the natives' energy and instincts have been corrupted by materialistic, overly rational imperialists, we can see that the charge of racism is itself reductive.
It is useful to place Heart of Darkness in its cultural context. The story speaks to major turn-of-the-century concerns: the breakdown of moral certainty, the sense that each of us lives in a closed circle, and the consequent fear of solipsism. Conrad feared that each of us is locked in his or her own perceptions and despaired in his letters that even language will not help us reach out to others. Thus, the fear that 'we live, as we dream-alone' is also an idea that recurs throughout the period of early modernism, a period in which humans felt, to quote the philosopher F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality, that 'my experience is a closed circle; a circle closed from the outside… In brief… the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.' That the frame narrator can retell to his audience the story shows that Marlow has communicated with someone and offers a partial antidote to the terrifying fear of isolation and silence that haunted Conrad. Conrad's narrative demonstrates how the Africans and Europeans share a common humanity: the -693- English too were once natives conquered by the Romans, and England too was once one of the dark places of the earth. Moreover, Europeans not only require laws and rules to restrain their atavistic impulses, but they become more monstrous than those they profess to civilize. Finally, terms like «savage» and «barbarian» are arbitrary designations by imperialists who in fact deserve these epithets more than the natives.
As an allegory of reading, Heart of Darkness resists easy simplifications and one-dimensional readings, resists attempts to explain in either/or terms. Even as Heart of Darkness remains a text that raises questions about the possibility of meaning, it suggests the plenitude of meaning. Just as Marlow gradually moves from seeing a drama of values to living a drama of characters, so as readers do we. Like him, we make the journey from spectator to participant. Are we not trying to make sense of Marlow as he is trying to make sense of Kurtz? And are we not also trying to make sense of the frame narrator who is trying to make sense of Marlow making sense of Kurtz? Does not the tale's emphasis on choosing a sign for our systems of meaning call attention to the arbitrary nature of choosing a framing sign and make us aware of the need for multiple perspectives? Do we not learn how one invests with value something not seen or known in preference to the ugly reality that confronts us? Is not Conrad's ironic parable about belief itself, including the Christian belief in whose name much of imperialism was carried on? Thus, in essence, the tale urges us toward a pluralistic perspective. Finally, one-dimensional readings bend to the need for a pluralistic reading that takes account of Marlow's disillusionment and his magnetic attraction to Kurtz as the nightmare of his choice. For Conrad has turned a story about a present journey to Africa into a journey through Europe's past, as well as into each human being's primitive psyche.
The Congo experience has plunged Marlow into doubt and confusion. Sitting 'apart, indistinct, and silent' in his ascetic Buddha pose, Marlow is deliberately trying to separate himself from the cynicism and hypocrisy that he associates with Europeans. As in 'Youth,' while Marlow is telling the story he arrests the future, places his back against the present, and becomes part of the created world of his own imagination. The tale Marlow tells becomes not only a version of but an epistemological quest into 'the culminating point of my experience.' The experience proves recalcitrant to Marlow's efforts to understand it. Marlow's probing mind cannot impose an interpretation on Kurtz: 'The thing -694- was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible-it was not good for one either-trying to imagine.' Part of his hostility to his audience derives from his own frustrated desire to discover the language that will make his experience comprehensible to himself. Marlow's is the voice of a man desperately trying to create meaning; unlike Kurtz, who 'could get himself to believe anything,' Marlow has trouble convincing himself that there is the possibility of belief. Marlow's narration is a quest for the symbols and signs to explain the darkness that still haunts his imagination. Ernest Cassirer, in The Logic of the Humanities, provides a helpful gloss: 'The possibility and necessity of… a 'breaking free' of the limitations of individuality emerges nowhere so clearly and indubitably as in the phenomenon of speech. The spoken word never originates in the mere sound or utterance. For a word is an intended meaning. It is construed within the organic whole of a 'communication, and communication 'exists' only when the word passes from one person to another.'
Marlow's experience in the Congo invalidated his belief that civilization equaled progress. While Kurtz, the man who seemed to embody all the accomplishments of civilization, reverted to savagery, the cannibals showed some semblance of the «restraint» that makes civilization possible. Kurtz was a poet, painter, musician, journalist, potential political leader, a 'universal genius' of Europe, a man who 'had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort,' and yet once he traveled to a place where the earliest beginnings of the world still survived, the wilderness awakened 'brutal instincts' and 'monstrous passions.'
Marlow's journey from Europe to the Congo helped prepare him to sympathize with Kurtz. From the outset he was offended by the standards and perspectives of the European imperialists, and gradually he began to sympathize with the natives against the predatory colonialists. As an idle passenger on a boat taking him to the Congo, he caught glimpses of the inanity which he later encountered as an involved participant. Even then, he saw the fatuity of the «civilized» French manof-war's shelling the bush: 'Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech-and nothing happened.'
Soon, more than Marlow's Calvinistic belief in the redemptive powers of purposeful labor was offended. He viewed the company's outer -695- station from an ironic standpoint, noticing the neglected machinery, lying like an animal's «carcass»; the 'objectless blastings'; and the native workers, their rags resembling tails, chained together as if they were a team of mules. He mocked the folly of those who put out fires with buckets that have holes in the bottom and who considered diseased and starving men «enemies» and 'criminals.' His original epistemological stance, dependent not upon a naive, idealized conception of the trading company's commercial ventures but simply upon his belief that European civilization represents a tradition of humane values, was shaken. He began to realize that this version of civilization is not an 'emissary of light' but an instance of exploitative imperialism at its worst. After arriving at the Central Station, Marlow's quest soon focused on discovering an alternative to the amoral pragmatism and cynicism illustrated by the manager and his uncle. The manager's only objection to Kurtz's abominations was that the results were unsatisfactory.
Conrad has Marlow describe his quest to meet Kurtz in romance terms to suggest ironically Marlow's kinship with folk and legendary heroes who also search for miracles and magicians to solve their problems and relieve their anxieties. Standing in the blood of his helmsman, Marlow could only think that Kurtz was dead, and that he would never be able to speak to Kurtz. It was as if he were frustrated in a journey to consult an oracle. After discovering that Kurtz had 'taken a high seat among the devils of the land,' he did not renounce his existential commitment to Kurtz m as 'the nightmare of my choice'; Kurtz still seemed preferable to the hypocrisy and malignity of the Europeans who have deprived language of its meaning, civilization of its ideals, and life of its purpose. Marlow, formerly a representative of European civilization, desperately identified with a man he knew to be ostracized by that civilization. Ironically, Marlow turned only to a different form of greed and egotism; Kurtz's atavistic impulses- modeled perhaps on the Belgian King Leopold's predatory imperialism-have a magnitude and purity that contrast with the pettiness and niggling greed of the imperialists.
We do not know how perceptive Marlow was when he met Kurtz, but Marlownow knows that Kurtz was without the restraint that even the helmsman and other cannibals had: 'Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts… there was something wanting in him-some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence.' Earlier in his narration, — 696- Marlow seems to be preparing to excuse Kurtz; he asserts that the «idea» behind an action can be redemptive for the committed individual. However, his narrative discredits this view that the ultimate test of an action is the sincerity of the concept that motivates it. Originally, Kurtz had 'set up and [bowed] down before' a benevolent idea, but when the wilderness had 'sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation,' Kurtz's idea became its own solipsistic parody: 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my-.'
Marlow invests Kurtz with values that fulfill his own need to embody his threat of the jungle in one tangible creature. If Kurtz is considered the center of the 'heart of darkness,' the business of following Kurtz and winning the «struggle» enabled Marlow to believe that he had conquered a symbol of the atavistic, debilitating effects of the jungle. This belief is central to his interpretation of the journey's significance. For Marlow, capturing Kurtz after he escapes symbolizes a personal victory over darkness. Increasingly, Kurtz had been attracted to the jungle by the urge to go ashore for 'a howl and a dance.' Having given in to his primitive urges, he appropriately crawled away on all fours. Marlow recalls how he too was tempted by savage impulses and confused his heartbeat with the beat of the natives' drums. Uncharacteristically, he thought of giving Kurtz a 'drubbing.' He was 'strangely cocksure of
