Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

94. Terror Within!--Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

          "He must meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I had a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced" (Conrad 247). This passage from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Harper & Row 1967) echoes the sentiment of Kurtz, existential hero and symbol of progress whose ambition leads him into the darkest recesses of the Congo in search of fortune from the ivory trade. As a tragic figure, Kurtz sacrifices love, talent, and prominence to discover sadly that his untimely death in this primitive environment deprives him of achieving those goals which ironically had been within his reach. Conrad uses irony, symbolism, and naturalism to create a tone of loss and betrayal, as the hero undergoes the transformation from a young and robust idealist to that of a weak and dying fatalist. Kurtz's transition for innocence to awareness corresponds with the narrator's view of him, as the young seaman-narrator ingratiates himself to him during those final days. The author depicts these two characters' coming of age as they realize that the dreams of life, like the sad case of Icarus, have been merely dangled before their eyes, as delusions of achievement and notoriety. In this setting, as in Victory and Nostromo, Conrad censures the ideals of western imperialism at the expense of Third-World countries. Conrad creates the following image of death to indict the industrial world for its criminal mistreatment of the undeveloped nations: "Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And that place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die." The young narrator goes on to say, "They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom" (226). Conrad uses irony and invective to contrast empty accomplishments of the white, educated bookkeeper with the contorted bodies of the dead surrounding him, all in the name of western progress , giving the starving black strings of beads and brass wire in exchange for "a precious trickle of ivory" (226-227). The author appropriately uses the word inferno to describe these heaps of death and disease (225). Unfortunately, this cruel practice, in one form or another, continues into the twenty-first century, be it for gold, diamonds, oil, or water. Speaking for Conrad, the young explorer bitterly criticizes the El Dorado Exploring Expedition and its goal: "To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe" (241). " As Thomas Carlyle affirms in Sartor Resartus, "If Clothes, in these times, 'so tailorize and demoralize us,' have they no redeeming value; can they not be altered to serve better; must they of necessity be thrown to the dogs?," so does Conrad suggests that the rags of European progress fail to clothe us spiritually or emotionally. In fact, the road to progress has led nineteenth-century industrialists into a world of mystery and darkness that commands a totally different set of values, one which compels Kurtz to search within the darkness of his own soul to discover the truth. Tragically, the hero describes his untimely fate as one of horror and loss. In his Recollections: An Autobiography (1997), Viktor Frankl suggests, "The experiential evidence confirms the survival value of the 'will to meaning' and of self-transcendence—the reaching out beyond ourselves for something other than ourselves" (Frankl 97). In his Natur and Idee, C. G. Carus writes, "The highest aspiration of the conscious mind, the attainment of God, can be approached only by its submission to the deepest of what to us is purely unconscious." In essence, Kurtz's merging of material and spiritual goals creates in him a metaphysical tension which Conrad uses to enhance his theme of fatalism and irony. Psychologically, Kurtz must undergo what Carl Jung calls individuation, a term describing the psychological process of transformation ending with a stage "characterized by a conscious dialectic relationship between ego and Self" (Jung in Edinger 7). In his book Why Men Fight (1916), Bertrand Russell calls for a type of spiritual transformation which the civilized world must undergo to be saved from decay. He suggests a change in the world's economic structure and in its philosophy of life (Russell 266). From a theological point of view, Kurtz experiences a Kierkegaardian form of despair, or Sartrean nausea ; however from a literary perspective, his ideals fail as a result of Conrad's cleverly contrived, fatalistically designed universe, much like the victims of Shakespearean tragedy.