Conrad’s narrator, unfolds his tale to three men in a yawl at the mouth of the
Thames. His nightmare experience has affected him more seriously than he realizes.
Impressed against his will by Kurtz’s intensity, he found that, back in Brussels, he
could not tell Kurtz’s ‘Intended’ the truth of his last words, ‘The horror! The horror!’
He says instead that Kurtz’s last words were ‘your name’, whereupon he hears ‘an
exulting and terrible cry, of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. “I knew
it – I was sure!” ’ These are the words of the Intended, yet it is not clear that the cry
comes from her only, for the story is also a fable about evil, and Marlow too has been
partly possessed by it. The story ends with the Thames ‘leading into the heart of an
immense darkness’.
That darkness is the darkness of the human heart, but also that of London and of
the nature of empire. Marlow has three hearers: a Director of Companies, an
Accountant and a Lawyer. ‘ “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of
the dark places of the earth.” ’ Britannia, he explains, would have looked ‘dark’ to a
young Roman naval commander waiting to invade. London is like imperial Rome,
but also like commercial Brussels, directed by companies, accountants and lawyers.
The conquest of Britannia, as described by Tacitus in his Agricola (AD98), is paral-
lelled with the exploitation of the Congo: a defiant African queen on the banks of
the river is described in terms which echo Tacitus’ account of the British queen
Boadicea; and Kurtz’s enclosure, decorated with human heads, is like Tacitus’ grove
of the druids in Anglesey. Conrad detested the Russian empire, and he had spent
many years carrying goods about the French, British and Dutch Empires. Marlow
tells his friends that the Roman administration was ‘merely a big squeeze’, and that
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have
a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when
you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only ... something you can set
up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to ....This portentous talk is true, and untrue, in ways that Marlow (and the reader at this
point) cannot see. Besides its dramatic irony,Heart of Darkness is a parable with
moral, psychological and spiritual aspects. Its heavily mannered narration generates
claustrophobia. Dickens’s drama is looser, James’s scrutiny is more refined, but
English prose had not seen anything of this dense universality before. In Conrad’s
maturer work, gesture and narrative become less obtrusive.
Nostromo
Other noted wor ks are Victory and The Shadow Line, with three major novels,
Nostromo,Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, of which Nostromo is the
ac knowledged masterpiece. Its opening shows Conrad’s rhythmical balance:
In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco – the
luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity – had never been
commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local
trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that,
needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built
on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of
Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf.
Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken
rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from
the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as ifFICTION 333