Leroy Searle
English & Comparative Literature
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195

(From: Democratic Literacy and The Politics of Reading)

Chapter Nine:  What is “Intended:”  Reading Conrad’s Heart of 
Darkness

	As in the case of Jonah, most readers will assume that Conrad’s phrase, “Heart of 
Darkness” refers to Africa, to the Congo basin; and further, that, because the people who 
live there are black, and black is dark, that in some way the frightening overtones of the 
phrase apply specifically to black people.    Now, if it happens that the reader is white, 
and is predisposed, for culturally over-determined reasons to take the text this way, it is 
partly because racism in exactly this form is centuries old in European culture; and if the 
reader is not white, and is predisposed, for the same culturally over-determined reasons  
to take the text the same way, but with perhaps a contrary intent, that too arises from the 
same history.  But what does Conrad actually say, and what relations does he actually 
articulate when he writes of the “heart” of  “darkness”?  And why is it that we tend to 
forget that the title of the book is Heart of Darkness, without the definite article, “The”  
(or even the indefinite article, “A”) which alone would make it appear that the phrase is a 
designator and not a stipulation or even a truncated description of a heart? 
	While this survey is not exhaustive, Conrad uses “darkness,” “heart,” and close 
verbal derivatives about twenty-five times, but by far the most interesting thing is that 
only two of them apply to Africa in any way that would tend to confirm this vague 
expectation that it designates the African wilderness in the Congo basin.  Rather, we start 
with a mention, at the start of Marlow’s narration, of England: “’And this also,’ said 
Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’” (9) The next, two pages 
later, refers not to the continent, but to the map of Africa, with a distinguishing precision: 
it draws the attention of Marlow as a boy because it is the biggest and blankest place, 
meaning only that European cartographers and geographers had not yet marked it up. 
Marlow comments: “It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white 
patch for a boy to dream gloriously over.  It had become a place of darkness.”    That is, 
it becomes a place of darkness, not by reference to what it is, but by virtue of its very 
exploration, made dark by the “fantastic invasion” of the white men, a phrase Conrad 
uses three times in describing the non-human spirit of the wilderness patiently waiting for 
the intruders to leave.(26, 35, 57)  In this case, the material fact that a map gets darker by 
being filled in with cartographic detail may be forgotten by an inattentive reader; but as a 
detail of the narrative, it is not coincidental, but part of a rich and subtle pattern, 
proceeding through a precisely modulated set of variations that does--if one notices it--
alter and complicate profoundly what one takes the “heart of darkness” to be.  
	The third mention, after two more pages, refers to the waiting room in the Belgian 
city that always reminded Marlow of a “whited sepulchre” (13) where the “uncanny and 
fateful” old woman with the cat sits knitting black wool causes him to think “of these 
two, guarding the door of Darkness.”(14)  Literally, of course, they are guarding the door 
of company headquarters, and Conrad’s image is particularly evocative because it recalls 
myths of the fates in an indefinite way, while making definite only the contrast between 
the whited sepulchre and the black wool.  Upon leaving, Marlow has the sense that 
instead of going “to the centre of a continent” he was “about to set off for the centre of 
the earth”(16); but as we travel this itinerary of darkness, Conrad is carefully collecting 
for us the images that later become, in a phrase of Emerson’s, “luminous with manifold 
allusion.”   We are told of all the cheap trading goods that go “into the depths of darkness 
and in return came a precious trickle of ivory” (21); later, we meet the manager of the 
middle station, that avatar of the “flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and 
pitiless folly” (20) who inspires only “uneasiness” (24), and appears to have “nothing 
within him,” as he says to Marlow, “’Men who come out here should have no 
entrails’”—and then “sealed the utterance with that smile of his as though it had been a 
door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping.” (25)  
	We next hear of the uncanny sketch in oils, made by Kurtz, of a woman, draped and 
blindfolded, holding a torch over head, against a background “sombre—almost black” 
(27) that recalls Marlow’s remark that he felt uncomfortably like an “emissary of light” 
(15) upon leaving the city of the whited sepulchre, and foreshadows both the gestures of 
the native woman, holding her hands out to the river as Kurtz is taken away (67) and the 
Intended, holding her hands out to the gray window in Europe.(75)  Remarkably, 
however, the only exact analogue to the figure in the painting is Kurtz himself, when, at 
the point of death, he describes himself as “lying in the dark waiting for death” while 
Marlow comments with trenchant irony (none are so blind as they who refuse to see) that 
the burning candle “was within a foot of his eyes.” (68)  
	Only after all this does the title phrase appear, almost half way through the story, as 
Marlow says that for him, the pitiful steamer of which he is pilot “crawled toward 
Kurtz—exclusively;” while “The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the 
forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return.  We penetrated 
deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.” (37) The closer Marlow and his grubby 
Pilgrims get to Kurtz, the more mentions of darkness, hearts, and hearts of darkness 
proliferate, almost like the build up to a musical cadence in which the tonic applies 
directly and repeatedly to Kurtz: “his was an impenetrable darkness.” (68) His voice, 
which for Marlow was the index of his power, “survived his strength” but only to hide 
“the barren darkness of his heart”  in its “magnificent folds of eloquence.” (67)   
	None of this evidence sets aside the impression that in going into the Belgian Congo, 
Marlow felt himself going into “the heart of darkness.”  But it is clear beyond serious 
question that it is the journey to Kurtz that concerns Marlow, just as Conrad, by 
distancing himself from his highly self conscious narrator, is concerned precisely with the 
problem of conveying that essential complication.  What is most notable, moreover, is the 
precision and specificity of Conrad’s use of these images, from the peculiarly iconic 
painting made by Kurtz, with the blindfolded woman holding a lighted torch against a 
black background or the image of the two old women knitting black wool, to the 
evocative phrases concerning hearts and darkness.  We may sense ambiguities, but they 
arise from associations we may (or may not) bring to the text, which evoke without 
designating some point of external reference.  The old women, as I have suggested, may 
remind us of the Greek Fates, but the allusion is partial and oblique, just as the 
blindfolded woman with the torch recalls the blindfolded figure of Justice, though in this 
case, she is not carrying scales but a torch.  Yet this is not in any way a confusion, or, as 
Frances Singh argues, “levels” of metaphor that “work against each other,” except in the 
sense that a reader may find them to conflict with what he or she expects or already 
assumes.  On the contrary, the specificity of these figures and images is internal and self-
regarding: a blindfolded woman, recalling Justice, but unexpectedly carrying a torch, is 
entirely explicable in the very terms of the painting itself, and accumulates pertinence (or 
Emersonian luminance) when it is connected to the equally specific detail of other 
features of the narrative--as, for example, Marlow feeling himself to be a commissioned 
“emissary of light.”  The figure, that is to say, not only allows itself to be read directly, 
but requires a good deal of inattention (or perversity) on the part of the reader to miss it: a 
blindfolded Justice needs no eyes to weigh the merits of the case, signifying that Justice 
is no respecter of persons but only the merits of the case.  But a blindfolded figure 
bearing a torch in a dark place is a figure of self-confounding folly: who needs a torch if 
one stays blindfolded?  And if the blindfold stays in place, the torch ceases to function as 
a source of metaphorical light, but simply a fire that might as well burn down whatever 
venue in which this self-confounding figure happens to stumble.
	Marlow, traveling exclusively toward Kurtz, completes the figural reasoning by 
telling us of the “barren darkness” of Kurtz’s heart, exposed with crushing irony when he 
lies there, a candle glowing a foot from his face, aware only of the darkness, not the light 
that illuminates him, just as later, Marlow describes The Intended in correlative terms: 
she is draped in the black of mourning, and instead of being unable to see, she is unable 
to hear, as she obsessively completes all of Marlow’s sentences for him.  Consider, then, 
how this instance of literary reasoning runs: As Marlow recognizes Kurtz to have become 
the figure he painted, the figure itself serves as a cognate commentary on the enterprise of 
the European company that sent them both out there, under the assumption that they were 
taking “light” into the heart of darkness.  At the very least, the literal details of the 
narration show us where we need to look: not to the darkness outside in the innocent 
jungle, but the darkness inhabiting the heart (and the voice) of Kurtz, the quintessential 
European, and reflected with compounded horror in the virtual deafness of the all too 
European “Intended.”
	Thus the full cadence of darkness comes, not in the jungle as Kurtz dies: it is a year 
later, not just in the city of the whited sepulchre, but the apartments of The Intended, set 
on “a street as still and decorous as a well kept alley in a cemetery”(72).   As the darkness 
there closes in on Marlow, an “eternal darkness,” a “triumphant darkness,” (74) a “stream 
of darkness,” (75) he is conscious all the while, that with “every word spoken the room 
was growing darker and only her forehead smooth and white” (like the bald, ivory 
colored head of Kurtz himself) “remained illumined by the unextinguishable light of 
belief and love,” (73, cf.  49) a perfect figural match for the candle Kurtz is unable to see.
	When Marlow tells “The Intended” his celebrated “lie” (more on that later) he says 
he does so because to repeat what Kurtz himself had said to this woman--described 
almost exclusively in terms of hard glistening things having the purity of “a cliff of 
crystal,” but especially the “cold and monumental whiteness” (72) of a marble fireplace--
would have been “too dark—too dark altogether.” (76)  For the reader, however, a deeper 
darkness has already appeared; while for Marlow’s auditors, sitting silently on the deck 
of the Nellie with Marlow sitting apart “in the pose of a meditating Buddha,” 
(illuminated, like Kurtz, by a glowing lantern) with the darkness of London behind him: 
They have already “lost the first of the ebb,” and the “tranquil waterway . . . seemed to 
lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” (76)
	One might say that after this prodigious build up to such a conclusion, locating the 
largest “heart of darkness,” as it were, encompassing the place where these men sat, 
telling and listening to the story, it is a willful reader who still thinks that Conrad means 
to portray Africa and its black inhabitants as the “heart of darkness,” though that is pretty 
much the view of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a widely read and incisively 
polemical essay written to prove that “Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.”    
From the perspective of the late twentieth century, this is not a surprising claim--indeed, 
if we count Conrad a racist, the difficulty would be in finding non-racists anywhere in 
Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.  The issue, however, is that such a claim is 
precisely what we would expect, since the public discourse of the last thirty years has so 
remarkably changed the terms, even the categories of analysis, that what we are liable to 
see in Conrad’s text is a reflection of judgments that originate later and elsewhere. 
	When we read Conrad in the 1990s, that is, we find what we expect to find, and it 
seems to be simply there, like Jonah’s whale.  Thus, when Achebe acknowledges the 
explicit analogue that Conrad constructs between the Thames and the Congo, this is how 
he puts it:
	Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good 
	the other bad?  Yes, but that is not the real point.  It is not the
	differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of
	common ancestry.  For the Thames too “has been one of the dark places
	of the earth.”  It conquered its darkness, of course, [sic] and is now
	in daylight and at peace.  But if it were to visit its primordial relative,
	the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of
	its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging 
recrudescence
	of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings. (252)
	No one would argue, I think, that the theme Achebe evokes here is easy to trace and 
to document in matters of attitude, public policy, historical record,  or in his own personal 
experience as an English educated African.   But it is still a gross misreading of Heart of 
Darkness,  no matter how much several generations of readers of Conrad’s novella, and 
perhaps readers of Achebe’s own early novels, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease 
might respond to Achebe’s accusation with a mixture of understanding, anger, sympathy, 
and guilt.  But even so, what happens in Conrad’s novella is almost exactly the opposite 
of what Achebe alleges in this passage, which is by no means unique in the article in 
question.
	The best critical corrective, however, may be not to argue with or dismantle 
Achebe’s article, but to read his novels, to see not only how much he learned from 
Conrad, but how, in trying to tell a story that brings to voice the silences in Conrad’s tale, 
he reiterates the very point that so angers him in Conrad.  I take a brief but rich example 
from his first novel, Things Fall Apart, telling a story of colonialism from the other side, 
following the life of Okonkwo, a man in an Ibo village.  What is striking, in this context, 
is that the task of telling a story is always a task of trying to attend to what Mark Platts, 
discussing the problem of moral reality, has called “the full, unobvious moral complexity 
of the present case.”   
	In the novel, Achebe traces the coming of the missionaries, the colonial 
administrators, and, step by painful step, the fissuring of Ibo social stability in the 
colonialist encounter.  His fidelity to the demands of the story, and, not coincidentally, I 
assume, his determination not to slip into the kind of racial representations that he finds 
offensive in Conrad, leads him to present the central character, Okonkwo, as troubled in a 
perfectly ordinary way in his relations to his father, his wives, his son, quite apart from 
the encompassing trouble of the colonial administrative courts and the Christians.  
	Okonkwo, a great and celebrated wrestler, warrior, and paternalist par excellence is 
uneasy with speech, having a slight stutter.  The whole narrative is framed by his problem 
with his ne’er do well father, his wives, his less than manly son, and his anger at the 
treatment of his people by the administrative court.  In a tense, climactic moment at the 
end of the novel, Onkonkwo, having been humiliated with five others by the court, has 
determined that no matter what his rival, the glib tongued Egonwanne does to persuade 
the village not to fight, not to retaliate, he will do so himself.  
	In a quick and awful moment, he cuts off the head of a court messenger, and then 
goes off to kill himself, becoming thereby, untouchable in death according to the customs 
of his people.  But the poignancy of the denouement, where the block-headed 
administrator fails to understand that the miscreant Okonkwo, being sought for 
punishment, can be brought in, but only if the white soldiers will help--not because 
Oknonkwo is too hard for them to subdue, but because the villagers will not touch the 
corpse of a suicide--derives much of its power from a more suffused but telling pattern 
that encompasses the entire book.  
	When the missionaries come, crudely, as missionaries are wont to do, the stories they 
tell about the gods and what happens to the dead create a powerful rift within the beliefs 
of the village of Umuofia, but particularly on the matter of what one should do when 
mothers give birth to twins or “ogbanji” children (believed to be reborn, after death as 
infants).  The traditional practice was to “throw away” twins, and to mutilate ogbanji 
children, so they would not return, as spirit children, to be born again to the same 
mother.   The novel presents, quietly and carefully, some measure of the anguish this 
causes in the families where twins have been born; and, when the missionaries acquire 
title to land for their church, choosing the very field where the twins and ogbanji are 
buried, the fact that the parents of twins, along with others characterized by Oknonwo as 
“worthless, empty men” and Okonkwo’s own son, are among the first of a steady stream 
of converts illustrates the complexity of such encounters that might otherwise be 
represented simply as the depredations of the evil colonizers on the virtuous indigenous 
natives.  By presenting the “full, unobvious moral complexity of the case,” Achebe 
shows, like Conrad, that in any such encounters, there is always enough darkness to go 
around.
	Critical writing, however, too rarely takes into account the unobvious complexity of 
texts, and seldom enough even the obvious complexities.  In some cases, such as Johanna 
Smith’s “’Too Beautiful Altogether’: Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness”  or 
Frances B.  Singh’s “The Colonialist Bias of Heart of Darkness”   complex arguments 
are developed, but the complexity is not commensurate with the text, but addresses a 
more pervasive problem.  It is partly that once an exemplary or paradigmatic reading of a 
cultural syndrome, one, moreover, that is both real and generally reprehensible, is in 
circulation, it can and will be applied to a text like Conrad’s, which is itself concerned 
with just such subjects.  It becomes what I have described in Part One as a theoretical 
protocol, where the indictment of the general pattern of patriarchal or colonial oppression 
carries over in the mode of naive “application” to Conrad’s text.  Without question, 
Conrad’s  view of women, taken in bits, is not flattering and is, in all the most palpable 
psychoanalytic particulars an invitation to take him on: Marlow’s view of women as “out 
of touch with truth,” his assertion that their beautiful world  would crumble in a minute if 
it had to contend with reality, (16) or that it had to be protected to keep the men’s world 
from becoming much worse (49) are almost too pat to be believed.  
	But that is just the problem.  This is too pat, and one can read Conrad as a patriarchal 
ideologue only if one reads Heart of Darkness for what is “in” it, that can be extracted 
and given a treatment, while overriding the self-reflexive structure of the narrative itself.  
Singh, as already noted, is not so categorical as Achebe on the matter of darkness being 
associated with dark skinned people, but finds Conrad grievously at fault for not 
inquiring into the native practices in the Congo basin, and taking for granted, like any run 
of the mill colonialist, that “native” means degenerate and wicked.  Her main evidence is 
the episode in which Marlow refuses to be told the manner in which one had to approach 
Kurtz (basically, on all fours), and in one sentence, Singh skids off the road and into a 
wilderness of her own making, where it appears to her that “Marlow’s sympathy for the 
oppressed blacks is only superficial.” (272)  Here’s the wrong turn: “His refusal to try to 
understand the significance of the rites of the Africans stems from his conviction that 
what he will be told will support his feeling that they are abominations.” (272)  But this 
appears to be a refusal to understand the point of the episode, which is precisely that the 
“ceremony” in question is one used with respect to idolizing Kurtz, who himself requires 
it.  Singh misses altogether that the only abomination is the behavior of Kurtz in 
presenting himself as a deity, an absolute ruler, over people who have, for whatever 
reasons and with whatever ceremonies, evidently accepted him as such. (cf. p.58)  The 
presumed superficiality of Marlow’s sympathy is no such thing at all: it is that the “rites 
of the Africans” are not at issue in any way whatsoever.  And if one persists in attempting 
to make them the issue, look where it leads: that the “rites” have significance just to the 
extent that they reflect a chosen condition of cultural dispossession, in their acceptance of 
Kurtz as a deity or absolute ruler over them.
	What is missing in all these examples is attention to what this text knows about 
itself; or, to cite once more Williams’s claim, that the “work of art is important, only as 
evidence, of a new world it was created to affirm.”  In Heart of Darkness, as that 
oppressive last scene between Marlow and Kurtz’s “Intended” unfolds in its starkly white 
setting where the darkness of mortal irony comes crashing down everywhere, Conrad has 
put us in a position so remarkable, so structured, that his very skill as a narrator has to be 
deployed at least three times to wake us up, to remind us to pay attention to what is going 
on, and to let us see what neither the group of male Company cronies, including, 
presumably, Conrad, nor focally and distinctly, Marlow, can see.  	Note, for example, 
that the ordering of the narrative is double, with one set of breaks, aligned on the telling 
of the story of the journey to Kurtz and the Inner Station, forming chapter boundaries, 
dictated at least in part by the original circumstances of serial publication.  But the other 
set of breaks are breaks in the narrating itself, as either Marlow pauses to reflect on or 
comment on what he is trying to do; or one or more among the company interject, 
indicating not only that they are still awake, but that they responded to very particular 
things.    Such explicit attentional markers provide a crucial kind of intentional 
redundancy, to prevent the reader from assuming that there is a simple truth that someone 
can simply deliver, by keeping the peculiar role of the storyteller, a dual participant in 
what is happening, not just in focus but located by a kind of navigational triangulation 
accomplished in a simpler way in the Book of Jonah.
	In the case of Jonah, a simple inversion of sequence has the effect of both calling 
attention to and blurring the issues of sin, punishment and salvation, as it pertains to 
Jonah himself: put Jonah in the belly of the fish, and then have him sing his psalm about 
calling to God from the belly of hell, and the reader will find a stumbling block that calls 
attention to and blurs the relation of sin to punishment and both to salvation.  There is, 
furthermore, a simple critical test one can apply: does the hypothesis to which you are led 
make it possible for you to go on?  Does it, that is, cause the issues treated by the text to 
open up, to prompt you, as it were, about what to watch for next?  Does it put in your 
path materials that can be strongly connected?  Does it, finally, permit you to go back and 
re-read the text, with the exhilarating sense that what formerly were puzzles, unclarities, 
problems, objectionable places, are now intelligible, and in fact, have transformed the 
way you think and see?
	In Heart of Darkness, the level of complexity of the material far exceeds what one 
finds in Jonah, but it also has, in addition to the double system of segmentation, figures 
that describe with fierce accuracy how the story being told will work.  I refer, of course, 
to the remarkable image Conrad uses to describe the kinds of stories that Marlow tells, in 
contrast to a typical sailor’s yarn: 
	The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which 
lies within the shell of a cracked nut.  But Marlow was not typical (if his 
propensity to spin yarns be excepted) and to him the meaning of an 
episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which 
brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of 
those misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral 
illumination of moonshine. (9)
	Now, when this is the point of the paragraph immediately following the abrupt 
launching of the tale with the motif of darkness, the reader ought to sit up and take notice, 
at least, that this story also knows something about what readers do, including how they 
fall asleep, forget, or grow lazy, hankering after the simplicity of a seaman’s yarn, with 
the meaning lying there, inside the shell of the narrative.  But what does this image 
mean?  What does it indicate or portend?  How can it be taken as instruction (or 
injunction) about what to look for?
	In this case, the radical specificity of the image is not ornamental but functional: the 
meaning is not in the tale, but surrounds it.  Here, that corresponds directly to the party 
aboard the Nellie, involving them, and what they represent, commercial, legal, and 
artistic interests; and, by extension, the whole society of that Europe that had contributed 
to the making of Kurtz (50).  The encounter with Kurtz, then, is, like the glow that brings 
out a haze, not itself what the story is about: it is, through and through, about England, 
about Europe, about the heart of darkness (and the individual hearts of darkness) that 
sustained “the horror, the horror” in the “fantastic invasion” of colonial exploitation.  
Taking the double marking of the text into account, the reader is then put in a position 
precisely parallel to the position occupied by the party on the Nellie, with the critical 
difference that we hear not only Marlow, but the exchanges between Marlow and his 
compatriots, giving us, as readers, a privileged point of vantage.  What we see when we 
look at that glow (the tale, including the narrative of Kurtz, and the narrative of the telling 
of the tale) is different both from what Marlow saw and what his immediate auditors 
heard.
	The reader’s share in the production of meaning is here structurally defined, just as it 
is fully authorized by the details of the text, of which, so to speak, that text itself is fully 
aware.  When as readers, for example, we contemplate that last scene, interpretive 
possibilities warranted by the text are available to us that were not available to Marlow, 
when talking with the Intended, nor to the immediate auditors who cannot know the 
structuring of the narrative in which they are included precisely because they are 
included.  At length, in the narrative, this figure of a glow that brings out a haze connects 
most appositely with Kurtz himself, lying with his head close to the candle he cannot see, 
to put Kurtz absolutely at the center of this story, as he tried to tell his story to Marlow.  
This puts Marlow in the same position as he tries to tell not just Kurtz’s story, but his 
own.
	Consider, then, what Conrad does with the concept of voice, as it plays off against 
the enterprise of writing. When Kurtz writes, his eloquence soars—but then flops, from 
projecting himself as a paternalistic god among heathens to become the vengeful figure 
who scrawls, “Exterminate all of the brutes.”  As Marlow crawls up river, he does not see 
Kurtz and has no image of him at all: he is only a voice. (48, cf. 30)  Once Marlow hears 
it, he understands far better than before why the harlequin Russian sailor (whose 
experience, not coincidentally, matches Conrad’s almost as closely as does the reported 
experience of Marlow) so idolized Kurtz—and recognizes, as he tells the story, that this 
idolatry was by far the most dangerous thing one could encounter (cf. 53-4).  But 
Marlow, in his Buddha-like pose, sits as an idol while these familiar listeners aboard the 
Nellie, by their sometimes stupid interruptions, indicate clearly enough that they are not 
about to be transfixed by the voice of their friend.  
	The problem is, in brief, the power of the voice when not checked by writing, which 
comes to enfold a heart of darkness: one is carried away by eloquence, without criticism, 
and ends up in that abyss of spirit that, arrogating to itself all that it surveys—my station,  
my ivory, my Intended, all the hearts beating in the wilderness—where everything, but 
especially the self, is lost.  But when Marlow has his choice of nightmares, and chooses 
Kurtz, remaining faithful to him to the end, it is because, at the moment of total loss, 
Kurtz did judge, he did choose, he did reject, in those chilling words, “The horror, the 
horror.”  And that is what makes the story needful to tell, just as it makes all its narrative 
complexity necessary. 
	As all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz, so all Europe contributed to the 
horror that Kurtz judged to be so; but only Kurtz made the judgment.  Marlow himself is 
unable to do it, and though he detests and hates a lie, like biting into something poisoned 
(29),  he tells one, literally, to the Intended at the end: confronted with the actuality of a 
person, so desperately and deeply out of it that her voice echoes Kurtz’s, soaring 
unfettered to those noble aims that we can speak to ourselves and our intendeds while the 
darkness of an abyss comes down around it.  The problem with these soaring visions is 
that acting on the words involves one in horrible treachery to the very idea the voice 
proclaims.
	Thus, when Marlow says that for good or ill, his is “ the speech that cannot be 
silenced” (38), the difference between his voice and Kurtz’s is that Marlow reflects on 
the primary act of judgment with which Kurtz ends his life--and crucially, we are reading 
this, not hearing it, in a version that pointedly situates Marlow’s speech with explicit 
reference to the occasion of the telling and to our non-present reading.   Conrad, 
moreover, can then use the instrumentality of Marlow’s voice by putting it in context to 
bring a searing indictment and a judgment upon the whole enterprise of European 
colonialism, holding in the suspension of this exquisitely structured story the whole 
moral complexity of the present case.  It is the story teller’s voice that cannot be silenced, 
standing at one remove; but what he has to tell is his own humiliation or failure—unable 
to judge, unable to report, unable to speak when he comes face to face with the Intended: 
that is reserved for the writer’s pen.  And just here, one can begin to glimpse, as the glow 
brings out the haze, the sense in which Marlow may have lied, but Conrad did not: the 
anomaly of this girl, no longer young, whom we know only as the “Intended,” is told that 
Kurtz’s last words were her name.  
	The homology, overstated, is that the “Intended” is “The horror, the horror,” named 
here by this figure derivable only from the story as written.  Put otherwise, we can say 
that the “Intended” is the very embodiment of Kurtz’s intentions, what he meant to do, 
what he aspired to do.  The horror of those intentions is that they are intentions for good, 
not evil, and will be and should be preserved, no matter what Marlow says or does not 
say on this occasion, in the full moral complexity of their dissociation from their factual 
consequences.  While it may be a nice point, it is nevertheless crucial to the story that 
Conrad does not, in seeing this evil, rush to embrace the Congo as if it were itself 
immune to evil, or, by virtue of being horribly wronged were therefore the locus of 
authentic goodness. The horror is just that until the story is written, as a story that 
explicitly associates intent with act, the consequences of an idea of “civilization” remain 
colorless, crystalline, beautifully deadly, like the “colorless, all-color” of whiteness in 
Melville’s Moby Dick. 
	For a critical reader, the horror conveyed by the written story is the intention 
inscribed in Kurtz and his Intended, the horror of mutually supporting illusions born of 
ecstatic speech and private intuitive claims to know and be able to choose and speak for 
the other in one’s own most secret heart.  It is the power that keeps women out of it, men 
behind it, and people of color under its heel, never able to speak—no, never able to 
write—the truth.  As Kurtz intends good for others, for what Spivak, following Gramsci, 
has called the subaltern peoples,   the good intended is a condition of consciousness that 
we do not speak.  Rather, it is what informs imaginative writing, with the difference that 
the immediacy of voice as presence closes an essential interval between the realm of the 
symbolic and the instant of action, the interval alone in which reflective judgment is 
possible.  It is not just that writing buys us time: it literally creates it as the possibility of 
knowing that we are not actors following a fateful script, but intelligent agents whose 
actions are, mercifully, subject to alteration, but only so long as we remain conscious of 
the complexity of our own intentions.
	The horror of the Intended, and that which makes the intended a horror, is that 
intentions toward and on behalf of the other blinds the would-be benevolent actor to the 
pre-emptive nature of such intentions, to render the other silent, passive, and incapable of 
independent human action.  One would bring civilization, but it proves to be a gift of 
death: in the images of the story, instead of a source of light it is a searing and destructive 
fire.  The story can make this horrific paradox intelligible, but it leaves to the reader the 
task of understanding the outcome of such moments of judgment.  For Marlow not only 
chooses Kurtz, among possible nightmares--and in so choosing, preserves Kurtz as not a 
voice but a character immortalized in this story--he remains firmly committed to the idea 
of civilization which Kurtz recognized, in his own impassioned pursuit of it, to constitute 
“the horror, the horror.”  
	If one considers the well made literary text to constitute a set of instructions or 
injunctions: think about this, imagine this, picture this set of alternatives, there is an 
implied compact that the reader has the free option to decline.  It is the agreement not to 
pretend about the choices that do become intelligible, in the course of reading.  Faced 
with the choice between Kurtz and the director of the middle station, or any, like him, 
serving the flabby god of a “pitiless and rapacious folly,” the difference is precisely that 
Kurtz and the director, both participants in the same repulsive enterprise, are opposites: 
Kurtz’s intentions, to bring the light of civilization, is a pole apart from the director’s 
intention to help out his relatives and block Kurtz’s ambitions.  Kurtz, in brief, has an 
idea of what he intends, and it is therefore amenable to judgment; the director does not, 
but proceeds only at the level of cynically self-interested tactics, where no occasion for 
reflective judgment will ever come up.  Moreover, Conrad knows that there is no choice 
between Kurtz (or the director) and the natives, once there is contact.  The “fantastic 
invasion” that fills in the map, whether those that fill it in declare themselves to be 
serving God or Mammon, can only be prevented by determining absolutely in advance 
that the other, the native, is essentially inferior, cannot be given a choice or even endued 
with human agency, but must be protected against a material process that is neither moral 
nor immoral, nor even amoral, but simply a restless and repeated diaspora that constitutes 
history.  It becomes tragic when it is crass and unconscious, unaware that the other is not 
the intended passive recipient of one’s largesse and good will any more than the other is 
the object and instrument of one’s own enrichment and aggrandizement.  The problem is 
precisely what to do once there is contact, what to do once there is conflict that takes a 
mortal shape between antagonists that are not material equals, to create the possibility of 
moral equality.  Achebe’s charge, that Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist is only 
answerable by returning it in kind, for such a judgment declines to imagine what 
alternatives, what choices could actually have been made.  Achebe the novelist, however, 
knows what Achebe the polemicist forgets: hearts of darkness can be found wherever 
judgments fails; and I submit that this is the insight to which we are forever indebted to 
Joseph Conrad.  
	Thus, for the reader, unlike for any of the immediate or mediated participants, the 
idea worth bowing down to (cf. p.10) is not the idea of England or the Empire, certainly 
not the idea of the white man as the emissary of light to all the dark people of the world, 
and not even the idea of the story teller, the impeccable raconteur.  The idea worth 
bowing down to is that odd condition Marlow describes as a “deliberate belief,” (38)--
odd because the condition of believing is not, ordinarily, something one has to deliberate.  
But here, one does, because it is dead set against the merely traditionary: it is the 
unselfish belief that one’s condition, individually or en masse, is not fated, and need not 
be as bad as one finds it; and the “way we do things,” whoever we are, cannot be 
assumed to be right just by virtue of who “we” are.  Thus, while Marlow shows all the 
signs, he also knows all the dangers of idolatry--even for the idea of the pursuit of the 
good.
	What one needs in the face of idolatry is criticism; and Heart of Darkness not only 
suffers and survives even foolish and mistaken criticism because the form of 
purposiveness that it reveals is in the form of a critical imperative.  Read this book, so as 
to account for what it says, and it becomes clear that criticism is not an option but a 
necessity.  But if one proceeds as if reading were, to recall Whitman, a “half sleep” and 
not a “gymnast’s struggle,”   then one finds yet another locus for the heart of darkness, 
in the careless reader, the inept writer, the dogmatic critic, whose unexamined confidence 
in the rightness of her own or his own opinions reaches only the form, and not the 
purpose, of critical culture.  It does involve conferring a privilege upon imaginative work, 
but with the knowledge that doing otherwise only hides the assumption of privilege in a 
subject that can never see itself. 
	These conclusions, however, help to clarify why it is that this work, as perhaps the 
most thorough indictment of European colonialism in Africa, has seemed so scandalous 
not only to the moral sensibilities of many contemporary critics but to Africans, such as 
Chinua Achebe.  It also becomes clearer why it is that the question of comparative 
evaluations of civilizations, as commended by another African, Kwame Anthony Appiah, 
from an avowedly cosmopolitan perspective, is so easily derailed by any actual case.  It is 
that Heart of Darkness, as a book about Europeans is addressed to Europeans, 
specifically as a scene--or rather, a repeated matrix of scenes--of judgment; and as such, 
it becomes exemplary of how it is that one signally honors the culture to which one owes 
loyalty by calling it into question.  That may itself be the surest indicator that the 
civilization in question is worth defending, perhaps even worth dying for, because it 
intends good, even in the severe complication of recognizing the evil that comes from 
permitting such intentions to soar off into gorgeous eloquence that forgets to imagine the 
concrete reality of lives, different lives, that are themselves caught up in the momentum 
of such civilizing intentions.  Conrad’s novella survives bad criticism because it 
incorporates a subtler and indeed, much sterner critical perspective in its own aesthetic 
structure.  And in suggesting that the best response to Conrad is other novels, like 
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, I mean to call attention to the fact that Achebe’s book, as 
itself a book about Africa that is also addressed to Africans, even as it serves as a kind of 
reply to European readers, has the same kind of internal critical correction that arises not 
only from conscious intent, but from the intrinsic intentionality of imaginative reasoning 
itself.
	If we think of literary works, accordingly, as forms of inquiry, and as modes of 
experimentation, the kind of knowledge they afford us returns to the scene of judgment 
when any person views his or her own culture and its values, not from the position of 
partiality alone, but with something like the benevolence recommended by Jonathan 
Edwards, in which judgment is just, and is the opposite of a humiliating condemnation.
	For Conrad, this involves also a condition of faith that, in these skeptical times, 
seems redolent of mystification, but remains strangely proof against it.   In distinguishing 
between the thinker or the scientist who write from and to common sense, Conrad 
critically insists on the artist, who makes his appeal 
	...to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because 
of the war-like conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight 
within the more resisting and hard qualities—like the vulnerable body 
within a steel armour.  His appeal is less loud, more profound, less 
distinct, more stirring—and sooner forgotten.  Yet its effect endures 
forever.  The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, 
questions facts, demolishes theories.  But the artist appeals to that in us 
which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently 
enduring.  He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the 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; to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in 
aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, 
which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to 
the unborn.”  


   See, for example,  Frances B. Singh’s “The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness,”  in Conradiana 10 
(1978), 41-54, reprinted in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, edited by Robert Kimbrough, third edition 
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1988),  268-280.  (I will cite this popular teaching edition as Kimbrough).  
While Singh acknowledges that Conrad’s novella may be “one of the most powerful indictments of 
colonialism ever written” (268), she finds in the title metaphor three “levels,” that end up “working against 
each other.” (271)  “On one level [the heart of darkness] indicates merely the geographical location of the 
Belgian Congo and the color of its inhabitants.”  A second level pertains to “the evil practices of the 
colonizers of the Congo, ... and suggests that the real darkness is not in Africa but in Europe...” (270)  The 
third level Singh views as “psychological in meaning,” and pertains to “abomination,” and depravity.  But 
Singh then concludes, “Historically Marlow would have us feel that the Africans are the innocent victims 
of the white man’s heart of darkness; psychologically and metaphysically, he would have us believe that 
they have the power to turn the white man’s heart black.  That is, Marlow equates the primitive with the 
evil and physical blackness of Africans with a spiritual darkness.  The physical is confused with the 
metaphysical, the literal with the metaphorical.” (271)  Chinua Achebe in “An Image of Africa: Racism in 
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness “ in Massachusetts Review 18 (1977), 782-94, reprinted in Kimbrough, 251-
262, dispenses with such discriminations in the spirit of proper polemic, to declare, “Heart of Darkness 
projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a 
place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.” (252).   
See discussion below.
   Kimbrough, 12.  The same point is mentioned in A Personal Record (1912) reprinted in Kimbrough, 148.
   Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” quoted from Lauter, The Heath Anthology of American 
Literature, rev. edition, 1533-4: “When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever 
book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.”  See also C. S. Peirce’s account of observation, 
quoted above in note 22.
   Quoted from Kimbrough, 257.  See note 32 above.  
   Achebe begins his article, for example, with two anecdotes, one a remark of an “older man,” who finds it 
“funny” that Achebe, whom he had taken for a student, was in fact a teacher of African literature, since the 
man “never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff,” and the second, a set of letters from high 
school students in Younkers who, having read Things Fall Apart, were pleased to have learned about “the 
customs and superstitions of an African tribe.” (251).
   Mark Platts, Ways of Meaning: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Language  (London: Routledge & 
Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 255.
   Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Fawcett, 1959), cf. pp. 74, 118, 137, 141.
   Reprinted in Murfin, 179-195.  In taking Conrad’s novella as a “story about manly adventure” within 
which there is a “collusion of imperialism and patriarchy,” Smith concludes that “Marlow’s narrative aims 
to ‘colonize’ and ‘pacify’ both savage darkness and women.” (180).  As she notes, “the full Chinese-box 
complexity of Marlow’s narrative is beyond the scope of my essay” (182); but beyond this point, she does 
not consider whether any of the complexity of the narrative even has a bearing on the sufficiency of her 
critique of ideology, as it applies to this text.
   Reprinted in Kimbrough, 268-280. See note 43 above.
   This structural duality is important as evidence, for both the reader and the narrator alike that the story is 
not only telling something, but doing or performing something.  The crucial breaks come either when 
Marlow pauses to reflect, turning to address his listeners directly; or when they interrupt, eliciting from him 
a response to comments they make (but which are not directly reported) as indices of points were Marlow’s 
narration appears to violate their common sense or moral sensibility--or his own.  See especially, pp. 30, 
36, 49.
   See Moby Dick,  chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” p. 1001.
   See Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by 
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271-313.
   See “Democratic Vistas” in James E. Miller, ed., Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (Boston: 
Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 500.
   From the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, reprinted in Kimbrough, p.224.