The Horror, The Horror!

Review of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1899)

May 12, 2025

As a mainstay of European and American English courses, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) has become a pedagogical curiosity – white professors teach white students how white a white man's criticism of white supremacy really was. It's a novella that has successfully "failed up."

Every cover, every blurb, every introduction in every paperback of this book tells you that you're in for a scathing dissection of European imperialism through a dense, moody, atmospheric trip that’s equal parts philosophy lecture and real-life horror story. Which is, of course, accurate on all points. That's why, for over 75 years, this book was upheld as a paragon of white conscience, until Chinua Achebe, among other African voices, pointed out its inherent racism, condemning it as “a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies.”

The Heart of Darkness has since become ground-zero of postcolonial literary criticism, revered in classrooms and clutched like a sacramental wafer by firebrand professors as an object of ritual condemnation.

Outside academia, however, it remains a cult classic, inspiring books, comics, movies, TV shows, video-games, and recently virtual reality immersions. Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now stands as the most famous cultural descendent, transposing Conrad's Congo to Vietnam-era Cambodia, with Marlon Brando channeling Conrad's most enduring character, Mr. Kurtz, giving him new psychological dimensions.

Conrad's spotlight on Empire's blindspot

Heart of Darkness follows Charles Marlow, a weary seaman who recounts his journey into the Congo Free State to retrieve an enigmatic ivory trader named Kurtz. Marlow travels up the Congo river by steamboat, witnessing the grotesque cruelty of European imperialism: Africans dying in chains, white men going mad with greed, and the jungle closing in like a living thing.

Along the way, he hears whispers about Kurtz—a man so brilliant, so eloquent, so terrifying—that he begins to seem more myth than man. When Marlow finally reaches Kurtz and tries to haul him back toward civilisation, he gets his unforgettable glimpse into the heart of darkness.

The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.

Conrad’s sources for this story are painfully real. The novella draws on his own voyage up the Congo in 1890, where he witnessed firsthand the brutalities committed in the name of profit and “civilization.” King Leopold’s Congo Free State wasn’t a colony—it was a slaughterhouse with a PR campaign. Heart of Darkness is Conrad's reportage in the guise of fiction, which is probably why there is so much power in Conrad's depiction of the jungle as a kind of sentient presence, an entity that unravels the European psyche with terrifying ease.

But Conrad doesn't make it an easy read. You have to wade through paragraphs swamps in which syntax becomes dense, recursive, and heavy with metaphor and philosophical digressions. It’s less of a story and more of a trance. The prose demands work.

“Droll thing life is--that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.”

But it's not because Conrad was writing in his third language (Polish and French being his first two). The prose is dense by design. You’re not supposed to zip through the book. You’re supposed to feel like you’re choking on fog, same as Marlow.

The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great river.

The claustrophobia. The moral vertigo. The way the jungle feels like it’s watching you. There’s a rhythm to it, like river waves slapping against the hull of a steamboat—slow, relentless, hypnotic. The language is part of the machinery that drags you inward, deeper into the darkness.

Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once -somewhere- far away in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.

This darkness isn't merely geographical but temporal—a journey backward through human development. The company's outposts are described as "scenes of inhabited devastation," where European "civilizers" prove to be anything but. With each mile upriver, the veneer of European superiority crumbles, until we're left with the gaunt, hollow, but grotesquely enlarged ivory-ball head of Kurtz himself, whose wide, fevered eyes still shine with avaricious grandiosity.

Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him--some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence.
Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last.
But 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.

While Kurtz hogs the spotlight and continues to inspire several Hollywood pastiches, Conrad's true genius shines through in the often overlooked Marlow, who is the spotlight itself. And an unreliable one at that.

“For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.”

He tells you the story while warning you not to trust stories. He digresses constantly, speaks in riddles, and wraps every observation in layers of personal interpretation. Marlow romanticises suffering and cloaks horror in mysticism. His obsession with Kurtz transforms the man into a myth long before the reader ever meets him. And when the moment comes—when the great Kurtz is revealed—Marlow offers only fragments and abstractions. Why? Because he’s not interested in truth. He’s interested in meaning, and that makes him slippery.

“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 of the very essence of dreams...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...”

He’s unreliable not because he lies maliciously, but because he filters everything through a dense fog of metaphor, memory, and moral ambiguity.

“You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.”

Conrad's own blindspot

Marlow's narrow spotlight on European decadence, and specifically on Kurtz, is so harsh that it blinds you to the other humans of the story, relegating them, as it were, into the heart of darkness.

“We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, of an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toilo. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse.”

The Africans in this novel are mute, nameless, and ornamental objects of pity rather than subjects with agency. They are “bundles of acute angles,” “black shadows of disease and starvation,” reduced to the geometry of suffering. Their pain exists solely to elevate the white man’s anguish, or at best, to act as the symbolic “other,” a foil against which Europe defines its own civility and sanity. Conrad’s Marlow may question this sanity of imperialism, but he never questions the idea that his definitions of sanity, reason and culture are European to begin with.

And that’s not just a product of its time—it’s a failure of imagination, especially in a novel obsessed with the moral decay of its so-called heroes. This is what Achebe was pointing out. The book treats Africans as scenery, not people.

The Verdict: Brilliant in Atmosphere, Blind in Empathy

Ultimately, Heart of Darkness demands vigilant engagement. Conrad's sinuous, hypnotic, and dangerously alluring prose can make you complicit in accepting his framing. It captures the sickness at the heart of empire and the cowardice behind polite society. But it also embodies the very erasure it condemns, remaining spectacularly incurious about African humanity.

The book's greatest value now lies in reading it alongside its critics, particularly Achebe. It teaches us how even "enlightened" criticism can perpetuate harmful narratives. So, approach with intellectual caution. Appreciate its literary innovation of turning adventure tales into psychological exploration. But don't forget to interrogate its racist foundations.

“And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.”

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