By Rabita Rahman Southi
(Batch 40)
"The Horror...The Horror..."
(Kurtz, Heart
of Darkness)
Yes...this is the horror of the revelation that the life you have been evoking with an epic grandeur is not even a mere poem, the horror of knowing that you are an exile within your own belonging, the horror of being disenchanted and disillusioned and loosing the spirit to celebrate yourself, the horror that leaves you suffocating within your own “chronotopes”, the horror of being in between nowhere, the horror of your own “being”, the horror of your essence that haunts you, the horror that takes your breath away, the horror of losing your own self while revering that of some other, its only the horror. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is the exploration of this horror that haunts, torments, exploits and leaves one suffocating, in this case leaving someone (Mr. Kurtz) exhausted at his death bed. It is the exploration of a human heart that couldn't reveal the horror and the darkness cultivated within him and when the revelation came, the cry was no more than a breath. Conrad through his artistic mastery has associated the universal humane essence of darkness with that of a continent which has been detected as a “Dark” one, awfully. In his hand the darkness lying within a human heart and stands one for the entire humanity, that couldn't detect its catharsis until the final moment, gets its resemblance with the setting of its happening which is regarded as “Dark” through its representation and again we are left with the questions hovering around the air surrounding us that, which darkness he actually has tried to talk about, project onto-Is the continent dark at all? Or, is it the representation and perceptions that makes it dark? Or, is it only the heart which is dark, which lacked its restraint and was not able to turn over the attributed “Darkness” over a continent, community or group of people? The Heart of Darkness, on its journey through a land awaiting exploration, both geographical and cultural, and inviting in doing so, implies a number of philosophies and ideas associated with the title of it, which itself awaits and attempts exposition at the same time.
As it’s been said in the novel, that “the thing was to know how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own”-this expression at once includes the entire universe and the people practicing colonial power on others for “their” own beneficial agencies, and Mr. Kurtz stands as one figure representing and including all other like him, whose demand of powers have been ultimately the access to the powers of darkness. Living in the heart of Darkness, geographically, Mr. Kurtz, himself remains identifiable with the idea and essence of “darkness”, who eventually climbs to the urge of being mad, which is complemented by the loneliness and the primeval, infantile but also hellish stages of existence of his surroundings. Mr. Kurtz, conforming to the demand of a setting that allows its inhabitants to go beyond their extents, skunks into darkness that grabs the essence of his being to such an extent that he no more remains a regular human rather succumbs to his daemonic stature among his natives.
However, this lack of restraint prevailing in Mr. Kurtz can as well be speculated through the Freudian inspection of the core humane psychic culmination of id, ego and super-ego, as termed by Freud. Mr. Kurtz, left into the widening gyre of a land where “anything can be done”, is dominated by his “id” or desire to transgress every sort of social boundaries, while the all-allowing stature of the land provides him with the comfort of being free from the moral-ethical bindings of the super-ego, and so his “ego” steps beyond its limits and submerges all the notions of humanity to some extent. Since “id” is very often interpreted as the darker sides of human psyche which needs to remain suppressed through the workings of social set of beliefs termed “super-ego”, the novel can be said a revelation of the heart where darkness dwells, an exploration of the human urge to break through and showing up the extent of being to which one can succumb. This un-interpretable, non-examinable, indefinable and mysterious interaction of the human psyche with its outward world has tried and fashioned its wings through the character of Mr. Kurtz into the novel. He is both rescued and enslaved at the same time by this overwhelming association with the apocalyptic desires to outrun, arose within him. Kurtz, who both rules and is entrapped by the natives, perishes as he encounters both his and Africa's Heart of Darkness.
The impenetrable jungles of the journey, devoid of the ray of sunshine, the uncanny stillness that cannot be penetrated through, the unlightened spheres of lands submerged with water, in short, the setting of the novel itself contributes to the darkness implied on both human and geographical locations within the text. Conrad’s narration of the events and the suggestive depiction and description of events and places contemplates the very literary interpretation of the title as suggesting the dark land, Africa in its surface level. Again this western gaze of the orient, in specific, Africa as a center of irrational and savagery articulation of madness, makes the way for Mr. Kurtz to continue with his un-restrained state of mind and uncontrolled and undoubtedly inhuman actions on the people he lived among. His various lusts has been curved and complemented by the land he came into suddenly and where he was given access to the utmost of freedom at once. His exercise of this freedom lacked the sense of limit and control while Marlowe overpowers and arises over him in this regard.
“... No, it is impossible; it is impossible to
convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which
makes its truth, its meaning—it’s subtle and penetrating essence. It is
impossible. We live, as we dream—alone....”
This impossibility to assert and analyze the essence of one’s existence remains at the center of Heart of Darkness. The truth and the meaning remains ambivalent towards its readers as well who can never fix up with the darkness of the continent and the human psyche. Marlowe, widely assumed as the protagonist of the novel and his journey through the dark, impenetrable jungles of Africa and its lands ends up as a journey into the deepest cores of human psyche. The continent itself emerges hand to hand with the continent floating within human unconscious and thus the Heart of Darkness stands parallel and analogues between both the heart and darkness, both the human and the land and nothing but the title chosen for it would have fitted it better than that.
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