“It was the farthest point of navigation and culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me------and into my thoughts.” Knowing he is going to fulfill his dream in childhood and expecting his prospect as glorious and glamorous as that of those great man “of whom the nation is proud”. Marlow directly correlates light with knowledge and cognizance. While imperialism worshipped in his mind as light, civility, the dark African jungle is experienced by the man, now a servant to the colonialism, as an alien cosmos whose every aspect violates his concepts of intelligibility and congruity. This can be seen in his description of the vacant, deaf landscape of the dark jungles. ”We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness”, ”going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world……” ”We were traveling in the night of first ages.” As “the earliest beginning of the world,” “might of first ages”, darkness here associates with the savagery and ignorance. Furthermore, when he first learns of Kurtz’s activities in the jungle, he attributes Kurtz’s moral downfall to his disconnection with civilization and civility. “Never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, this very arch of this blazing sky appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.” The darkness here explicitly equals corruption, degradation and the detestation.
However, as Marlow proceeds deeper into the heart of darkness, this metaphor begins to shift, the civility, knowledge, glory attached to light begin to fade, and savagery, ignorance, detestation suggested by darkness gradually become less intense. He is led to make a distinction between the surface truth and the hidden truth----“the overwhelming reality” which can only be gained experientially. He saw how the white “civilized” men, boasting “anything, anything can be done in this country” slaughter, suppress and exploit the black natives. He comes to realize that the black society, not savagery as he originally supposes, rather “has a right to exist”. He states “I’ve seen devils of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but by all the stars! These were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils that swayed and drove men-men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later,” “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 attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.” With those atrocities committed in the blinding sunshine by the white men, the established bright begins to imply wickedness, savagery and cruelty of imperialism and colonialism; and the blacks, tortured, overworked and reducing from human to shapes by “civilization”, begin to appear in the dim light, which implies Marlow realizes they are not as evil or insane as he imagines, but are sick, starving, dying, hopeless and weak. The “dim light” here also suggests Marlow’s half awareness.
The metaphor comes full circle, when Marlow sees Kurtz’s sketch in the manager’s station. In that sketch, “the background was somber, almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister.” Kurtz’s sketch of a blindfold posts against a black background and carrying a torch that casts sinister light on her face transforms Europe’s traditional figure of justice into an image of that continent’s arrogant, unseeing and unjust invasion of Africa. Marlow’s understanding of civilization is here fundamentally changed: the civility of the imperialism he initially thinks of as rational and glorious turns out to be blind and degraded. Light, at this phase, is equated with sin, ignorance and blindness. On the other hand, the darkness in Kurtz’s last moment serves as the metonym of ultimate knowledge. “His stare could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.” “His was an impenetrable darkness.” Kurtz, whose pursuit of profit and power, nurtured in the specific circumstances where “the bounds of permitted aspiration” has appeared illimitable, drives himself to flee the society of his peers to enter a universe where he is a god to the lakeside tribes of wilderness, repeats “horror, horror” in his dying bed. It is not the horror of the darkness and the wilderness of the black jungles, but of his own greed to despoil the land he craves to possess and of his own fate as the victim of “terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion.” Kurtz realizes it finally in the ultimate darkness.
Back to Europe, Marlow withholds the real story of Kurtz’s life and death from his Intended, a woman with fair hair, pale visage and pure brow, because “It would have been too dark----too dark altogether……” Marlow implies ladies, like Kurtz’s Intended living in the fantasy created by the imperial, would be incapable of assimilating the profound truths. Darkness and blackness here signify positive qualities: immanent in Africa’s dark wilderness are “overwhelming realities” and “invincible truths” inaccessible to empiricist modes of cognition and outside the narrow range of experience ratified by western cultures.
In the end, the Thames “leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky-----seeming to lead into the heart of the immense darkness.” This significant ending intensifies the meaning of the darkness, Marlow’s moral, that shrouding in darkness may be the reality, truth, and light about civilization.
In this novella, Conrad, through his depiction of a special geography location, a metaphysical landscape, a society of the colonists and the oppressed blacks, creates a strong contrast of light and darkness to reveal the cruelty, savagery, ignorance, arrogance and decadence of imperialism, and express his sympathy for the sick, hopeless, weak blacks and their emaciated culture and civilization. Therefore, Heart of Darkness is an attack on imperialism and a parable about the construction of the ethical values.
