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’s savagely criminal conduct. A well-known example of this practice occurs in the melodramatic closing scene, in which Marlow meets with Kurtz’s fiancee and falsely reports that her lover’s final utterance was her name. By withholding from her the knowledge of Kurtz’s breakdown, he thus acts on his earlier assertion that women inhabit a world of beautiful illusions and that it is the duty of men to keep them there. Yet this relatively inconsequential effort to spare an individual’s feelings is not the only act of insincerity in which Marlow has engaged with respect to Kurtz’s memory. During this meeting he comforts the grieving woman by affirming her consoling thought that Kurtz’s “words, at least, have not died” (p. 123), an apparent allusion to his published writings. On this matter Marlow has previously sanitized Kurtz’s reputation in a much more significant fashion. Having been “repeatedly entreated” by Kurtz “to take good care of ‘my pamphlet’ (he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career” (p. 93), Marlow has acceded by tearing off the damning postscript (“Exterminate all the brutes!”) before offering up “the famous Report for publication” (p. 119). This action tends to be overlooked in interpretations of the novella because Marlow makes only passing mention of it. We are, however, given to believe that the essay has been published as the magnum opus of a man whom the public at large continues to view as a great humanitarian, and, as such, it would no doubt have been used to further legitimize the imperial ravaging of the Congo. Indeed, while the text strongly hints that this is the case, regardless of how we interpret the possible impact of Kurtz’s report, what is certain is that Marlow has been complicit in the conspiracy of silence about the crimes this eminent figure has perpetrated. We thus encounter the deep irony that in this story whose chief purpose is ostensibly to disclose dark truths, Marlow confesses how he has declined his greatest opportunity publicly to do just that.

We have a variety of alternatives for how to make sense of Marlow’s solicitousness toward the reputation of a man whose conduct he views as deplorable. For example, we may assume it to be a function of his conviction that Kurtz, as largely a victim of his own misguided idealism, is less condemnable than the other company agents who have no ideals to lose; or of his belief that the primary sort of knowledge he has to impart is less of a political than a metaphysical nature; or we may speculate that, through his complicity, he enacts Conrad’s own mixed feelings over having remained aloof from the growing protest movement and instead written an aestheticized account of what he had witnessed in the Congo. More broadly, however, Marlow’s paradoxical fidelity to Kurtz is emblematic of the complex dynamics of Heart of Darkness as a whole, and it thus helps to account for the diverse range of competing interpretations that the text has generated. Much of the controversy over how to read the novella, in fact, resolves into the rather unnuanced question of whether we are to view it primarily as a challenge to or an affirmation of the status quo. That is, it tends either to be celebrated for bearing witness to human rights atrocities and the evils of imperialism or excoriated for complacently reproducing the racist assumptions of its historical era. Indeed, few literary works have been so heavily freighted with cultural baggage or tugged in such different directions simultaneously. What tends to be disregarded in this polarized debate, however, is the fact that what makes this work of art enduring is precisely its complex oscillation between perpetuating and challenging the premises of its historical moment. The more we can recognize Heart of Darkness to be the creation of a writer who was neither a passive product of his own culture nor fully able to transcend the assumptions of that culture, the better we will be able to come to terms with this deeply troubling book.

A. Michael Matin is a professor in the English Department of Warren Wilson College, where he teaches late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century British and Anglophone postcolonial literature. His essays on Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Anita Desai, and David Lodge have appeared in Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Modem Literature, Scribners