E. N. Dorall, author of “Conrad and Coppola: Different Centres of Darkness”, explains Kurtz's loss of his identity. Daring to face the consequences of his nature, he loses his identity; unable to be totally beast and never able to be fully human, he alternates between trying to return to the jungle and calling to mind in grotesque terms his former idealism. Kurtz discovered, “A voice! A voice!” It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength and becem hidden inside him, inside the barren darkness of his heart. However, both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated battled for the ownership of that soul satisfied with primitive emotions, avid of lying, fame, of pretense distinction, of all the appearances of success and power. Unavoidably Kurtz collapses, “his last words epitomising his experience, The horror! The horror!” (Dorall 306). The reason that Kurtz’s last words are “the horror, the horror” is because of his self realisation; concerning the mistakes he committed whilst in Africa. The colonizers' cruelty towards the natives and their lust for ivory also is magnified in Kurtz's horror. The white men, who came to the Congo claiming that they would bring progress and light to darkest Africa, have themselves been deprived of the sanctions of their European social orders. The theoretical purpose of the colonizers' traveling into Africa was to civilize the natives. Instead, the Europeans took the natives' land away from them using force and destruction. They burned their towns, stole their property, and enslaved them. “Enveloping the horror of Kurtz is the Congo Free State of Leopold II, totally corrupt though to all appearances established to last for a long time” (Dorall 309). The circumstances and conditions described in Heart of Darkness reflect the horror of Kurtz's words: the chain gangs, the grove of death, the payment in brass rods, the cannibalism and the human skulls on the fence posts.
“Africans bound with thongs that contracted in the rain and cut to the bone, had their swollen hands beaten with rifle butts until they fell off. Chained slaves were forced to drink the white man's defecation, hands and feet were chopped off for their rings, men were lined up behind each other and shot with one cartridge, wounded prisoners were eaten by maggots till they died and were then thrown to starving dogs or devoured by cannibal tribes” (Meyers 100).
The colonizers enslaved the natives to do their biding; the cruelty practiced on the black workers were of the white man's mad and greedy rush for ivory. “The unredeemable horror in the story is the duplicity, cruelty, and venality of Europeans officialdom” (Levenson 401). Civilization is only preserved by maintaining illusions. Juliet Mclauchlan, author of “The Value and Significance of Heart of Darkness”, stated that every colonizer in Africa is to blame for the horror, which took place within. Kurtz's moral judgment applies supremely to his own soul, but his final insight is all encompassing; looking upon humanity in full awareness of his own degradation, he projects his debasement, failure, and hatred universally.
“Realizing that any human soul may be fascinated, held irresistible, by what it rightly hates, his stare is wide enough to embrace the whole universe, wide and immense.... embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe” (Mclauchlan 384).
The darkness of Africa contrasts and collides with the evils of Europe upon Kurtz's last words. Kurtz realized that all he had been taught to believe in, to operate from, was a mass of horror and greed standardized by the colonizers. As you can see in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Kurtz painted a painting releasing his knowledge of the horror and what is to come. A painting of a blindfolded woman carrying a lighted torch was discussed in the book. The background was dark, and the effect of the torch light on her face was sinister. The oil painting suggests the blind and stupid ivory company, deceitfully leading people to believe that besides the ivory they were taking out of the jungle, they were, at the same time, bringing light and progress and civilization to the jungle. Kurtz, stripped away of his culture by the greed of other Europeans, stands both literally and figuratively naked. He has lost all restraint in himself and has lived off the land like an animal. He has been exposed to desire, yet cannot comprehend it. His horror tells us his mistakes and that of Europe's. His mistakes of greed for ivory, his mistakes of lust for a mistress and his mistakes of assault on other villages, were all established when he was cut off from civilization. When Conrad wrote what Kurtz's last words were to be, he did not exaggerate or invent the horrors that provided the political and humanitarian basis for his attack on colonialism. Conrad's Kurtz mouths his last words, “The horror! The horror!” as a message to himself and, through Marlow, to the entire world. However, he did not really explain the meaning of his words to Marlow before his death. By means of Marlow's summary and moral reactions, we come to realise the possibilities of the meaning rather than a definite meaning- there are various ways that the words can be comprehended but these meanings all boil down to the same thing- the evils of the colonizers and their repressive brutal acts that they committed in (largely central, hence the heart) of Africa I think that the message means more to Marlow and the readers than it does to Kurtz. The horror to Kurtz became the nightmare between Europe and Africa. To Marlow, Kurtz's last words came through what he saw and experienced along the way into the Inner Station. To me, Kurtz's horror shadows every human, who has some form of darkness deep within their heart, waiting to be unleashed, it gives a hint toward anyone who has ever felt impurity within themselves, and one recognizes the internal primitive longings, the natural internal desire that is so evil. “The horror that has been perpetrated, the horror that descends as judgment, either in this pitiless and empty death or in whatever domination there could be to come” (Stewart 366). Once the horror was unleashed, there was no way of again restraining it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
E.N. Dorall · Conrad and Coppola: Different Centres of Darkness
Michael Levenson · The Value of Facts in Heart of Darkness
Garrett Stewart · Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness
Juliet McLauchlan · The "Value" and "Significance" of Heart of Darkness
John Meyers - The Frontier on Which Heart of Darkness Stands
