Why is Conrad's Heart of Darkness often referred to in the literature on colonialism?

The continuous presence of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (HoD) in the literature on colonialism can be attributed to what literary critic Harold Bloom has called its 'unique propensity for ambiguity,' so that rather than having an immutable meaning that has endured for several generations, it has allowed different readers in different places and at different times to attribute diverse and sometimes contradictory meanings to it.  Some of the sources of its continuous reference in the literature on colonialism are: its importance for postcolonial theorists, representing both imperialism's monopoly over and failure of representation of the colonized; its shifting meanings over time, with some seeing Conrad as a pioneering social critic and others as complicit with prevailing European ideologies; its representation of 'helpless imperialism,' an issue often overlooked in narratives of an all-powerful and pervasive colonialism; its status as somewhat representative of ongoing European neo-colonial racism; its capacity as fiction to represent unspeakable atrocities in a long-lasting manner in a way that other texts such as the Casement Report* could not; and last but not least its representations of the different types of evil present in colonialism.

An useful starting point to explain HoD's longlasting relevance is its crucial importance for postcolonial studies. Indeed, Benita Parry sees HoD as representative of imperialism's monopoly over AND failure of representation of the situation in an European colony, as evidenced by the allusive language used by Conrad throughout the novel and which British literary critic F.R. Lewis sees as an 'insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery.' The book indeed shows colonialism's epistemological constraints to understand external alterity, coupled with an unwillingness to do so, as illustrated in this passage:

'[Marlow:] The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings, we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled.'

 This leads to a sense of no alternative in which the 'Horror of the West' is omnipresent and omnipotent. Edward Said has however proposed two different views about the fate of imperialism being present in HoD, one being the never-ending cycle without alternative picked up by Coppola in Apocalypse Now, the other being colonialism as dated in a particular time and place and thus 'escapable.' However, although obviously set in Leopold's Congo, Conrad left many details vague enough to make us think of colonialism as a never-ending cycle rather than a dated phenomenon, as he became aware after his visit to Congo of the rhetorical gaps between what 'civilization' meant and what colonial powers such as Belgium were undertaking on the ground.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God: a Heart of Darkness in Spanish America?

The above-mentioned ambiguity, which some have connected with Conrad's potential PTSD, has also led critics to use the book as an example of Marlow's (and Conrad's?) complicity with prevailing social ideologies, whose interests are served by its continuous preservation as a classic. In HoD, Conrad offered no explicit criticism of the British Empire, and seemed to be a believer in some sort of 'good' colonialism as represented mainly by Britain. Marlow differentiates between 'colonists' and 'conquerors,' approving the activities of the former, who follow the 'idea.' Indeed, HoD applies two main criteria to judge imperialism, a criteria that coincide with public perceptions of the time and which we cannot know if Conrad chose in order to make his case more persuasive to contemporary audiences: the efficiency of colonialism and the presence of a civilizing mission. These two social Darwinist ideas are lacking in the colony described in HoD, which supposedly makes it a bad colony. The lack of efficiency is made evident in HoD through the messiness of both the railways and the currency system, while the lack of a 'proper' civilizing mission is not necessarily made evident by the killings of natives, which could be seen as 'exemplary' according to the rhetoric of the coloniser, but by the system of formal forced labour that is in place. Thus, HoD presents both an adept social criticism of 'bad' colonialism and recognises that colonialism is not monolithic while remaining somewhat complicit in the prejudices of the time.

Another feature that makes HoD consistently appear in the literature on colonialism is its treatment of 'helpless imperialism' or 'reverse colonization,' represented mainly through the overarching figure of Kurtz. The 'imperial helplessness,' described by Reinkowski and Thum, is often part of the experience of moments of crisis, usually connected with the fragility derived from overreach and overambition or with the fear and exotization of the unknown. The constructed fear of 'going native' by the colonizer represented by Kurtz is more revealing of his internal weakness than of the existence of an 'external enemy' that could render the imperialists inept at meeting the great challenges of their self-assigned mission. But it not only Kurtz who runs the risk of 'becoming savage,' but even Marlow mentions at one point: 'Being hungry and kept on my feet, too, I was getting savage.' HoD shows that in colonialism it was often the perception of threat rather than the threat itself that influenced political action, and that sometimes fuelled the idea of imperialism as 'self-defense' which echoes American justifications for foreign intervention from Vietnam to Afghanistan. But although not explicitly evident in HoD itself, it is easy to take from the novel that it is not fear which makes for violence on its own, but other factors come into play such as the feeling of cultural superiority. After all, the feeling of helplessness was neither the one and only nor the dominant imperialist experience, but it was an innate part of imperialist experience in moments of crisis.

A shot from Apocalypse Now, loosely based on Heart of Darkness itself

It is precisely HoD's analysis of helpless imperialism / reverse colonization that sparked a huge debate around the novel after Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe called Conrad a racist for his use of Africa 'as a foil to Europe,' eliminating the African as a human factor and not granting the natives their freedom despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them. By using 'Africa as the prop for the break of one petty European mind,' Achebe saw HoD as an 'offensive and deplorable book,' its canonical status reflecting an ongoing European neo-colonial racism and ignorance of Africa, a continent which is still to a large extent used as a 'carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward' today as much as Conrad allegedly did in HoD.

The 'banality' of this evil, that is the potential complicity of the novel with existing structures of racism and foreign domination, is most evident in the confessional mode of narration in which Marlow tells the story (Marlow and Conrad are often used interchangeably, but some authors have questioned a straightforward identification between the two). This is one of the evils of colonialism that HoD implicitly shows: the banal complicity of ordinary people whose silence and denial allows evil to prosper, so well articulated by Hannah Arendt. The other implicit evil in the novel, for which Conrad has been criticised for not making more explicit, is that evil at the heart of civilization and modernity (and some would argue capitalism), leading to crimes against humanity in the name of 'progress' and so present in all colonial contexts (one just has to look at resettlement programmes in Vietnam, Algeria, or Kenya to name a few), and which Adam Hochschild has seen better represented by King Leopold (distant, patient, Christian, manipulating, technologically sophisticated) than by any characters of the novel itself. The third and last evil present in HoD is that of Kurtz, mentioned in the previous paragraph: the base, primitive, perverse allure of lust and greed in the deepest recesses of the human psyche. Thus, HoD illustrates to some extent the full range of evils present in colonial contexts, a triad of evil eloquently proposed by Katkin and Katkin, and remains highly relevant for the study of colonialism from the point of view of the coloniser. A bad book about Africa, yes, but a very good book on European imperialism.

*Casement Report: human-rights investigation on the Congo carried out by British diplomat of Irish extraction Roger Casement, presented in the British Parliament and pivotal in turning the British public opinion against King Leopold.