Ian Watt
HEART OF DARKNESS AND
NINETEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT
Conrad isn't a philosophical novelist in the way that
George Eliot, Thomas Hardy or George Meredith are; we don't feel in
the presence of logical arguments or moral lessons. But if Conrad
doesn't present himself as a thinker, he strikes us as very thoughtful;
the intimations of his fictional world steadily invite ethical and even
metaphysical response.
The basic conflict in this fictional world arises from a double
vision; Conrad wants both
to
endorse the standard Victorian moral
positives, and to express his forebodings that the dominant intellectual
directions of the nineteenth century were preparing disaster for the
twentieth. This conflict between the endorsements and the forebodings
is most comprehensively expressed in the tension between Marlow and
Kurtz in Conrad's ideological
summa, Heart of Darkness.
It
has
gradually established itself for the twentieth century as the supremely
modern work in the Conrad canon; and it appeared, very appropri–
ately, in the last year of the nineteenth century, and in the thousandth
number of that very representative organ of high Victorian culture,
Blackwood's Magazine.
Scientifically, Conrad was fairly well informed and, unlike most of
the other great modern writers, he neither doubted nor discounted the
findings of natural science. His position about the ultimate human
implications of these findings, however, was deeply skeptical, and in
several ways. Like Mauhew Arnold in his essay "Literature and Sci–
ence, " Conrad diagnosed a deep intellectual muddle behind contem–
porary attempts to force a marriage between science and culture; for his
own part he contemptuously rejected "the tyranny of science and the
cant of science," and concluded that "life and the arts follow dark
courses and will not turn aside
LO
the brilliant arc-lights of science."
Some negative inferences, however, had to be drawn from science
as regards human life, and they led to radical conclusions that brought
Conrad fairly close to an Existentialist position: the individual con-
