The Heart of Darkness
Conrad’s novel “The Heart of Darkness” establishes a close connection between its main characters and the physical nature that surrounds them and that, in many ways, defines who they are and what they do. The idea that the environment influences our decisions and ways of looking at the world is not new; in fact, during Conrad’s period, it played an important role in explaining the superiority that Northern Europeans—who came from cold environments and had to be hardy—over others raised in hot, tropical climes, like Africans and Indians, since the latter were presumed more lazy than Europeans. For this reason, this essay analyzes the characters and examines the relationship between man and nature in the novel.
It appears that, in this novel, Conrad wants to denote the unseen of the unexplored regions in Africa in which jungles, deserts, and savannas are contrary to what Europeans view their superior civilization; this is what impresses the most about the novel how the European finds himself in a foreign land, prolific of unusual things, and exotic creatures. In “The Heart of Darkness”, Marlow illustrates the jungle as having “a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of the heart” (Conrad, 46). Conrad’s description of nature is so realistic that readers may end up feeling they are right there next to Marlow on the steamboat, drifting down the “long stretches of waterway.” One can sense being a remote place surrounded by wilderness.
Conrad portrays the river and the wilderness that surrounds it as the opening door to Africa for the Europeans. At the same time, the river makes reaching Africa difficult for the Europeans, travelling up the river is slow and full of struggles while traveling down the river going away from Africa is quick. Such depiction of the river, permits that the reader associates nature by considering a river like a door that when opens give pace to the wild, the exotic and the unknown of the nature sceneries to encounter in The Congo, furthermore when the door closes because the Europeans would travel down the river takes them back to civilization, to a world they consider familiar superior.
Kurtz provides the reader with a good way to understand just how nature and man interact in “The Heart of Darkness”. The Congo represents a return to a more primitive state, one that connects with the most profound, animalistic aspects of human nature. As Marlow describes the Congo, “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings” (Conrad,46).
Conrad continues illustrating the scenery in such primitively place. The scenery is described as a place where animals are living in their environment as free as they can be, “on silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side”(Conrad, 46). Marlow explains the vastness of the river by comparing losing your way in the river as you can get lost in a desert, “you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert”(Conrad, 46). In this paragraph, the author adds to his description of a primitive place by stating that Kurtz due to the primal of the environment may be have lost his mind. The audience can interpret that in primal sceneries surrounded by animals and deserts such as the one surrounding the characters in the novel people can get so frightened that can lose their minds.
Moreover, in associating the humanity’s relationship with the natural world the author give symbolic meaning to the geographical area when relating that Marlow travels on a waterway which symbolizes passage into the depths of the Congo as if the land were a woman and his boat were a phallic symbol. As man enters nature once again, he loses himself in the same way that one loses oneself, one’s awareness and self-importance, during the conjugal act. As Marlow notes, “Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf, but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went.”(Conrad, 32) Here, humanity clearly is nature’s subject. In addition, Marlow feels close to the natives as he observes them dancing, which implies that Marlow is reflecting and looking into his subconscious; “but if you were men enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you could comprehend” (Conrad, 106). In this part of the novel, the author tries to establish such association by conveying that if the Europeans were not that focused on suppressing the natives and hording ivory they could find genuineness within them and establish an association of the natives and nature itself.
Since the beginning of the novel, the author strives that the reader understands the association between nature and the characters in his work. For instance, when Marlow refers to The Congo as the end of the world, “the very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a ski the color of smoke” (Conrad, 27) with such illustration the reader can picture the geography of the place as being dense and dominant of human’s actions. The Congo, as a primal place, is an appropriate location for human beings to reach down into their subconscious, a task that drives the Europeans mad. Marlow finds that “outside, the silent wilderness … struck [him] as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion” (Conrad, 39). Both images are so powerful, as they serve as evidence for how men are, in reality, completely subject to nature’s power.
Despite this, man attempts to continue his fantastical invasion. Reality and perceptions are not always the same, and the men who come to the Congo arrive with delusions of grandeur and incredible idealism. Marlow details historical figures who did the same elsewhere, “hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire” (Conrad, 2). That fire they aspire to bring to the Congo marks civilization and its supposed good, the triumphant end to which all men ought to aspire. But no matter man’s passion for gold and glory, for exploration and ivory, nature ultimately subdues man in due course.
Words Cited:
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Konemann, 1999.
Hall, Donald. Literary and Culture Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2001.
