Conrad’s Horror: Heart of Darkness and the Imaginary of Power

Abstract

In 1890 Joseph Conrad travelled into the Congo Free State. Heart of Darkness appeared in 1899. Yet this text, standing at the inauguration of the twentieth century, and with its intimations of generalised bloodshed, racism, and murder, is not straightforwardly autobiographical. Today’s critics tend to treat with some marked scepticism the dogged efforts of biographers such as Norman Sherry in attempting to relate every section of Conrad’s oeuvre to some concrete aspect of his life. And yet, equally obviously, nor is Heart of Darkness straightforwardly a work of narrative fiction. One might say that it is the record of a spiritual journey that is captured in the form of the ‘necessary lie’ of fiction.¹ But, if so, whose spiritual journey is it? Conrad’s own, arguably; his hero Marlow’s evidently. Yet, in a sense, this journey belongs to nobody in particular. Rather, it belongs to the future, or at least to something that is beyond the immediacy of its own time. Heart of Darkness is a spiritual journey not least in so far as it is something like prophecy. As such, Heart of Darkness would have an honoured place in any genealogy of twentieth-century subjectivities of power. It almost amounts, among other things, to a treatise on the forms of power trialled during that burdened epoch and, above all, on the links between power, ethics, and knowledge during that era. It is also, then, a treatise on evil and barbarism, and a kind of spiritual prophecy relating to these phenomena.