Notes on Water, Cycles, Holes, and Ivory in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
by Jenny (Walicek) Clendenen
San Jose State University, 2004
ON WATER
Although the images of darkness and light get the most scholarly and critical attention in Joseph Conrad’s highly symbolic novel Heart of Darkness, the abundant references to very different bodies of water strike me as equally intriguing and worthy of examination.
The outer frame of the story begins and ends on a seafaring boat in an ocean port. The inner frame, the story told by an exemplary seaman named Marlow, is prefaced by his reflections on ancient Roman use of the Thames River and his reminder that he had once turned fresh-water sailor, just after having sailed the Indian, Pacific, and China seas. He begins his narrative by describing his childhood fascination with the “immense snake” of the Congo River and his attempts to get a job as a skipper of a river steamboat. When he gets the job he crosses the Channel to sign the papers, and soon arrives at the Company who runs an oversea empire. Once he boards the steamboat, the story takes place almost entirely on or beside the Congo.
In a longer essay I would examine Marlow’s multitude of descriptions of the Congo and the possible symbolism behind each of them, but for this journal suffice it to say that there are lots. One observation worth noting is that the bodies of water that carry Marlow from his London home to the heart of darkness begin with the great wide ocean and then, like arteries on their way to the heart, narrow as he proceeds. From the wide Channel his passage is narrowed to the mouth of the Congo, a river which continues to narrow until, at a mid-stream chain of shallow patches resembling a “backbone,” he is forced into a channel “much narrower than I had supposed. To the left of us there was the long uninterrupted shoal, and to the right a high steep bank heavily overgrown with bushes” (59). Penned in by land and foliage, he makes the continually narrowing approach to Kurtz. It is as if he has traveled through the larger arteries of the body, following along the backbone, and arrived in the heart of darkness.
In a way, the inner story told by Marlow also ends on the water. Marlow is returning “a slim packet of letters and the girl’s portrait” (90) This can only be the portrait painted by Kurtz of the draped, blindfolded woman carrying the torch against a sombre background, which he was said to have painted about a year before Marlow arrived (40). The Intended is, of course, draped in mourning in a sombre, darkening room with bedraped columns. Even more interestingly, the name Helen is Greek for “Light” or “Torch-Bearer,” so if we presume the Intended’s name to be Helen, then it follows that her nickname would be Nellie -- the name of the boat where this story started.
ON CYCLES
The beginning and ending of Heart of Darkness contain many similarities, and I think Conrad did this on purpose to bring the story full circle and to point out the cyclical nature of good intentions that, because of human nature, yield bad results.
In the beginning five men are sitting on a boat called the Nellie in a port of the Thames. (Nellie is a nickname for Helen, which is Greek for light and which connotes the beautiful Helen of mythology.) It is dusk, and there is a “mournful gloom” over London. They are waiting for the turn of the tide so they can embark on their voyage down the river.
The narrator tells us that the lawyer lies on a rug, the accountant toys with “the bones” of dominoes, Marlow leans cross-legged against the mizzenmast looking like an idol, and the Director joins them. The latter looks like “trustworthiness personified.” We’re told his work “was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom.” The sun “becomes more sombre every minute.”
“The sun sets, and the narrator muses silently about the history of the river and the explorers it has carried. A three-legged lighthouse is shining. Marlow makes a sudden remark about England having once been a dark place, and the narrator thinks about Marlow’s atypical search for meaning on the outside of a story, like “one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
The end of the book also takes place at dusk, but now it is Marlow speaking. For him the tide has already turned; he has already been down the river (“been there”) and taken that voyage (“done that”). He is saying that upon his return he was visited by three men, reminiscent of the three crewmen to whom he is speaking. Though his story ends in an elegant drawing room with an unnamed woman instead of sitting on a ship named after a woman, the setting is similar: sombre, near sunset, not lit by a three-legged lighthouse but by three windows described like lighthouses: “three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns.” The “mournful gloom” of the novel’s opening is echoed in the materials present in the door, furniture, fireplace and piano, which are all from Africa: mahogany, gold, marble (yes, I checked) and ivory. These African products correlate to the ivory dominoes on the Nellie. The Intended enters “all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk,” like the narrator’s “moon” metaphor in the beginning. She is not very young and has “trustful” eyes and “a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering;” she sounds like the matured Marlow, or even the trustworthy Director, of the beginning. The sun begins to set, as it did in the beginning. “This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo;” just as the sky deepened over the ship, the room continues to darken until “only her forehead, smooth and white, remained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief and love.” -- another connection to the earlier moon metaphor. He hears “the horror, the horror,” tells her the lie and then stops the story. In his story, Marlow heard the words “the horror”; in the retelling, the crewmen hear the story of “the horror”.
The Director, bringing Heart of Darkness full circle, says “We have lost the first of the ebb.” This means that it is too late. There is a black bank of clouds, which is ominous, and the “tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky -- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” Here we go again -- another sombre sky, another journey to another heart of darkness. Conrad is saying that the cycle keeps on cycling, and the story within the story within the story will no doubt soon add another layer.
ON HOLES
Despite the “impenetrable” mysteries that pervade Heart of Darkness, it is riddled with holes -- real holes in physical objects. Unlike so many of Conrad’s visuals, these holes are fixed and tangible. Yet the recurrent use of this definite image throughout a novel so well known for its indefinite descriptions implies another layer of meaning. A close reading of the text indicates that the holes are also metaphors for holes in arguments and ideas.
The first hole that the narrator, Marlow, describes is the “vast artificial hole” (31) he sees when he arrives at the Company’s first station on the Congo. The hole had been dug on a slope for no apparent purpose; as Marlow says, “it was just a hole.” In his efforts to avoid it he almost falls into a narrow ravine that held broken pipes, a “wanton smashup.” Upon reaching the trees beyond this ravine he felt as if he “had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno” where only the sound of water could be heard, and he gets his first vision of the black shapes that “crouched, lay […] clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, an despair” in the “greenish gloom.” These dying workers are his first glimpse of the Company’s brutality. Because it precedes this hellish scene, and because in avoiding it he nearly lands on a scrap heap, the hole on the slope seems to be a warning symbol for The Pit itself. Marlow is not on a wanderlust’s adventure, as he originally thought; he’s en route to Hell.
The second hole Marlow has to deal with is in the bottom of his steamer (36) when he reaches the Central Station . The bottom had been torn out and it had sunk before he arrived, and this causes him to delay his adventures up the Congo several months. He can’t make the repairs any faster because he is unable to get the rivets that he needs. He comments in exasperation that there were rivets all over the place down at the first station yard (where he had seen the first hole), but the only cargo that arrives at the Central Station is useless -- calico, beads, handkerchiefs (43). The hole in the steamer symbolizes the lack of control that Marlow will have on this journey into Hell; he will find himself at the mercy of ladder-climbing Company men, surprisingly restrained cannibals and natives under the command of Kurtz.
The third hole is in the bucket that the “pilgrims” are using to carry water to douse the fire in the grass shed. Marlow says it “burst into a blaze so suddenly that you would have thought the earth had opened to let an avenging fire consume all that trash” -- the same trash that he received instead of rivets. He smokes his pipe quietly by his dismantled steamer as he watched the firefighting efforts, and observes the hole in the pail (38). This foreshadows Marlow’s own futile attempts to fight the fires of Hell; he will be drawn into a confrontation with Kurtz in the jungle night that will result in their alliance.
Marlow observes “large holes” in the peaked roof of Kurtz’s “long decaying building on the summit,” which stands “half-buried in the high brass” behind a row of posts “ornamented with round carved balls” (68). Later he adds to his description of the house “three little square window-holes” (73). The balls turn out to be shrunken heads, and the image of holes in the roof and wall of a decaying building are reminiscent of the sockets in a skull. This set of holes is an indication that Marlow will soon be dealing with death -- both Kurtz’s, and his own.
In the end, Marlow tells us that Kurtz was buried in a muddy hole -- and then, as the signs indicated, “they very nearly buried me” (87). This is to fulfill the what the other holes have prophesied: that Marlow will journey into Hell, with little control over his own destiny, where he will confront his alter ego and then face death.
The holes may also metaphorically express the holes in certain arguments and ideas, but they most certainly forebode steps and conditions of Marlow’s journey into the Hell of Self.
ON IVORY
One of the most intriguing images of light against darkness in Heart of Darkness is that of ivory. Although it is only light in color, and not in reflective or illuminating properties, its connotations carry more meaning than all the other lights that sparkle and beam and glow throughout the story.
Exploited not only for art’s sake but for profitable art’s sake, ivory represents the entire reason for European penetration into the heart of darkness. This claim is substantiated by the image of the Accountant “toying architecturally with the bones” of a box of dominoes (made of ivory in Victorian days) on the deck of the Nellie: he is metaphorically toying with human lives, calculating the profits. That the Africans are given “rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire” for this commodity tells us that the profits are very big indeed.
Later, in the jungle, another account tells Marlow that Kurtz is valued by the Company because he “sends in as much ivory as all the others put together,” a comment made to the tune of a beaten African lies groaning amidst buzzing flies. When Marlow reaches the station he finds huge stacks of ivory: “you would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country.” The acquisition of ivory requires death -- not only the deaths of the elephants, but of the natives who are forced to defend or collect the treasure. In fact Kurtz is described as “an animated image of death carved out of old ivory [shaking his hand at] men made of dark and glittering bronze.” This juxtaposition of carved ivory against dark men is yet another commentary on the human costs of art for profit’s sake.
Marlow recollects Kurtz claiming the ivory was his own, because the Company had not paid for it, and because he had collected it himself at great risk. Kurtz had wondered if he should resist, and had said that all he wanted was justice. The Africans, of course, could have used that same argument and pondered those same issues.
Ivory always represents the butchering of an animal, and in Heart of Darkness and many more untold stories, it also represents the subjugation of native peoples. Its use as an image of light juxtaposed against the darkness is effectively loaded with the connotations of commerce and art, cost and profit -- and of death.
San Jose State University, 2004
ON WATER
Although the images of darkness and light get the most scholarly and critical attention in Joseph Conrad’s highly symbolic novel Heart of Darkness, the abundant references to very different bodies of water strike me as equally intriguing and worthy of examination.
The outer frame of the story begins and ends on a seafaring boat in an ocean port. The inner frame, the story told by an exemplary seaman named Marlow, is prefaced by his reflections on ancient Roman use of the Thames River and his reminder that he had once turned fresh-water sailor, just after having sailed the Indian, Pacific, and China seas. He begins his narrative by describing his childhood fascination with the “immense snake” of the Congo River and his attempts to get a job as a skipper of a river steamboat. When he gets the job he crosses the Channel to sign the papers, and soon arrives at the Company who runs an oversea empire. Once he boards the steamboat, the story takes place almost entirely on or beside the Congo.
In a longer essay I would examine Marlow’s multitude of descriptions of the Congo and the possible symbolism behind each of them, but for this journal suffice it to say that there are lots. One observation worth noting is that the bodies of water that carry Marlow from his London home to the heart of darkness begin with the great wide ocean and then, like arteries on their way to the heart, narrow as he proceeds. From the wide Channel his passage is narrowed to the mouth of the Congo, a river which continues to narrow until, at a mid-stream chain of shallow patches resembling a “backbone,” he is forced into a channel “much narrower than I had supposed. To the left of us there was the long uninterrupted shoal, and to the right a high steep bank heavily overgrown with bushes” (59). Penned in by land and foliage, he makes the continually narrowing approach to Kurtz. It is as if he has traveled through the larger arteries of the body, following along the backbone, and arrived in the heart of darkness.
In a way, the inner story told by Marlow also ends on the water. Marlow is returning “a slim packet of letters and the girl’s portrait” (90) This can only be the portrait painted by Kurtz of the draped, blindfolded woman carrying the torch against a sombre background, which he was said to have painted about a year before Marlow arrived (40). The Intended is, of course, draped in mourning in a sombre, darkening room with bedraped columns. Even more interestingly, the name Helen is Greek for “Light” or “Torch-Bearer,” so if we presume the Intended’s name to be Helen, then it follows that her nickname would be Nellie -- the name of the boat where this story started.
ON CYCLES
The beginning and ending of Heart of Darkness contain many similarities, and I think Conrad did this on purpose to bring the story full circle and to point out the cyclical nature of good intentions that, because of human nature, yield bad results.
In the beginning five men are sitting on a boat called the Nellie in a port of the Thames. (Nellie is a nickname for Helen, which is Greek for light and which connotes the beautiful Helen of mythology.) It is dusk, and there is a “mournful gloom” over London. They are waiting for the turn of the tide so they can embark on their voyage down the river.
The narrator tells us that the lawyer lies on a rug, the accountant toys with “the bones” of dominoes, Marlow leans cross-legged against the mizzenmast looking like an idol, and the Director joins them. The latter looks like “trustworthiness personified.” We’re told his work “was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom.” The sun “becomes more sombre every minute.”
“The sun sets, and the narrator muses silently about the history of the river and the explorers it has carried. A three-legged lighthouse is shining. Marlow makes a sudden remark about England having once been a dark place, and the narrator thinks about Marlow’s atypical search for meaning on the outside of a story, like “one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
The end of the book also takes place at dusk, but now it is Marlow speaking. For him the tide has already turned; he has already been down the river (“been there”) and taken that voyage (“done that”). He is saying that upon his return he was visited by three men, reminiscent of the three crewmen to whom he is speaking. Though his story ends in an elegant drawing room with an unnamed woman instead of sitting on a ship named after a woman, the setting is similar: sombre, near sunset, not lit by a three-legged lighthouse but by three windows described like lighthouses: “three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns.” The “mournful gloom” of the novel’s opening is echoed in the materials present in the door, furniture, fireplace and piano, which are all from Africa: mahogany, gold, marble (yes, I checked) and ivory. These African products correlate to the ivory dominoes on the Nellie. The Intended enters “all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk,” like the narrator’s “moon” metaphor in the beginning. She is not very young and has “trustful” eyes and “a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering;” she sounds like the matured Marlow, or even the trustworthy Director, of the beginning. The sun begins to set, as it did in the beginning. “This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo;” just as the sky deepened over the ship, the room continues to darken until “only her forehead, smooth and white, remained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief and love.” -- another connection to the earlier moon metaphor. He hears “the horror, the horror,” tells her the lie and then stops the story. In his story, Marlow heard the words “the horror”; in the retelling, the crewmen hear the story of “the horror”.
The Director, bringing Heart of Darkness full circle, says “We have lost the first of the ebb.” This means that it is too late. There is a black bank of clouds, which is ominous, and the “tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky -- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” Here we go again -- another sombre sky, another journey to another heart of darkness. Conrad is saying that the cycle keeps on cycling, and the story within the story within the story will no doubt soon add another layer.
ON HOLES
Despite the “impenetrable” mysteries that pervade Heart of Darkness, it is riddled with holes -- real holes in physical objects. Unlike so many of Conrad’s visuals, these holes are fixed and tangible. Yet the recurrent use of this definite image throughout a novel so well known for its indefinite descriptions implies another layer of meaning. A close reading of the text indicates that the holes are also metaphors for holes in arguments and ideas.
The first hole that the narrator, Marlow, describes is the “vast artificial hole” (31) he sees when he arrives at the Company’s first station on the Congo. The hole had been dug on a slope for no apparent purpose; as Marlow says, “it was just a hole.” In his efforts to avoid it he almost falls into a narrow ravine that held broken pipes, a “wanton smashup.” Upon reaching the trees beyond this ravine he felt as if he “had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno” where only the sound of water could be heard, and he gets his first vision of the black shapes that “crouched, lay […] clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, an despair” in the “greenish gloom.” These dying workers are his first glimpse of the Company’s brutality. Because it precedes this hellish scene, and because in avoiding it he nearly lands on a scrap heap, the hole on the slope seems to be a warning symbol for The Pit itself. Marlow is not on a wanderlust’s adventure, as he originally thought; he’s en route to Hell.
The second hole Marlow has to deal with is in the bottom of his steamer (36) when he reaches the Central Station . The bottom had been torn out and it had sunk before he arrived, and this causes him to delay his adventures up the Congo several months. He can’t make the repairs any faster because he is unable to get the rivets that he needs. He comments in exasperation that there were rivets all over the place down at the first station yard (where he had seen the first hole), but the only cargo that arrives at the Central Station is useless -- calico, beads, handkerchiefs (43). The hole in the steamer symbolizes the lack of control that Marlow will have on this journey into Hell; he will find himself at the mercy of ladder-climbing Company men, surprisingly restrained cannibals and natives under the command of Kurtz.
The third hole is in the bucket that the “pilgrims” are using to carry water to douse the fire in the grass shed. Marlow says it “burst into a blaze so suddenly that you would have thought the earth had opened to let an avenging fire consume all that trash” -- the same trash that he received instead of rivets. He smokes his pipe quietly by his dismantled steamer as he watched the firefighting efforts, and observes the hole in the pail (38). This foreshadows Marlow’s own futile attempts to fight the fires of Hell; he will be drawn into a confrontation with Kurtz in the jungle night that will result in their alliance.
Marlow observes “large holes” in the peaked roof of Kurtz’s “long decaying building on the summit,” which stands “half-buried in the high brass” behind a row of posts “ornamented with round carved balls” (68). Later he adds to his description of the house “three little square window-holes” (73). The balls turn out to be shrunken heads, and the image of holes in the roof and wall of a decaying building are reminiscent of the sockets in a skull. This set of holes is an indication that Marlow will soon be dealing with death -- both Kurtz’s, and his own.
In the end, Marlow tells us that Kurtz was buried in a muddy hole -- and then, as the signs indicated, “they very nearly buried me” (87). This is to fulfill the what the other holes have prophesied: that Marlow will journey into Hell, with little control over his own destiny, where he will confront his alter ego and then face death.
The holes may also metaphorically express the holes in certain arguments and ideas, but they most certainly forebode steps and conditions of Marlow’s journey into the Hell of Self.
ON IVORY
One of the most intriguing images of light against darkness in Heart of Darkness is that of ivory. Although it is only light in color, and not in reflective or illuminating properties, its connotations carry more meaning than all the other lights that sparkle and beam and glow throughout the story.
Exploited not only for art’s sake but for profitable art’s sake, ivory represents the entire reason for European penetration into the heart of darkness. This claim is substantiated by the image of the Accountant “toying architecturally with the bones” of a box of dominoes (made of ivory in Victorian days) on the deck of the Nellie: he is metaphorically toying with human lives, calculating the profits. That the Africans are given “rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire” for this commodity tells us that the profits are very big indeed.
Later, in the jungle, another account tells Marlow that Kurtz is valued by the Company because he “sends in as much ivory as all the others put together,” a comment made to the tune of a beaten African lies groaning amidst buzzing flies. When Marlow reaches the station he finds huge stacks of ivory: “you would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country.” The acquisition of ivory requires death -- not only the deaths of the elephants, but of the natives who are forced to defend or collect the treasure. In fact Kurtz is described as “an animated image of death carved out of old ivory [shaking his hand at] men made of dark and glittering bronze.” This juxtaposition of carved ivory against dark men is yet another commentary on the human costs of art for profit’s sake.
Marlow recollects Kurtz claiming the ivory was his own, because the Company had not paid for it, and because he had collected it himself at great risk. Kurtz had wondered if he should resist, and had said that all he wanted was justice. The Africans, of course, could have used that same argument and pondered those same issues.
Ivory always represents the butchering of an animal, and in Heart of Darkness and many more untold stories, it also represents the subjugation of native peoples. Its use as an image of light juxtaposed against the darkness is effectively loaded with the connotations of commerce and art, cost and profit -- and of death.