The Adapted Model of Heart of Darkness

By Jeremy Cowan, Heart of Darkness Project Team

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a reactionary text. Written as a response to the atrocities of the Congo Free State, the text’s intent is inform, motivate, and horrify its reader. Presuming the above to be not only assumed by the readership but understood as the reason for the penning of the text, it is only suitable that there are reactions to the text itself. Before going any further, an examination of the actual text is necessary for the foundation of analysis of the text.

            Heart of Darkness grapples not with the unknown but with the indescribable. While Marlow, the narrator of the story, habitually uses the word “not” to describe what a given feature lacks, he often times fails to state what said feature “is”. From describing the shore of Africa as being “veiled not by a sense of mystery” (5), the ambitions of the Company that he works for as being “not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (7), or describing himself as being “not particularly tender” (16) a feeling of ambiguity is established. Ultimately this mode of description fails to establish a sense of what the shore of Africa is, what one does see when looking too much into the Company, or even how tender Marlow is or at least thinks himself to be. By only describing what is not, Conrad creates an environment that is fertile for the active imagination. It is up to the reader of the text to imagine what an accurate description of a given moment described in the text is when all that is given to the reader is a sense of what a given moment is not.

            Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is, at its core, a critique. Whether describing Africa as a “tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms” (67) or a feeling of remorse for his dying helmsman, “for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in black Sahara” (50) Marlow feels pity for Africa and its native inhabitants. But who are the “greedy phantoms” that reduce the natives to “no more…than a grain of sand in black Sahara”? When using Marlow’s method of description, of describing what something is by approximating what it is not, it can be deduced that the phantoms are not “tenebrous” as they are not natives to the land that they are invading. Given that tenebrous is a synonym for “dark” it can be concluded upon because the phantoms are not “dark”, that they are therefore “light” the antonym of “dark”. From here it is only a leap, skip, and a bound to the conclusion that they invading phantoms are white men, or more precisely, Europeans, the emissaries of the Company. It is in the above descriptions—and the many others that reduce the humanity of the Africans—that Conrad makes his critique of the Congo Free State. As the Company in the novella is representative of Belgium’s Congo Free State it is not without reason that one may associate the crimes against the Africans perpetrated by the Company as being the literary counterparts to real crimes committed against Africans by Belgium by proxy of the Congo Free State.

            But how does one consolidate the above two interpretations of the text? Are the aforementioned ambiguous descriptions meant to mystify the Continent, the Company, or neither? Perhaps the best way to approach this question would be to develop an understanding of the “heart of darkness” as described in the text.

“Heart of Darkness” is mentioned only twice in the narrative. The first is when Marlow, having finally started down the river that will lead him to Kurtz states that his steamer had “penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness” (35). Marlow’s second mention is when he remarks that “the brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress” (67). Never does the text plainly state what the heart of darkness is. Long before approaching Kurtz, Marlow had been in Africa without being in the heart of darkness. Only after moving away from the Central Station towards the Inner Station does Kurtz move into the heart of darkness. It is only as Marlow moves farther from reach of European society, farther from the Central Station, and farther from the coast that the heart of darkness is penetrated.

            Aside from Kurtz, there is one other European that Marlow encounters in the heart of darkness: the harlequin (52). When attempting to converse with the harlequin, all that Marlow could initially get from him was a

garbled ; ‘Brother sailor…honour…pleasure…delight…introduce myself…Russian…son of an arch-priest…Government of Tambov…What? Tobacco! English tobacco; the excellent English tobacco! Now that’s brotherly. Smoke? Where’s a sailor that does not smoke?’  (53).

Until the introduction of European amenities the harlequin appears to have lost his sanity. This is not to say that smoking restores the harlequin’s mental discord, but that the reminder of his native continent is enough to restore enough of his humanity that he may relate, in part, what his experiences in the heart of darkness have taught him. From his first words it is made obvious that the Harlequin has been shaken to the core, that the heart of darkness has wrought havoc on his state of mind. It can be argued that this is from either his being so distanced from the luxuries of European culture or from being in the heart of darkness, a unique place from other non-European locals. Regardless of the exact reasoning, it is due to being away from Europe that the poor Harlequin is made unstable. Only when Marlow reminds him of Europe and its splendors with the tobacco does the Harlequin regain some sense of proper speech and is able to hold discourse with Marlow.

            With a better understanding of what the “heart of darkness” is, a more thorough consolidation of the above interpretations of the book may be found. Marlow, as the narrator of the story, cannot necessarily be trusted to have an accurate depiction of what is going on due to his exposure to the heart of darkness. If Marlow cannot have an accurate depiction of what had happened then the reason for his ambiguity must be that the heart of darkness alters the minds of those who venture into it by making them unable to cognitively reason through their experiences in the heart of darkness. The heart of darkness is then not a place but an altered state of mind, where once one sets foot in this new threshold of thinking one cannot go back. What atrocities Marlow encounters both inside and outside of the heart of darkness are the result of the Company, the entity that surrounds the heart of darkness and only exists within the heart of darkness through Kurtz, who is driven by the heart of darkness to disassociate himself with the Company.

            As was said in the beginning of this essay, Heart of Darkness is a reactionary text. In an age of emergent digital modeling, how can the digital age react to the literary cannon, specifically, Heart of Darkness? The “Heart of Darkness Project” at UCSB has attempted to find a modeling structure that would emulate both the reactionary purpose of the text with commentary on the text.

            In deciding how to format such a model it was decided by the project members that a website would be the premier medium for such a task. As the internet becomes more and more immersed and integral to contemporary society it would be most prudent to use it as the medium for publishing the final results of the Project’s labors. The next step for the Project team was to decide what aspect of the text ought to be represented in the model. Would the team adapt the opinions of Kurtz, Marlow, or the Harlequin in a blog-type format or use a more standard website layout to present some facet of the text in the same way that a website presents the topic of the given website? It was decided that the team would use a traditional website layout so as to be better able to take advantage of the conventions used for websites as a means of providing a more comprehensive understanding of the topic of choice. While the blog format would be of use in preserving or adapting the opinions of characters it would be limited in its ability to bring in sources outside of the text as an exhaustive understanding of the characters would be necessary to estimate their reactions to the reactions of the novella. By using a website a more detached interpretation of the topic at hand can be assumed, given that the purpose of the Project’s website is to inform (versus a website that is intended to sell a product or perform some other task).

            Next the Project team had to decide what aspect of the text would be modeled on the website. The Company was selected for several reasons. Due to the fact that the reasoning for Marlow’s trek into the heart of darkness is due to his being hired by the Company to make the trek, and that the motivation for nearly all of the characters in his narrative (with the exception of the Africans, the Harlequin, Kurtz, and himself) is to improve their status within the Company, the Company presented itself as being an ideal candidate for being modeled into a website. Given then that the website to be constructed by the Heart of Darkness Project team was to be of a Company, corporate website design was thought to be a logical stylistic choice for how the website should the designed.

            The text was analyzed to discover if it could be of use in designing the website. Using TAPoR, the Text Analysis Portal for Research, the dominant colors of the text were found to be black (42 occurrences), white (39), red (14), and blue (9) (McMaster). From this it was decided that black and white would be the predominant colors of the website while blue and red would be the secondary colors of the website. Although red technically does occur more times in the text than blue given that there is a relatively small difference between the number of occurrences of either of them and that blue better matches the black and white design scheme, blue does occur more often in the website design. Given that the word “light” is used 28 times in the text whereas “dark” is used only 25 times (McMaster) lighter shades of the colors selected were used in designing the website.

            Adhering to the conventions observed in numerous websites (such as the Wal-Mart corporate website (Wal-Mart)) a portion of the webpage was reserved for a navigational menu, a feature seen on many websites. The types of pages made were also from the conventions used by corporate websites. While not every website will have sections labeled “FAQs”, “Future Plans”, or “Executive Profiles” most corporate websites will have equivalent sections dedicated to the same topic that is covered on the Company’s website, the exact title of the section is merely a semantic choice.

            In order to fit the Company into the selected model, creative work had to be done in order to comfortably adapt the topic into the chosen format. Neither Marlow nor Conrad provides many details about the exact nature of the Company, both prefer to detail the nature of the people who work for the company, having them insist that they are working for the benefit of the Company without stating how it is that they Company is benefitting from their actions. This is presented from the beginning of the text, where Kurtz is described as “a piece of good fortune for the Company” (12) to the end of the text where the Company’s employee’s insist to Marlow “that the Company had the right to every bit of information about its ‘territories’” (71). While a degree of ambiguity could be preserved on the website it became a necessity to invent the people who were the Company, or at least the people who were profiting from the Company. Additionally, miscellaneous information such as the Press Releases, Business Partners, and the For Kids sections had to be invented by the group given that they are conventions of a structure alien to time period that Heart of Darkness was written in.

            Within the invented sections critique of corporations was to be placed. Given that the basis of the website is the Company, the team attempted to create a sense of self-aware irony that attacks not only the Company but the establishment that is the “Corporation” in the twenty-first century. It was decided upon by the team that references to Heart of Darkness in other pieces of literature ought to be included as well. Unfortunately this did not extend past the inclusion of references to T.S. Eliot and Hunter S. Thompson on the Executive Profiles page, both of whom have quoted Heart of Darkness in their own works (1 and 273 respectively).

Rather than cultivate a series of homage those influenced by Heart of Darkness or to those who influenced the text, the team thought it more prudent to indulge in the irony of the website. The ultimate aim of the group’s irony is to bring attention to the way that terrifying actions can be justified by a Corporation, mirroring the intent of Conrad to bring attention to the terrifying events occurring in the Congo Free State. Either the model that emphasizes homage or the model that emphasizes irony could be argued as being less of a model and more of an adaptation of the text but the Heart of Darkness Project group came to the conclusion that adapting Conrad’s intent for Heart of Darkness would more closely approximate what a model is than an attempt to create a website based solely on a series of references made to those who referenced, critiqued, or influenced the text.

The final question to ask then is what does the fitting of one aspect of Heart of Darkness into a new medium do to provide a new context for interpreting the work? To understand this it must be made clear that the medium that the Company is being adapted to is not that of a corporate website, but simply that of a website. Corporate design layout was chosen because the aspect being adapted was a company, not because it is the medium for the model, but because it is the most logical choice for a design within the chosen type of model. If a different portion of the novella were to be adapted to a website than a different website aesthetic would need to be selected to better fit the given portion being adapted.

From this sort of model much more is said of the interpretation of the text by the members of the project than of a “pure” modeling of the text. A “pure” model of a text would be a model of the text that does not add or detract from the text but reshapes the text so that it can be analyzed differently. As there is a lot of material that has been created by the project for the sole purpose of making the irony of the Company website evident the website itself strays from this notion of what a model should be. However, the emergence of irony as being evidence of an attack on the corporate makes the website a parody of what a corporate website is. In becoming a parody, the Company website does preserve the aspect of the text that the group saw as being paramount to the end result that the group was attempting to find. This suggests that the result is not a product of the website being more of an adaptation than a model but that the choice of modeling created the need for irony to preserve an attack on what a corporation. The website then is suggesting that while the model was that of a website the end result was a parody, reducing the drama of the original text to being merely an attack on the Congo Free State and recreating that as something modern. But is there a better model? One that can preserve tone as well as intent? There is not enough space in this essay to examine that possibility. All that can be suggested is that in modeling a specific aspect of a given text creates a void that must be filled. In this case the void was filled by parody. With more time or by modeling a different aspect of the text could the tone have been better preserved? That remains to be seen.

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 4th ed. New York: Norton & Company, & Inc., 2005.

Eliot, T.S.. The Wasteland and Other Poems. “The Hollow Men”. New York: Dover

Publications, 1998.

Heart of Darkness Project at UCSB. The Company. 2008. 16 March 2008.

McMaster University. TAPoR. 2008. 16 March 2008.

Thompson, Hunter S.. Hell's Angels. New York: Balantine Books, 1996.

Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart Stores. 2008. 16 March 2008.