Heart of Darkness: Morality and Meaning - Essay Example

Heart of Darkness: Morality and Meaning I. Introduction Heart of Darkness is seemingly a narrative of a man’s moral and psychological deterioration and of another’s spatial and intellectual sojourn to appreciate the fundamentals of the matter. A reader anticipates that such a narrative will conform to particular rules, that the journey will be beset by unsurpassable ordeals, but at its closing chapters will be a meaningful revelation in which the deterioration will be positioned in a moral structure.1 In this paper, I will attempt to show through discussion, nevertheless, that Heart of Darkness may be perceived to refute, specifically, the significance of such a moral structure and to challenge, generally, the likelihoods of meaning for the sojourn itself, that as the narrative progresses it is redefined in order to refute the essential assumptions upon which it seems to be established. One of the two likely claims of the title is this, the ‘darkness’ has a ‘heart; a reader breaks through the mysterious and the incompletely known to the identified. Marlow proposes throughout the narrative that at the heart of things there is purpose and meaning that he is trailing this meaning. And yet the power of Marlow’s questions serves only to intensify the vagueness of his discoveries. Recurrently, he appears about to proclaim the truth about Kurtz and the darkness, yet his statements most frequently assume form in either a deafening opposition in terms or a muted and introspective bewilderment. In this manner readers are left with the second and perhaps the prevailing claim of the title specifically and Heart of Darkness in general, it is the heart, primarily that is made up of ‘darkness’, there that the genuine darkness rests, and the reader’s progress must be through the evidently or somewhat identified to the anonymous.2 II. The Darkness in Kurtz’s Amorality The contradiction indicated in the title is nowhere more apparent than at what is normally assumed to be the heart of the narrative; Kurtz’s deathbed agony, “The horror! The horror!”3 These utterances appears a reaction to the most primeval nightmare, to the mysterious itself, but Marlow maintains that they are fairly the reverse: a “moment of complete knowledge”.4 He claims that the horror is related not merely with Kurtz’s terrifying past, but also with the world outside them, which is large enough to engulf the entire universe, penetrating enough to infiltrate every heart that beat in the darkness. In trying to resolve this evident conflict, readers may question into the something that can be known of Kurtz’s past. Some time ago he was a perfectionist of a kind, a member of the “new gang virtue”5 of the buy and sell company, and, as Marlow stated, a man who obviously had emerged equipped with moral insights of some kind. A difficulty of this perception of Kurtz as a moral man is handed out near the end of the narrative by an occasional journalist collaborator: “He electrified large meetings. He had faith--- don’t you see?—he had the faith.”6 Based on the journalist’s description to this point, a reader might be predisposed to approve of the likely but understated view of Kurtz as an obvious instance of moral deterioration; the man sometime uphold the faith, which a reader may suppose to be some noble and clear-cut doctrine, and then, in Africa, mislaid the faith. Kurtz would have plunged, in these terms, within the structure of a conventional moral scheme, from heaven to a hell. However, as the journalist goes on, his account turns upon itself; “the faith. He could get himself to believe anything—anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party. What party? I asked. Any party, answered the other. He was an—an—extremist. Did I not think so? I assented.”7 Kurtz is illustrated as a man who possessed every kind of faiths, or any faith. Marlow, akin to a reader, temporarily does not comprehend this and inquires, “What party?”8—meaning that he also visualizes ‘the faith’ as a solitary moral principle to which Kurtz committed himself. But then the issue becomes clearer; ‘the faith’ is a quality or capability that allowed Kurtz to trust in any doctrine whatsoever. With this evaluation Marlow concurs. The dilemma of the relationship between Kurtz’s expressive and deceitful moral aptitude and Kurtz himself, his fundamental being, worries Marlow greater than any other. On the concluding stages of the voyage up the creek towards the Inner Station, along with the blood of his mediocre helmsman in his shoes, he echoes this anxiety in a sentiment of frustration, as though the man he is pursuing were something in general devoid of substance. Marlow envisages Kurtz not as taking action but as discoursing; it is Kurtz’s only assertion that is the man’s genuine presence, his skill to discourse, his words. Even after the real, physical surprise of Kurtz’s outward show and, conclusively, of his demise, Marlow persists, “The voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am of course aware that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole.” 9The pilgrims buried an unknown thing, as if Kurtz’s truth were absolutely secluded from Kurtz as defined by his voice. The detachment between Kurtz’s language and Kurtz’s silent self is frequently depicted in relation to his deterioration. As Marlow reflects the human heads upon stilts nearby Kurtz’s headquarters, he comments that “they only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him, some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence.”10 The murmur of the wilderness reverberated deafeningly within him since he was empty at the core. It is therefore suggested that Kurtz discovered himself in a dimension which, in similarity to civilization with its outwardly compelled limitations of “law, social morality and public opinion”,11 was a dimension of tempting and perilous possibilities, where a man must rely upon his personal inborn strength, his rule of dedication, to an ambiguous backbreaking venture. Kurtz possess no such dedication; his ability for subjective persuasiveness and belief left him empty at the core. The faith, as the reader may now infer, was Kurtz’s faith in his own self, not as a moral principle but as a principle who could apply or disregard morality; Kurtz survived as if what was most important about him were entirely detached from what he acknowledged to believe. But this, Marlow maintains, is not merely two-facedness: “I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke him—himself—his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! He had kicked the very earth to pieces.”12 Kurtz’s deterioration is not the long-established outcome of a moral breakdown; it is worshipped and hard to believe, possibly godlike; it is the impact of his establishing himself separated from the earth and the morality of the mortal, aside from, even, from the mother tongue of the earth with which he had such brilliant talent. What Kurtz has accomplished has wide-ranging consequences. He has separated himself from the moral dimension, but in doing so he has, in any case for Marlow, demolished that dimension. Not merely has he ‘kicked himself loose of the earth’ but ‘kicked the very earth to pieces’.13 Kurtz’s disregard of morality has public implications, and Marlow is troubled; he proclaims, looking ahead to Kurtz’s “the horror!”—that “no eloquence could have been so withering to one’s belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity”. ‘Belief in mankind’14, can be, indicating to the moral nature of humanity, the very venture in which Kurtz could be extremely skilled, and in freeing himself from his moral birthright, Kurtz has demonstrated not merely the likelihood of such an escape but as well as, as Marlow suggests, the probable insufficiency and insignificance of morality to all mortals. Kurtz’s disappointment hence becomes his triumph, and if that triumph remains to some extent a failure, the sufficiency of moral standards is nonetheless challenged. III. The Reader’s Dilemma of Darkness This dilemma is a known one to readers of Conrad. The ingenious, moral man enters a dimension of peril and temptations; he fights, alone, to uphold his morality. Frequently he fails. But in Heart of Darkness the issue is quite complicated, for here the probable moralities, the manners of control, may be perceived to be less accessible, as options or alternatives, illusory. I have tried to demonstrate something of the means in which morality may be perceived to fail Kurtz in Heart of Darkness; subsequent is a version of the failure of morality in more all-encompassing manner. Throughout the narrative a reader is faced with an array of restraint that is evidently inadequate. The main accountant achieves something with his fussy dress, for instance, and the manager conceals his spiteful and recurrent dishonesty with a two-faced concern for saying and doing the appropriate thing. The most apparent instance of this fake kind of discipline is Marlow’s indigenous helmsman; he “thought all the world of himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had ever seen. He steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk, and would let that cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand of him in a minute.”15 As a supplementary to these pseudo-moralities, there are men for whom control or discipline is useless: “you may be too much of a fool to go wrong—to dull even to know you are being assaulted by the power of darkness... Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds.” 16Neither of these reactions to the wasteland is achievable for Marlow, nor, to Marlow’s thought, for Kurtz. Both are men to whom the plainer untruth as morality does not demand, and each, of course, enjoys adequate imagination to deliver him dangerously susceptible to the ‘darkness’17. IV. Marlow’s Voiceless Body Searching for Meaning Marlow proclaims that in facing the wilderness, the truth of it, a man should “meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.”18 At this instance Marlow’s idea of restraint seems well undeniably. He goes on, claiming that the moment the wilderness pleaded to him, as it should to every man, and he had an inner voice. At once following his testament to his inner voice, nevertheless, he confess that what hindered him from going “ashore for a howl and a dance” was merely that he was extremely active keeping his steamboat away from destruction: “I had to mess about with white-lead... watch the steering, and circumvent those snags... There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man.”19 Marlow’s principle, as the type of reality that a man may bring into play to defend himself against the reality of the wilderness, is simply a practical matter; it is established upon keeping oneself hectic, upon catering to matters superficially. Marlow admits at one instance that it is in labour that man may identify himself, his personal truth; eventually, however, he appears to challenge himself and comments, “When do you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same.” 20As these passages imply, Marlow make use of the term ‘reality’ in two approaches: the foremost reality is the proposed spirit of the wilderness, the darkness that should kept buried if a man is to subsist morally, whilst the second reality is a symbolic reality such as labour, a false reality by which the genuinely real is hidden or even changed. And Marlow acknowledges that this reality of the second kind is merely a deceiving activity, a fabricated play above the external realities of things. Marlow’s version of his own limitation as a fiction mirrors his nature as a nomad; he is a morally drifting, possibly, similar to Kurtz. In pertaining to the “droll thing life is,”21 Marlow depicts his predicaments in a manner that is indicative in terms of Kurtz’s experience: “I have wrested with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.”22 Marlow implies that at particular moments, in fighting with death or, possibly, with a wilderness, it is most painful for a man to see any reality in a relationship between moral correctness and his experience; a man’s greatest struggles are unavoidably confronted in a context of half-hearted uncertainty. When Marlow himself fights to maintain the steamer on the surface of the water, struggles for his existence, he trades his own half-hearted uncertainty with labour; he is compelled to do so by his physical peril. Kurtz’s circumstance has never been effortless. Similar to Marlow, he had no prevailing or saving insight but neither did he have Marlow’s physical peril with its repercussions, the labour that fortunately conceals the reality. In this way Kurtz seems even more susceptible than Marlow. For him the half-hearted uncertainty was greater; he perceived the discrepancy between his moral unreality and an amoral truth more blatantly. Why he essentially did so, I have taken into account only in part, but if readers will depend at all upon Marlow’s resolve that Kurtz’s experience matches to his own, then readers may finalize for the moment that Kurtz’s attitude of ‘kicking himself loose of the earth’23 was brought about by his incapacity to save himself with unrealities; when Kurtz’s dream, the dream which Marlow takes to be extremely identical to his own, wiped out the truth of morality and limitations, it also obliterated their accessibility. It is on this version, I think, that Maslow declines to denounce Kurtz in a moral manner. The manager of the company comments that Kurtz’s strategy is illogical, but Marlow refutes this, claiming that it is no strategy at all. The manager envisions that Kurtz was once upon a time a remarkable man when his strategies are logical, probably, but that after that his life has been wasted. Discussion of logical or illogical is immaterial for Marlow, nevertheless, and Kurtz is a remarkable man precisely because he has freed himself from the world of logical and illogical, because he has demonstrated that such notions are insufficient as a measure of his experience.24 Kurtz’s transgression or accomplishment, then, is not simply that he has dealt with things imperfectly for the company or, more commonly, that he has sinned in a distinctive terrible way, but that by ways of an act of hallucination he has slice himself off from the likelihood of sin. At the time of this discussion with the manager, Marlow properly proclaims his empathy with Kurtz. V. Conclusion Throughout Heart of Darkness, once more, it is not merely the symbols of the insignificant characters that are manifested to be dishonourable, nor is it simply Marlow’s symbols that is confirmed an unsubstantiated fiction. Discipline as such is defined in the narrative not merely as restraint, but as well as a singularity of a notion or motive, on the contrary, obviously, to something such as Kurtz’s manifold faith or to the unending opportunities of the wilderness. This type of spiritual inflexibility is the essential attribute of the book which Marlow discovers on his route to the Inner Station: “Not a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right of way of going to work... The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakable real.”25 The reality of the book, its determined concern with labour, is evidently the fake or secondary reality that I have commented, but it is more appealing to emphasize here that if such reality appears likely, it seems so only with regard to those that are abnormal in the wilderness. It is obvious that this book is completely inappropriate in the wilderness that regardless of Marlow’s fraught grasp on the book as a representation of moral truth, this truth is given artificial and unreal by ways of the very attribute by which he proclaims it set up: its worthlessness to the wilderness enveloping it.26 In an n identical manner, the wilderness may be viewed elsewhere to refute singleness of objective or, its counterparts, restraint and morality. As Marlow continues down the coast of his sojourn, he confronts a French gunboat firing into the jungle: “There wasn’t even a shed there, as she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy well swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go once of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen.”27 Armed resistance or war, with its schism of life and death, triumph and defeat, enemy and foe, may be viewed commonly as a direct issue. Guns, also, are conventionally and severely meaningful, and when they are used something might go to happen. Here nothing takes place: the guns pop; the firing directions are weak; there is no adversary and no outcome. In a likewise account, explosives are employed at the first station to eliminate a cliff: “The cliff was not in the way or anything; but this objectless blasting was all the work going on.”28 The explosion is not merely objectless but as well as devoid of effect, for no change materialized on the countenance of the rock. An instant later Marlow sees six indigenous unlawful people in fetters, hears another blast, and then fused these occurrences with his memory of the gunboat: “Another report from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of war I had seen firing into a continent. It was the same kind of ominous voice; but these men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea.”29 The law, with its evident, direct purpose, akin to the shells and the explosion has been cancelled out; it has turned out to be an enigma, unfathomable, and has no impact as law, but simply submits the savages distantly and miserable. Here the law, the explosion, and the combat then are illustrated as having no ordered objective or effect, and the discrepancy between these instruments of civilization and the wilderness which they effort matches to the discrepancy between morality and the wilderness discussed previously. The coverage of this discrepancy between human programmes and the wilderness, as the reader continues to the narrative, is ever encompassing.30 It has been commented here that Marlow’s own capability for restraint in Africa relies upon his active insensitivity, and he has admitted that this restraint mirrors an issue only with the confrontations of the surface, in contrast to the truth at the heart. The narrator who starts Heart of Darkness describes Marlow’s ways of recounting in a manner that is perplexing yet evidently parallel to Marlow’s own characterizations of his moral qualities. In Heart of Darkness, it is observed Marlow moving along the coast of the jungle or over the facade of the creek, and here readers will confront the notion of his language moving beyond the externality of an occurrence, surrounding the occurrence but never infiltrating it. Marlow’s efforts at purpose and meaning as such, then, assume the identical form as his attempts at morality specifically. Both meaning and morality are viewed to be concerns of the exterior, whilst the reality, not Marlow’s fake reality but the reality over the exteriors, is something profound within, something at the heart that is not consulted.31 There is a significant difference, nevertheless, between Marlow’s moral perspectives and his more commonly purposeful conduct: in the first situation he repeatedly proposes that it would be unwise to look underneath the facade; in the second he just as often acknowledges that it is not viable to do so. Heart of Darkness, in that case, as the version of a journey into the heart of things, of Africa, of Kurtz, of Marlow, and of human survival, presents itself as the dismissal of such a journey and as the dismissal of the common metaphorical idea that meaning may be located within, beneath, at the midpoint. At the final stages of the search we confront darkness, and it is no more distinct than at the origin of the journey and the story; it goes on to exist merely as something remote.32 The stages of such a sojourn and such a discussion, the fight with ambiguity and contradictions, coupled with the sentiment that one is not yet at the hub of the concern, must be adequate. Once again in the midst of the restraints and meanings of civilization that are so effortlessly and hastily taken on to be genuine, Marlow summons to thought his experience over these meanings and proclaims that troubled nurtures to his destabilized body are close to the point: “it was my imagination that wanted soothing.”33 Works Cited Bergenholtz, Rita A. "Conrads Heart of Darkness." The Explicator (1995): 102+. Bloom, Harold. Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Brown, Tony. "Cultural Psychosis on the Frontier: The Work of the Darkness in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness." Studies in the Novel (2002): 14+. Conrad, Joseph. Youth; Heart of Darkness; The End of the Thether. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1946. Grant, Kenneth. "Conrads Heart of Darkness." The Explicator (1995): 24+. Kreilkamp, Ivan. "A Voice without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness." Victorian Studies (1997): 211+. Navarette, Susan J. "The Anatomy of Failure in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness." Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1993): 279+. Read More