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Discriminating Black from White in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

© Pamela St. Clair

“One day putting my finger on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa, I declared that some day I would go there,” mused a sixteen year old Joseph Conrad as he recalls in his essay “Geography and Some Explorers.” The qualifier “then” is important, for somewhere along the way, Conrad’s white vision of the ivory coast blackened.

During the time frame in which the novel is set, Belgium ruled the Congo, mercilessly exploiting the natives to finance its ivory trade. Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness a decade after he set sail for the Congo in 1890. Expecting to find a white sandy continent of unexplored regions, he found, instead, the violence and slavery bred of pure hot greed. In this thinly veiled autobiographical novel, the narrator, Charlie Marlow, recounts his travels to Africa, which leave him disillusioned. It is not simply the heart of the continent that is black but the hearts of the white Europeans as well. Hence, all is not what it seems. White means black, and black means white in this complex modernist text about an inner and external journey of discovery.

The modernist movement, which included such literary luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Maddox Ford, and James Joyce, was significantly influenced by the horrors of World War I, which stripped Europe of the majority of its male population. Against this surreal backdrop of war atrocities, a scarred populace fumbled with its grasp of reality. What was substantial? Reliable? Important? Modern art and literature tested traditional notions of a static reality. In art, for example, pointillist dots and flecks blurred to suggest images rather than to clearly delineate forms or substance. Disabused of his idealized Congo, Conrad likewise shifts the sands beneath our feet.

We learn about reality through the various and often second hand accounts of others. Hence, which account is “real?” Furthermore, our faithful narrator may not be faithful after all. Marlow recounts his trip to Africa to four passengers on a boat sailing down the Thames. One passenger comments:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.