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Discriminating Black from White in Conrad's Heart of Darkness - Page 2

© Pamela St. Clair

A nut is an interesting metaphor, for its dark exterior masks a white, fleshy interior. Marlow’s tale-telling, we are advised, encompasses both the inside and the outside of the nut, both the black and the white. Yet, to complicate matters, his tales unfold as if in a foggy, dream-like state. They materialize through the misty haze visible only through the ghostly and fickle light of the moon. Hmm.

We learn that Marlow traveled to Africa to rescue the enigmatic and satanic Mr. Kurtz, who had fallen gravely ill. Kurtz was commissioned by the “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” to make a report for “future guidance.” After describing the path to Kurtz’s house, which was lined with black human heads atop tall wooden stakes, Marlow explains that there was a deficiency about Kurtz, one Marlow attributes to a “lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him.” Wanting indeed. Kurtz is an unattractive portrait of the white everyman. As Marlow explains, “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”

Kurtz dies on the return trip from the Congo. His last words are, “The horror! The horror!” We are left to discern for ourselves what Kurtz believes the horror to be. Is he reformed? When Marlow visits Kurtz’s lover to tell her the news, she wants to be reassured of Kurtz’s affections. She insists on learning Kurtz’s final words. Marlow lies and tells her that her name was the last word Kurtz spoke.

Is Marlow’s lie part of that spectral illumination? Perhaps the fabrications Marlow weaves mirror those the Europeans propagated as they raped the African coast. Then again, were those really Kurtz’s last words? We have only Marlow to believe or disbelieve. Marlow completes his story alleging that it would have been “too dark—too dark altogether” to have told Kurtz’s lover the truth. There are many dark truths in the novel. As if in contemplation along with the reader about such dark truths, our own and society's, Marlow’s fellow passengers remain still as the Thames flows “sombre under an overcast sky...[which seems] to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” The immensity suggests a universal condition in which truth, reality and the future remain uncertain and obscured.

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