1. Joseph Conrad
“Heart of Darkness”

2. Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, to Polish parents in Berdichev (now Berdychiv), Ukraine, and was raised and educated primarily in Poland. After a sea-faring career in the French and British merchant marines, he wrote short stories and novels like Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent, which combined his experiences in remote places with an interest in moral conflict and the dark side of human nature. He died in England on August 3, 1924.

3. As the story begins, Marlow muses on civilization and “darkness.”
In “Heart of Darkness” Conrad muses on European IMPERIALISM: both the justification for it and the criminal way it has been practiced.
As the story begins, Marlow muses on civilization and “darkness.”

4. “The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway--a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.” "And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth." (1493)

5. Marlow, thinking back on his adventure in the Congo, muses on the European attempt to bring “civilization” to the “darker” parts of the planet:
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to " (1494)

6. The idea Marlow refers to is “civilization.”
Although he clearly objects to the way the natives in the Congo are treated by the colonial authorities, he feels the benefit of the civilization the Europeans are bringing the Africans is worth it. He feels it will help them rise above “savagery.”

7. Marlowe’s Aunt represents those who saw colonization as way a to bring Christianity and civilization to the “savages” of the earth.
“. . . I was going to take charge of a two-penny-halfpenny river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached! It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit.” (1499)

8. On his voyage to the Congo, Marlow observes how, at times, the forces of civilization are irrational:
“Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. . . There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives--he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.” (1500) In the paragraph following, Marlowe characterizes the colonial enterprise as a “merry dance of death and trade.”

9. When Marlow reaches the coast where the Congo river empties into the sea, his first impression of colonial Africa is that of a bizarre wasteland. As he walks up the hill to his company’s station, he encounters “a boiler wallowing in the grass” and “an undersized railway truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. . . To the left a clump of trees made a shady spot where dark things seemed to stir feebly.” (1501)

10. “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die They were dying slowly--it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,--nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.” (1503)

11. Marlow describes this scene as “the grove of death.”

12. The grove of death

13. Is the last “devil” he describes the devil of imperialism?
Marlow begins to reflect on the desires that drive men of action—those adventurers who are the actual agents of imperialism:
I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men--men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. (1502)
Is the last “devil” he describes the devil of imperialism?

14. At the station Marlow meets the station manager and an agent who is ill—probably dying from tropical disease. As he leaves the office, he creates for us a defining image: “He turned to his work. The noise outside had ceased, and presently in going out I stopped at the door. In the steady buzz of flies the homeward-bound agent was lying flushed and insensible; the other, bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still tree-tops of the grove of death.” (1505)

15. Marlow quickly catches on to the political posturing of the men at the colonial station:  
“. . . then I saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life.” (1508)

16. Men of the ivory trade

17. The agents Marlow meets are only concerned with advancing their own careers, not with advancing “civilization.”
“There was an air of plotting about that station, but nothing came of it, of course. It was as unreal as everything else--as the philanthropic pretense of the whole concern, as their talk, as their government, as their show of work. The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages.” (1509)

18. Marlow finds one of the agents particularly empty of any desire but greed:
“I let him run on, this papier-mache Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.” (1510)

19. A person like that may be said to be hollow or empty.
The poet T. S. Eliot saw this emptiness that Conrad describes as symptomatic of a larger malaise, and felt that it was particularly pronounced in the European civilization after the cataclysm of World War I.
Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men,” carries this epigraph: Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
The quote comes from the end of the story, as Kurtz dies while being transported back to the main station at the mouth of the Congo. For Eliot, Kurtz was representative of the type of person who loses his inner compass, his inner sense of morality or any empathy for the other creatures on the planet.
A person like that may be said to be hollow or empty.

20. Anomie
Another symptom that Kurtz represents, and which is represented in “The Hollow Men” is anomie: Alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals: Emile Durkheim’s concept of anomie referred to a condition of relative normlessness of a society or social group; other writers have used the term to refer to conditions of specific individuals. In this psychological usage, anomie means the state of mind of a person who has no standards or sense of continuity or obligation and has rejected all social bonds.

21. Here is the beginning of “The Hollow Men”
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

22. As implied in “Heart of Darkness,” anomie can strip a person of fellow-feeling for others, especially if they are considered savages. The lip service the Belgian agents give to the noble cause of civilizing the people of Africa is belied by their lack of concern for the native people, and their rapacious desire to get rich quick by getting as much ivory out of the jungle as is possible.

23. Marlow’s job is to take the steamer up the Congo river and retrieve Kurtz and whatever ivory he has.
He finds that Kurtz has “gone native” and is almost worshipped as a god by the natives. The power he has over men drives him insane, and he cracks.

24. Marlow meditates on what he perceives as the savage nature of the inhabitants of the Congo:
The earth seemed unearthly. . . and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend. (1518)

25. Kurtz has apparently contracted a tropical disease, so Marlow is able to capture him and bring him aboard the steamer. He soon realizes that the natives regard him as if he were their god-king, and Kurtz has gone mad with the belief that he is invincible:
“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. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air. . .”(1542)

26. “It [the jungle wilderness] echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”
“. . . the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.” (1536) (T. S. Eliot was paying attention—hence “The Hollow Men”).

27. Kurtz’s Journal
Marlow reads Kurtz’s journal, in which he collects thoughts for a book he had planned to publish. He was writing it for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. In it he writes “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.” By the time he assumes his god-like sway over the natives, he has clearly changed his mind. Scrawled at the foot of the last page of the journal is this message:

29. Marlow looks in on Kurtz, below decks, just before the moment of his death.
I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath-- "'The horror! The horror!' (1545)

30. What is the horror?
Marlow clearly develops the idea that Kurtz, finding himself free of the restraints of civilization in the “heart of darkness,” and finding that the natives regard him with awe, succumbs to the temptation to play god among them. But what does he see that final moment before he dies?

31. Marlow sees the Europeans invading the wilderness, but he also sees the wilderness having an effect on “civilized” man. Look closely again at what Marlow asserts:
“The wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”

32. Marlow later observes this of Kurtz:
“But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by Heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”

33. Perhaps the horror relates to what Kurtz realizes he has become
Perhaps the horror relates to what Kurtz realizes he has become. During the height of colonial expansion the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed the following:
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche . Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146 (1886).