What is the "heart of darkness"?

The following is a sample response to tomorrow's assigned reading. You can use this as a model of your own responses. Note the references to specific parts of the text; the commentary of the passages quoted; and the questions for discussion posed at the end. Our class discussion tomorrow will be based on this post. Please prepare comments to share in class.

***

What exactly does the “heart of darkness” refer to? At first glance, it seems quite obvious. Surely it must refer to Congo given Marlow’s description of its wild and creepy landscape populated with “black” and “savage” brutes. Furthermore, Marlow emphasizes the geographic location of Congo as being at the heart of the African continent—“dead in the centre”—and through which ran a river “like a snake” (10). His travels into the jungles lead him to encounters with sickly and dying indigenous men, where huge bugs and the oppressive heat made the Europeans irritable and irrational. Things seem to go wrong in this place—Marlow’s steamship mysteriously sinks, leaving him to contend the disorganized state of affairs at the station as well as the threat of a wild hippopotamus

However, while sailing on the Thames off the shores of London, where Marlow tells his story to the narrator and his companions, Marlow says that “this also…has been one of the dark places of the earth” (5). It is a description that is in stark contrast to the narrator’s depiction of the same surroundings. For centuries, out from the River Thames did great men sail into the “unknown earth” (5), eventually establishing London as the center of the British Empire. Furthermore, Marlow seems to display a great deal of cynicism when it comes to his venture with the Company into the Congo. For example, he dismisses his aunt’s notion of his role as an “emissary of light,” one who would “‘[wean] those ignorant millions from their horrid ways’” by framing his work with the Company as simply a pursuit of profit. Moreover, Marlow’s repeated references to London as a “whited sepulchre” (9) suggest that at the heart of empire lay rot and death.

There seems to be a play between darkness and light, black and white, along with themes of good and evil as well as civilization and primitiveness. How should we read the descriptions of Congo given in the text? What is the text saying about the European colonial project? Is Marlow critical of the very project in which he participates? If he is, how does he account for his own participation in it? Perhaps the heart of darkness does not refer to a place, but alludes to a state of being--Marlow's conscience???

Work Cited:
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Fourth Edition. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. W. W. Norton: New York, 2005.