a judgment, a summing up. He says it had candor, it had conviction, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth.

Marlow nearly dies himself on the return journey. Back in Brussels, the sepulchral city, he finds ordinary life almost unbearable. People walk the streets with their stupid self-importance, knowing nothing of what lies beyond their comfortable world.

Various people come to claim pieces of Kurtz. A company official wants his documents. A cousin insists he was a great musician. A journalist says he should have been in politics. Everyone claims a different version of the man. Nobody knows the real one.

Finally, Marlow visits the woman Kurtz was to marry, his Intended. More than a year after his death, she is still in mourning, still devoted, still radiant with her faith in the man she loved. She speaks of his nobility, his genius, his beautiful words. She asks Marlow for his last words, something to live with.

Marlow cannot do it. He cannot tell this grieving woman that the last thing on her beloved’s lips was not her name but a cry of horror at everything he had become and everything he had seen.

“The last word he pronounced was your name,” Marlow tells her.

It is a lie, and Marlow knows it. But the truth, he decides, would have been too dark. Too dark altogether.

Heart of Darkness is a difficult, uncomfortable masterpiece. It has been rightly criticized for the way it renders African people as backdrop rather than as full human beings. But its power as a moral fable remains devastating. Conrad was writing about what happens when a civilization that calls itself enlightened uses that claim as justification for unspeakable cruelty. He was writing about what happens when a man of great gifts and great ambition is placed beyond all accountability.

Kurtz is not a monster who went to Africa. He is a product of Europe, of its idealism and its greed. The horror he whispers about at the end is not the horror of the jungle. It is the horror of looking into yourself and seeing what you are capable of when no one is watching, when no rules apply, when power is absolute and consequences do not exist.

Marlow returns from his journey unable to live comfortably in the civilized world, because he knows now what civilization is built on and what it conceals. The river that runs through the story, from the Thames to the Congo and back again, connects these two worlds. The darkness at the heart of one is the darkness at the heart of the other.

“The tranquil waterway,” Conrad writes in his final line, “seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”

This has been Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.