Heart of Darkness Response

Joseph Conrad does not have seemed to buy into Emily Dickinson’s maxim that “Much madness is divinest sense.” In Heart of Darkness, the African wilderness is portrayed as mad, but the European civilizers are also crazy at times, making the characterization of madness more broad and thus strengthening the scope of the novel itself . By this portrayal, the book not only questions the nature of the British Empire, but of all human civilizations and, in a way, power structures in any form. This is consistent with the ambivalence that pervades the book, making the novel not only timeless in its scope but poignant in its unclear message about human nature.
Conrad’s intention to broadly comment on social themes is prevalent in other aspects of the work. Conrad, instead of giving most of his characters clear names, defines them by means of their occupation. There is the “manager,” “lawyer,” and “director” rather than Jack, Rick, and Davy (or whatever). It is not clear whether or not Conrad intends for these characters to simply stand for the institutions for which they are a part, or more vaguely the civilizations in which they exist. Whatever their un-naming signifies, it is clear that these characters only barely exist past Marlow’s descriptions, and that one of the few named characters—Marlow—is the one to whom we should pay attention.
The ambivalence of the work is most clear in Conrad’s physical descriptions. The land in Africa (from the view of the ship) is described as “like a spine sticking out from a man’s back” rather than as peninsulas, bays, etc. The arrows that the natives shoot at the ship as it goes through fog are also, oddly, not creating a panic, but rather, noticed because they may contain a “dangerous poison.” The constant obsession with jewelry is not really clear; the reader is never sure if the jewelry makes the blacks more attractive and noticeable to the whites, or if the whites are just out for the jewelry itself (in their first reactions, of course, given the stated purpose of ivory).
The idea of madness in the novel extends to physical sickness, from which neither race is safe. After all, there are more than a handful of sick people in the book. Marlow himself is not in good health according to the doctor, barely escaping death at the end. The Kurtz seems almost ill in his insanity, acting on impulse as if he has no superego at all. Marlow, past physical health, is mentally unbalanced in his strange obsession with the Kurtz before he even meets him. There are other suicides, cannibal references, and other instances of ailment throughout the book, but it is clear that Conrad views something in the imperial-colonial operation as inherently unstable and wrong. By this broad statement, Conrad seems to question the role of power structures in all human civilizations. The question remains, is the imperializer better off, or his the Kurtz, who is autonomous but inherently savage?