THE SYMBOLISM OF LITERARY ALLUSION IN "HEART OF DARKNESS"

Author(s): Betsy C. Yarrison

Source: Conradiana , 1975, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1975), pp. 155-164
Published by: Daniel Lees; Janet Leake (on behalf of the estate of Edmund Bojarski,
copyright holder); Texas Tech University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24641776

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 THE SYMBOLISM OF LITERARY ALLUSION
IN HEART OF DARKNESS

Betsy C. Yarrison

The rich and unmistakable literary allusiveness of Joseph Conrad's

Heart of Darkness has fascinated and frustrated a generation of critics in
their search for fixed patterns of symbolic meaning in the tale. Note
worthy articles have interpreted Heart of Darkness as a rephrasing of Book
VI of the Aeneid of Virgil, of Dante's Inferno, and of the grail quests of
Arthurian legend.1 Extensive scholarship has also been done on Conrad's
use of religious allusion; critics have found clear reference in the story to
pagan, Christian, and Buddhist traditions.2 The last word on the issue
would appear to belong to Albert J. Guerard, who remarked in Conrad the
Novelist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958) that "we may apply
to Heart of Darkness Thomas Mann's words on Death in Venice : a little
work of'inexhaustible allusiveness' " (p. 310).
Interestingly enough, the allusions in Heart of Darkness, despite their
multiplicity, do not really duplicate or contradict one another; they rather
unearth the elements which certain religious and literary traditions share
with Heart of Darkness and, by implication, with each other. As James
Mellard has suggested in "Myth and Archetype in Heart of Darkness," it
appears that
some sense of organization can be achieved from this critical chaos if one is
willing to back away from the story for a moment and look at it whole, to see,
in other words, its most obvious character, thematic, and structural pat
terns. If one does this, keeping the varied interpretations in mind all the
while, he may be able to reduce the story to its lowest common denomi
nator. In literature the common denominators, that is, the basic structural
and thematic patterns, may be found in myth and archetype.3

Mellard's comprehensive approach is highly sound, but his search for

the "lowest common denominator" fails to take into account the most
conspicuous characteristic of the allusions, their very multiplicity. It
seems plausible that Conrad's explicit textual reference to not one but
four earlier epics may have been deliberate. It is not unlikely that Conrad
sought to stress the fact that the Aeneid, the Inferno and the Arthurian
legends all tell the same tale that he is about to retell-the tale of a heroic
pilgrimage and its effect on the man who undertakes it.
Like Aeneas and Dante, Marlow seeks illumination in the dark wood of
ignorance and wishes to learn the secrets of the earth. Driven by a desire
for knowledge which appears fatally prefigured, he brushes aside warnings
of danger in the sepulchral city, embarks upon the river Styx, and passes

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156 / Conradiana

from station to station deeper into a morally-structured labyrinth which

resembles the classical Hades or the densely populated Hell of Dante. He
undertakes a journey to the depths of his own soul and back, in search of
that unknown goal which would mean achievement of his full hu
manity. In the course of that search he completes his education, meeting a
series of human beings who have failed themselves and life, and emerging
victorious from a series of trials of his own selfhood. As Feder indicates in
"Marlow's Descent into Hell" (p. 280), Conrad must have been aware that
the pilgrimage is an ancient image for the descent into the self. Certainly
he requests a place for his own story within the literary history of the
pilgrimage epic by borrowing a metaphor for Marlow's journey from
earlier traditional literature-the metaphor of a descent into hell and a
return to civilization.
Marlow's descent into hell and his encounters along the way may be
seen to observe a structural pattern established in traditional myth and
imitated by literary epic. According to this pattern: "A hero ventures
forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural
wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is
won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power
to bestow boons on his fellow man."4 Moreover, as both Feder and Evans
have painstakingly documented, Conrad actually incorporates into his pre
sentation of this basic mythic descent a number of specific encounters and
incidents derived from Virgil and Dante. The details of Marlow's journey
have literary antecedents in a variety of traditional treatments of the
voyage to hell and back. All of these traditions have been superimposed
by Conrad upon his own tale of the pilgrimage of modern man into the
core of his self, and as a result Marlow's entire retelling of the story of
Heart of Darkness appears constantly to the reader as a double ex
posure. Strange as the tale is, it carries an uncanny quality of familiarity.
Conrad sought intentionally to introduce this quality of familarity into
the unknown world of the Congo in which his story is set. As he himself
described the craft of fiction:

In truth every novelist must begin by creating for himself a world, great or
little, in which he can honestly believe. This world cannot be made otherwise
than in his own image: it is fated to remain individual and a little mysterious,
and yet it must resemble something already familiar to the experience, the
thoughts and the sensations of his readers.5

Into his realistic description of the Belgian Congo, Conrad introduces a

sequence of precise, striking, and unmistakable allusions to the literary
masterpieces of the Western tradition. He reminds his reader of the
heritage they share, thus provoking from him the realization that Heart of
Darkness is a twice-told tale, concocted from ancient and familiar
materials.

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 Literary Allusion / 157

Judicious use of materials familiar from earlier literature helps Conrad

to maintain an advantage over the reader, whose involuntary memory he
thus controls. When Conrad presents a recognizable character, situation,
or image he forces the literate reader into an automatic mental juxta
position of the familiar item with the new context. For example, his
passing reference to the brickmaker of the Central Station as a "papier
mâché Mephistopheles"6 cannot help but lure the reader into using
literary history to interpret the character and his relationship to Marlow.
He recalls at once the Faust legend, which he already knows, and he is
tempted to equate the two heroes and to distill elements in Marlow's being
from that of Faust.
Conrad drops names, phrases, and unexplained epithets such as
"papier-mâché Mephistopheles" in rapid-fire fashion throughout Heart of
Darkness. His abrupt insertion of details from other works into his own
story catches the reader's attention and tantalizes him into wondering why
the brickmaker should remind Marlow of Mephistopheles or why the
manager of the Central Station should recall King Arthur to him. Inhabi
tants of a real Congo acquire extra-literal dimensions as they are likened to
the symbolic characters of traditional epic. The women knitting black
wool in the waiting room of the Company offices are transformed to Fates
when Marlow describes them as "uncanny and fateful.. . guarding the
door of Darkness" and silently hails them with "Morituri te salutant" (p.
11). Conrad's hero is himself the first to notice that the behavior of simple
Belgian working women may appear to resonate with symbolical signifi
cance.

Conrad surrounds Marlow with characters who are made through allu
sion to look symbolic, and he sets them into a world which is itsel
thematically representational. The geography of his Congo is the famili
symbolic geography of traditional epic—mournfully still groves, "primev
mud" (p. 27), "matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of
temple" (p. 27), and "rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were
rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the con
torted mangroves" (p. 14). In fact, the geography is real enough, but it
carried beyond its own realism by Conrad's use of an epic style for its
description. The language of Heart of Darkness is as condensed and
elevated as that of classical heroic verse. The story's prose must be read
analytically, word by word, because of its complex syntax, its rhetorica
intricacy, and its extravagant, dense, and highly developed imagery. Co
rad simulates epic style in order to increase the portentous effect of hi
prose, to imbue it with epic "high seriousness," and thus to preclude hi
tale's being circumscribed by its own realism.
The author's inclusion of direct literary allusion within a story whose

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158 / Conradiana

very style is recognizably allusive, suggests strongly to the reader that the
meaning of Heart of Darkness is somehow to be found in its literary
antecedents. Conrad has Marlow say, "it seemed to me I had stepped into
the gloomy circle of some Inferno" (p. 17), because he wishes the realistic
hell of the Congo also to be a literary hell as significant and as meaningful
as the figurative Inferno of the Divina Commedia. The scenery and char
acters of Heart of Darkness maintain simultaneously a lifetime and a
literary reality. The knitters of black wool in the Company offices do not
cease to be realistic women although they are transformed in Marlow's
imagination to Fates. Nor is the great river any less the Congo merely
because it is also Styx, Phlegethon, Acheron, Cocytus, and the "tumid
river" of Dante.
The Congo, ravaged by colonialism, is a genuine hell-hole peopled by
"moribund shapes" whose existence is living death. Yet it is also a literary
hell, structured as the inverse of Dante's. The imaginary reality of the
Inferno is derived from life; Dante's shades are, in fact, people. Conrad's
vision of a modern hell, on the other hand, is captured metaphorically in
the real hell of the Congo, and its people are mere shades, their actions
characterized by a failure, error, and frailty as terrifying to the modern
reader as was sin to the fourteenth-century Florentine. Conrad uses the
realism of Heart of Darkness to convict the reader of complicity in
colonial exploitation, but by carrying the story beyond realism and
making the Congo as familiar as hell, he threatens him, along with Marlow,
with damnation. By asserting that his Congo is a literary hell, he insures
that an extra-realistic interpretation of his story will prevail. He uses allu
sion to place that story within the developing sequence of literary hells
envisioned by poets since the origins of literature.
Conrad creates in his novels an ambiguous atmosphere which combines
familiar and exotic lifetime reality with both familiar and fresh literary
reality. This atmosphere casts into artistic form the paradoxical nature of
literature itself as perpetually new phrasings of old questions in familiar
patterns. Through allusion, Conrad demands a place for Heart of Darkness
within the tradition of the literature of epic quest. He unabashedly
parallels Roman and British imperial civilizations by paralleling their
epics. Moreover, by reasserting the quest motif in a modern context of
realism, he seems to suggest that his tale partakes of a symbolic continuity
allying all epics around their shared characteristics, characteristics which
have become familiar precisely because they are recurrent.
A certain validity accrues around a symbol or pattern which repeats
itself in tradition after tradition over a long period of literary history.
Conrad was certainly aware of the phenomenon of the archetype and was
much intrigued by it; he has Marlow comment at one point upon "the

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 Literary Allusion / 159

convention that lurks in all truth."7 Convention lurks throughout all of

Conrad's own novels-motivating behavior, dictating plot-but the
archetypal familiarity of Conrad's content, rather than making his symbols
seem hackneyed, succeeds in imbuing them with an uncanny incantatory
power. Conrad can conjure up in his reader's mind all of the traditional
meanings associated with a symbol such as—for example-snakes, without
being forced to recount those meanings specifically in his own text. He
guides the reader from an initially realistic perception of Heart of Darkness
to a symbolic perception.
Conrad intends for his reader to construct patterns of meaning for
Heart of Darkness which draw the multiple dimensions of its presentation
into a symbolic whole and render it, for each individual listener, conclu
sive. Readers of Conrad are certainly prone to project universal truths
from the strangely familiar facts given them by the author. In fact, Con
rad drives his reader to imaginative projection by presenting those facts in
an ambiguous and mysterious style. Conrad's prose is actually as vague as
it is rich. He duplicates in art the infinite complex of ways in which life
presents itself for man's comprehension. Thus he builds into his novels
myriad suggested interpretations.
An understanding of Conrad's views on art in general tends to lead one
to the conclusion that the man was perfectly aware of the bewildering
suggestiveness of his novels and that he intended to leave them unex
plained. In his letters and prefaces he states repeatedly the belief that the
mysteries of art should remain undefined, as he considered the mysteries
of life to be. He countered Richard Curie's accusation of insufficient
narrative explicitness with the reproach:
It is a strange fate that everything that I have, of set artistic purpose, laboured
to leave indefinite, suggestive, in the penumbra of initial inspiration, should
have that light turned on to it and its insignificance ... exposed for any fool
to comment upon or even for average minds to be disappointed with. Didn't
it ever occur to you, my dear Curie, that I knew what 1 was doing in leaving
the facts of my life and even of my tales in the background? Explicitness, my
dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all
suggestiveness, destroying all illusion.'

Conrad's very suggestiveness of presentation, however, lures readers

into the assumption that some fixed pattern of meaning is latent in the
text. Critics have succumbed to Conrad's tempting offer of a prefabri
cated allegorical substructure in Heart of Darkness and have made fevered
attempts to discover the precise, given meaning of Marlow's riddling ex
perience in the Congo. But precise, given meaning in art was no com
ponent of Conrad's aesthetics. Furthermore, Conrad actually explains the
aesthetics of Heart of Darkness within the text, when he has the first
narrator observe:

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160 / Conradiana

But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and
to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in
the likeness of one of those misty haloes that sometimes are made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine (p. 5).

The first narrator's description of Marlow's storytelling technique is too

close in style and tone to Conrad's own prefaces and letters to be dis
regarded. The first narrator is scarcely Conrad's mouthpiece, but neither is
he an uncomprehending listener. He understands Marlow as Marlow
understands Kurtz, and through him the reader, unlike the Directors, gains
a certain perspective on them both. He alone among the listeners appears
to apprehend the extra-literal nuances of Marlow's tale.9 His very presence
helps to establish the fact that Heart of Darkness is less a parable, whose
import would lie in a kernel of meaning, than a recounting of a symbolical
experience whose import lies in its suggestiveness. Marlow's experience is
triply suggestive-to himself, to the first narrator, to the reader.
It appears from Conrad's comments to Curie that he viewed the artistic
quality of any work to be indexed in its suggestive power. As he explained
in a letter to Barrett H. Clark,
a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not neces
sarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer
it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character . .. The symbolic
conception of a work of art has this advantage, that it makes a triple appeal
covering the whole field of life. All the great creations of literature have been
symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth, and
in beauty.1 0

Such a view probably arises from Conrad's belief that art should be faith
ful to the fluidity of truth, and it leads him to the conclusion that
symbolic art is superior to literal narration because symbolism can present
simultaneously a number of different facets, finely and subtly discrimi
nated from one another. Suggestiveness, then, is a key characteristic of
Conrad's symbolism. He appears to have regarded symbolism not as a
one-to-one correspondence between the plane of facts and the plane of
ideas, but rather as shifting effects of light illuminating the world from
various changing perspectives. As he once told Curie:
my manner of telling, perfectly devoid of familiarity as between author and
reader, aimed essentially at the intimacy of a personal communication, with
out any thought for other effects. As a matter of fact, the thought for effects
is there all the same (often at the cost of mere directness of narrative) and can
be detected in my unconventional grouping and perspective, which are purely
temperamental and wherein almost all my "art" consists ... [my art] is fluid,
depending on grouping (sequence) which shifts, and on the changing lights
giving varied effects of perspective.12

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 Literary Allusion / 161

In Heart of Darkness, Conrad's "personal communication" with his

reader hinges on the reader's recognition of conventional material
principally familiar symbols-through the shifting lights. The author filters
the unknown through the known, the unseen through the seen, the un
familiar through the familiar, in order to dissuade the reader from a literal
interpretation of the story. like a prism, the symbol in Conrad's fiction is
a tool for presenting the reader with a spectrum of possible meanings for
the text. The symbol breaks down the bare facts of life into their com
ponent nuances and shades. It produces color, which is complex, from
simple and intense white light. It produces meaning, which in Conrad's
terms is "art," from direct fact, which is life. Symbolic meaning provides
the margin by which Marlow's Congo experience differs from Conrad's
own, on which it was based. The symbolic meaning of Marlow's
adventures lies in the art of their disclosure.
The art of meaningful disclosure, according to Conrad's aesthetics, is
centered in the suggestive presentation of symbolism. Conrad imbues facts,
characters, setting with symbolical resonance, largely through his use of an
ambiguous, portentous, and mysteriously allusive epic style and through
his insistent manipulation of light and darkness imagery for stage effect. A
factual event in Heart of Darkness, such as Marlow's final lie to Kurtz's
Intended, is given so oblique and incomplete a passing illumination by
Conrad that the reader is obliged to develop some significance for the
event in his own mind. The scene with the Intended is of particular
interest in this regard, because it may be read either seriously or ironically
depending on one's assessment of the meaning of Heart of Darkness as a
whole. It is either an excellent example of the fictive brief encounter of
sentimental Victorian fiction, or it is a relentless pastiche of such an en
counter scene. Conrad's contemporary readers probably took the ending
seriously; they would have understood Marlow to believe that to contami
nate civilization with the knowledge of human atavism would accomplish
nothing, would be "too dark-too dark altogether..(p. 79). Our age
tends toward an ironical reading, pitying Marlow his inability to reach
either the girl or the Directors, who have not "breathe [d] dead hippo" (p.
50). Such a reading implies that Conrad viewed British colonialism to be
premised on a colossal self-esteem. Marlow's lie then appears motivated by
an unwillingness to take responsibility for puncturing England's self
delusion. In this sense, Marlow's is a sad and compromised morality.
Either of these readings is consistent with the literal text. The scene is
a familiar one; is it therefore true to life because it is conventional, or is it
no truer than the fiction from which it comes? The answer depends on
the reader and the critic, and Conrad bequeaths to them the responsibility
for interpreting his tale. He explains in a letter to Clark:

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162 / Conradiana

I don't think you will quarrel with me on the ground of lack of precision; for
as to precision of images and analysis my artistic conscience is at rest. I have
given there all the truth that is in me; and all that the critics may say can make
my honesty neither more nor less. But as to "final effect" my conscience has
nothing to do with that. It is the critic's affair to bring to its contemplation
his own honesty, his sensibility and intelligence. The matter for his conscience
is just his judgment.14

The meaning of a Conrad story, then, can be seen to exist largely in the
mind of the reader. Conrad's words and phrases often suggest meanings
beyond the literal, but the added dimensions in Marlow's character, in the
Congo, in the brickmaker, actually materialize in the consciousness of the
reader. Conrad's symbolism, then, depends not on a correspondence
between symbol and thing symbolized, but on the effective communica
tion of the symbolical resonance in objects to a perceiving, comprehending
reader. Still, there is a potential discrepancy between Conrad's presenta
tion of symbolic meaning and his reader's perception of it. Moreover,
because of the ambiguity of its style, Conrad's work is unusually suscepti
ble to variant readings. The "final effect" of Heart of Darkness remains in
many respects an enigma.
How elusive, then, did Conrad intend to leave the meaning of Heart of
Darkness? Despite his belief that "a work of art is seldom limited to one
exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion,"
Conrad saw a core of truth in the kaleidoscope of art. He wrote in his
preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus"And art itself may be defined
as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the
visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, under
lying its every aspect." The truth of Heart of Darkness is indisputably
manifold. Yet it is also one, in the sense that its symbolism, while a
function of the reader's perception, is not exclusively personal. Conrad
makes his reader recognize a known truth of human experience in an
unknown verbal context. He establishes sufficient contact in the text
between symbol and thing symbolized to guide the reader into reaching
the same contact mentally. He accomplishes this feat primarily through
the use of literary allusion.
Literary allusion, as Conrad uses it, unites precision of reference with
infinite suggestiveness of meaning. Since allusive words and phrases exist
simultaneously within and beyond the text, Conrad can play off his
reader's prior acquaintance with elements in Heart of Darkness against the
limited scope of his knowledge within the story itself. Thus he implies by
the very use of allusion that part of the ultimate meaning of Heart of
Darkness may be found by placing the story in a context of known litera
ture. The presence of the allusions implies that literature, as a valid ex
pression of some truth about human experience, is richer in context than

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 Literary Allusion / 163

in isolation. They themselves suggest that the truth of literature lies as

much in its kinship with other literature as in its kinship with life. Epic
self-awareness, for example, comes to human experience from literature,
not from life, and Conrad writes a modern epic at least partially to show
that the epic sense of life need not be lost even though the epic has ceased
to exist vitally in Western literature. He thus acknowledges the responsi
bility of the artist to preserve literary experience within life. As Gross has
indicated in his analysis of the role of the first narrator: "That the narrator
is able to arrive at his moral insight through 'literature,' as Marlow had
arrived at his through experience, demonstrates Conrad's faith in the moral
efficacy of experience through literature" (p. 169). Therefore, as long as
the literary allusions in Heart of Darkness continue to remain suggestive to
the reader and meaningful within his experience, they may be said to
symbolize in their effect the self-perpetuating continuity of literary truth.

University of Maryland, Eastern Shore

NOTES

1. See, foi instance, Lillian Feder, "Mallow's Descent into Hell," Nineteenth
Century Fiction, 9 (March 1955), 280-92; Jerome Thale, "Marlow's Quest," Univer
sity of Toronto Quarterly, 24 (July 1955), 351-58; Robert 0. Evans, "Conrad's
Underworld," Modern Fiction Studies, 2 (May 1956), 56-62; Guy Owens, Jr., "A
Note on Heart of Darkness," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 12 (September 1957),
168-69.
2. See William Bysshe Stein, "The Lotus Posture and Heart of Darkness,"
Modern Fiction Studies, 2 (Winter 1956-57), 167-70; Robert F. Haugh, Joseph Con
rad: Discovery in Design (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957), pp. 35-40;
Edwin M. Moseley, Pseudonyms of Christ in the Modern Novel (Pittsburgh: Univer
sity of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), pp. 16-19; Kaspar Spinner, "Embracing the Universe:
Some Annotations to Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,' " English Studies, 43
(October 1962), 420-23.
3. Tennessee Studies in Literature, 13 (1968), 1-15.
4. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Bollingen
Foundation, 1949), p. 30.
5. "Books," in Notes on Life and Letters (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page
&Co., 1926), p. 6.
6. Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1963), p.
26. Subsequent references are to this text.
7. The comment is not in Heart of Darkness, but in the contemporaneous
Marlow saga, Lord Jim, chapter eight.
8. Letter of April 24, 1922, in Richard Curie, Conrad to a Friend (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928), pp. 112-13.
9. Seymour Gross has made a solid and convincing case for the intelligence,
sensitivity, and vision of the first narrator in "A Further Note on the Function of the
Frame in 'Heart of Darkness,' " Modern Fiction Studies, 3 (Summer 1957), 167-70.
10. Letter of May 4, 1918, in G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927), II, 205.

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164 / Conradiana

11. "Henry James: An Appreciation," in Notes on Life and Letters, p. 13.

12. Letter of July 14,1923, in Conrad to a Friend, p. 149.
13. For related discussions of Conrad's symbolism, see Marvin Mudrick, "The
Originality of Conrad," Hudson Review, 11 (Winter 1958-59), 545-53 and Stewart C.
Wilcox, "Conrad's 'Complicated Presentations' of Symbolic Imagery," Philological
Quarterly, 39 (January 1960), 1-17.
14. Aubry,II, 205.

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