Colleen Burke
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
A Metaphor of Jungian Psychology
Acknowledgment and Dedication
In 1961, Richard Verreault, who had been denied tenure as an English
professor at a local university, joined the faculty of our ill-literatured -- if not illiterate -- high school and, with
probing short story assignments, opened an unknown world to an unconscious
sophomore. My imagin-ation danced in the pages of
Joyce, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, but crashed into the unknown -- and presumably
unknowable -- with our Heart of Darkness assignment.
We were to journey to the dark underworld
of Conrad’s Congo and bring back an understanding of “The Horror! The
Horror!” In spite of Mr. Verreault’s ever present
encouragement and my A’s on most papers, I received only a B (it was actually
a B- with the minus crossed off) on the Heart of Darkness paper and I still
feel, thirty-four years later, that I failed to answer the question posed by
my literary psychopomp, Mr. Verreault.
What does a fifteen year old (at least in rural, upstate New York in 1961) know about the darkly savage shadows of
that deep interior place?
The moment we received our Mythological
Studies assignment for Jungian Depth Psychology, I knew I would re-enter dark
continent and, through my own untenured lenses, hopefully pay tribute to the
memory of Richard Verreault -- and perhaps to my
own individuation journey.
As the Heart of Darkness snakes its
way into the savage shadows of the African continent, Joseph Conrad exposes a
psycho-geography of the collective unconscious in the entangling metaphoric
realities of the serpentine Congo. Conrad’s novella descends into the unknowable
darkness at the heart of Africa, taking its narrator, Marlow, on an underworld
journey of individuation, a modern odyssey toward the center of the Self and
the center of the Earth. Ego dissolves into soul as, in the interior, Marlow encounters his double in the powerful
image of ivory-obsessed Kurtz, the dark shadow of European imperialism. The
dark meditation is graced by personifications of anima in Kurtz’ black
goddess, the savagely magnificent consort of the underworld, and in his
porcelain -skinned Persephone, innocent intended of the upperworld.
Though “Dr. Jung’s discoveries were not known to Conrad, “
(Hayes, 43) who wrote this master work between 1898 and 1899, Heart
of Darkness presents a literary metaphor of Jungia
n psychology.
This paper explores the dark territory of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as metaphor for the Jungian concepts of
the personal and the collective unconscious, as a journey of individuation, a
meeting with the anima, an encounter with the shadow, and a descent into the
mythic underworld. Like Conrad’s Marlow, who is propelled toward his African
destiny despite ample warning and foreboding, I have been drawn beyond the
classic analysis of the Heart of Darkness, embarking down an uncharted
tributary, scouting parallels between Marlow’s tale and Jung’s own journeys
to Africa, and seeking murky insight into the physical and the metaphorical
impact of the dark continent on the language and the landscape of depth
psychology.
“Africa,” wrote
Graham Greene, “will always be the Africa in the
Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent in the shape of the human
heart.” The African heart described by Greene “acquired a new layer of
meaning when Conrad portrayed the Congo under King Leopold as the Heart of Darkness,
a place where barbarism triumphs over humanity, nature over technology,
biology over culture, id over super ego." (McLynn,
ix).
The unknown and uncharted topography of the
African continent first beckoned Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, into its depths
in his boyhood: “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”
(Conrad, 5). When Marlow was grown and Africa was no longer a blank space on
the map, but rather “a place of darkness,” there was still one river there
that drew him especially, “a mighty big river, that you could see on the map,
resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at
rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the
land” (Conrad, 5-6). This same deep place that had seduced Conrad’s ivory
hunting Kurtz into the horrors of its savage embrace had, in 1890, lured
Conrad himself into adventure that turned him from sailor to writer (Smith,
25) and severely effected his health for the rest of his life (Conrad,v). As the voyage up the Congo pro ved fateful for the
development of Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, it was equally fateful for Conrad’s
individuation, as he reflects in his letters “Before the Congo I was just a mere animal.” (Jean-Aubrey, 141)
Hillman, in “Notes on White Supremacy”
reminds us that, like Conrad, both Freud and Jung were called to venture into
the shadowed continent and vestiges of their journeys still color our
psychological language:
The convention informing
geographical discoveries and the expansion of white consciousness over Africa continue to inform psychic geography. The topological language used
by Freud for “the unconscious” as a place below, different, timeless,
primordial, libidinal and separated from the conscious-ness recapitulates
what white reporters centuries earlier said about West Africa. From Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to van der Post’s Venture to the Interior, Africa and the unconscious allegorize the other place.... “Just don’t stay
in the topical colonies too long; you must reign at home,” writes Freud in 1911
to Jung, who himself made the African journey fourteen years later,
describing the vast lands and dark peoples he encountered in language he
applies as well to the immemorial unconscious psyche.... Part of psychology’s
myth is that the unconscious was “discovered” as its contents are “explored”
(45).
Thus Africa has become a topology of the mind -- its location, its shape, its
cultures, its textures, its rhythms, its foliage, its hues, its wildness -- all calling forth something lost in the
psychology of the white European. It is with an understanding of our destiny
to explore that symbolic lost continent within ourselves that we can begin to
appreciate the prescience of Jungian psychology in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness.
While the allegorizing of the African
continent with the darkness of its instinctual, shadowed, primeval underworld
establishes a revealing context for an examination of the Jungian concepts in
the Heart of Darkness (the assignment which will be undertaken shortly), I am
drawn first to explore an uncharted literary tributary, tracking the striking
similarities between Jung’s reflections on his trips to the dark continent
(North Africa in 1920 and to Kenya and Uganda in 1925) and the tale told by
Marlow in Heart of Darkness published in 1902. Jung himself in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections concludes that his dreams while he was in
Africa “seemed to say that they considered ... the African journey not as
something real, but rather as a symptomatic or symbolic act” (272) and it is
this sense of the symbolic in Jung’s travels to Africa that can be juxtaposed
to the symbolic in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Jung’s reflective
entries on his African travels in Memories, Dreams, Reflections
repeatedly echo Marlow’s narrative on topics from the reason for setting
forth in the first place to the expectations of inner change, from the
experience of primordial time to the encounter with wildness and the
recognition of personified shadow.
The Heart of Darkness tells the story
of a night sea journey of exploration and self discovery of its narrator,
Marlow, a European able to see himself and
“civilization” more clearly against the dark backdrop of the center of the
earth. Similarly, through a dream he had at the end of his first visit to Northern Africa, Jung recognized his first travels to Africa as an opportunity to discover a lost aspect of the self, his
invisible and unconscious parts. In Memories Dreams, Reflections, Jung
analyzes his dream:
In traveling to Africa to find a psychic observation post outside the sphere of the
European, I unconsciously wanted to find that part of my personality which
had become invisible under the influence and the pressure of being European.
This part stands in unconscious opposition to myself, and indeed I attempt to
suppress it . In keeping with its nature, it wishes
to make me unconscious...so as to kill me; but my aim is, through insight, to
make it more conscious...(244).
Jung’s analysis of this
dream in which there was a dark Arab aristocrat provides even deeper insight
into the impact his travels had on his work. Opening the possibility of a
collective shadow, Jung writes,
The
Arab’s dusky complexion marks him as a “shadow,” but not the personal shadow,
rather an ethnic one associated not with my persona but with the totality of
my personality, that is, with the self. (245)
The question of what
happens to Europeans who venture into the primitive continent was one Jung
posed to himself and one that, in Heart of Darkness, the company doctor
asked of Marlow in a pre-departure physical. The company doctor, in fact,
produced a calipers and asked if he could measure
Marlow’s head, “I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure
the crania of those going out there.” When Marlow asks if he also measures
the employees heads upon their return, the doctor remarks, “Oh, I never see
them ... and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know” (9). Of his
own intellectual curiosity about the impact of the African wilds inside the heads
of Europeans, Jung writes:
To
my astonishment, the suspicion dawned on me that I had undertaken my African
adventure with the secret purpose of escaping from Europe and its complex of
problems, even at the risk of remaining in Africa, as so many before me had
done, and so many were doing at this very time.... What is going to happen to
Jung the psychologist in the wilds of Africa? This was a question I had constantly sought to evade, in spite of
my intellectual intention to study the European’s reaction to primitive
conditions (273).
Traveling northward on his
way back toward Europe “from the heart of Africa”, Jung journals that the answer to his question had been found:
Amid
such thoughts I glided on the peaceful waters of the Nile
toward the north -- toward Europe, toward the future....Thus the journey from the
heart of Africa to Egypt became, for me, a kind of drama of the birth of
light. That drama was intimately connected with me, with my psychology. ... I
had wanted to know how Africa would affect me, and I had found out (273-4;
emphasis added).
Both Jung and Conrad
experienced Africa as a dreamscape, slipping from the physical to the
metaphoric in a trance-like state. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung
writes that, while in Kakamegas, “... I no longer
knew whether I had been transported from reality into a dream,
or from a dream to reality” (257). Similarly Conrad’s narrator Marlow
expresses the dreamlike quality of his narrative “It seems to me I am trying
to tell you a dream -- making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream
can convey the dream-sensation.... (Conrad, 24).
In addition to sharing the dreamlike nature
of the African experience, both Conrad’s narrator in the novella and Jung in
his actual travels observed the phenomenon of time seeming to move backward
as they travel into the African interior. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
Jung journals, “The deeper we penetrated into the Sahara, the more time slowed down for me, it even threatened to move
backward” (240). Paralleling Jung’s impressions, Marlow observes “Going up
that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world,
when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings” (Conrad,
30).
At moments in their respective African
journeys both Jung, in his journal, and Marlow, in his fictional narrative,
find themselves so far back in time that they might
be the first men on a prehistoric earth. Jung writes,
Thousands of miles lay
between me and Europe, mother of all demons. The demons could not reach
me here -- there were no telegrams, no telephone calls, no letters, no visitors. My liberated psychic forces poured blissfully
back to the primeval expanses” (264).
At one point Jung witnesses
a “slim, brownish-black figure standing motionless on a jagged rock, leaning
on a long spear” and observes,
I
was enchanted by this sight -- it was a picture of something utterly alien
and outside my experience, but on the other hand a most intense sentiment du deja vu. I had the feeling that I had already
experienced this moment and had always known this world which was separated
from me only by distance in time. It was as if I were
this moment returning to the land of my youth, and as it I knew that
dark-skinned man who had been waiting for me for five thousand years (250).
Jung’s words echo those of
Marlow, who refers to his boatload of pilgrims as “wanderers on a prehistoric
earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet,” observing, “We
could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an
accursed inheritance....We could not understand because we were too far and
could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of the first ages,
of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign -- and no memories”
(Conrad, 31-32). Back in England, reflecting on his adventure into the
wilderness, Marlow asks his English companions, “How can you imagine what
particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammeled feet may take him
into by the way of solitude...?” (44).
Both Jung in his “real life” journals and
Marlow in his fictional tale slip between the cartographic and the metaphoric
when they think about entering the African continent. Traveling on the
Ugandan railroad into the interior, Jung comments, “we had, as it were,
reached the edge of the oikumene , the inhabited earth from which trails stretched
endlessly over the continent” (256). Whether the edge of the earth or its
very center, these were no ordinary trips to a geographical destination. In a
moment of premonition before leaving on his journey, Marlow comments, “... I
felt as though, instead of going to the center of a continent, I were about
to set off for the center of the earth” (Conrad, 10).
Jung and Marlow also paint very similar
pictures of a frenzied, primitive wildness in the interior. Writes Jung, “The
people ran around in a great state of excitement, shouting and gesticulating.
They looked savage and rather alarming” (241). Similarly, Conrad, through
Marlow, records “a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a
mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes
rolling...” (32). And then Conrad takes us the next step, as he allows Marlow
to witness his own reflection in the wilderness and foreshadows the Jungian
concept of shadow:
They howled and leaped and
spun, and made horrible face; but what thrilled you was just the thought of
their humanity -- like yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this
wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were
man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the
faintest trace of a response of frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of
there being a meaning in it which you -- you so remote from the night of the
first ages -- could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of
anything -- because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the
future. What is there after all? ...-- who can tell? -- but
truth -- truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder
-- the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must be as much a
man as these on shore. He must meet the truth ...(32).
Jung recognizes this same
primitive vitality of the shadow in his analysis of his North African dreams,
The
predominantly rationalistic European finds much that is human alien to him,
and he prides himself on this without realizing that his rationality is won
at the expense of his vitality, and that the primitive part of his
personality is consequently condemned to a more or less underground
existence... (245).
And, as if he were an
intimate with Kurtz himself, Jung then touches on the sense of the
prehistoric timelessness and the potential for slipping directly into the
savage skin:
These dreams show that
there is something in us which does not merely submit passively to the
influence of the unconscious, but on the contrary rushes eagerly to meet it,
identifying itself with the shadow...these seemingly alien...surroundings
awaken an archetypal memory of an only too well known prehistoric past which
apparently we have entirely forgotten. We are remembering a potentiality of
life which has been overgrown by civilization...If we were to relive it
naively, it would constitute a relapse into barbarism... (245- 246).
Describing what befell
Kurtz as he slipped into the savage skin, Marlow says the “wilderness...had
caressed him, and --lo! he had withered; it had
taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh,
and sealed his soul to its own by inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish
initiation (Conrad, 44). Jung’s dreams evidence a deep resonance with Kurtz’
psychological disintegration into his savage shadow self. Jung recognizes
this potential of becoming savage, of “going black under the skin” as he
analyzes one of his North African dreams with insight gained from his travels
in tropical Africa:
I was not prepared for the
existence of the unconscious forces within myself which would take the part
of these strangers with such intensity, so that a violent conflict ensued...
I was not to recognize the real nature of this disturbance until some years
later, when I stayed in tropical Africa. It had
been, in fact, the first hint of “going black under the skin,” a spiritual
peril which threatens the uprooted European in Africa to an extent not fully appreciated. “where
danger is, there is salvation also” -- these words of Holderlin
often come to my mind in such situations. The salvation lies in our ability
to bring the unconscious urges to consciousness... (245).
It is just this salvation
through bringing the unconscious urges to consciousness that we witness in
Marlow’s journey of individuation -- a journey which can be contrasted to
that of his shadow double, Kurtz, who slips into the Horror! the Horror! of taking one step
too many into the African continent and over the edge of the world. As Marlow
contrasts himself to Kurtz,” True, he had made that last stride he had
stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating
foot”(65).
As long as we are standing at this precarious
edge, there is one further parallel between Conrad and Jung that begs to be
mentioned before examining some of the Jungian concepts “illuminated” by the
novella. This last parallel relates to the mythological phenomenon of the
underworld journey . The Heart of Darkness is
clearly a cartographic and psychographic journey to the underworld. In Rape
and Revelation, Evans Smith presents the thesis that “The descent to the
underworld is the single most important myth for Modernist authors” and
suggests that the it is also the “central myth of
[Jung’s] psychotherapy (1). Smith reveals that, like Jung, Conrad himself
experienced a descent to the underworld (in Conrad’s words “a taste of hell”)
in the mental breakdown he had preceding the composition of the Heart of
Darkness between 1897 and 1898 (19). Frederick Karl writes of this period
of Conrad’s life as a descent “into his own kind of darkness” and observes
that Conrad’s creative imagination carried him “down not only into memory but
into the very chaos and extravagance of the unconscious ....Stalled,
depressed, ill, he had touched bottom and had, in his own way, found his
subject matter” (Smith, 20; Karl, 441). Similarly, between 1912 and 1916,
Jung experienced his own psychological crisis “which he referred to as his
personal descent to the underworld, during which the myths he lived by were
revealed as the basis for all his future work” (Smith, 1). One might conclude
that Jung and Conrad and Marlow -- and even Kurtz -- took heroic life
journeys to the underworld -- meeting and embracing “the Horror! the Horror!”
“The Horror! The Horror!” takes us to the
Jungian psychological construct of Shadow which, in the Heart of Darkness,
is personified by Kurtz, Marlow’s diabolic double of the interior. The word
“shadow” is used frequently throughout the novella -- sometimes capitalized
as the personification materializes and as the concept of shadow is explored
and confronted. When the pilgrims first carry Kurtz on a stretcher out of his
cabin, Marlow describes Kurtz, observing, “This shadow looked satiated and
calm” (55). When Marlow later discovers Kurtz missing from his steamer cabin
and determines to find and capture him on shore, he comments, “I was anxious
to deal with this shadow by myself alone” ( 59).
Overtaking the escaping Kurtz crawling in the bush, Marlow comments, “This
clearly was not a case for fisticuffs, even apart from the very natural
aversion I had to beat that Shadow -- this wandering and tormented thing”
(60). Finally, back in London
and paying a visit to Kurtz’ intended, Marlow has a
vision of Kurtz as “a shadow insatiable of appearances...a shadow darker than
the shadow of the night” (68).
In “The Journey to Hell: Satan, The Shadow,
and the Self,” Charlotte Spivack provides the
following context for our consideration of shadow in the Heart of Darkness:
One of the archetypes of
the collective unconscious is what Jung calls the shadow, the innate
propensity for evil resident in the depths of human nature, “the negative side
of the personality,” as Jung puts it, “the sum of all those unpleasant
qualities we like to hide” (429).
Spivack continues, explaining that the “shadow is the
psychological equivalent of original sin...all men -- psychologically --
contain the shadow of evil....To become conscious of the shadow “challenges
the whole ego personality “ for it “involves recognizing the dark aspects of
the personality as present and real” (429).
The shadow, if unrecognized, enslaves. Jung
could be describing the character of Kurtz himself when, writing on the
inferiorities constituting the shadow, he observes, “On this lower level with
its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one behaves more or less
like a primitive, who is not only the passive victim of his affects...but
also singularly incapable of moral judgment.” Kurtz dies, gasping “the
Horror! the Horror!” -- a
horrific recognition that is reflected in Jung’s remark “although it is quite
within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of
his nature, it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the
face of evil” (Spivack, 432).
Richard Hughs
adds that “Kurtz’ last words, “The horror! The horror!” sum up the Jungian
insight that “from the same root that produces wild, untamed, blind instinct
there grow up the natural laws and cultural forms that tame and break its
pristine power. But when the animal in us is split off from consciousness by
being repressed, it may easily burst out in full force, quite unregulated and
uncontrolled. An outburst of this sort always ends in catastrophe -- the
animal destroys itself” (21).
Leading us from an understanding of the
Jungian concept of shadow to an exploration of the Jungian concept of
individuation, Spivack makes the following points:
The word ‘shadow’ itself
postulates the illusory nature of this unconscious assertion of evil; a
shadow is a reflection of reality rather than substantial reality. But it is
no less dangerous, for the archetypal; shadow in the unconscious spins the
illusions that veil the conscious world, leaving the individual out of touch
with reality. The person not yet acquainted with his shadow is in danger of
refocusing the world into the replica of his own unknown face.... If the
individual does not undertake the visionary journey to the potential hell
buried in his own soul, the psychological hell of dis-
integration will be just as inevitable as the theological hell of damnation
(430).
In the Heart of Darkness,
while Kurtz befalls what Spivack calls the
“psychological hell of disintegration” (430), Marlow embarks on such a
visionary journey -- a night sea journey, a hero’s journeys -- a journey of
individuation.
In his biography of Conrad, Guerard states that the Heart of Darkness concerns
“Marlow...and his journey toward and through certain facets or potentialities
of self” and notes how “Marlow reiterates that he is ‘recounting a spiritual
voyage of self discovery.’ He remarks casually but crucially that he did not
know himself before setting out, and that he likes work for the chance it
provides ‘to know yourself...what no other man can
ever know.’” For Marlow, Guerard observes, “the
Inner Station was ‘the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point
of my experience,’” and he concludes, Marlow’s was a “night journey into the
unconscious, the confrontation with an entity within the self” (38).
Hughs, on the other hand, sees the novella as two
journeys into the hidden self -- one is “horrifying, ending in personality
destruction and death;” the other is “restorative, wisdom-producing, a
gateway to wholeness... Conrad has seized on the paradoxical quality of the
descent into the unconscious...” revealing, the two faces of Dionysos, in the words of Jung: “Liberation and renewal
as well as enslavement and existential death” (58).
And the argument could be made that the
work holds three journeys of individuation: those of Marlow, of Kurtz -- and
of Conrad himself. Guerard in his biography, Conrad
the Novelist, calls the Heart of Darkness “Conrad’s longest journey in
the self”(33).
Marlow’s journey of individuation is open
to rich interpretation. Hughs describes a the
metaphoric layering of the journey: “Marlow’s journey is thus spatial (into
the African interior), temporal (back to the origins of man), and psychic (to
the roots of his own unconscious) (62) and Spivack
concurs with the three level interpretation:
Marlowe (sic) soon
realizes, and accordingly informs his reader, that his journey is a triple
one. Parallel with the geographical retreat up the river into the wilderness
is a temporal journey backwards in time, leaving modern civilization and
returning to the lush, vegetative, prehuman swamp
world, as well as a psychological journey deep into his own personal hear of
darkness, where lurks the impulse to savagery that he had never acknowledges
while in the deceptive milieu of a sophisticated city (432).
In his Collected Works Jung
expands on his concept of individuation. In his own words, it is:
the process by which individual beings are formed and
differentiated; it is the development of the psychological individual ..as being distinct from the general, collective
psychology.... Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation...,
having for its goal the development of individual personality.... Individuation
is practically the same as the development of consciousness out of the
original state of identity.... It is thus an extension of the sphere of
consciousness, an enriching of psychological life (6: 448-9).
There can be little doubt
that Marlow undergoes a “development of consciousness” toward an “enriching
of psychological life” as he follows the serpentine Congo toward the inner station and his encounter with
Kurtz. Guerard adds the mythopoetic
view, noting that Marlow’s journey is “the archetypal myth dramatized in much
great literature since the Book of Jonah: the story of an essentially
solitary journey involving profound spiritual change in the voyager. In its
classical form the journey is a descent into the earth, followed by a return
to the light (47).
In Trials of the Self: Heroic Ordeals in
the Epic Tradition, Lord provides the insight that “Marlow’s riverine voyage leads him to a physical and meta physical
cul-de-sac” reaching a climax “in labyrinthine centers of numinous
experience” (194). Lord sees that the painful challenge of the journey of
individuation in a secular society:
“Marlow is handicapped in
his rite of passage by the fact that there is no ritual to guide him in his
encounter with the Heart of Darkness; that the ultimate experience is
not an illumination but a dark vision of human degradation; that the light by
which Kurtz leads him is extinct...His ordeal ,
then, is an ordeal of individuation without any sustaining or authenticating
myth and without any ritual to endow it with a more than purely personal
coherence. He exemplifies the plight of man in a secular society that has
discarded the encounter with the numinous as unscientific nonsense” (207).
Marlow’s heroic journey of
self discovery, whether archetypal, mythic, or stripped of ritual in a
secular society, provides a literary metaphor for Jung’s concept of
individuation. “Jung’s awareness that the darkness is part of himself, that
to deny the darkness would be self-mutilation, and that awareness is not
erased but heightened by a recognition of that dark self: this is Marlowe’s
(sic) discovery” (Hughs, 66).
For Jung, the integration of the
personality is not possible without a full descent into the unconscious (Hughs, 66) and clearly the Heart of Darkness is
about the descent into the unconscious, into the depths, into the underworld,
into the very Heart of Darkness. Kurtz is not only the personal shadow
of Marlow, but the collective shadow of all of Europe and of European imperialism. Throughout the novella there is a dense
undergrowth of Congo unconsciousness, as Marlow succinctly states, “All
of Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (45). In the “Role of the
Unconscious” Jung writes “the further we remove ourselves from (the
unconscious) with our enlightenment and our rational superiority, the more it
fades into the distance, but is made all the more potent by everything that
falls into it, thrust out by our one-sided rationalism. This lost bit of
nature seeks revenge” (Hughs, 54-55
). Pushed down and repressed, it seeks horrific revenge.
The Jungian unconscious and the collective
unconscious are so pervasive in Conrad’s work that a full treatment of the
concepts falls beyond the scope of this paper. Hopefully it has become clear
thus far that Marlow’s journey toward individuation and his encounter with
the darkness of his own shadow are set against a jungled
backdrop of the personal and the collective unconscious. It would seem that,
in the midst of so much shadow and heroism and individuation, an encounter
with Jung’s concept of the anima might provide some needed balance in our
exploration. Similarly in the Heart of Darkness, it is just at the
point of deepest penetration into the unconscious continent that She appears,
“along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman”
(56). She is the feminine soul of the wild, Kurtz’s savage consort, queen of
the underworld and black madonna of the Congo. She is anima and she is magnificent.
Before we approach Conrad’s wild woman, let
us put her in the context of the heroic journey of integration. In Trials of
the Self, Lord presents an heroic context for Marlow’s entire narration,
noting specifically the role of the anima in the Jungian journey of
integration:
The story begins with the
hero leaving home, with its protective but unchallenging milieu, on a quest
that will establish his separate identity as a person of exceptional courage
and wisdom. The journey requires his entering another world, usually
repellent or monstrous, with incidental encounters with hostile or
apocalyptic figures that Jung calls threshold guardians. The other world is
typically transpersonal and supernatural and often the land of the dead.
Usually he has a guide or some other source of secret knowledge
.... On his journey he acquires a mystical understanding of the past
and future that will afterward guide him, as an individuated self, in his
efforts to return to his society...The ordeal of individuation may entail the
hero’s encounter with and integration of his anima, the feminine shadow
aspect of his personality, in what Jung calls the syzygy...
(5-6).
Thus, for our hero Marlow,
it is time to encounter the feminine shadow as well. Having reached the Inner
Station and having brought the emaciated, skeletal shade of Kurtz on board
the steamer, the personification of anima appears on the shore:
She walked with measured
steps, draped in striped and fringed clothes, treading the earth proudly,
with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head
high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to
the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny
cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things,
charms, gifts of witch men...(56).
Could there be a more apt
personification of the anima, a more elegant description of the feminine
nature of the soul of man? She is wild. She is strong. She is dark. She is
primitive. She is warrior and goddess. She is adorned and adored. From the
deck of his lumbering steamship which now held the frail body of Kurtz,
Marlow continues his awed description:
She was savage and superb,
wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her
deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly on the whole
sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and
mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking
at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul (56).
She is a reflection of the
soul of the wilderness and she is the wilderness itself, “She stood looking
at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding
over an inscrutable purpose.” She is the last image seen before the steamer
departs the Heart of Darkness and she gives blessing to the retreating
figure of Kurtz in a shadowed embrace:
Suddenly she opened her
bare arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an
uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift
shadows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the
steamer into a shadowy embrace” (56).
This extraordinary anima,
this black queen of the underworld has a Persephone counterpart, another
personification of the anima waiting for Kurtz back in London. It is Kurtz’ innocent intended, to whom Marlow
brings the remnants of Kurtz’ letters and his falsified last words. Convinced
she knew and understood her Kurtz better than anyone ever could have, she too
carries the anima of Conrad’s strange journey, sharing a gesture locks her in
symbolic embrace with her underworld counterpart. Describing Kurtz’s still
mourning fiancee in her London apartment, Marlow observes:
She put her arms as if
after a retreating figure, stretching them back and with clasped pale hands
across the fading and narrow sheen of the window... I shall see this eloquent
phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her, too, a tragic and familiar
Shade, resembling this gesture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with
powerless charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal
steam, the stream of darkness (71).
Smith in Rape and
Revelation iterates this impression, “At the nadir of his descent, Marlow
encounters a powerful Queen of the Underworld, a Persephone who personifies
the ‘tenebrous’ and passionate’ soul of the jungle .... In addition, when he
returns he meets an avatar of Persephone in her inscrutable innocence” (25).
Hughs calls her ”the grand
archetype of the unconscious, consort of the mad Kurtz and the goal of the
inner search” (268-269). She is the “soul as anima,” “the inner attitude,”
“the inward face.” Jung’s explains, “The inner personality is the way one
behaves in relation to one’s inner psychic processes; it is the inner
attitude, the characteristic face that is turned towards the
unconscious....the inner attitude, the inward face, I call anima” (XI: 467).
Perhaps it is the anima which allows for
the paradox within the title the Heart of Darkness -- perhaps she, the
anima, is the throbbing heart of the darkness. David Miller in Hells and Holy
Ghosts , refers to the “paradoxical, if no less
real, poetic and inferential light of historical darknesses,”
referring to the “irony of Joseph Conrad’s title.” Miller concludes, “That
darkness has a heart ...which mystics and philosophers join poets in
acknowledging.... C.G. Jung, for example, out of his experience as a
therapist, wrote:
Filling the conscious mind
with ideal conceptions is a characteristic feature of Western theosophy, but
not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not
become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness
conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not
popular (93-4).
The Anima, the Shadow,
Individuation and the journey to the heart of the Personal and Collective
Unconscious are thus illuminated in the dark meditation of the Heart of Darkness .
Conrad’s novella has become seen as a literary metaphor of the psychological
concepts of Carl Jung, expressing in its deep journey the very heart of
Jung’s philosophy that “light from above makes the darkness still darker, but
light from within the darkness turns blackness bright” (Jung, C W, 13.335).
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, New York: Dover, 1990.
Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard U. Press, 1958.
Hayes, Dorsha. “Heart
of Darkness: An Aspect of the Shadow,” Spring (1956): 43-47..
Hillman, James. "Notes on White
Supremacy: Essaying an Archetypal Account of Historical Events," Spring
(1986): 29-57.
Hughs, Richard E. The Lively Image: Four Myths in
Literature. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers, 1975.
Jean-Aubry,
George. Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. Vol. 1. New York: Page, 1966.
Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. Ed. Aniela Jaffe.
New York: Random House, 1989.
Jung, C.G. Two Essays on Analytical
Psychology. R.F.C. Hull. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1977.
Lord, George de Forest. Trials of the Self: Heroic Ordeals in the Epic Tradition Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1983.
McLynn, Frank. Hearts of Darkness: The European
Exploration of Africa. New York: Carol & Gey, 1992.
Mellard, James. "Myth and Archetype in Heart of
Darkness," Tennessee Studies in Literature 13 (1968): 1-15.
Miller, David. Hells and Holy Ghosts: A Theopoetics of Christian Belief. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989.
Smith, Evans Lansing. Rape and Revelation:
The Descent to the Underworld in Modernism. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1990.
Spivack, Charlotte. "The Journey to Hell: Satan, The
Shadow, and the Self." Centennial Review 9:4 (1965): 420 - 437.
Heart of Darkness: A Synopsis of the Narrative
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a
masterful tale told by an experienced night seaman, Charlie Marlow,
reflecting back upon his journey into the interior of Africa under the employ of a Belgian ivory trading company. The story
begins at anchor in London, on the “civilized” Thames, which, Marlow reminds his small audience of fellow seaman, was
itself “one of the dark places of the earth” when the Romans first came north
and found “sandbanks, marches, forests and savages” (4). Like the Romans
nineteen hundred years earlier, Marlow’s tale takes him to a distant dark
place on this earth, as he journeys south to Africa where he has received, with the intervention of an aunt, an
appointment to captain a steamboat up the Congo.
After passing through some ritual
initiations into the company, an interview in Belgium and a brief physical examination, Marlow arrives at
the first station where he is told the steamboat he is to captain has been
run aground and is in need of months of repair before he can take his charge
of ivory-hunting pilgrims into the interior. During these languid months awaiting
rivets, Marlow first hears about an enigmatic figure, a man called Kurtz,
“chief of the Inner Station” (22), an eloquent idealist, an extraordinarily
successful ivory tradesman, and the first class agent in charge of the most
interior station. According to rumors which deeply intrigue the narrator,
Kurtz has fallen ill and his trading post in jeopardy. His boat restored,
Marlow’s embarks on a laborious, faltering trip up the Congo, penetrating “deeper and deeper into the heart of
darkness” (31) in search of the enigmatic Kurtz.
Kurtz’s fate is darkly unraveled as Marlow
enters the deep mysteries of inner and outer landscapes. It appears Kurtz,
who had begun his assignment a man of great idealism and the highest morals, had
become strangely savage. Tribes of natives worship the man who lives in a hut
surrounded by fence posts topped with recently acquired human skulls. Kurtz
has undergone a total disintegration -- physical, psychological and
spiritual. He neither wants to leave his tribe of Kurtz-worshipping savages,
nor do they want him to be taken away by the whistle-blowing monster of
Marlow’s steamship. As his feeble body is taken aboard the ship, his
underworld consort appears on shore as a magnificent savage apparition.
Though Kurtz escapes from the steamer once,
Marlow goes ashore to reclaim him. Back on board and knowing he is close to
death, Kurtz asks Marlow to deliver some treasured papers to his intended,
his finance in London. And then Kurtz cries out “twice, in a voice that
was no more than a breath,” his last words: “The Horror! The Horror!” (64).
Returning to London. Marlow eventually brings the papers to Kurtz’s
intended who asks what were the last words of her beloved.
Marlow lies and tells her that her name was the last thing on Kurtz’s lips.
Marlow takes leave of Kurtz’s intended and returns to the Thames to tell the story of the Heart of Darkness.
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