Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is a novella by English author Joseph Conrad that was first published in 1899 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and then in Conrad’s Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (1902). Heart of Darkness examines the horrors of Western colonialism, depicting it as a phenomenon that tarnishes not only the lands and peoples it exploits but also those in the West who advance it.

Although it initially garnered a lackluster reception, Conrad’s semiautobiographical tale has gone on to become one of the most widely analyzed works of English literature. Critics have not always treated Heart of Darkness favorably, rebuking its dehumanizing representation of colonized peoples and its dismissive treatment of women. Nonetheless, the novella is considered by many to be a Modernist masterpiece directly engaged with postcolonial realities.

Summary: Plot and characters

Heart of Darkness tells a story within a story. The novella begins with a group of passengers aboard a boat floating on the River Thames in London. One of them, Charlie Marlow, relates to his fellow seafarers an experience of his that took place on another river altogether—the Congo River in Africa. Marlow’s story begins in what he calls the “sepulchral city,” somewhere in Europe. There “the Company”—an unnamed organization running a colonial enterprise in the Belgian Congo—appoints him captain of a river steamer. He sets out for Africa optimistic about what he will find.

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But his expectations are quickly soured. From the moment he arrives, he is exposed to the evil of imperialism, witnessing the violence it inflicts upon the African people it exploits. As he proceeds, he begins to hear of a man named Kurtz—a colonial agent who is supposedly unmatched in his ability to procure ivory from the continent’s interior. According to rumor Kurtz has fallen ill (and perhaps gone mad), thereby jeopardizing the Company’s entire venture in the Congo.

Marlow is given command of his steamer and a crew of Europeans and Africans (the latter of whom Conrad stereotypes as “cannibals”). As he penetrates deeper into the jungle, it becomes clear that his surroundings are affecting him psychologically: His journey is not only into a geographical “heart of darkness” but into his own psychic interior—and perhaps into the darkened psychic interior of Western civilization as well.

After encountering many obstacles along the way, Marlow’s steamer finally makes it to Kurtz. Kurtz has taken command of a tribe whose members he now employs to conduct raids on the surrounding regions. The man is clearly ill, physically and psychologically. So intent is Kurtz on executing his “immense plans” that Marlow has to threaten him to make him go along with them. As the steamer turns back the way it came, Marlow’s crew fires upon the natives previously under Kurtz’s sway, including a queen-figure described by Conrad with much eroticism and exoticism.

Kurtz dies on the journey back up the river but not before revealing to Marlow the terrifying glimpse of human evil he had been exposed to. “The horror! The horror!” he tells Marlow before dying. Marlow almost dies as well, but he makes it back to the sepulchral city to recuperate. He is disdainful of the petty tribulations of Western civilization that seem to occupy everyone around him. As he heals, he is visited by various characters from Kurtz’s former life—the life he led before finding the dark interior of himself in Africa.

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A year after his return to Europe, Marlow pays Kurtz’s “Intended” a visit. She is represented—as several of Heart of Darkness’s female characters are—as naively sheltered from the awfulness of the world, a state that Marlow hopes to preserve. When she asks what Kurtz’s final words were, Marlow lies: “your name,” he tells her. Marlow’s story ends there. Heart of Darkness itself ends as the narrator, one of Marlow’s audience, sees a mass of brooding clouds gathering on the horizon—what seems to him to be “the heart of an immense darkness.”

Publication and reception

Heart of Darkness was published in 1902 as a novella in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories. But the text first appeared in 1899 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a literary monthly on its thousandth issue, to which its editor invited Conrad to contribute. Conrad was hesitant to do so, perhaps for good reason—although Heart of Darkness received acclaim among his own literary circle, the story failed to secure any kind of popular success. That remained the case even when it was published in 1902; of the stories included in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, Heart of Darkness received the least attention (and the collection was named after another one of the stories altogether). Conrad did not live long enough to see it become a popular success.

Heart of Darkness first began garnering academic attention in the 1940s and ’50s, when literary studies were dominated by a psychologically oriented approach to the interpretation of literature. Conrad’s work was, accordingly, understood as a universalist exploration of the human soul—of its corruptibility, inaccessibility, and inherent darkness. There was something lacking in these critiques: any kind of examination of the novella’s message about colonialism or its use of Africa and its people as an indistinct backdrop against which to explore the complexities of the white psyche.

That changed in the 1970s when Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart (1958), leveled an excoriating critique at Heart of Darkness for the way it dehumanizes African people. His critique opened the door for further postcolonial analyses of the work and was followed by those from other academic perspectives. Feminist readings, for example, revealed a similar kind of effacement of the story’s female characters. Although Heart of Darkness has remained on many syllabi since the 1970s, it came to occupy a much more controversial position in the Western canon: It is often viewed as a story that, while leveling critiques against colonialism that were novel for their time and helping to shape the emergence of Modernist literature, is still deeply and inexcusably entrenched in the white male perspective.

Analysis: Themes, style, and criticism

On the most superficial level, Heart of Darkness can be understood through its semiautobiographical relationship to Conrad’s real life. Much like his protagonist Marlow, Conrad’s career in the merchant marine also took him up the Congo River. And much like Marlow, Conrad was profoundly affected by the human depravity he witnessed on his boat tour of European colonialism in Africa.

But some critics think it is reductive to boil Heart of Darkness down to the commonalities it shares with Conrad’s own experiences. Instead, many critics find it more useful to examine the story’s elements in relation to the emergence of Modernism: for example, Conrad’s use of multiple narrators; his couching of one narrative within another; the story’s achronological unfolding; and, as would become increasingly clear as the 20th century progressed, his almost post-structuralist distrust of the stability of language. At the same time, his story pays homage to the Victorian tales he grew up on, as is evident in the popular heroism so central to his story’s narrative. In that sense, Heart of Darkness straddles the boundary between a waning Victorian sensibility and a waxing Modernist one.

One of the most distinctly Modernist elements of Conrad’s work lies in this kind of early post-structuralist treatment of language—his insistence on the inherent inability of words to express the real, in all of its horrific truth. Marlow’s journey is full of encounters with things that are “unspeakable,” with words that are uninterpretable, and with a world that is eminently “inscrutable.” In this way, language fails time and time again to do what it is meant to do—to communicate. This phenomenon is best summed up when Marlow tells his audience that “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence… We live, as we dream—alone.” Kurtz—as “eloquent” as he may be—cannot even adequately communicate the terrifying darkness he observed around him: “The horror! The horror!” is all he can say.

Some critics have surmised that part of Heart of Darkness’s mass appeal comes from this ambiguity of language—from the free rein it gives its readers to interpret. Others posit this as a great weakness of the text, viewing Conrad’s inability to name things as an unseemly quality in a writer who is supposed to be one of the greats. Perhaps this is itself a testament to the Heart of Darkness’s breadth of interpretability.

Examining Heart of Darkness from a postcolonial perspective has given rise to more derisive critiques. Achebe declared Conrad a “thoroughgoing racist,” one who dehumanized Africans in order to use them as a backdrop against which to explore the white man’s interiority. From this perspective, although Conrad rebukes the evils of colonialism, he does little to dismantle the racism that undergirds such a system, instead portraying the people of Africa as little more than part of the natural environment. Ironically, Conrad’s work has been held up as one of the West’s most insightful books on the evils of European imperialism in Africa, and yet it fails to assign any particularity to African people themselves.

Feminist discourse has offered similar critiques, noting that Conrad flattened his female characters, much like he did his African ones. According to these critics, the women in Heart of Darkness are deployed not as multidimensional beings, but as signifiers undistinguished from the field of other signifiers that make up the text. They are shells emptied of all particularity and meaning, such that Conrad can fill them with the significance he sees fit. The African queen becomes the embodiment of darkened nature and an eroticized symbol of its atavistic allure. Kurtz’s “Intended,” meanwhile, is just a symbol for the illusory reality of society that Marlow is trying to protect against the invading darkness of human nature. Neither woman is fleshed out or interiorized, and neither is named—a rhetorical strategy that feminist critics view as being less about Conrad illustrating the failures of language and more about him privileging his masculine voice above any possible feminine ones.

Much contemporary analysis—including postcolonial and feminist critiques—is centered not on the text itself, but on other commentaries on the text, thereby elucidating the way that discussions in academia might unwittingly perpetuate some of the work’s more problematic elements. Thus, Heart of Darkness occupies an ever-changing position in the literary canon: It is viewed no longer as a story that reveals the depths of human depravity but as an artifact that is the product of such depravity and that reproduces it in its own right. The question then becomes: Does the Heart of Darkness still belong in the West’s literary canon? And if so, will it always?

Adaptations

In 1979 Heart of Darkness was famously adapted as the film Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola. The film moves the story’s setting from late 19th-century Africa to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s or early 1970s and follows a U.S. Army captain (played by Martin Sheen) tasked with traveling from South Vietnam to Cambodia to assassinate a rogue Special Forces colonel (Marlon Brando) whom the Army believes has gone insane.

Like Heart of Darkness, Coppola’s film explores the human capacity for evil and examines the fragility of the human mind, the mechanisms by which it categorizes reality, and the ways in which an encounter with a profoundly unfamiliar environment can upend an individual’s mental models of the world and cause the person’s sense of morality, order, and normalcy to break down. Also like Conrad’s work, the movie was highly controversial. Its production was chaotic and costly, and its treatment of Vietnamese characters has been criticized for reproducing the racist perspective of Heart of Darkness.

Another notable adaptation is Nicolas Roeg’s 1994 television film Heart of Darkness, starring Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz.