'All the hearts that beat in the darkness': On the Title of Conrad's Heart of Darkness

By Andrew Nicol, Student

A brief psychoanalytic reading of Heart of Darkness in terms of its title.

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

The title of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness is deeply suggestive but, like the nature of the story itself, it is an “inconclusive experience”. As one of the first novelists of the modernist movement, ambiguity and complexity were techniques employed extensively by Conrad; it was his belief that the rich complexities of experience could not be conveyed with a “direct simplicity”. The title of Heart of Darkness, then, is both an intentional enigma and a mechanism by which Conrad sets out to explore the human consciousness in all its darkness and elusively. On a symbolic level, the word ‘heart’ connotates life and emotion, but can also be extended to signify the place of central importance. ‘Darkness’ is associated with disorder and chaos, but can also mean the absence of the clear and tangible. The title alludes to the setting of Africa, the outline of which is roughly in the shape of a heart, and which was seen by Europeans as a place inhabited by dark, savage natives. Deconstructing the title, however, is not an adequate approach to understanding it. The phrase ‘heart of darkness’ is itself a recurring motif of the text. It is used in such a way that the reader feels as though he is being guided slowly to a place of realisation, a “culminating experience” that will change his perceptions of human behaviour. The journey to the heart of darkness is an exploration into the human unconscious, and the culminating experience is the realisation of the pervasiveness of our unconscious desires.

Marlow’s journey is identified repeatedly as an exploration of primordial behaviour. He feels as though he is “traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world” to discover the “concealed life” of Africa. When the boat is attacked by natives, Marlow acknowledges the “kinship with this wild and passionate uproar”. He declares that the adornments of culture – “acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags” – do not characterise man, and that it is instead our “inborn strength” and the exercise of our emotions that make us who we are. This is the first stage in Marlow’s realisation of the nature of the heart of darkness. He has been so profoundly affected by his discovery of the truth in the natives’ behaviour that he speaks “a speech that cannot be silenced”, despite the fact that he is provoking grunts from his listeners. Marlow’s discovery is that there is a part of the heart in every man which yearns for our “human passion to be let loose”, transcending race, culture and “stripped of its cloak of time”.

The discovery of this heart of darkness is intrinsically linked to Kurtz. Marlow describes the objective of his journey as “crawl[ing] towards Kurtz – exclusively”, and subsequently establishes the link between Kurtz and the heart by declaring “we penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness”. When we first meet the “shade of Mr Kurtz”, we are given the overwhelming impression that Kurtz is as much the embodiment of Marlow’s inner self as a character in his own right. He is described as an “atrocious phantom”, an “apparition” and a “shadow”, all of which serve to prove the extent to which he can be read as being the Personification of a part of Marlow’s psyche. Kurtz is the superlative product of the ideals of Western colonialism, and to some extent Marlow may have shared his belief in liberating the natives from their primitive state before he traveled to Africa. This, together with his “various desires” make Kurtz the representation of Marlow’s id – the supply of all Marlow’s impulses and beliefs that remain suppressed in the unconscious mind. The appropriately named Inner Station is the site of the culminating experience, where Marlow discovers the unconscious in both himself and Kurtz:

“I had – for my sins, I suppose – to go through the ordeal of looking into it [his soul] myself… I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.”

Marlow had plunged into the depths of his soul, and seen “a glimpsed truth”. He had not only discovered himself, but also “all the hearts that beat in the darkness” – what he saw is universal. He identified the source of darkness in himself and in the consciousness of all civilisation; at that moment finding for the first time the heart of darkness.

The self-knowledge that Marlow finds makes it difficult for him to return to an ordinary life in Europe. He finds the company of other people an “irritating presence” because “they could not possibly know the things [he] knew”. Just as Marlow’s discovery of the heart of darkness “threw a kind of light” on his life, the title of the novel illuminates the story for its readers. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a powerful exploration into the unconscious; and the multiplicity of suggestiveness associated with its title is a guide to the complex voyage upon which its readers embark.