The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is unquestionably disturbing. Not so much because of the surprise ending (if you can call it that) but because throughout the whole book we are like the anonymous second-hand narrator, who describes his emotions this way during a break in Marlowe’s narrative: “I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.”
My sense is that in the person of Marlowe we are led to experience the disillusionment that waits in every shared project whose public face and fragmented private motivations are at odds. But Marlowe takes us further than disillusionment—he follows the workings of the Company all the way to the point where the veil is lifted and the inhuman power behind this particular economic principality comes howling out of the darkness in the person of Mr. Kurtz.
Throughout the novel, the Ivory Company that has hired Marlowe to pilot their steamboat demonstrates a thorough and confusing dislocation of purpose between every single person employed by it. Neither the manager of the company, nor his doctor, nor any of his underlings all the way down the coast or into the continent share any common idea of the purpose of the company. Some of them are in it by inertia, some out of scientific curiosity, some for the small thrills of petty politics. Some of the company men we encounter have no object but the maintenance of their own personalities in the face of the de-culturizing forces of Africa where they work. We are led to question the very possibility of The Company—how can such a rag-bag of motivations conspire to get the daily business of ivory trade done? In fact, they don’t. Something much darker and more purposeful seems to control the inexorable results of the Company’s operations, and that something is embodied in the diabolical corruption of Kurtz, the one man in the novel who seems to understand both the purpose and the practice of the Company—but it has driven him mad.
I don’t think, then, that the ambiguous horror of the novel derives from what it suggests about human nature, but from what it suggests about the alien and evil powers that come to control human associations and institutions, directing them malevolently to follow an internally fixed course. In short, I think The Heart of Darkness is one of the most potent glimpses into the principalities and powers that govern this world of sin that I have ever read…
