Kurtz is mysterious, just as Africa is mysterious. Marlow penetrates into both mysteries. The title of Joseph Conrad's novella first appears in Marlow's description of his journey upriver: "We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness." (Dell, p. 69) In addition to traveling into the interior of tropical Africa, Marlow and his men travel back in time, thereby encountering, perhaps, something of what Kurtz refers to when he cries, "The horror! The horror!":
"We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign--and no memories." (pp. 69-70)
Nietzsche warned us not to peer into the abyss. Characters (and presumably authors) in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, from 2023) fail to heed that warning. But their abysses are within themselves rather than outward in the cosmos. They are empty inside. Inside themselves they have created and nursed and cultivated voids. Kurtz is empty inside, too, and comes from a kind of void. Marlow calls him a "wraith from the back of Nowhere." (p. 88) Referring to human heads on posts outside his abode, Marlow says:
"They only showed that 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 . . . ." (p. 99; emphasis added, ellipses in the original)
Marlow's assessment is echoed in Caitlín R. Kiernan's short story "Night Fishing," when the narrator says: "That night on the lake, it saw my face [. . . .] It saw something wrong with my soul. It saw an easy mark." So is that an allusion or reference to Heart of Darkness? Or is it a case of one author arriving independently at the same kind of conclusion as another?
In my Dell edition of Heart of Darkness, a previous owner underlined different passages and made notes in the margins. This person's marginalia on the passage above reads:
". . . is horror, horror out there or in here?"
A perceptive question and one that gets to an issue with Weird Tales #367, namely that the horror that many of its characters experience is not actually cosmic because it isn't "out there" but "in here." Their horror is about themselves and their own self-made voids. I would add that their inner voids are not very interesting. Kurtz's problems are more so. Kurtz is obviously the greater man. But in the end, maybe Kurtz, to match his small stature, is also a small man. He need not have descended into Nowhere or dived into his inner emptiness.
(Remember that the meaning of the word utopia is "nowhere" and that Samuel Butler had written a book called Erewhon, its title an anagram for nowhere, published in 1872. Remember the Beatles song "Nowhere Man," too.)
Later on Marlow says of Kurtz:
"But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had--for my sins, I suppose--to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it--I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself." (p. 111)
Like the characters in the Cosmic Horror Issue--or they are like he is--Kurtz is a man without faith.
I have one more image of Kurtz, who now lies on his deathbed. Marlow remembers:
"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines." (p. 114)
Kurtz has fallen into an abyss--is it a Nietzschean abyss?--and Marlow peers in after him. Marlow backs away from the abyss, but for Kurtz it's too late. And then Kurtz cries his last words: "'The horror! The horror!'" (p. 114)
To be concluded . . .
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| Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was first in Blackwood's Magazine No. 1000, a "Special Double Number" published one hundred twenty-six years ago this month, in February 1899, the last February of the nineteenth century. The magazine is also called Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. |
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
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