CONRAD
519
rately "psychological" tale, a pilgrimage toward some debasing revela–
tion about human character, "Heart of Darkness" is not immobilized
by totally contradictory intentions in the manner of
Victory.
Marlow
tells us explicitly that Kurtz is "the nightmare of my choice," and
no subtle inferences are needed to establish
his
ambivalence toward
Kurtz. We see, for example, that he yearns to hear Kurtz's voice but
cannot stand to hear of the natives' obeisances to him, we see him
hanging on Kurtz's dying words but refusing to approach the corpse or
witness its disposal and we see that he
is
willing to lie on Kurtz's
behalf even though he regards him as a degenerate.
It
is
Marlow him–
self who finally concludes, "I had no clear perception of what it was
1 really wanted," and who surmises that he has had an "unconscious
loyalty" to Kurtz. Thus, though we are not meant to decipher exactly
what is meant by "the horror," "the fascination of the abomination,"
and so on - indeed, though Conrad expects us to share Marlow's
and his own feeling of being assailed by "something altogether
monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul" - we know
at least that Marlow's adventure amounts to an uncanny self–
unfolding.
No one, to my knowledge, has bothered to define the psychologi–
cal content of this adventure/ but it is hardly obscure. Just consider: a
sunken, ascetic narrator who fervently believes that women should be
kept quarantined "in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets
worse," tells us that he felt irrationally compelled to visit a dark and
mysterious continent, a "confoundedly big" and "dumb thing," "and
1 had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there." Since childhood he had yearned
to visit this area, and now at great risk and in the face of Kurtz's
hostility he arrived via a river described as "an immense snake un–
coiled, 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." After passing
jungle of "vengeful aspect" whose rank and matted vegetation appear–
ed ready to "sweep every little man of us out of his little existence,"
he eventually found the much-respected Kurtz in a state of depravity,
accompanied by a savage mistress in a wilderness "that seemed to
draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and
5. See, however, Richard F. Sterba's perceptive "Remarks on Joseph
Conrad's
Heart of Darkness,"
in the July 1965
Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association.
