In analysis of Heart of Darkness, much is made of Conrad's intentions in telling his tale. People search for a moral lesson, a strict social commentary, an absolution for the evil of the dark jungle. It isn't there, and that's not the point. In works of philosophy (like The Republic), or works of political theory (like Socialism: Utopian and Scientific), or works of natural science (like The Origin of Species), this sifting of important and clear ideas from the mess and confusion of experience is what writers like Plato, Darwin, or Engels are doing.
They experience the world in all its messy confusion, and then they attempt to abstract from the mess, by careful selection, a system of ordering principles which other people can comprehend and make use of. In more figurative words, they are trying to shed the light of intelligence upon the darkness of experience. As, primarily, students and teachers, we naturally look for the conveyance of such ideas in any material we encounter. We miss that books like Heart of Darkness are fundamentally different in intent and we continue searching for that lesson from which to make a rational response to the story.
Even literary professionals seem often to fall into the error of neglecting or misunderstanding the novelist's purpose. Consider, for example, the criticism leveled against Heart of Darkness by Paul O'Prey in his introduction to the Penguin edition. He writes: 'It is an irony that the ? failures' of Marlow and Kurtz are paralleled by a corresponding failure of Conrad's technique--brilliant though it is--as the vast abstract darkness he imagines exceeds his capacity to analyze and dramatize it, and the very inability to portray the story's central subject, the ? nimaginable', the ? impenetrable' (evil, emptiness, mystery or whatever) becomes a central theme. ' Mr. O'Prey's sentence is somewhat impenetrable itself, but his complaint is that Conrad wants to evoke an abstract notion of darkness, but he doesn't manage to adequately define it or analyze it. He then goes on to quote, approvingly, another critic, James Guetti, who complains that Marlow 'never gets below the surface,' and is 'denied the final self-knowledge that Kurtz had. ' In other words, according to Mr. O'Prey and Mr.
Guetti, Conrad has somehow failed in his attempt to delineate the horror that is Kurtz's final vision, failed to penetrate the darkness that Marlow evokes, failed to give a precise name and shape to the dark and tragic human condition. Mr. O'Prey and Mr. Guetti want, as all good academics want, clarity, definition, intellectual coherence, order, a well-stated and well-argued thesis; they wants light and more light, and are upset that Conrad has failed to provide it. Like a carping English Four instructor they scrawl on the bottom of Conrad's paper--Too vague, C-plus.
For many novelists, especially modern novelists, the messiness and confusion and darkness of experience is in itself an interesting thing. That sense of frustrated distraction, chaos, and inadequacy is fascinating to novelists. Rather than trying to simplify and abstract a particular idea or meaning from experience, novelists tend to wallow in the multiplicity of ideas and meanings and sensations that experience can provide. Novelists, in other words, are not generally in the business of abstracting orderly ideas about experience. They are rather in the business of re-creating and communicating the rich complexities of experience itself.
Their purpose is to get the reader to re-live an experience in some important and concrete way, with all its complexity and messiness, all its darkness and ambiguity, intact. A novel is not a kind of orderly argument. It is addressed to the reader, not the student, and its ordering principles are of an altogether different, and more difficult, kind. For the novelist, it is the fullness of experience, not the abstract meaning of the experience, that counts. Thusly, the book was never intended to have a lesson for the students, and didn't mean to reach a clear exploration of darkness for the literary critics.
Conrad himself says so, in a preface to another novel cited by Mister O'Prey: 'The thinker,' he writes, 'plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts--whence, presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They speak authoritatively to our common-sense, our intelligence . . . It is otherwise with the artist. Confronted with the same enigmatical spectacle, the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife . . . he finds the terms of his appeal.
His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities [less obvious, that is, than intelligence and common sense] . . . The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom . . . He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to that sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts ... And even Marlow weighs in on the lack of clarity, expressing a story-teller's exasperation at his own limited powers at communication: 'Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible, which is the very essence of dream . . .
No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning-- its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone . . . ' If Conrad seeks to lead his readers to an experience of the 'heart of darkness' it is not to shed the light of reason on it--to analyze and define it in some abstract way--but rather to re-create, in all its fullness, his experience of darkness in our feelings, our sensibilities, our own dark and mysterious hearts.
Once you understand that, you will see that Heart of Darkness is not a coded message, a kind of complicated puzzle you are supposed to solve in order to get the meaning or message that is hidden in it. It is, rather, a re-creation in a pattern of words and images of a set of experiences that can, if you read it well, become a part of your own experience.
Author: Marian White