Chart of Darkness

"Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look like that) I would put my finger on it and say: When I grow up I will go there… But there was one yet-the biggest-the most blank, so to speak-that I had a hankering after."

What drives Marlowe more than anything else to seek out the dark “heart” of Africa is the fulfillment of a fantasy that reaches far back into his childhood. From this point in his life, he is driven by a fascination with the “blank spaces” on the map that separate all he knows in the world from whole continents of unadulterated newness. When he takes the job as a steamboat captain he isn’t entirely unlike the colonists who surround him. Only while they go to extract Africa’s material resources to expand the European sphere of influence, Marlowe goes simply to expand his own experience, by internally lifting the veil on Africa’s mysterious physical wildness.

Because of the importance Marlowe places on his visual experiences in the Congo, the imagery through with they are relayed take on a special significance. It first turns Europe into a “whited sepulcher,” a place of morbid staleness that Marlowe can only try to escape from. This same whiteness appears again in the Congolese ivory, another representation of Europe’s unstoppable ability to deplete the spiritual significance of every place it touches. This is contrasted with the literal blackness of Africa itself, a visual manifestation of the exotic unknown he came to encounter. The impossibility of comprehending Africa is illustrated by the fortress-like imagery of the jungle, described as a “great wall of vegetation,” “heavy like the closed doors of a prison.” In the jungle he is surrounded by blackness both externally and internally, in his inability to clearly see the world around him and his inability to shed light on it.

By the end of the novel, Marlow has failed in his quest to unravel the exotic Congo. He leaves Africa with no clearer image of it than when he started, and it remains as amorphous as its two dimensional representation he knew as a child. This emptiness turns out to be the only significant image he can draw from his adventure there, for as wild and savage as they are, to an outsider like Marlow the jungles of Africa can never be any more than the blank spaces on a map.