Edge of Experience

From London-based terrorist plots to perilous journeys into the heart of Africa, Joseph Conrad wrote dangerous fiction. His most famous book, Heart of Darkness (1899), is a classic – a prose work of stunning quality which continues to haunt today’s popular imagination. It is also a controversial work, exposing the horrors of Belgian colonialism years before Roger Casement’s widely publicized report in 1903.

 

The novella opens on a yacht sitting on the banks of the river Thames, with a close-knit audience listening to Charlie Marlow’s tale of his time in Africa. Marlow tells a tale of incessant struggle: of traversing the inner-African continent, the nightmarish realities of an inhospitable climate. Structurally speaking, his is an age-old traveller’s tale, harking back to a Western colonial tradition, with roots in the mid to late nineteenth century during the height of the continental scramble for Africa.

 

Conrad pulls back the curtain and displays the European way of dealing with the Congo in full show. Post-colonial readings of this work have focused on its depiction of Africa, debating whether Conrad saw it as a place that was inherently evil, with its hyper-focus on Marlow’s perspective – a narrow-tunnelled vision of the European mind, excluding the victim’s point of view. In the words of novelist Chinua Achebe, Conrad’s ‘bloody’ racism is still very much a hot topic [1].

 

But this is a historical text, steeped in a string of certain prevailing discourses and worldviews. The novella’s stylistic merits outweigh its problems, with its penetrative visions of the human soul in despair, the banality of evil, darkness, hell, the search for selfhood – or in the words of journalist Tim Butcher, its picture of how far ‘the depths the human soul can plumb’ [2].

 

Central to Marlow’s journey is his confrontation with spiritual emptiness, the void of an inhospitable hate-filled environment and the effects it has on how he views his relationship with the world. The plot is simple: Marlow finds work with a merchant company in the Congo, then ships to Africa from London. There, officials task him to locate and secure the ‘first-rate’ Ivory dealer Kurtz and return him to Europe.

 

As Marlow’s boat journey on the Congo river deepens, the wilderness begins to disempower his senses. ‘No man here bears a charmed life’ warns a fellow merchant, as Marlow begins to realise the Imperial dream is far from its representations back home in the metropole.

 

Marlow’s quest for his ‘own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no man can ever know’ is important. Written in intensely spiritual language, Conrad pushes his narrator to the edge of experience. He lives amongst rivers which are hostile, layered in waves of mist. ‘The rest of the world was nowhere,’ Marlow coldly remarks. ‘Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared.’ Familiarity fades; with Marlow we travel into darkness.

 

When Marlow finally reaches Kurtz’s outpost, he finds a man engulfed by the wilderness. Kurtz is skin and bone, a deity among the natives, a man on the threshold of spiritual life. In his every interaction with Kurtz, Marlow’s blood runs cold, for this is a man on the precipice of self-destruction. Marlow knows Kurtz’s ‘unlawful soul’ was well-beyond earthly life – the ‘bounds of permitted aspirations’, beyond the web of human-spun reality.

 

This story is about inner torment, the result of a soul that ‘had looked within itself’ and was unable to look away. Marlow is capable of framing his experience in words and gets closer to understanding the enigma of Kurtz. But in the end he only reaches the cusp of human understanding. ‘I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.’ His words are deeply impressionable.

 

Marlow’s tale brought from the edges of colonial experience back to the shores of the metropole has a dark mood. But it is blindingly infectious. This story proves the will of the spirit, the dark knowledge which comes from being on the brink of horrific circumstances, depicting a torturous world where all of us are capable of abject destruction. Conrad shows that this power comes from inside us and nowhere else.

 

Notes:

[1] Quoted in O. Knowles, ‘Introduction to Heart of Darkness’ in J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Penguin: London, 2007), p. xx.

[2] T. Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart (Vintage: London, 2007), p. 5.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) is a grim
exploration of the human soul at its limits