Rough Thoughts #1: Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

- John Steinbeck

This post is the first of a three-part series, where I share a rough thought on one of the most controversial and ambiguous texts in the literature syllabus. Elusive and somewhat amorphous, any interpretation of “Heart of Darkness” feels incomplete and lacking. However, the key is to focus on one point of interest at a time, dwell on it for a while, and then complicate it oh-so-slightly so as to add depth and complexity, without completely contradicting your point.

I decided to build this piece of analysis around a few keywords: hollowness, fragility, insubstantiality, and instability.

Within Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is an intense preoccupation with the hollowness and fragility of the colonial project; saturated with sordid images of degeneration and decay symbolic of the crumbling “idea at the back of it”, the novella strips imperialism of its glorified garb, rendering its paradigm unstable. As decrepit vestiges from the colonial invasion litter the land - “a boiler wallowing in the grass”, a railway-truck “dead as the carcass of some animal”, “a stack of rusty rails” – the glory of Europe’s Industrial Revolution is suddenly reframed in the light of this pitiful scene. The oxymoronic description of “decaying machinery” depicts not so much the physical state of the non-degradable scraps of metal but the cold and careless attitudes of these so-called “emissaries of light”. The squalid setting of the novella reflects the moral impurity and degradation of Imperialist mission, the also manifested in Marlow’s description of Brussels as a “city that always makes [him] think of a whited sepulchre” and the Inner Station as a “long decaying building” with “large holes in the peaked roof [which] gaped black from afar.” In Conrad’s image of the “little begrimed steamboat” with leaking steampipes, this Western symbol of exploration and progress physically breaks down. In likening it to “sluggish beetle crawling along the floor”, Marlow’s admits his own lack of power and control as he is “made [to] feel very small” and “very lost”. Western superiority is thus rendered as insubstantial as the flimsy “papier-maché Mephistopheles” which Marlow could “poke [his] forefinger through …and find nothing but a little loose dirt”. As Conrad vacillates between the material and immaterial, bodies and shadows, the jungle and darkness, the physical blurs into the imaginary, and the moral pillars of Imperialism reified by “noble and lofty expression” are disintegrated by Marlow’s narrative, exposed as nothing more than a “hollow sham”. Conrad’s figurative act of unveiling Imperialism’s ulterior motive of economic gain is foreshadowed in the veil imagery of the “mist” hung “like a gauzy and radiant fabric”, echoed also at the end of the novella, when Marlow tells his audience “It was as though a veil had been rent”, symbolising the stripping away of the “magnificent folds of eloquence” that is imperialistic propaganda to expose the reality of the situation.

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Although alternative interpretations constantly surfaced in my mind as I wrote, I temporarily disregarded them in order to dedicate myself to the concept I had initially set out to explore. Throughout your studies of a text, you will come across many different interpretations and it may tempting to try to cover all of them at once, so as to not be “wrong” at any given moment. While it is important to introduce a degree of complexity and nuance to your analysis, try not to get bogged down by not being able to paint the whole picture, for not only is it impossible to do so, it is also an unnecessary pursuit. Stick to one point, mould a well-rounded discussion around it, then move on to the next point before it gets dry.

Happy writing!

With love

Dawnie

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