The Imperialist Primitive

"But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know..."

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness inverts the core principle of European imperialism: that civilization conquers barbarity. Conrad characterizes the natives as savages, but blurs the distinction between civilization and barbarity when he describes "civilized" people as equally primitive. Kurtz, the ultimate expression of the evils of imperialism, is unrecognizably transformed by the irresistable frenzy and dark heartbeat of the jungle. He is the Company's master of exploitation; he comes to take and let the natives die like flies, but the more he takes, the more the Congo infects him. The wilderness awakens forgotten and brutal human instincts in him; he comes to embody the primitivity that he came to conquer.

Marlow first hears about Kurtz from the Company's chief accountant, who represents holding onto the notions of civilized society in a place where they mean nothing: "His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser's dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That's backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character." The attempt to maintain "civilization" in an atmosphere of disease, darkness and chaos is set in terms of absurd futility. Civilization implies the possibility of a charmed life, and that does not exist in the Congo. The imperalist setup is itself comical; the work done is for show, like the man who is supposed to make bricks but never does because some essential ingredient never arrives.

Marlow perceives as soon as he joins the Company that he has joined some sort of conspiracy, and as he journeys down the river he sees the conditions of starvation and death it has wrought. The philosophy of ruthlessly tearing treasure from the earth, of taking from those who are only weaker than you because of health, becomes more and more pronounced. The more of the darkness Marlow sees, the more he comprehends the mental health changes alluded to in the beginning of those who go to the interior. At one point he asks whether those who have strayed into the Congo handle it, or it handles them. It handles them all to one degree or another; less than half ever come back at all. "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz", and he dies mad with "the horror" in the Congo. Marlow does return, but fundamentally changed, and he tells his story in the act of venturing back into the blackness.