Goddess or Nightmare?
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair….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!”
What does a human soul look like?
No, seriously. Our souls. We can’t touch them or taste them; most of the time we forget about them; but we know they’re there. What are they like? What does a human soul look like?
If Joseph Conrad is to be believed, we don’t want to know.
Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) tells the story of Marlow, a sailor who takes a job captaining a steamboat down the Congo River into central Africa. Conrad had done the trip himself in 1890, and his imagination never fully recovered. In the novella, Marlow sees the native Congolese consigned to hard labor, imprisoned in chain gangs, or simply left to die beneath the trees, “bundles of acute angles.”* The Europeans Marlow meets are consumed by the “flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.” The jungle menaces him, “smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out.” As a result of all these pressures, he has not been long in the continent before his psychological condition causes him to remark, “I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.”
Marlow’s mission is to retrieve Kurtz, an ivory trader deep in the interior, who has apparently taken ill. On his way upriver, he hears from person after person about how great a man Kurtz is, how eloquent, how idealistic, how he is destined for great things. This Kurtz set out from Europe with humanitarian ideals, goals of improvement and benevolence. The Kurtz Marlow eventually meets, however, is worshiped as a god, leading one tribe in wars of extermination against other tribes and presiding over “certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which…were offered up to him — do you understand? — to Mr Kurtz himself.” His cabin is surrounded by impaled heads.
What happened?
It was the wilderness, Marlow explains. In the solitude of the jungle, Kurtz’s true self emerged. “The wilderness had found him out early,” Marlow says, “and had taken on him a terrible vengeance….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.”
When Kurtz dies, he sees what he has become. His last words are his epitaph: “The horror! The horror!”
And Conrad argues that this final pronouncement applies not only to Kurtz — it applies to all of us. When all of European civilization was stripped away — policemen and laws and social codes and the rest — and when Kurtz looked deep into his bare soul, he discovered that he was a barbarian at heart. The only reason we “civilized” people don’t act like Kurtz, Conrad argues, is because society distracts us. We have never been alone enough to see who we really are. This is why when Marlow visits Kurtz’s fiancée back in Europe, he cannot bear to tell her the truth. “The last word he pronounced,” he tells her, “was — your name.” Marlow lies to keep from speaking the horror, for it is truly too great to be spoken: if he is right, we are all horrors.
C.S. Lewis’s sermon “The Weight of Glory” concludes by considering what we will be like after the resurrection. He writes,
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
With the words “gods” and “goddesses,” Lewis is not dipping into polytheism. Rather, he is attempting to imagine what a glorified body will be like: something like the old mythic understandings of gods, perhaps, but surely far greater. With the word “nightmare,” Lewis is attempting to imagine the opposite — a soul perfected in its damnation. And notice how he describes it: “a horror.”
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness illustrates Lewis’ nightmare. Kurtz has seen the desperate wickedness of his heart and gone mad — not intellectually insane, but morally mad. “There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it,” says Marlow during one confrontation. “Confound the man! He had kicked the very earth to pieces.” Kurtz appears in a black blaze of spiritual power, consumed by the lusts of his soul and impervious to reason. Marlow continues, “I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.” A soul with no restraint, no faith, and no fear. On a certain day in the future, after a certain judgment, Kurtz will (for many) be just the beginning.
But not for all. And this is where Heart of Darkness ultimately falters. We see no shortage of depraved souls. But there are no redeemed souls — indeed, Conrad essentially implies that such things are impossible. There are no ideals, no principles, that can stand against the darkness of the heart, he writes: only distraction can save us. A successful life is not one that accomplishes anything worthwhile (is that even possible?); rather, it is one that manages to avoid contamination by the stinking “dead hippo” of the soul as long as it possibly can.
The gospel speaks into Joseph Conrad’s world: in fact, it is perhaps best heard by people living in Conrad’s world. The gospel tells us of the blind deceitfulness of our hearts — then tells us that God offers us new hearts, hearts fit for children of light rather than children of darkness. In Christ our souls are remade so that we might escape the nightmare within. It is only through the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection that we can read Heart of Darkness with anything other than despair.
Should I read it? Yes. Heart of Darkness is consistently ranked as one of the greatest works of fiction of the twentieth century. It’s not an easy read, though: the vocabulary and sentence structure are somewhat imposing. When you read it, keep in mind that Conrad was Polish by birth — his ability to write such beautiful prose in his third language (which he didn’t learn until his twenties) is astonishing.
*The question of whether or not Heart of Darkness is actually a racist work is still on the table. I’d argue that it’s both super critical of European imperialism and pretty racist in its depiction of Africans. I don’t think this invalidates its larger point about human nature, though. If this question interests you, check out Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’”
