An important theme arising from this is how the individual reacts when he is cut off from his customary environment and put in an alien, natural environment. “Out there there were no external checks.”(p.26) Marlow, like Kurtz, is tempted to give in to the wilderness. Conrad makes it clear that for most white men, the temptation is ivory and that many have become brutalised in their desire to acquire it, exploiting the natives without scruple. Marlow himself is not tempted by ivory but nevertheless is swayed by the sheer power of nature and the enigma of the primeval forest. It is in the heart of this forest – ‘the heart of darkness’ that Kurtz lives. Although Marlow doesn’t know what awaits him, a link is suggested between man’s lust for ivory and the forest as a place where he is tempted to yield to his base instincts. That Marlow himself is aware that his morality is being put to the test and that he attempts to understand the significance of his experience is what sets him apart from Kurtz. In that landscape he can either be “swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind” (p.49) or like Kurtz, let “the powers of darkness claim him for their own.” (p.60) Kurtz is too weak not to succumb: he is seduced by it and lulled into believing that he is an omnipotent power, supreme ruler of his world, he totally blinded to the fact that in reality the wilderness of nature had “drawn him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts” (p.76), and that he is in fact in thrall to it. When Marlow eventually finds Kurtz he is deeply shaken by what he sees and hears and he tries to “break the spell,” but it is too late and Kurtz dies. His last words, “The horror! The horror!” (p 86) have been widely interpreted, but seem to suggest to Marlow at least, “a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on earth” in other words a final awareness of what he is. Marlow also claims that “it has candour, it has conviction – it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth.” When Marlow himself returns from the Congo he comments, ‘it was my imagination that wanted soothing,’ (p 88), acknowledging that his own imaginative power and the capacity for moral discrimination that influences it had also been put to the test and that it had been a struggle not to succumb like Kurtz. Marlow suggest that it is not the white man’s conscience or innate superiority that keeps him on the straight path but his fear of the policeman and of public opinion. It brings to mind Tennyson’s description of ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ – and underlines the Darwinian view that while civilisation has socialised man and given him a framework of morality, underneath that he is only a highly evolved animal: put back into an unmediated natural environment he can easily revert to brutality and savagery.
“Heart of Darkness” is set in an age of colonialism, when the white man had begun to exploit the natural resources of the world for money and glory, changing the natural environment irrevocably in the process. In “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy a cataclysmic and, we assume, man-made event has not just changed the environment, but destroyed it. The narrative, like “Heart of Darkness,” also describes a journey, as an unnamed father and son head south through a desolate American landscape along a deserted highway towards the sea, in a vague hope that conditions will be better there. The author describes a hellish post-apocalyptic landscape where nature has been destroyed and can no longer sustain human or animal life. The few survivors do what they can to stay alive. Whereas Conrad is describes a vivid world of contrasts, of light and darkness, where nature is something great and invincible, bigger than man, McCarthy describes a world where man has actually managed to destroy nature. The world is described in shades of grey, devoid of colour, where everything is covered in ash. If Africa is the cradle of humanity, then this hellish imagined vision of America is surely its graveyard. The boy is too young to know any different, but his father remembers how things used to be: “In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.” (p92.) All the beauty and power of nature is achingly remembered in that vivid description. Yet he must explain to the boy the phrase “as the crow flies” (p156) which he uses unthinkingly, a remnant from his old life, because the boy has no knowledge of any kind of bird. There are no birds in the new world.
Marlow describes the trip up the river as a journey back in time, to a “prehistoric earth” (p.40.) This remark reflects the European inclination to view colonized peoples as primitive, further back on the evolutionary scale than Europeans. The prevailing view was also that the savage was somehow at one with nature while the civilised white man had become alienated from it. In “The Road” this alienation became so great that man forgot his essential dependence upon it and so destroyed it. Mankind has come full circle, reduced to savagery and barbarism and the strong literally eat the weak (groups of cannibals roam the countryside looking for human prey.)
Both novels explore in different ways what it means to be human when the trappings of civilisation are taken away and although no glib answers are provided by either, both indicate that, although difficult, it is possible to keep a sense of morality. So what seems to save Marlow is his belief in the dignity of work, which helps him resist the appeal of the wilderness: “I like what it is to work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality.” (p 44) For the father it is love. For the love of his son he tries his utmost to keep hope alive with the prospect of a better life once they reach the coast, and it is what stops him from succumbing to savagery because he cannot bear for his son’s simple belief that they are “the good guys” to be shattered. Yet both these novels never let us forget that mankind is ultimately a part of nature and utterly dependent on it, and that alongside our rational, ‘civilised’ self, there is a much baser, instinctual side to our nature which can be repressed but never destroyed.
Word count : 1,571
Bibliography
Conrad J Heart of Darkness Penguin Classics 2007
McCarthy C The Road Picador 2009
