"Heart of Darkness": Out of Africa Some New Thing Never ComesAuthor(s): Sandya ShettySource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Spring, 1989), pp. 461-474Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831602 .Accessed: 11/05/2011 15:31

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SANDYA SHETTY

University of New Hampshire

Heart of Darkness: Out of Africa

Some New Thing

Never Comes*

Contradictions, ambiguities, and discontinuities?these are hallmarks

of Joseph Conrad's colonial fictions. It is particularly difficult to assess

Conrad's relationship to imperialism because of his shifting responses to

the dominant political phenomenon of his time. Until recently, it has

been customary to view the immanent contradictions within his narra-

tives as consciously wielded weapons in an ironic attack upon imperi-

alism's premises and to read them as successful attempts to undercut

and censor Europe's compulsion to dominate the world.1 But such

views suggest a too ready belief that literary discourse possesses a re-

demptive value and that the verbal intricacies of the literary text enable

it to transcend ideological limitations. Given the exceptionally prepos-

sessing quality of imperialistic culture, however, we may question

whether we are really justified in seeing the contradictions within the

literary text as control led strategies that wash it clean of ideological

taint?or whether, as Terry Eagleton has claimed, they are simply in-

decisions and self-contradictions that "disturb imperialist assumptions

to the precise degree that [they reinforce] them."2 Conrad's colonial

* After this essay was written and submitted for publication, several articles and books which deal with Heart of Darkness, Africanist discourse, and other relevant issues appeared. Among them are Patrick Brantlinger ''Heart of Darkness: Anti-lmperialism, Racism or Impressionism?" Criticism XXVII (Fall 1985), 363-385, which comes closest to my own arguments; Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist-Discourse in French (University of Chicago Press, 1985); and Simon Watney "Missionary Positions: AIDS, 'Africa' and Race," Critical Quarterly XXXI (Autumn 1989), 45-62.

1 See for example Cedric Watts, '"A Bloody Racist': About Achebe's View of Conrad," Yearbook of English Studies, XIII (1983).

2 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso Edition, 1985), pp. 130-140.

461

Sandya Shetty, "Heart of Darkness: Out of Africa Some New Thing Rarely Comes," Journal of Modern Literature, XV:4 (Spring 1989), pp. 461^74. ? 1990 Temple University.

462 SANDYA SHETTY

work needs to be examined in light of the notion, forwarded by Edward

Said, that the critic of empire who functions from within the dominant

culture must find it well nigh impossible to venture far beyond the very

ideological barriers which he purports to dissolve.3

As with any critic of empire situated within the culture of imperialism,

Conrad's problem in transcending ideology is compounded by the fact

that he necessarily employs the language of the dominant culture which

he intends to criticize. Theoretical ly, liberation from such linguistic

and, by implication, epistemological constraint is possible. And Conrad

in fact achieves this to a considerable extent; sometimes, his well-

known manipulation of textual irony and cultural symbolism functions

as potent weapons. But rather than offering an alternative vocabulary

for discussing racial and colonial politics, such subversive manipula-

tions are more often undermined by their inevitable adherence to the

rhetoric of political and cultural dominance.

It is well known that in Conrad's time the general vocabulary for

talking about alien cultures dominated by European man came from

evolutionary anthropology and psychology. Ideologically loaded, this

terminology can hardly be considered the ideal medium for criticism of

imperial ideology and the mode of domination that it supported. Con?

rad's colonial fictions are replete with the terms of these pseudo-

sciences, the primary contemporary purveyors of ostensibly objective

knowledge about colonial reality. In the early novels, Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, for instance, the narrator clearly draws

on the racist lexicon of cultural anthropology even as he challenges the

European attitudes which it describes. Sometimes even when there is no

conscious invidious intent, the narrator employs a pejorative idiom in

speaking ofthe native characters. For instance, relating Almayer's mem?

ories of perpetual disillusionment, he says, "At first, when his wife

reverted to her original savagery, Almayer, now and again, had sought

refuge from her there [in his office]. . . ."4 The estrangement of Almay? er's Sulu wife from him and from European influence writes itself in the

colonial context as "reversion to original savagery." These terms culled

from late Victorian evolutionist psychology?and in the narrative con?

text clearly untempered by irony?reveal that the language at Conrad's

3 "Seeing Through the Story," 7/mes Literary Supplement, (October 1984); see also Orientalism (Vintage Books Edition, 1979).

4 Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Modern Classics, 1976), p. 244.

HEART OF DARKNESS 463

disposal frequently counteracts the critical impulse which is evident

elsewhere in his narratives.

Although inadvertent, such an effect signals the limitations imposed

by the very language and worldview available to Conrad?writing in

English as a new member of a powerful imperialistic culture, creating

for a specific community within that culture, and disseminating his

ideas through such conservative institutions as Blackwood's. Such an-

tinomies as "civilization" and "savagery," as posited by this commu-

nity's ideological apparatus (namely its scientific institutions) become

epistemological tools, culturally and scientifically ratified means of ar-

ticulating the differences between colonized native and colonizing Eu?

ropean. Thus the language itself frequently blocks Conrad's movement

beyond the culturally determined and forces him into self-contradictory

positions.

The several occasions when Conrad's narratives reveal cultural blind

spots and their accompanying rhetoric lend credence to Said's notion

that even for the critic of empire, the "imprisonments and dominations

of the imperialistic moment" are overwhelming and highly resistant to

pressure.5 As a result, despite the effort to step outside the circle of

imperialistic premises and expose them, there still may remain "areas of

darkness," inaccessible even to the most acute critic's awareness,

"genius," or "humanity." It cannot, then, be surprising that Conrad's

colonial works participate in the very ideology which they attempt to

expose and destroy.

This situation is particularly evident in Heart of Darkness, a text

which reinforces invidious orthodox perceptions of Africa?even as it

exposes imperialism's avowed intentions in "the Dark Continent." As

critics have noted previously, Marlow's narrative certainly disturbs the

conventional association of Europe and Africa with light and darkness,

civilization and savagery, revealing the "blackness" of Europe's impe-

rial activities in the Congo.6 Nonetheless, no corresponding sense ofthe

"whiteness" (or even "grayness") of Africa emerges. This absence sug?

gests that either Conrad did not intend to debunk the idea of African

blackness or that he cannot do so, so long as he uses the terms made

available by imperial discourse. Thus, in seeking to readjust Europe's

flattering colonial image of itself, Marlow's narrative fails to effect a

corresponding readjustment in Europe's distorting image of Africa?the

5 Said, "Seeing Through the Story," p. 1149. 6 See Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism (London: Macmillan Press, 1983) for an excellent recent discus?

sion of Conrad's subversion of the conventional antinomies of light and dark in Heart of Darkness.

464 SANDYA SHETTY

bizarre other against which it self-righteously defined itself. Since no

alternative is offered to the construction of Africa as the locus of abom-

inations-the imperial discourse?much ofthe ideological scaffolding of

imperialism is left intact.

It is Conrad's embroidery on the motif of Africa as a dark and back-

ward abysm that places Heart of Darkness within the ideological

bounds of Western discourse despite its forceful opening denunciations

of colonial activity. The text implicates itself in its own recriminations

against colonialism by silently transforming history into ideology, actual

geography into a typically colonial mise en scene. These mythologizing

actions are not unique, purely imaginative, ideologically neutral modes

of operating, reserved exclusively by the literary text as a privileged

form of discourse. For all the politically dissonant notes which Heart of

Darkness strikes, its particular constructions of reality disclose its own

affinities with the narrative and ideological conventions which are pe-

culiar to both literary and non-literary colonialist discourse on Africa.

Strictures against colonial cruelty and rapacity appear primarily in the

first segment of Marlow's narrative?the part ending with the Eldorado

Exploring Expedition's arrival at the Central Station.7 But any explicit

criticism of colonial practice as sordid is relegated to a secondary po?

sition, as the text gradually and unobtrusively transfers its attention to

other interests and anxieties. In the second part of the tale, Africa as the

tenebrous place of death, as the "White Man's Grave," the relic of his

abominable prehistory and augur of dread possibility assumes more

definite and noticeable contours. From the point at which Marlow be?

gins the final leg of his journey towards Kurtz, the narrative relinquishes

its interest in historical matters and is increasingly captured by the myth

ofa dark, primordial land. The notion ofa "hostile space," adumbrated

earlier, now comes to occupy center stage as Marlow's narrative fitfully

deploys and gradually abandons the overt anti-colonial rhetoric. Mar?

low's and Kurtz's solitary contests with the "darkness" ofthe land and

its original inhabitants become the text's primary focus, drawing in-

creased attention to the participation of the fiction in Europe's "imagi? native geography."8 In Heart of Darkness the territorial sense is unmis-

takably acute and establishes itself fairly early in a passage that bears a

striking resemblance to Conrad's essay, "Geography and Some

7 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (Norton and Company, 1971), pp. 3-31. Sub? sequent references will be given parenthetically in the text.

8 The term appears in Edward Said's discussion of Orientalism.

HEART OF DARKNESS 465

Explorers."9 This essay furnishes interesting insights into the confusion

inherent in colonial discourse of actual geographical space with some

kind of mythic space that is finally an ideologically determined con?

struct; this is exactly the process we see at work in Heart of Darkness.

We know that as a boy Conrad's passion for map-gazing led him to

dream delightedly over the blank space on the atlas that stood for an

unknown Africa. African exploration in the mid-nineteenth century contributed a great deal of positive knowledge and filled that blank

space with rivers, forests, lakes, and falls, giving "honest precision to

[his] imaginative faculty."10 Conrad's study of geographical discoveries

on the African continent drew him into a "world of mentality and

imagination," inhabited by images "indissolubly connected with cer?

tain parts ofthe world." This peculiar fusion ofthe geographical and the

imaginative is manifested in Conrad's statement: "western Sudan, of

which I could draw the rivers and principal features from memory even

now, means for me an episode in Mungo Park's life" (15).

The effect of this comment is to distinguish two kinds of geographical

knowledge: factual knowledge (the geographer's "exact configura- tions" and accurate operations which, interestingly enough, the essay both belittles and applauds) and imaginative knowledge (the sort fabri-

cated by linking private meanings to actual places so as to make the

western Sudan exist for Conrad as "an episode in Mungo Park's life").

However, the facts of the land's "rivers and principal features" are

purely tangential to Conrad's imaginative topography.11 In many ways, Heart of Darkness raises similar issues of "imaginative geography." Marlow begins his tale about his African experience by recalling a

childhood passion of his own for maps and for Africa:

At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map ... I would put my finger on it and say, "When I grow up I will go there. ..." I have been in some of them. ... But there was one yet?the biggest, the most blank, so to speak?that I had a hankering after. . . . True this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery?a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness (8).

Marlow's memory draws attention to the relationship among geograph-

9 Conrad, "Geography and Some Explorers" (1924), in Last Essays (Doubleday, Page and Company, 1926), pp. 1-21.

10 "Geography and Some Explorers," p. 13. 11 Here I am indebted to Said's discussion of "Imaginative Geography" in its Orientalist manifestations. See

particularly Orientalism, pp. 52-55.

466 SANDYA SHETTY

ical space, geographical knowledge, and "imaginative geography."

The "blank" Africa of his and Conrad's boyhoods is a place that occa-

sioned glorious dreams, something opposed to the access of facts?

"rivers and lakes and names"?which convert blank space into dark

space. Facts, however, do not necessarily supplant imaginative knowl?

edge, as seen in the partial mutation from "blankness" to "darkness."

The undifferentiated qualities of "blankness" and "darkness" remain

important, for they suggest the crucial features bestowed on space,

regardless of factual knowledge. This lack of differentiation enables the

observer to refashion and order space at will. Thus, if for the boy, Africa

had been "a blank space" of delightful mystery, then for the adult

Conrad it is "a place of darkness," a geographical-imaginative confla-

tion that still permits uncurbed acts of attribution.

Most obviously, the "darkness" is the darkness attendant on the "sor?

did buccaneering spirit" of European colonizers following in the wake

of the "great," "disinterested" explorers whom Conrad admired.12

Nevertheless, in the light of the latter part of Heart of Darkness and its

emotional and imaginative resonances, surely it signifies something

more than that: a more satisfactory explanation for the sonority of the

images is available. To Conrad, as to most Europeans at the time, Africa

constituted unfamiliar or "hostile space," a place of darkness, physi?

cally located well beyond European territory. Even in Marlow's child?

hood memory, Africa, "the biggest, most blank" space, is designated as

a place "out there." ("When I grow up I will go there" or "I felt

somehow I must get there. . . ."[8]) The repeated and emphatic use of

"there" is even more conspicuous in the conversation between Marlow

and the doctor, who, "in the interests of science," customarily mea-

sures "the crania of those going out there" (11). "There" draws a tacit

boundary on the far side of which lies the "not-here," "not-us," un?

familiar Other. In Heart of Darkness, Africa clearly occupies this spatial

beyond, this hostile space that "imaginative geography" fills with a

river "resembling an immense snake uncoiled . . . its body at rest curv-

ing afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land"(8)

and with other images of indigenous darkness and horror.

12 Conrad's eulogies to "some explorers" appear in "Geography and Some Explorers." Apparently, even as a critic of colonial enterprises, he was unable to admit the connections between exploration and colonialism. His distinction between "geography militant whose only object was the search for truth" and geographical explo? ration tainted by the "acquisitive spirit" seems vague at best. The metaphor employed in his applause for the former, moreover, is unwittingly telling. Speaking of Africa, "the continent out of which the Romans used to say some new thing was always coming," he exclaims: "Regions unknown! My imagination could depict to itself there worthy, adventurous and devoted men, nibbling at the edges, attacking from north and south, east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there . . ." p. 13.

HEART OF DARKNESS 467

The perceived likeness of the Congo to an immense, fascinating

snake is amplified by hostile suggestions for a Western audience; it

certainly does not belong to the objective order of topographical facts

but signals vigorous projective tendencies that, in effect, transmute

mere space into significant space. Gaston Bachelard has shown in The

Poetics of Space that the mind fastens positive qualities to that space

mentally staked out as familiar and felicitous.13 Bachelard dwells

chiefly on images of "felicitous space," but the idea is useful in exam-

ining Conrad's and Europe's collective apprehension of the alien Afri?

can setting as hostile, primordial, and chaotic: factual knowledge nei?

ther inhibits nor fosters such negative apprehensions but is simply

irrelevant to the issue at hand. Hence, to argue for the factual validity

of the colonial setting in Heart of Darkness (as some critics have done)

possesses little, if any, rhetorical force.14 The several images of dark?

ness that make up Conrad's picture of Africa should instead be consid?

ered elements of an ideological construction rather than historical re?

ality or pure artistic creation.

In this connection, Chinua Achebe's observation is right on the mark.

Disclaiming "lack of factual knowledge" as a significant cause, he

accounts for the "dark" image of Africa in Western discourse by pos-

iting a need "in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe,

a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison

with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest."15

Although I must disagree with the latter half of this proposition?given

Conrad's dim view of Europe's "spiritual grace"?the fact remains that

in Heart of Darkness the archaic, transmogrified, and threatening land?

scape does vividly re-invent a hostile place "out there" against which

Europe may define itself. This impulse to demarcate sharply hostile

space from "what we are accustomed to" is made manifest in the text,

which thus surreptitiously incorporates the Manichean premises upon which imperialism bases its arguments for conquest with the elimina-

tion of threatening space.

It is in the passages describing setting and landscape that the narrative

most startlingly overlaps with overtly ideological documentaries on Af?

rica. The impressions of "the Dark Continent," their imaginative springs and verbal arrangements, accord so well with collective, monolithic

13 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. (Orion, 1964). 14 See particularly G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad in the Congo (Little, Brown, and Company, 1926) and

Hunt Hawkins, "The Issue of Racism in Heart of Darkness/' Conradiana, XIV (1982), 164. 15 Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa," Research in American Literatures, IX (Spring 1978), 2.

468 SANDYA SHETTY

conceptions articulated in political treatises, popular romances, travel-

ogues, missionary and official reports that it becomes very difficult to

credit Albert Guerard's endorsement of Conrad's "feel for the country,"

unless we add a coda: the country as it was known and represented in

European writing about it.16

Conrad's representations of African landscape function in various

complex and even contradictory ways. In their overlapping with other

writing of the time, they suggest the work's imaginative affinities with

the Western imperial ethos even as the novel criticizes that ethos.17

They point up the existence of a powerful convention in late nine-

teenth-century European culture that legitimized certain images and

attitudes for the discussion of alien lands and peoples. The fact that

Conrad and H.M. Stanley, the explorer, with their expressly antagonis-

tic positions towards colonization, could converge in their conceptions

of Africa seems both ironic and remarkable. The consistencies between

certain images in Heart of Darkness and those in travel accounts such

as In Darkest Africa (1890), by Stanley, the very man who "fastened the

label ofthe 'Dark Continent' upon Africa,"18 are striking:

I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river?seemed to beckon with a dishonour-

ing flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the

lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart. It was so startling that I leaped to my feet and looked back at the edge of the

forest, as though I had expected an answer of some sort to that black

display of confidence. The high stillness confronted these two figures with its ominous patience, waiting for the passing away of a fantastic invasion (33).

The sable forest heaved away to the infinity of the west, and they shook their clenched hands at it with gestures of defiance and hate. . . but the

great forest which lay vast as a continent before them, and drowsy, like a

great beast, with monstrous fur thinly veiled by vaporous exhalations, an? swered not a word, but rested in its infinite sullenness, remorseless and

implacable as ever. 19

Both writers see the alien African landscape as implacable, ominously

silent, and indifferent to the sorrow or defiance of man; both descrip?

tions are animated by the observers' apprehensions of potential evil

behind the forest's vast and sullen facade. Such a landscape dwarfs the

16 Albert Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (Harvard University Press, 1958). p. 46. 17 In the earlier sections ofthe narrative, the African landscape serves as a monitory force, mutely rejecting

the vast arrogances and presumptions of the colonizers and issuing warnings against dangerous trespass. See for example Heart of Darkness, p. 14.

18 See Alta Jablow and Dorothy Hammond, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa (Twayne Publishers, 1970), p. 60.

19 Henry M. Stanley, In Darkest Africa: or the Quest Rescue and Retreat of Emin, Govemor of Equatoria, Vol. I (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890), p. 282.

HEART OF DARKNESS 469

human element and forces the Western observers into startled and vul-

nerable postures. Although Heart of Darkness evidently attempts an

ironic variation on the themes of popular colonial literature and on the

quest-form of the immensely popular literature of travel and explora-

tion, such passages provide strong proof of fiction's entanglements with

certain dominant attitudes about geographical ly and culturally alien

territory.

Any sociology of European knowledge about Africa can demonstrate

the solid, representative, and typical rather than the contingent, private,

and unmediated in Conrad's presentation of Africans and Africa. Patrick

Brantlinger, for one, substantiates the coincidence between Victorian

imaginative discourse about Africa and the bestselling reports of explor?

ers and missionaries, primarydisseminators ofthewidespread European belief in Africa's darkness or barbarism.20 Titles such as To the Central

Lakes and Back (Joseph Thomson, 1881), Life in the Wilderness, or

Wanderings in South Africa (Henry Methuen, 1846), Journal of a Mis?

sion to the Interior of Africa (Mungo Park, 1815), How I Found Living? stone: Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa (Stanley,

1870), Through the Dark Continent (Stanley, 1878), In Darkest Africa

(Stanley, 1890), Three Years in Savage Africa (Lionel Decle, 1898), In

Savage Africa: or Six Years of Adventure in Congoland (E.J. Glave,

1892) embody the powerful collective myth which Conrad and these

other writers drew upon, for different purposes surely, but eventually to

similar effect. Both the difference and the similarities are communicated

strikingly in Brantlinger's description:

The great explorers' writings are nonfictional quest romances in which the hero-authors struggle through enchanted or bedeviled lands toward a goal, ostensibly the discovery of the Nile's sources or the conversion of the cannibals. But that goal also turns out to include sheer survival and the return home, to the regions of light. These humble but heroic authors move from adventure to adventure against a dark, infernal backdrop where there are no other characters of equal stature?only bewitched or demonic sav- ages. Although they sometimes individualize their portraits of Africans, explorers usually portray them as amusing or dangerous obstacles or as objects of curiosity. . . . Center stage is occupied not by Africa or Africans but by a Livingstone or a Stanley. . . Victorian Saint Georges battling the armies of the night. Kurtz's career in devilry suggests that, on at least some occasions or in some ways, it was a losing battle.21

Brantlinger's easy and unobtrusive transition to Kurtz and Heart of Dark-

20 See Patrick Brantlinger, "Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent," Critical Inquiry, XII (Autumn 1985), 175.

21 Brantlinger, 176-178.

470 SANDYA SHETTY

ness is itself suggestive and indicates the imaginative affinities between

Conrad's narrative and these African travelogues. Apart from this, spe?

cific parallels may be drawn with regard to mood and atmosphere.

Marlow's, the "hero-author's," narrative too creates the sense of an

"enchanted" and "bedeviled land" through its macabre images, its

suggestive references to all sorts of vague horrors only partly seques-

tered in the dark jungles, and its generally surrealist, nightmarish de?

piction of scenery. Marlow's struggle can also legitimately be seen as a

Victorian Saint George's battle against the wilderness, in the course of

which he, like other Britons, clings desperately to his Englishness. One way of maintaining one's Englishness in the tropics, many ex?

plorers and administrators argued, was by indulging in strenuous activ?

ity or attending devotedly to one's work whatever the circumstances.

The British emphasis on hard work may be traced partly to Carlylean notions of a strenuous life, notions that played a crucial role in forming the British imperial self-image.22 Efficiency and devotion to work for its

own sake were seen to possess a moral value known only to the ma-

terially progressive English culture. Moreover, in Africa they had value

as "prime therapies" against a range of evils from illness to savage

regressions.23 Conrad's and Marlow's subscription to this work ethic is

generally recognized, as is the imperialist's belief in the innate idleness

of the African. The Victorian explorer, Samuel Baker, for instance,

believed that "the African['s] . . . instincts being a love of idleness and

savagedom, he will assuredly relapse into an idle and savage state, unless specially governed and forced to industry."24 Similarly, in Heart

of Darkness, work and the "devotion to an obscure, back-breaking business" emerges as a major ethical value with the power to distin?

guish Marlow, the English captain, from the shiftless Africans who

"howled and leaped, and spun" (36).

That Conrad drew on culturally determined images of Africa is clear

from the Author's Note to Youth: and Two Narratives. Conrad's The

Congo Diary, too, indirectly furnishes evidence that Conrad deliber?

ately neglected "sincere colouring" in writing Heart of Darkness so as

to point up a "sombre theme."25 Apparently, the bland facts of actual

22 Jerome H. Buckley, W.E. Henley: A Study in the 'Counter Decadence' ofthe Nineties (Princeton University Press, 1945), pp. 3-27.

23 Jablow and Hammond, p. 56. 24 Samuel Baker, as quoted in Jablow and Hammond, p. 59. 25 Author's Note, Youth: and Two Narratives (Doubleday, 1929), n.p.

HEART OF DARKNESS 471

experience, privately recorded in his diary, were of little use in public

discourse, to which he gave instead "a sinister resonance, a tonality of

its own . . . ."26 Significantly, in his depiction of a fictionalized land?

scape, Conrad not only pushed facts, but he seems to have pushed them

along certain well-trodden paths, choosing the most powerful of the

stereotypical images of Africa, recognizable images that would certainly

have had the desired effect on "the minds and bosoms" of his contem?

porary readers.

The various Africas of Western cultural fantasy, as documented by

Jablow and Hammond, may be grouped under two broad categories:

Africa as an open, sunlit, salubrious land (seen, for example, in Rider

Haggard's King Solomon's Mines or in the later Africa of Isak Dinesen's

memory) and Africa as a dark, miasmic land.27 Conrad chose the dark

continent image, the oldest, most enduring and powerful image avail?

able to him, but certainly not the only version at hand. Of course, for

the serious critic of Empire intent on deflating imperial rhetoric and

practice, it was bound to have a stronger appeal. But apart from this

appeal and from its richer dramatic and emotive potential, the miasmic

rendition of the African setting appears best suited, even intrinsic, to

Conrad's imaginative conception ofthe tale, as well as highly congenial

to his avowed rhetorical purpose in "bringing it home to the minds and

bosoms of the readers."

The gaps among Conrad's actual experience in the Congo, the his?

torical realities, and Marlow's representation of experience in Heart of

Darkness nicely illustrate the text's transformation of history into ideol?

ogy. Heart of Darkness omits, for instance, details found in Conrad's

Congo Diary: "Country more open. Gently undulating hills. Road

good, in perfect order (District of Lukungu). . . . Camped on the market

place. Not well enough to call on the missionary" (163). Or again: "Went ourselves round by the Mission of Sutili. Hospitable reception by

Mrs. Comber. . . . The looks ofthe whole establishment eminently civ?

ilized and very refreshing after the lots of tumbled down hovels in which

the State and Company agents are content to live. Fine buildings. . . .

Rather breezy."28 Refreshing environs, social calls, populated villages, and roads?here are signs of a milieu completely foreign to the hostile,

26 Author's Note, Youth, p. xi. 27 See Jablow and Hammond, 87-90. 28 Diary, pp. 163, 167 in Last Essays, pp. 155-171.

472 SANDYA SHETTY

inscrutable, and sombre world ofthe fiction. Furthermore, the pointed

elision of such details has the effect of under-emphasizing the extent to

which colonial development had proceeded?an effect with a double

cutting edge.29

Conrad's apparently conscious plan to ignore "sincere colouring"

and to omit from Heart of Darkness signs of material "progress" in

Belgian colonial territory was probably prompted by the need to main-

tain the narrative's overt ideological position as an anti-imperialistic

text. But, besides calling into question the claims of progress and en?

lightenment made by Leopold and other imperialists, the text's slanted

representation of the African setting also serves another rhetorical pur?

pose at odds, really, with its anti-imperial posture. Had they been

included, signs of development would have disturbed the postulate of a

primitive land, dark, silent, wild, and threatening?a conception inte-

gral to the story that is told, in which dark and savage Africa becomes

an important focus for the text's several meanings.

To enable his readers to measure the extent of Kurtz's fall and its

trajectory, Conrad had to posit some force against which Kurtz's orig? inal culture and virtues as a man "equipped with moral ideas of some

sort" could be contrasted.30 This adversary was to be savage depravity and a violent lust for self-gratification; to drive this idea home to "the

minds and bosoms of his readers," he needed to give it a place and a

name. That place was Africa, that name, darkness; in the European

imagination, one recalled the other. Thus, at the most accessible but

nonetheless significant level, Conrad was exploiting what Michael

Echeruo, in a discussion of James Wait, has labelled an exo-cultural

stereotype?a peculiar resource of colonial discourse. As Echeruo ar?

gues, the "real determinant of the symbolic [value of an exo-cultural

image] is the imagination of the audience. . . ."31 In Marlow's narra?

tive, Africa certainly functions as an exo-cultural symbol, that is, as an

image towards which its audience already held powerful, culturally determined attitudes.

Thus, Conrad invites readers within Western imperialistic culture to

read "darkness" in predictable and questionable ways: as a literal ref?

erence to primitive savagery or, on a slightly higher level of abstraction,

29 See lan Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 1979), p. 139; also Norman Sherry's Conrad's Western World (Cambridge University Press, 1971).

30 Watt, p. 141. 31 Michael C Echeruo, The Conditioned Imagination from Shakespeare to Conrad: Studies in the Exo-cultural

Stereotype (London: The Macmillan Press, 1978).

HEART OF DARKNESS 473

as symbol of an "accursed inheritance"?the darkness latent in every

man's heart. Defences of Conrad's ideological freedom natural ly un-

derline this second reading, regarding African darkness as a symbol of

a universal human reality. True, one cannot deny the effect of the

central metaphor's suggestive open-endedness, the tale's symbolic

bias, its narrator's acknowledged doubts, or the ambiguous quality of

his story?telling itself: these uncertainties all caution against a too-

simple literal reading of the elusive verbal reconstruction of an elusive

experience.

Despite the text's disposition to blur meaning, however, I would

argue that African darkness allows the reader to respond ideological ly. In 1899, especially, such a predisposition may well have been a cer?

tainty. In fact, the symbol's very vagueness and indeterminacy, which

make the narrative inconclusive, also encourage negative political con-

notations because of its exo-cultural nature. Perhaps underlying the

text's adjectival vagueness is the assurance that a Western audience

could be counted on to construct the specific "abominations" if certain

familiar, culturally shared, cues were provided.

Whatever else it does, the text does not require its readers to examine

critical ly Western attributions to Africa, for its "sombre theme[s]" ap?

pear to depend in large measure on the orthodox image for their "sin-

ister resonance" and effect. Marlow's storytelling, in fact, relies on his

audience's "knowledge" of Africa and its acceptance of certain postu- lates: Africa as the locus of primitive darkness or psychic and material

archaisms, alongside the notion of darkness or primitive savagery as a

root, historical condition, the opposite of "civilization." Acceptance of

even one of these as axiomatic automatically induces the reader to take

seriously Marlow's claims regarding "customary" savage life and his

anxieties about savage regression. If, on the other hand, these postulates are not considered self-evident, then the literal level ofthe tale appears rather exaggerated and even nonsensical.

In other words, darkness as primitive savagery works only as an

exo-cultural symbol, that is, with an audience that can be expected to

read it in predictably negative ways despite its vagueness. The basic

postulate of darkness as savagery not only makes the text ideologically

suspect but also undermines it at its literal and most accessible levels.

And if we argue, as Sarvan does, that Africa is only a "locale symbol" for a universal darkness, then we must still doubt the symbol's appro-

priateness, given the narrative's express intention to censure the colo-

nization of Africa and to reveal the Continent's ruthless and savage

474 SANDYA SHETTY

exploitation by imperial powers.32 Such intentions are significantly en-

feebled because the text exploits, without exposing, the dramatic and

sensational aspects of a cherished imperial myth. The resulting inco-

herences splinter Conrad's critique of imperialism; and because the

latent issues at stake are not only aesthetic but political, it would be

factitious to attempt to defend the critique's integrity by explaining its

contradictions as conscious technique deployed within an essentially

unified literary text.

32 See Charles P. Sarvan, "Racism and the Heart of Darkness," International Fiction Review, VII (Winter 1980), 6-10.