Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary Read Online Free Page A

that seem to have surprised Conrad himself, prompting him later to feel that its last two instalments were ‘wrapped up in secondary notions’ ( Collected Letters , vol. II, pp. 146, 157). One sign of its changing character is that Marlow, predominantly a detached figure in Part I, becomes with his journey upriver an involved participant, increasingly excited, feverish and panic-stricken. Simultaneously, he is obsessed by the charismatic voice of Kurtz, a spectral figure who actively dominates the later part of the story. With these developments, the pattern of the quest becomes more insistent. Marlow conceives of his journey as culminating in a meeting with Kurtz, who is himself engaged in a quest into unexplored regions: when the two make contact late in the story, they become, in effect, agents in each other’s lives.
    Successive generations of critics have been impelled to testify to the nature of the elusive developments following upon Marlow’s upriver departure, and there is now virtually an interpretation of the story to suit every predilection–the psychoanalytic, philosophic, political, post-colonial and gender-based. Each generation has also thrown up a major dissenting critic. In the immediate post-1950 period, F. R. Leavis was highly influential with his claim that the story was marred by an ‘adjectival insistence upon…inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery’. 7 Later generations have been overshadowed by the Nigerian novelist and critic Chinua Achebe, whose angry polemic of 1975 accused Conrad of virtually betraying his subject by eliminating ‘the African as a human factor’, lamented his ‘preposterous and perverse arrogance in reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind’ and condemned the author as a ‘bloody racist’. 8
    Traditionally, the most immediate problem for readers has been that of adjusting to the tale’s dramatically changing character. Although Part I anticipates some of the terms of Marlow’s coming quest, it hardly foreshadows the ambitious symbolic method to be brought into play. In part, Marlow himself becomes an active symbol-maker, constantly seeking a figurative equivalent for his feelings. But in addition, the obscure nightmare in which he is embroiled increasingly determines the character of the story and embraces Kurtz as a significant part of its structure: everywhere felt but only occasionally glimpsed, the latter emerges as a strangely protean presence, forming and re-forming like the genie from a bottle. Achebe regards the story as involving a single ‘petty European’, but the symbol of dark nightmare also has a strenuously generalizing effect in suggesting that all Europeans are involved in the breakdown of the imperial dream.
    Symbolic method also brings with it a new, and in some ways, problematic range of ‘secondary’ interests. In moving away from the symptoms of colonial rowdyism in Part I, the tale is not thereby always less topical, but it now devises markedly wider tests in order to probe the credentials of the European mission in Africa. As a compendium of decadent excesses, the figure of Kurtz is obviously central to the tale’s free-wheeling and–as some readers have felt–erratically widening scope. His is the most comprehensive test and the most spectacular fall; in one of his many guises, he offers access to what might be called Europe’s political unconscious–into the underlying obsessions and needs that both fostered and found relief in the imperial project. And finally, when Marlow returns to Europe, he brings with him a Kurtzian legacy that helps to shape an even wider vision of Western civilization and its discontents.
    Early in Part II, with the beginning of Marlow’s journey to the interior, the tale signals that the narrator’s own inherited British traditions will be the first to come under scrutiny. The