The Heart of the Matter: Examining Conrad's Motives in Heart of Darkness

The issue of authorial intent is one that has plagued literary analysts since the very invention of literary analysis. Readers of any work face this dilemma: what was the author really trying to say? The matter is complicated by the filters of media, culture, and the reader's own experiences. It becomes virtually impossible to determine authorial intent without asking the author himself. Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness is no exception to this dilemma. Long regarded as an attack on imperialism, since Chinua Achebe's famous 1997 essay "Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" it has come under suspicion of being racist, and slightly less anti-imperial than was originally assumed. However, no analyst can provide overwhelming support for one view or the other. This is likely because Heart of Darkness is not primarily concerned with the portrayal of Africans, nor even with imperialism - except as a vehicle for the exploration of the darkness in the human mind.

Now, as Chinua Achebe himself stated, Conrad is "safely dead" (Achebe), so we can not ask him exactly what he meant by certain phrases, or what the driving idea behind the novel really was. However, we can examine statements Conrad made regarding Heart of Darkness. About his most famous novel, Conrad said it "is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case" (Meyer 154). He also said, quite explicitly, that the novel was "mainly a vehicle for conveying a batch of personal impressions" (Singh 41). Knowing this, it seems clear that Conrad only intended his story to be the revelation of his experiences in the Congo, a method by which he could finally express the way these experiences impacted him.

He was, however, aware that some people might read the work from an anti-imperialist standpoint. In fact, when Heart of Darkness was first published in Blackwood's, Conrad wrote a letter to an admirer warning that, though "the first installment could be read as anti-imperialist... not the story as a whole" (Watt 85). Conrad was dealing with imperialism so closely only because it was directly connected to his experience. His time in the Congo was made horrible - dark - because of the way King Leopold ran his colony. The Belgian ruler's darkness (a figurative darkness of greed) was the first European darkness in the Congo. While he ruled, the population of the Congo was decimated. Native inhabitants were forced or conned into working for "the State" (read: Leopold), and essentially enslaved. Soldiers held women and children captive to ensure good behavior from the Africans, and frequently murdered at random to instill fear, and to scare the people into meeting rubber quotas (Goshal 134, 157). Leopold even treated his white workers poorly - the conditions of the stations in Heart of Darkness attest that "[The accountant's office] was built of horizontal planks, and so badly put together that...he was barred neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight" (Conrad 15). As a captain on a steamboat, Conrad would have witnessed some of these things firsthand, particularly the squalor in which the officers and slaves lived and worked (though the condition of the slaves was by far the worse). He saw the exploitation of the Congo and the people living and working there - both black and white - all for the benefit of a single man. King Leopold's personal darkness engendered the darkness of all the other Europeans to live or work in his Congo Free State.

Conrad was certainly against the wastefulness and greed of the Congo Free State (Watt 85) , but to him it was a special case. As far as Britain was concerned, Conrad was pro-imperial (Watt 90). In Heart of Darkness, Marlow views a map in the Trading Company with the thought that the red areas are "good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there" (Conrad 7). Conrad also expresses that there is difference between colonialism and imperialism. He says "The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the ... idea at the back of it"(Conrad 4). This way of viewing imperialism is still in use today: Robert Young examines the differences between colonialism and imperialism in his chapter on colonialism and concludes, like Conrad, that while colonialism is mercantile in nature, imperialism is an ideal (Young).

Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in a remarkably short time. He began in December of 1898 and finished in February of 1899 (Meyer 154). This can be compared to the length of time it took Aphra Behn to complete Oroonoko ("It will be no commendation to the book to assure your Lordship I writ it in a few hours..." (Behn 5)). Both these novels deal with race and colonies - and both have a decided lack of political direction: Behn was writing an adventure/romance, not a critique of slavery, in the same way that Conrad was writing an analysis of character, not a critique of imperialism. The speed at which these authors completed their respective works does not seem to suggest careful analytical thought about political stance. In fact, Conrad avoided definite political stances throughout his life. This can be seen in his reluctance to join the Congo Reform movement, a cause his experiences gave him good reason to support (Watt 92). He did not want to be associated with any major political issue: he simply wanted to tell his story, and make people aware of the issues people in the Congo faced, particularly the psychological ones.

As for the charge of racism, Conrad would not even have known what that word meant. It was not coined until long after the publication of Heart of Darkness. In Conrad's time, it was taken for granted that people with black skin were different from people with white skin - the subject was not a topic that was given much thought, if any. Therefore, while Chinua Achebe may have a valid point when he calls Conrad "a thoroughgoing racist" (Achebe), it is a fact readers of Conrad must accept, and overcome, in order to understand the real meaning of Heart of Darkness. While the notion is certainly deplorable, Conrad could hardly have been expected to rise above the prejudices of his era - and even if he could have, it is difficult to expect that he would have. He did want his novel to sell. In any case, it is doubtful that he was thinking much of the portrayal of Africans to Europeans except insofar as the Africans had a psychological impact on his characters. This is one reason the Africans in Heart of Darkness are hardly personified at all, that they appear to be one with the setting: Conrad did not need several more personalities clouding the issue of Marlow's personality, and of Kurtz's. That he gave precedence to the European minds above the African ones is only logical: he was writing through the lens of his own experience, which was decidedly European. Furthermore, the cause of the darkness in Heart of Darkness is not African in nature - it is European. Conrad was writing of the evils of the European mind, for the benefit of European readers.

That Achebe is correct in his accusation that Africa and its native inhabitants are reduced to the role of props (Achebe) in Conrad's novel is quite true, and furthermore, Conrad probably did it on purpose. Actually, all of humanity receives rather poor treatment at the mercy of Conrad's pen. Conrad himself once said that "man is an evil animal" (Meyer 157), showing that he did not have much use for people in general, whatever the color of their skin. Thus, Europeans are portrayed as vicious, greedy beasts ("To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe." (Conrad 27), if not fanatics (such as the "harlequin") or mentally imbalanced tyrants (Kurtz). The savagery of Conrad's Africans is juxtaposed with the savagery of the Europeans, and the reader is left with a very clear idea of which is worse.

If racism in Heart of Darkness can be looked over as a peculiarity of the time period and the author, and anti-imperialistic sentiment as a coincidental by-product of Conrad's own experience in King Leopold's Congo, then the reader must turn to a much less concrete psychoanalytical reading of Heart of Darkness - the reading Conrad had in mind when he wrote it.

The language of the novel is obsessive about darkness of all kinds. Not only does Conrad constantly use the word, but he also writes of the kind of darkness that can not be seen (illustrated by the use of adjectives such as "inscrutable", and lists of rhetorical questions: "What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle the dumb thing or would it handle us? ... What was in there?" (Conrad 23)). Marlow is Conrad's avatar in the story, the eyes through which the reader must see each event. Marlow, like Conrad, sees humanity's "darkness" everywhere he looks - in the greed of the station officers, in the mysterious rituals of the Africans, even in the knitting of European ladies. The most obvious example of this darkness, however, is the character Kurtz. Kurtz is an example of a mind that has succumbed to its inner darkness. The character was a genius, an artist, capable of everything he set his hand to: but when he came to the Congo, all of these qualities were shadowed with the inner darkness - which, Conrad implies, always exists within a person, but is only made apparent in extreme situations. Marlow resists the transformation that occurred in Kurtz by engaging in constant hard work, though the temptation to fall into his own darkness is certainly present ("You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no - I didn't ... I had no time" (Conrad 32)). The idea seems to be that if one does not think about it, but distracts oneself, one can resist the pull of the inner darkness. In this, the intellectual is in far more danger than the unthinking laborer - which, perhaps, is part of the reason Conrad's Africans can live in the Congo in pure innocence and Europeans all seem to go mad after any sort of extended stay there. Conrad intended his European audience to see this and think of themselves in a similar context - to realize that they too had darkness in them. Given his personality, however, he probably would not have been surprised that most of his readers miss this point entirely and instead focus on the meaning for other people - imperialists and Africans.

Heart of Darkness has undergone many different interpretations over the course of its existence - from the first psychological analysis, to the anti-imperialist assumptions, to its denunciation as a racist novel undeserving of its status, and finally, back to psychology. Of course, it can never be known absolutely that Joseph Conrad did not intend every one of these interpretations while he was writing the novel. However, with ample evidence of Conrad's time period, personality, and his own words, a reader can come close. Heart of Darkness is exactly what the title implies: and examination of the darkness within the heart of humanity.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness". Massachusetts Review 18 1977 .

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Dover Publications INC, 1990.

Goshal, Kumar. People in Colonies. New York: Sheridan House, INC, 1948. 134, 157.

Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001. 15-69.

Meyer, Bernard C. Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytical Biography. New Jersey: Princeton UP 1967.

Singh, Francis B. "The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness". Conradiana. 10 (1978). 41-53.

Watt, Ian. Essays on Conrad. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. 85-92.