All Conrad's major characters are, in a fundamental sense, orphans. To men like Marlow, his parents offer him no predestined place in an ordered world, or, if such a place exists, they do not feel it is a real alternative for them.

The knowledge of a hostile, annihilating force at the centre of existence brings to Conrad's characters a constant sense of their personal vulnerability. Before this revelation, they were orphans in search of a ground for their lives, but they never doubted their ability to discover such a ground.

For most of Conrad's characters, the experience of vulnerability marks the real beginning of their voyage. Conrad's novels are attempts to come to terms with this experience, to work out ways of living with or overcoming this knowledge, for only if some such way can be found can man ever attain a stable identity.

Perhaps mind can confront the darkness directly and master it. Although this darkness is in its essence something alien to mind, if mind can asset its control over this force, if it can give it rational form and substance and thus fix the image of the "ombre sinistre et fuyante" the darkness will be robbed of its destructive potential. By assimilating its sources in this way, it might still be possible for man to achive self, sufficiency. While he will not have found a father, found some source which naturally confers its reality upon him, man will have made one.

For most of Conrad's characters, the initial thrust of their attempt to assert sovereignty over the ground of their existence is directed toward its immediate source in the irrational.

Ultimately, however, man's efforts to control the darkness must lead him beyond the irrational. He must come to grips with the tenuous material of the darkness whose vibrations give rise to all levels of consciousness if his efforts to master his own being are to be successful. For this reason. Conrad's heroes are not contemplatives. Although most are obsessed by the dream and by their habit of "idealizing every simple feeling", their object is not, at least initially, to create a fantasy world in which mind exists unto itself.

In the final analysis, the aim of these characters is always to perform some concrete action in the world, an action which will bring the dream to reality.

The men of this time have a natural control of themselves and of their environment so, they are able to live in harmony with one another as well.

For Conrad's ironic characters and narrators, this tension exists between their initial commitment to the world of men and action and their awareness of a darkness which nullifies the validity of this world. Commenting on the characters in Alphonse Daudet's fiction, Conrad writes that "inevitably they marchent à la mort- and they are very near the truth of our common destiny: their fate is poignant; it is intensely interesting, and of not the slightest consequence.

From their initial encounter with the darkness, then, there emerge two possibilities for Conrad's characters. They can return to commit themselves to the world and the men who inhabit it. To do this is to affirm at least the possibility that the dream can be realized: that man, through his own will can master the darkness and win for himself a stable identity. Alternatively, they can accept the darkness as final and, by doing so, come to terms with the ephemerality of their own selves. To do so is to reconcile themselves to being orphans who can never transcend their initial, tentative state of existence. (21)

This dreadful tale has been variously interpreted and valued. It has been viewed as essentially about Marlow, who represents the simple virtues of honesty, courage, pity, and fidelity, and who in Kurtz meets not only intimations of an evil before which these are no resource but also an individual with whom he is horrified to feel some obscure shadow of identity. His own code is a sufficient armour against the plain scoundrels among whom he finds himself, but is wholly vulnerable when confronted by the darkness of Kurtz, with whom, inexplicably, he has to acknowledge a link. This reading finds some support in the text, but is far from rendering lucid the conception of evil which Conrad is endeavouring to convey. Another estimate regards the story as valid in all its concrete exemplifications of corruption, but vitiated by a portentous insistence that the profundity and significance of Marlow's revelation lies in an unmapped hinterland of sinister suggestion. Certainly we may rather sharply feel that Conrad has gone all out to create the "resonance" of which his preface speaks, and that he has achieved this at the cost of failing to make Kurtz any very convincing individual creation.

There is perhaps an illuminating contrast to be made here with Captain MacWhirr in Typhoon (1903), a keenly and triumphantly realized figure free of any metaphysical penumbra. Kurtz, as soon as we a little disengage him from his brilliantly macabre ambience, is nothing like so actual. An another comparison suggests itself. Heart of Darkness has marked affinities with James's The Turn of the Screw. Both stories invite us to stand appalled before not simply evil but some unspeakable and inexpressible quintessence of it. The writers make a bogy of vice, a great to-do over never quite contriving or daring to lift the curtain on its naked gigantic form. Evil thus posed is not often very successfully domesticated in England; it is among the things they order better in France. Mr.Graham Greene, who has learned both from France and Conrad, has grasped this fact, and never proposes to make our flesh creep as Conrad and James in these stories do.

Kurtz may be described as the logical consequence for any man of admitting a breach in those defences which the guarding of personal integrity constantly requires. The line of human heads with which his station had been embellished only showed, Marlow reflects, "that there was something wanting in him- some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be bound". Or- as it is elsewhere pu- "his nerves went wrong". There are several other tales of this period- notably Falk and The End of the Tether- which turn upon this theme. And it makes, if with a somewhat less lurid colouring, the basis of Lord Jim (1900). (22)

All of Europe, we are told, contributed to the making of Kurtz-Europe: safe, civilized, scheduled, masculine, literate, Christian, and dead. Kurtz, a European "Knight", sets out on a crusade to win the hearts and minds of a lesser people, ignorant of the degree to which Africa is dangerous, wild, timeless, feminine, unfettered by letters, religious, and vibrant. His love turns to rape when he discovers how unfitted he is to master the magnificent vitality of a natural world. The difference between Europe and Africa is the difference between two secondary symbols: the European woman who has helped to puff up Kurtz's pride and the African woman who has helped to deflate him.

The Intended (nameless, intended for someone else, not herself) is totally protected (helpless), rhetorically programmed (words without matter), nun-like in her adoration (sexually repressed), living in black, in a place of darkness, in a pre-Eliot City of the Dead, in the wasteland of modern Europe. She, like Europe, is primarily exterior, for the simple black garment hides nothing.

The Native Woman is Africa, all interior, in spite of her lavish mode of dress. While Kurtz is male, white, bald, oral, unrestrained, the native woman is female, black, stunningly coiffured, emotive, and restrained.

When Kurtz says "The horror! The horror!" rhetoric and reality come together; Europe and Africa, the Intended and the African, collide. Kurtz realices that all he has been nurtured to believe in, to operate from, is a sham; hence, a horror. The primal nature of nature is also, to him, a horror, because he has been stripped of his own culture and stands both literally and figuratively naked before another; he has been exposed to desire but can not comprehend it through some established framework. That which we can not understand we stand over; that which we can not embrace, we reject; that which we can not love, we hate. To Kurtz, Europe and Africa have both become nightmares- "The horror! The horror!"- and it is between these nightmares that Marlow must make his choice.

Because of his total self- and sexual knowledge, Kurtz could never go back to his Intended- the agony of this realization informs his repeated "horror". Such as he had become would overwhelm the male-sheltered, carefully cultured, literally manufactured woman. Her repressed sexuality, further battened down by her mourning, is part of Kurtz's horror. On the one hand he experienced lust unleashed- through carnal knowledge of Africa coming into self-knowledge of his European hollowness- but he is rendered unable to share that knowledge. To do so would be to inflict rape and slaughter merely of a different kind in a different place in the world. And for Marlow to have indicated to the Intended the way Kurtz lived and died would have been to carry out that rape and slaughter.

Conrad set up the ironic contrast between the two women through the painting by Kurtz that he left behind at the Central Station. The picture represented "a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre- almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister". Europe in Africa- the torch will be quenched, the blind woman swallowed whole. Marlow did not really lie, for the last words Kurtz pronounced were in partial reference to his symbolic model for his symbolic picture.

Marlow knows that the Intended could not stand up to (understand) the raw truth as discovered by Kurtz, could never stand up to (understand) the Native Woman. Marlow neatly sums up the tragic relationship that was created among these three people:

Empty words, empty gestures. Europe and Africa. Each is a Heart of Darkness. A choice of nightmares. (23)

Peter Hyland has argued that Heart of Darkness has been criticized both for its demeaning, stereotypical representation of women and for its exclusion of the female reader. Marlow's critical comments on his aunt and his idealization of the Intended reflect Victorian patriarchal stereotypes: in both cases what Marlow preceives is not the woman herself but an image based on his own preconceptions about women. A stereotype is asserted to avoid confronting the "otherness" of women, and the sexual fear underlying this particular manoevre is even more evident in Marlow's representation of the African woman at the Inner Station: "the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul".

Johanna M. Smith has noted how the jungle's absorption of Kurtz is imaged as "sexual cannibalism": "it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh". Through Marlow's conflation of woman and jungle, itself based on an ideological alignment of male/female with culture/nature, the "heart of darkness" can be read as Marlow's fear of women projected on to the jungle. The threat the African woman embodies is subsequently represented by asserting the myth of the pure, self-sacrificing woman, the myth that Marlow imposes on the Intended, although that imposition is itself destabilized by the threatened return of the repressed.

Hyland notes that though women are marginalized by Marlow's narration, they actually usher Marlow into the experience he recounts. It is Marlow's aunt who has the influence to get him a fob when his own efforts have failed. At the start of Marlow's narrative is this disorienting experience, when his assumptions about power and gender are undermined, and Marlow's unease at the experience of his own powerlessness is recuperated through irony at the expense of his aunt and women in general In the same way it is women who guard "the door of Darkness", and Marlow's uneasiness, again related to women in positions of power and knowledge, is this time recuperated through literary distancing. Women also, arguably, constitute the experience that Marlow recounts.

As Hyland suggests, certainly, it is the African woman and the Intended who are the focus of the final part of Marlow's narrative. If Kurtz sets himself up as a god to be worshipped, Marlow here sets up the Intended for his own ambivalent act of worship: as he "bows down" before what he conceives of as the Intended's faith, "that great and saving illusion", he simultaneously reasserts and imposes on her the patriarchal ideology of separate spheres, a female world of illusion and a male world of truth. Marlow's lie to the Intended shows how what presents itself as an act of venerating women actually asserts and protects men. (24)

(21) ã The Metaphysics of Darkness. Royal Roussel

A study in the unity and development of Conrad's Fiction

1971- The John's Hopkins Press By Baltimore and London.

Pages: 1,16, 17, 19, 26 and 27.

(22) ã Eight Modern Writers. J.I.M:Steward

Oxford History of English Literature

Edited by F.P.Wilson and Banamy Dobrçee

Oxford at the clarendon Press

Oxford University Press. 1963

Pages: 196 and 197.

(23) ã The World's Classics

Joseph Conrad. Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether.

Edited with an introduction by Robert Kimbroutgh

Introduction, Notes, Glossary Crobert Kimbrough-1984

Pages: 15,16, 19, 20 and 21.

(24) Heart of Darkness with the Congo Diary

Introduction and Notes ã Robert Hampson, 1995

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.

Pages: 35, 36 and 37.

RETURN TO THE CONTENTS