Was it a badge- an ornament- a charm- a propitiatory act?

“Heart of Darkness” and “Apocalypse Now” are prodigiously racist. But Heart of Darkness is an impenetrable text and Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” is governed by vibrating indignance. I read the novel as a fairly straightforward text. It had glimmers of profound meaning throughout, but essentially I read it literally as a journey toward inexorable, illuminating truth. Human (Kurtz’s) end is to mean something, if not exactly a discourse on mortality. The specular qualities in Marlow and Kurtz’s relationship cohere the sense of a relay: Marlow accesses meaning when Kurtz accesses death. His narrative only reaches apotheosis when Kurtz dies and grants him experiential value in his story, if not authenticity.

Meaning is thus presented as mere (pithy yet strangulated) articulation of this “horror”. Death is to grant us knowledge of life in its last few moments but I don’t see Kurtz’s last words as particularly enlightening. It’s choked off, definitely not authoritative, and ironically diminished at the very moment it is realized. In fact, this cry is, I would argue, inarticulate. It’s something atavistic that has more in common with the incomprehensible babble of the natives than it does with the civilized language that Achebe argues Conrad withholds from the rudimentary souls to “let the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts.” It emphasizes the powerlessness of Kurtz on his deathbed, and the failure of language here is echoed in Marlow: he extrapolates the candour, conviction, revolt and glimpsed truth because he has need to. “And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the difference, and all the truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps!” Yeah, perhaps. I, on the other hand, excavate more significance in the contemptuous pronouncement “Mistah Kurtz- he dead.” (300 words)

Nur Khairunnisa Ismail