Heart of Darkness ends with Marlow calling on Kurtz’ fiancée in a dimly-lit mansion in an unnamed metropolis which Marlow calls merely the “sepulchral city.”  Still in mourning more than a year later, she wants to know Kurtz’ final words.  Marlow tells her that Kurtz called her name.  But this is a lie – as he lay dying, Kurtz whispered, “The horror!  The horror!”

Marlow’s little white lie was meant to shield a woman’s feelings from an ugly truth.  By the end of the narrative, however, the author Joseph Conrad’s made the point that civilization is based on lies – although we may call them faith, beliefs, ideas, or “the great and saving illusion.”  And we need these lies, he implies, to shield us from the primeval darkness which lies deep within the soul.

But is this really the case?  As someone who spends a lot of time in wilderness, this question nags at me.  I recently reread Heart of Darkness, as I was preparing for a trip to Maine, a place that seems plenty mysterious and primitive, if not quite so far off as Africa.

A Journey into Wilderness

The protagonist of the story is a seaman and “wanderer” named Marlow, who’s fascinated by blank spots in maps.  The plot follows his journey into an unnamed region in Central Africa (based no doubt on Conrad’s experiences in the Congo), where he encounters the dying Kurtz — a civilized, educated man with big ideas and a gift for eloquence, who has “gone native,” so to speak.  Marlow notices this while studying Kurz’ jungle station through binoculars and spots severed human heads impaled on stakes.

What happened?  There must have been some kind of “defect” in Kurtz’ personality, Marlow speculates.  An inability to restrain himself.  Kurtz was “hollow at the core” – vulnerable to the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness, which “seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions.”  Marlow pictures Kurtz lured to “the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations.”  Once there, Kurtz forgot himself among the primitive inhabitants of the jungle.  Spent his time leading violent raids, in violation of company protocol.  Ventured outside the bounds of permitted behavior.

Although in this regard, Kurtz hardly seems unique.  On the journey south, Marlow passes a warship lobbing shells deep into the jungle where no target is remotely visible – and comments on “a touch of insanity in the proceeding.”  He sees the company’s traders as “sordid buccaneers” lusting for booty – reckless, greedy, cruel — while “a taint of imbecile rapacity” characterizes their demeanor.  And it’s not just Africa where civilized people behave poorly.  Marlow casts back into Europe’s dark past, brings up the Roman legions who invaded Britain – “They were conquerors,” he comments, referring to the centurions and citizens who belonged to the greatest civilization of the time.  “They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind.”

The victims in the story are the African natives, with whom Conrad clearly sympathizes.  Marlow sees in them “a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast.”  These are not enemies, he concludes, nor criminals.  Listening to the far-off tremor of drums, Marlow recognizes that these sounds contain the same profound meaning as church bells in a Christian country.

The Contrast Between Marlow and Kurtz

Throughout the account, Kurtz is described as a man with a powerful voice.  It was “grave, profound, vibrating” — and rang deep to the very end.  Afterwards, a friend of Kurtz explained to Marlow how Kurtz “electrified large meetings.”  Because he had a kind of faith – he could get himself to believe anything.  Kurtz would have made a splendid leader of a political party, the friend insisted, especially an extremist movement.

In contrast, Marlow is a skeptic.  He hates lies.  They make him miserable and sick.  “There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies–which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world–what I want to forget.”  Like Kurtz he has a voice, but he limits his pronouncements.  Acknowledges that on his deathbed he would probably have nothing to say.  Sees himself as someone who will peep over the edge, but then draws back, while Kurtz strode across.  Respects Kurtz as a remarkable man, in that Kurtz had something to say and said it.

The Horror

So how do we interpret the creepy last words of this man with a voice, the last words which Marlow felt compelled to lie about?

The reader with a vested stake in civil society – like Marlow’s aunt, who insists “the ignorant millions must be weaned of their horrid ways” — might view Kurtz’ final words as a deathbed confession.  After a life of sin, he recognized that his actions, words, ideas, and ambitions were wrong.  He was horrified by what he had done – and repented.

Maybe.  Although there is nothing in the text to indicate that Kurtz regretted his wild ways.

Indeed, there’s something unconvincing about the death scene of such a monstrous personality who seems frightened at the end.  One starts to wonder, what point was the author trying to make, in placing these words in his character’s mouth, before killing him?  The conventional interpretation is that Conrad was calling attention to the depredations of colonial Europe, whose traders were ruthlessly exploiting the wealth of Africa.  Early in the story, Marlow is no doubt expressing Conrad’s sentiments when he comments, “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

If Conrad was trying to shift European public opinion against the rape of Africa, then he faced a challenge in persuading a rapacious people to show restraint.  So he decided to frighten them, with the thought that the African wilderness contained a darkness that could destroy them, just as it had devoured Kurtz.

The Abyss

Marlow saw Kurtz as lost in an impenetrable darkness.  “I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.”  Kurtz was alone in the wilderness.  His soul “looked within itself.”  And whatever it saw drove him mad.

In one of his most famous aphorisms, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed a similar point — “take care that if you fight monsters, you do not become a monster, for if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” It may be that Conrad, who had read Nietzsche, was influenced by this idea, or maybe he came to it on his own.  Either way, both authors are suggesting that the soul contains a mix of passion, lust, terror, cruelty — call it the turbulent primeval energy which animates us — a force from which the rational part of the mind recoils in horror.

Which is why we need civilization, even if it is based on half-truths and outright fabrications – we need these lies to shield us from introspection, lest we discover that deep down we are the same as Kurtz.

The Role of Lies in Life

The historian Hannah Arendt was fascinated by Conrad, and some think her famous comment on Nazi terror – how it reflected the “banality of evil” — was inspired by his work[1].  She was also critical of America’s role in Viet Nam, where the high command’s preoccupation with the “body count” struck here as delusional.  But she caveats this point with an interesting observation.

The deliberate denial of factual truth—the ability to lie—and the capacity to change facts—the ability to act—are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination. It is by no means a matter of course that we can say, “The sun shines,” when it actually is raining (the consequence of certain brain injuries is the loss of this capacity); rather, it indicates that while we are well equipped for the world, sensually as well as mentally, we are not fitted or embedded into it as one of its inalienable parts. We are free to change the world and to start something new in it.[2]

And this is precisely what Conrad did in Heart of Darkness – he created a little white lie — that civilized people cannot tolerate introspection and thus should stay away from wilderness — as a rhetorical argument to persuade Europeans to leave Africa alone.

But I don’t think Conrad felt this way himself.  As he sailed up the river in search of Kurtz, Marlow felt like he was “traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.”  The wilderness evoked in him a sense of awe and reverence.  “The silence of the land went home to one’s very heart–its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.”

For Conrad, the wilderness must have provided an opportunity for reflection — and served as a source of inspiration.  In this regard, the author resembles his character – for Conrad was certainly a man with a powerful voice.

I’m looking forward to my trip to Maine and wondering what I’ll find.

---

[1] NADEL, IRA. “Conrad, Arendt, and the ‘Banality of Evil.’” Conradiana 49, no. 1 (2017): 43–52. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26939852

[2] Arendt, Hannah. Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (p. 5). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.