Excerpt from

“Introduction to the Danse Macabre: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”

Frederick R. Karl, New York University, 1968

in Murfin, Ross, ed. Heart of Darkness: Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

. . .  Where art rules, artifacts are a form of power. The art object takes on magical significance, becoming a kind of totem, the fairytale golden egg. Knowing this, Kurtz gains his power, indeed his identity and being, from the ivory he covets. In a world of art, the most greedy collector is often supreme; matter, not manner, counts. One source of Kurtz's fascination for Marlow is the former's will to power, Nietzschean, superhuman, and brutal. Kurtz has risen above the masses — of natives, station managers, even of directors back in Brussels. He must continue to assert himself, a megalomaniac in search of further power. Marlow has never met anyone like him, this Kurtz who represents all of Europe. The insulated Englishman now faces east, toward the continent. "I took great care to give a cosmopolitan origin to Kurtz," Conrad noted in a 1903 letter to K. Waliszewski.5 "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz," we read (p. 65).

He is indeed Europe, searching for power, maneuvering for advantage; and he finds the lever in the colonial adventure of ivory. No wonder, then, that Kurtz's hunger for acquisition is so overwhelming. Supremacy over all is all he seeks: supremacy over things, people, and, finally, values. Having gratified forbidden desires, he is free of civilized taboos. In the Congo, he can do anything. His only prescription: produce results, send back ivory. Indeed, his very will to power and confident brutality make him appear a kind of god to the natives and other agents who fear him and to the Russian sailor who believes in him.

The ultimate corruption is that Kurtz can go his way without restraint. All human barriers are down. Only power counts — no matter whether political or economic. In the jungle, as in enterprise, only the strong survive, and Kurtz obviously is one of the strong. He brings European power — all of Europe — into the jungle; his weapons encompass 2,000 years of Western civilization. And the consequence: corruption of self and death to "inferiors" on a monumental scale.

When a journalist informs Marlow that Kurtz would have been a "splendid leader of an extreme party," Marlow understandably asks, "What party?" "Any party," his visitor answers, "he was an — an — extremist" (p. 89). With that Conrad presents his grandest insight into the politics of our time — totalitarian politics especially but democratic politics as well. The absence of social morality, the desire to rise at everyone's expense, the manipulation of whole peoples for purely selfish ends, the obsession with image and consensus, and personal power, the absence of meaningful beliefs, the drive for advancement and aggrandizement without larger considerations, the career built on manipulation and strategies, not ideas: these are the traits that have characterized the leaders of our age, that have become the expected burden of the ruled in our century. The rapists have been Belgian, German, Russian, and American — though they have, to be sure, raped and plundered in different ways and to varying degrees. Too often power is vested in the chameleon, the politician who claims to be all things to all people. "The best lack all conviction," as William Butler Yeats expresses it in "The Second Coming," "while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

In this conception of Kurtz Conrad's powers as an artistic thinker were at their strongest. In reading Conrad it is often necessary to discriminate between pure thought and thought embodied in a work of art. As a political and social theorist, he was antagonistic to modem developments, deeply conservative in the sense that he suspected or mocked new departures or experiments. As an artistic thinker, however, he was at once caustic, subtle, broad. His conception of Kurtz, slim on the surface, broadening beneath, is a Cassandra's view of Western progress, a view both realistic and ironic.

Conrad was concerned with the rape of a people. The Congo had been, since 1875, the private preserve of Leopold II of Belgium, a medieval kingdom for personal use, organized under the deceptive tide of the International Association for the Civilization of Central Africa. Demographists estimate that hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Congolese died in slavery or through brutality. Kurtz, or his type of exploiter, was the rule, not the exception. Kurtz himself was based roughly and loosely on one Georges-Antoine Klein (Klein = small, Kurtz = short), whom Conrad had taken aboard his steamer during his Congo days. Conrad's journey, as he relates in his Congo diary, was real; Kurtz and his type prevailed; the land and the natives existed; the facts are undisputed. Even if Conrad used symbols to excess, as he feared, each symbol is solidly grounded in fact. Here is white against black, entrenched against primitive, have against have-not, machine against spear, civilization against tribe.

If Conrad's novella is to have artistic as well as political significance, it must make broad reference to human motivation and behavior. One evident part of the application comes with Kurtz's double shriek of "The horror! The horror!" (p. 85). The cry is far richer and more ambiguous than most readers make it. We must remember that Marlow is reporting, and Marlow has a particular view and need of Kurtz. As Marlow understands the scream, it represents a moral victory; that is, on the threshold of death, Kurtz has reviewed his life with all its horror and in some dying part of him has repented. Marlow hears the words as a victory of moral sensibility over a life of brutality and prostituted ideals. This "Christian" reading of the words is, of course, what Marlow himself wishes to hear; he is a moral man, and he believes, with this kind of bourgeois religiosity, that all men ultimately repent when confronted by the great unknown. Kurtz's cry, in this interpretation, fits in with what Marlow wants to know of human nature.

We are not all Marlows, however, and we should not be seduced into agreeing with him, even if he is partially right. More ambiguously and ironically, Kurtz's cry might be a shriek of despair that after having accomplished so little he must now perish. His horror is the anguish of one who dies with his work incomplete. In this view, Kurtz does not repent; rather, he bewails a fate which frustrates his plans. Indeed, at the very moment of death, he challenges life and death and tries to make his baffled will prevail. Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, he prefers hell to compromise.

Just because Marlow fails to see Kurtz as a devil, however, does not mean that his author did. Conrad always harked back to the individual devil in each man — perhaps as part of his Catholic background. He believed that men deceived themselves to the very end: about the evil in others and in themselves. "Our refuge is in stupidity', in drunkenness of all kinds, in lies, in beliefs, in murder, thieving, reforming — in negation, in contempt," he wrote in 1898, in vet another letter to Cunninghame Graham. "There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that whether seen in a convex or a concave mirror is always but a vain and floating appearance."

Marlow cannot, or will not, admit the truth of what Conrad here suggests. Returning from the world of the dead, Marlow — our twentieth-century Everyman — cannot even admit the full impact of the indecency he has witnessed, of the feelings he has experienced. Even this most honest of men must disguise what he has seen and felt. Like a politician he must bed down with lies. Marlow, that pillar of truth and morality, does Kurtz's work at the end, lies to protect the lie of Kurtz's existence, ultimately lies to preserve his (Marlow's) own illusions. In an impure, dirty world, he desperately seeks a compromise — and finds it in the pretty illusions of naive women. Only Conrad, who is outside both Marlow and Kurtz, can admit the truth, can limn the lie and see it as a lie. Only the artist, and his art, can triumph; all else is dragged down or forced to exist by virtue of untruths. Marlow, the narrator, controlled in turn by Conrad, the creator, can transform the horror of his experience into the human terms necessary for continued life. Conrad has succeeded in constructing a form which can, so to speak, hold the horror at arm's length and yet also touch us deeply.

In this and other respects, Heart of Darkness is a masterpiece of concealment. Just as Marlow has concealed from himself the true nature of his own needs, so too we can find concealment — in art, in nature, in people — in virtually every other aspect of the novella. The jungle itself, that vast protective camouflage barring the light of sun and sky, masks and hides, becoming part of the psychological as well as physical landscape. Like the dream content, it forms itself around distortion, condensation, and displacement.

Post-Darwinian and overpowering, the jungle is not Words­worth's gentle landscape, by no means the type of nature which gives strength and support in our darkest hours. Rather, it runs parallel to our anxieties, becomes the repository of our fears. The darkness of the jungle approximates darkness everywhere, adumbrating  the blackness of Conrad's humor, the despair of his irony…