I just finished Heart of Darkness and it's hard to figure out how much of the racism in the book is Conrad using a character like Marlow to explore the racist colonial mindset of people at the time – and how much is simply Conrad's own racism spewing out.
However it seemed to me that a core part of the book was that this racist coloniser is only able to scratch the surface of the Depths of horror being committed in Africa. And I'm wondering if anyone else thought this.
Kurtz's last words "The horror! The horror!" and the seeming "love" expressed by a woman ad they take him away seems to pick st the idea that Kurtz had the true horror of the situation laid bare within and it sort of drove him mad. That his ivory hoarding seems aimless.
It seems the character Marlow, whether intentional or not, simply cannot truly reckon with the reality of the horror at play in a way that Kurtz seemed to have. But there's one passage where he seems to have a moment of existential cosmic dread.
"I think – would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I didn't believe them at first- -the thing seemed So impossible. The fact is I was completely unnerved by the sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What made this emotion so overpowering
was—how shall I define it?—the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly. This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and then the
asual sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the possibility of a sudden onslaught and massacre, or something of the kind, which
saw impending, was positively welcome and composing. It pacified me, in fact, so much, that I did not raise an alarm.
I was wondering if there's an idea that this colonial racist mindset is impossible to truly divorce form. And even someone like Marlow, at best, can have a moment of clarity – but won't fundamentally change. After all, when he retells his tale, Marlow continues to describe Africans in racist stereotypes. He uses the n-word frequently etc. The fact Marlow is still going out on the Boats of the colonists at the end.
Almost as if it's a story of a racist coloniser that travels to the Depths of a Hell of his people's making. And at best it gave him pause.
But I don't know how much this is coloured by a 21st century mindset or how much Conrad is making a point.
by aphidman