Heart of Darkness: The novel as entry-point of Revision History PART 3 (final installment)

As early as the seventeen hundreds there were a few who did speak out against the immoral nature of colonialism and its derivatives such as slavery, including, the French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot, as well as the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and J. G. Herder.  But in all honesty, even though these Western European thinkers opposed colonialism of non-European people on ethical rather than economic grounds, their views focused more on the inappropriate nature of the processes of colonialism from the Western perspective of what is considered fair play, as opposed to its horrors.

 

The intention of the previously mentioned political, economic and philosophical thinkers was to delineate clear, concise ideas and explanations from the mess and confusion of human experience, that is, to define, systematize and order social, economic, political and philosophical phenomena—in this case colonialism—so people can make sense of and understand it, to clarify the mess and dispel the confusion.  That is what political scientists, economists and social scientists do.  They attempt to categorize and clarify.

Novelists, on the other hand, tend to approach the world somewhat differently than scientists. Rather than trying to categorize or quantify the human experience, novelists tend to bask in the multiplicity of sensations and emotions that experience can provoke, and try to communicate these rich complexities to the reader.   For most novelists, the fullness of experience is what really matters, in all its ambiguity and messiness, and not a set of formulas and doctrines intended to clarify, sometimes at the expense of the fullness of experience because of omissions or additions made to reach the desired scientific conclusion.

Here is what Conrad says in a preface he wrote for a novel in 1897:

"The thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts.  They speak authoritatively to our common-sense, our intelligence.  It is otherwise with the artist. Confronted with the same enigmatical spectacle, the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities.  The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom.  He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to that sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn." For Conrad, the fullness of experience, and perhaps the fullness of understanding, is not scientific, rather it is an appeal to our emotive selves—to beauty, mystery, pain, elation, suffering, happiness, love, hate, bitterness, anger, etc.

For Conrad, the world as we experience it is not something that can be reduced to a set of clear scientific or even philosophical principles. Life and historical phenomena are messy, vague, irrational, suggestive, and in flux.  And it is art, according to Conrad, that gives us the broadest view or picture, because whereas it is the intent of the scientist and social theorist to whittle away noise and distractions of a messy world, the intention of the novelist is to display the messy world in its wholeness for the reader to decipher.

In Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s intention is not to shed the light of science, or even reason on colonialism, but rather to re-create, in all its fullness, the experience of political, economic, social, religious, moral, ethical elation and torment, and all points in-between, of the colonial experience.

In Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, the reader, along with Marlowe, is anticipating meeting Mr. Kurtz, and experiencing Kurtz’s colonial enterprise in the Congolese jungle.  The trip down the river is a journey of both the physical senses, and of Marlowe’s sense of self and of the ‘other’.  This is going to be a clash of cultures—Western European vs. African.  Marlowe, it can be gleaned early on, has a sense of both.  But unknown to Marlowe is that these perceptions are going to be challenged, turned upside down.  There is nothing scientific here.  The things experienced by Marlowe will not come to him in the neat and tidy package of doctrine or dogma.  His experience is a full frontal assault to his eyes, ears, and even nose, and well as his understanding on race and culture, politics and religion. 

The reader, like Marlowe, is not sure who or what they will find when they get to Kurtz.  There is an air of mystery surrounding him, and that is of course the intention of Conrad.  Kurtz, the African jungle, Africans, the colonial enterprise, are all shrouded in mystery.  But perhaps the biggest mystery of all is that of Western civilization, its heart and soul.  What will Kurtz and his colonial enterprise say about Western civilization?  What will the verdict be once Marlowe sees Kurtz and his colonial outpost?  Kurtz is carrying a lot of weight, bearing a lot of responsibility here.  The reader gets the sense that Marlowe is sincerely hoping that Kurtz will not let him down, that he will not let Western civilization down.  After all, the Western Europeans burdened themselves with being the great civilizers, creators, savers of souls, purveyors of God’s will.  Kurtz, although a Westerner like Marlowe, must have been changed or altered in some way as a result of his colonial experience, as a result of living in a place considered by the Western world at that time to be dark, dangerous, foreboding, wild, uncivilized.  And even though Kurtz was supposed to be an instrument of taming and civilizing process of Africa, how has that untamed and wild land and its people affected Mr. Kurtz?

The first bits and pieces Marlowe, and the reader, receive regarding Kurtz come from the Russian man.  He too was in the Congo to extract ivory in order to get rich.  The man was in awe of Colonel Kurtz and was not shy in conveying his admiration for the man, while at the same time divulging Kurtz’s flaws.  The man tells Marlowe that Kurtz tried to kill him the other day, to Marlowe’s horror.  Yet the Russian man still held Kurtz in high esteem, but then concedes the fact that the things Marlowe was seeing in Kurtz’s camp were things caused by a man who was indeed quite mad, that Mr. Kurtz himself acknowledges that there is something not quite right in this place.  “He hates all this,” confesses the Russian while looking around the camp, a place teaming with the sights and smells of death.  There were skulls detached from their bodies and placed on spikes and short poles strewn about.   

The reader is led to believe that they are a testament to both Kurtz’s genius and to his insanity.  The Russian tries to explain to Marlowe that these two things are really one and the same, that the fine line between genius and madness is in reality so thin that perhaps the two are perhaps identical.  He hints to Marlowe that Kurtz is beyond comprehension to people of the Western world, that his ways and thinking are at the same time primitive and yet advanced, and that this is something the Western mindset cannot understand.  Marlowe ignores this assertion and immediately begins to believe the heads are evidence that there is something wrong with Kurtz, that he is not right, that he is not the great and visionary man that the Russian is trying to make him out to be, but rather that he is altogether insane.

When Marlowe sees Kurtz for the first time, he describes him as ‘emaciated’, ‘nothing but bones’.  Yet, when Kurtz opens what Marlowe describes as his ‘frail mouth’ to speak for the first time in Conrad’s account, he says that Kurtz, albeit frail looking, appears poised to swallow and devour.  Conrad’s Kurtz, although very real, can be construed as a kind of metaphor, a symbolic figure.  He represents the West, the white Western Europeans.  They are a dying empire by the late nineteen hundreds.  The time of European white man’s domination of the world is almost over, and Kurtz symbolizes or represents this to a certain extent.   And so Kurtz, like the Western Europeans, although a mere shell of his former self, is still feared, still dangerous, still in a position of power, still obeyed, still hungry for more.  Conrad writes that Kurtz opened his mouth as if wanting to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

But Conrad adds a very interesting twist to this.  He says that the wilderness drew Kurtz to its ‘pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts.’  And that this awakening ‘beguiled his soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations.’  Conrad is implying that Kurtz has in effect thrown off the shackles of civilized society, of Western civilization, and is hearkening back to the ways of his primeval ancestors, those who relied on instinct and adhered to the so-called ‘law of the jungle’ or ‘survival of the fittest.’  This ‘bounds of permitted aspirations’ is what is allowed by Western civilization, what is considered moral, ethical, normal or proper.

A question for the reader is whether or not Kurtz has ascended or descended, evolved or devolved, in order to go beyond the ‘bounds of permitted aspirations.’  One answer to this question is that he did both, that Kurtz ascended and descended, evolved and devolved.  On the one hand, Kurtz has freed himself from the constraints of Western society.  Its

Judeo-Christian ethical and moral code would not allow the violent subjugation of other human beings, even if they are dark of skin, non-Christian, or even ‘wild’ and ‘uncivilized’, as people from the African continent were portrayed in the nineteenth century.  And so in this regard, Kurtz ascended the ethical and moral code from whence he came.  But it is more complicated than that, because it is that very same Judeo-Christian moral and ethical code that justified the Western world’s claim to their ascendancy over and above the African.  And so Kurtz’s descent or devolvement is in effect justified in order to conquer and subjugate the so-called “noble savage” who is altogether lacking in moral and ethical character and restraint.  That is, Kurtz had to become more wild, more savage, more lacking in moral and ethical restraint than the savage in order to savage, yet at what cost to himself?

Marlowe explains that there is ‘nothing above or below Kurtz’.  Perhaps Conrad is trying to make the point that Kurtz, and the Western European colonial enterprise, has ascended to the place of god, and that both the colonizer and the colonized have bought into this lofty ideal.  The Europeans have transcended Judeo-Christian morality by descending to that of the most violent and cruel of all human beings; that because they are gods, their ends justify their means. 

But what exactly are their ends?  What are their means?  Intention and results can sometimes be two separate things, as they are in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The work performed by the Company is described as “trade,” and their treatment of the Africans is framed as the benevolent project of “civilization.” But Kurtz does not speak in such vague and flowery terms.  He is clear about the fact that he does not trade but rather takes ivory by force.  He uses such words a “suppression” and even “extermination” to describe his treatment of the Congolese people.  He is not afraid to admit that he rules through violence and intimidation. His honesty, his lack of diplomatic tact, his willingness to tell the truth, leads to his downfall in the mind of Marlowe, that is, it is exposing the evil practices of the Europeans in Africa.

But Kurtz’s admissions do not necessarily produce sympathy for the plight of the Africans on the part of Marlowe.  However, it does speak to the dehumanization of the Congolese in that they are portrayed for the most part as objects, props, things in the background, pieces of machinery, statuary.  Conrad has received much criticism of this, his detractors claiming that this is Conrad’s own perspective of Africans.  But what the reader must keep in mind is that Conrad is making the point that colonization dehumanizes both the colonizer and the colonized, and his is a novel which speaks to the evils of colonization from the perspective of Mr. Kurtz and of Mr. Marlowe, two Western Europeans.  It explains how one man has grown numb to exploitation and the excesses of freedom, while the other is at the same time horrified and already in the process of numbing himself in order to comprehend, and accept, the incomprehensible and the unacceptable. 

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