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Conrad’s Poetics: An Aristotelian Reading of Heart of Darkness1

Nic Panagopoulos
National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

Heart of Darkness (1899) is widely regarded a seminal modernist text, ushering in a

radically new type of literature. Virginia Woolf, in her influential essay “Modern Fiction”
(1919), distinguished Conrad not only from his Victorian predecessors but from his
Edwardian contemporaries too, since they had allegedly lost touch with “the essential
thing” (105) and wrote using outworn formulas. In a famous paradigm shift which seems
to echo the frame narrator’s claim in Heart of Darkness that meaning for Marlow was
like “one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral
illumination of moonshine” (HD 30), Woolf claimed that, “Life is not a series of gig
lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (106). The iconic status
of the novella for literary Modernism was also underlined by T. S. Eliot’s use of the
phrase, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” (85), in the epigraph to “The Hollow Men” (1925): a
passing away clearly meant to signify the transition from one era to another. Such early
responses from Conrad’s fellow modernists set the tone for the way Heart of Darkness
would be read up to the present day.
But how pioneering and radical is Heart of Darkness? In answering this question,
most critics point to such features as the novella’s experimental narrative technique,
semantic ambiguity, and lack of conventional resolution.2 However, there are also
dissenting critical voices which stress the novella’s links to earlier literary traditions. Ian
Watt, for example, has claimed that, although the narrative technique of Heart of
Darkness is typical of the general tenor of modern literature, “its plot, its themes, and
some of its intentions are closer to some of the central features of the French symbolist
movement” (1979: 363). Cedric Watts has identified older conventions still in Heart of
Darkness, ranging from the Victorian dramatic monologue and the multiple narrators of
Wuthering Heights to the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the inset tales of the
Homeric epics (48). Finally, in a recent article entitled “King Lear and Heart of
Darkness” (2011), Richard Meek has flown in the face of critical orthodoxy by proposing
that “the narrative indeterminacy and skepticism that recent critics have identified in
Conrad’s novella is not something that appears abruptly with the advent of modernism,
but is rather a phenomenon that can be traced back to Shakespearean tragedy”—and, I
would argue, beyond.

1
A version of this paper was given at the 39th Annual International Conference of the Joseph Conrad
Society (UK), Roma Tre University, Rome, 10-13 July, 2013.
2
Peter Brooks, in a famous essay on Heart of Darkness, argues that in it Conrad poses “central questions
about the shape and epistemology of narrative” (238) while Tzvetan Todorov claims that “Truth, reality
and essence remain intangible” (164) in Heart of Darkness. Along similar lines, Margaret Bruzelius has
claimed that Heart of Darkness is a kind of fiction “permeated by the acute consciousness of storytelling as
a process that leads nowhere” (183), while Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan has emphasized its “denial of a
transcendent authority or ‘voice’” which seems to give rise to a new kind of artist (421).
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Given that Modernism emerged in opposition to 19th-Century realism and many

of its assumptions about language and reality, what different rules of narrative, if any,
does Heart of Darkness espouse in contrast to the classic realist text? Of course, this
question is inextricably linked with the problem of Modernism itself which is beyond the
scope of this essay to address, so I shall confine myself to asking where Conrad fits in the
perennial quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, or “Battle of the Books,” as it
has been called. In addressing this issue, I propose to go back to the first systematic work
of critical theory in the Western tradition, the Poetics—arguably the basis of the classic
realist text—and compare Conrad’s literary strategy in Heart of Darkness with Aristotle’s
analysis of tragic poetry. The aim of this study is to ascertain the extent to which
Conrad’s poetics follow or depart from what have traditionally been seen as the
prescriptions of Classical literary theory, especially in relation to Aristotle’s views on
mimesis, plot, genre, and character.

Conrad’s fiction as Aristotelian techne

Although little is known for certain about Conrad’s formal education, it has been
speculated that he followed a classical curriculum in Cracow (Bowers 117)—a fact that
would explain why he later claimed to being “steeped in classicism to the lips” (Jean-
Aubry 289). Apollo Korzeniowski’s correspondence mentions “classical books” in
conjunction with his son’s primary education, but we don’t know exactly what these
books may have been, because we cannot be sure how many forms he finished at school
(Najder 22, 37). The young Conrad must have known enough Greek to be able to read the
Iliad by the third form, as was customary at Cracow at the time, and we know that he
loved the Odyssey, seeing similarities between his own wanderings and those of the
archetypal Greek hero, some of which are reflected in works like Heart of Darkness (Karl
89-90). However, it is not necessary for Conrad to have read the Poetics at school to be
influenced by it, nor even to be consciously following it in his work; his need to reaffirm
traditional values such as truth, fidelity, and community, coupled with his impulse to
revitalize the art of fiction are sufficient to render him an emblematic figure in the “Battle
of the Books” at the turn of the century.
At first glance, there seems to be a natural affinity between Conrad’s novella and
Aristotle’s Poetics on account of the former’s allusive and figurative use of language.
However, the Poetics does not confine the term “poetry” to its traditional meaning of
verse set to music. By focusing on the root of the term in the Greek verb poiein (to make,
or to create), Aristotle opens the definition up to include all types of creative writing,
regardless of style or genre. As he writes, “The art which uses language unaccompanied,
either in prose or in verse […] remains without a name to the present day,” so we should
give the generic title of poet to literary imitators of all kinds (Poetics 47a-b). Moreover,
on account of Aristotle’s professional quarrel with Plato over the philosophical status of
mimetic art, the Poetics has little to say about poetic language as such, other than the
commonplaces that it should be “made pleasurable” (49b) and interesting “by the use of
unfamiliar terms” (58a). Also, as Olson writes, “Aristotle does not talk about figurative or
poetic language in The Poetics because tragedy, which is at the focus of his attention,
allows little opportunity for lyricism as opposed to epic where the narrative may dwell on
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descriptive passages much more” (70). As a result, Conrad’s preoccupation with matters
of literary style3 finds few correspondences in the Poetics, directing our attention to these
texts’ more formalistic alignments.
A common misunderstanding surrounding the Poetics concerns the assumption
that it constitutes a treatise on how to write, as opposed to a being a work of aesthetic
philosophy. The innovation which the Poetics actually represents in the history of ideas
lies in what Stephen Halliwell has called its “foundational strategy” or “explicit attempt
to scrutinize poetry in a systematic and analytic manner,” beginning with first principles
and ending with the final goal (7). Aristotle proceeds to trace the history of mimesis from
its earliest beginnings in instinctive imitation and primitive performance, to more
elaborate dramatic spectacles, culminating in tragedy. All these different forms of artistic
expression are said to provide pleasure and knowledge through the recognition and
comprehension of created likenesses (Poetics 48b, Rhetoric 71b). Viewed from this
perspective, poetry is a species of what Aristotle understood as techne: a productive
activity informed by an understanding of its intrinsic rationale that characterizes the
evolution of the human species (NE 40a). Indeed, the heightened understanding and
appreciation of art which texts like the Poetics provide falls under the same category.
Often, Conrad seems to have a techne-based model of writing in mind as when, in
“A Glance at Two Books” (1904), he criticized the “national English novelist” for not
having “a clear conception of his craft” and not “building his book with a precise
intention and a steady mind” (LE 101). Just as tragedy represents for Aristotle the highest
form of poetry and, by extension, mimetic art, so for Conrad the novel represents the
highest type of literature as regards the artistry it presupposes and the effects it
engenders. Nevertheless, unlike many of Aristotle’s disciples throughout the ages,
Conrad was no believer in fail-safe formulas for creative writing. A case in point is his
claim in “Books” (1905), that “No secret of eternal life for our books may be found
amongst the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of
drugs” (NLL 10).
Literary prescriptions notwithstanding, Conrad was one those of writers who had
fairly strong aesthetic views which he refined throughout his working life and set down in
his various author’s notes and essays. One of his most elaborate literary manifestos was
the Preface to the Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) which was written only a couple of
years prior to Heart of Darkness and constitutes a defence of fiction as a fine art
comparable to Aristotle’s, Sidney’s, and Shelley’s apologies for poetry. The Preface to
the Nigger contains Conrad’s famous artistic credo summed up in the sentence: “My task
[…] is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is,
before all, to make you see” (NoN xlix). Besides recalling the emphasis placed by the
Victorians on the visual, this statement bears a curious resemblance to Aristotle’s
admonition in the Poetics that the aspiring writer “put the actual scenes as far as possible
before [the reader’s] eyes” (55a), as well as the advice found in the Rhetoric that orators
should aim to make their audience “see things” (41b). In a letter to William Blackwood
written at the same time as the Preface (6 September 1897), Conrad stressed the
importance of literal seeing for the reader by underlying the verb ‘to see’: “I aim at

3
For this topic, see Allan H. Simmons, “Reading Heart of Darkness,” The New Cambridge Companion to
Joseph Conrad, ed. John H. Stape, Cambridge: CUP, 2014, pp.15-28.
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stimulating vision in the reader. If after reading Part 1st you don’t see my man [Lingard]
then I’ve absolutely failed” (CL1 381).
Much has been made of Conrad’s keen descriptive eye. Woolf, for example,
opined that in, Conrad’s case, “we are sometimes tempted to apply terms more applicable
to the painter’s art than to the writer’s” (227). However, for Conrad, as for the realists
that came before him, literary verisimilitude was not an end in itself, but one of the
preconditions for the psychological and moral insights which fiction was intended to
provide. On the basis of his literary collaboration with Conrad, Ford Madox Ford affirms
that, “if you make mankind see the very few simple things upon which this temporal
world rests you will make mankind believe such eternal truths as are universal” (317).
Thus, just as Aristotle regarded poetic mimesis as a means of acquiring knowledge of the
universals, comparable to philosophy (Poetics 51b), so Conrad writes in the Preface, that

The artist, […] like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth, [and Art]
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, underlying its every aspect. (NoN xlvii)

Contemporary critics may be tempted to attribute such philosophically realist views to

Conrad’s relative inexperience at the time of writing, yet they are reiterated in many of
his later essays too, as in the following unambiguous claim from A Personal Record
(1912) that, “Fiction […] after all is but truth often dragged out of a well and clothed in
the painted robes of imaged phrases” (93).
For Conrad, the truth which fiction illuminates resides not in the physical world,
but in the inner life, in consciousness, and in the psychological processes that take place
out of view, but which can ideally be revealed by a meticulous attention to surface
details. The hermeneutic activity presupposed in such a poetics which links fiction with
philosophy is particularly evident in delayed decoding, the narrative device that Heart of
Darkness is most famous for. As Ian Watt observes, besides making narrative appear
natural and unmediated, delayed decoding is intended to imitate the way life itself is
experienced: “while we read [Heart of Darkness], we are as in life, fully engaged in
trying to decipher a meaning out of a random and pell-mell bombardment of sense
impressions” (1979: 358). John G. Peters has associated delayed decoding with
“primitive perception” which he defines as the “initial sense impression before the
observer organizes it into meaning that accords with past experience” (2001: 37). In
emphasizing the inescapable subjectivity of human perception, delayed decoding seems
to contradict Aristotle’s thesis that poetry provides knowledge of universals, comparable
to philosophy. Yet, one could argue that this is only an apparent contradiction because
Conrad’s impressionistic method in Heart of Darkness posits the universal form of
human perception as being primitive and subjective, regardless of culture.
In the Preface to the Nigger, there are also veiled references to Aristotle’s theory
of catharsis, as in the claim that the artist “speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder,
to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and […] fear, which
binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity” (NoN xlviii). Regardless of
whether Conrad subscribed to the idea of liberal universalism, one of the mainstays of the
classic realist creed, what is particularly noteworthy in the above passage are the terms
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“pity” and “fear,” which, albeit separated by a host of platitudes, explicitly refer to
Aristotle’s argument in the Poetics that the “peculiar pleasure” derived from tragedy is
“effecting through fear and pity the purification [catharsis] of such emotions” (49b).
Thus, just as Aristotle defines tragedy as that genre which produces pity and fear through
the audience’s identification with the characters on stage, so Conrad in his poetic
manifesto makes the arousal of sympathy for a suffering mankind one of the basic tenets
of his own craft. The tragic emotions of fear and pity are explicitly yoked in various
instances in Heart of Darkness too, e.g. the ailing Kurtz’s “pitiful and appalling” (HD 99)
appearance when Marlow first sets eyes on him, and Kurtz’s weapons being described as
“the thunderbolts of that pitiful Jupiter” (HD 100). Heart of Darkness also reflects the
state that precedes catharsis in which the emotions to be purged are powerfully released,
e.g. “the tremulous and prolonged wail of mournful fear and utter despair” (HD 82) that
is said to come out of the jungle when Kurtz’s followers hear the steam-whistle, or the
African queen’s “tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with
the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve” (HD 101).

Conrad cum Aristoteles contra Platonem

The theory of catharsis can be said to represent the application of Aristotle’s golden
mean to the problem of the emotional effect of tragedy which was identified by Plato as
one of the more problematic aspects of the genre. Contrary to Plato, Aristotle proposed
that tragedy can be ethically and socially beneficial, despite the potentially unruly
passions it arouses, because it is not emotion itself which is the enemy of virtue, but its
excesses. So, as he claimed, “to feel [fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity] in response to
the right things, with regard to the right people, for the right reason and in the right
way—that is the mean and the optimum, which is the characteristic of virtue” (NE
1106b). It can be argued that Marlow’s pose of a meditating Buddha at the end of Heart
of Darkness signals the adoption of just such a via media in response to the extreme
emotions provoked by his meeting with Kurtz and his whole nightmare experience in the
Dark Continent. It is as though Marlow himself has undergone a similar purging
experience as the audience of a tragedy and attained a state of grace or emotional balance.
Kurtz too, upon his first appearance, is said to look “satiated and calm, as though for the
moment [he] had had [his] fill of all the emotions” (HD 100). But for the most part, he is
associated with excess—a trait which is presented by Marlow as a kind of tragic flaw, the
misconstrued hamartia of the Poetics.4
Conrad can be said to participate in the archetypal debate between Aristotle and
Plato on the epistemological value of poetry, initiated in the Republic which famously
claimed that the mimetic arts represented “a third remove” from the reality of the Ideal
Forms because they constituted “a copy of a copy” of the truth (Book X 598a).5 Given

4
See the last section in the present essay, “Character in Heart of Darkness and the spoudaios-favlos
dichotomy”, for a fuller discussion of Aristotle’s concept of hamartia in tragedy.
5
Although Plato excluded mimetic art and artists from his ideal state, he himself can be considered a poet
on account of his use of fictive dialogues and poetic metaphors (Sidney 111). As R. P. Sonkowsky
observes, it is a paradox that “Plato the supreme enemy of art is also the supreme artist” (17). Also,
Socrates presents a more positive picture of poetry in Ion where he proposes that, by divine inspiration, the
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the important educational and political role that drama played in ancient Athens, this was
no mean criticism, and Aristotle took up the gauntlet by arguing in the Poetics that, far
from being a form of deception in which the poet was confined to representing the mere
appearance of things, poetry “may imitate things as they ought to be” (60b), i.e. the very
Forms that Plato set so much store by. Similarly, in answer to those who would classify
him a writer of the sea, Conrad stated in a letter to Sir Sydney Colvin, on 18 March 1917,
that “all my concern has been with the ‘ideal’ value of things, events and people” (CL6
41). Like Aristotle who claimed that “poetry is more philosophical and more serious than
history” (Poetics 51b), Conrad also favourably contrasted fiction to other types of
discourse in his essays, as in the following pertinent passage from “Henry James: A
Reappraisal” (1921):

Fiction […] stands on former ground, being based on the reality of forms
and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on
documents, and the reading of print and handwriting—on second-hand
impression. Thus, fiction is nearer the truth. (NNL 19)

It is worth noting here that the Platonic “reality of forms” is associated by Conrad with
creative writing, which is moreover viewed as the more truthful discourse, turning the
Republic’s famous criticism of poetry on its head.6 By proposing that creative literature
has an epistemological advantage over history Conrad could not have presented a more
Aristotelian argument.
Besides offering a copy of a world that was itself a pale imitation of the Ideal
Forms, Plato also believed that poetry should be excluded from the ideal state due to its
corrupting moral influence. As he argued in Books II and III of the Republic, popular
poets like Homer lost themselves in the dramatic imitation of immoral persons and acts,
while also promoting scandalous myths about the gods which confused good and evil.
Aristotle countered these criticisms in the Poetics by arguing that the poet, rather than
dissembling and proving false to himself, encouraged sympathetic identification (Butcher
266), and added that, in any case, “correctness is not the same thing in ethics and poetry”
(Poetics 60b). Similarly, Conrad’s oblique narrative style serves to partially shield fiction
from the charge of immorality and transform authorial indirection from a potential vice
into a virtue. Moreover, in keeping with Aristotle’s dictum that “the poet in person should
say as little as possible” (Poetics 60a), Conrad believed that the author must not “utter
any views,” but instead should aim to “keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that
the author exists—even of the fact that he is reading a book” (Ford 322, 320).7 Thus, the
impersonal author aims to foster self-forgetting in the reader in an attempt to encourage
imaginative identification which is a force for good because, as Shelley affirms, “A man,

poet makes an improved copy of the True (534d). So the question of poetry in Plato is considerably more
complex than any brief summary of the argument found in the Republic can do justice to. See Charles L.
Griswold, “Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014), Edward
N. Zalta, ed. online source.
6
In his notes to Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ Cedric Watts has also observed that, in
the famous debate between Plato and Aristotle, Conrad’s position is “basically Aristotelian.” Cedric Watts,
Endnotes, Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ (London: Penguin, 1988), 130n.
7
Besides being basic to Aristotelian as well as modernist aesthetics, the “invisibility” of the author also
relates to the classical ideal known as ars celare artem, i.e. that art should conceal its own processes.
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to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in
the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must
become his own” (212). This is the same formula for fiction that we find promoted in the
Preface to the Nigger which seems to outline many of the aesthetic principles that Conrad
tried to put into practice in Heart of Darkness and the Youth volume, generally.
Aristotle’s anti-moralistic view of poetry as an activity governed by its own laws
which should not be censored was also shared by Conrad who regarded creative writers
as single-minded pursuers of truth, bound by no other law than their artistic consciences
and an “absolute loyalty towards [their] feelings and sensations” (NLL 13). This idea also
emerges from Conrad’s description of the dedicated creative writer found in A Personal
Record which, as Cedric Watts has noted, bears some interesting resemblances to the
renegade Kurtz in the wilderness:

In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for
the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no
pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds.
Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
(qtd. in Watts 49)

If we translate Kurtz’s experience in Heart of Darkness into artistic terms, it implies that
the novelist may possess greater “freedom of expression” and “liberty of imagination”
relative to other thinkers but, as Conrad claimed, he must resist the temptations of “moral
Nihilism” (NLL 12, 13): as we read in “Books,” the “proud and unholy joy” which
attends the discovery that there is much evil in the world, is not “the proper frame of
mind” with “which to approach seriously the art of fiction” (NLL 13).
In Conrad’s oeuvre we notice a privileging of such fictive discourses as creative
writing that “aspires to the condition of art” (NoN xlvii), and which was also favoured by
Aristotle in the Poetics because of its universal range of meaning. However, we also find
a general skepticism towards language which, like Kurtz’s “gift of expression,” tends to
manifest itself as either “the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart
of an impenetrable darkness” (HD 83). Thus, within the context of a logos that is
inherently ambivalent and potentially misleading, fictive discourses, Conrad might argue,
are more honest about themselves than non-fictive ones and therefore more ethical. This
is the same argument that Sidney employs in An Apology for Poesy to defend poetry
against Plato’s charge of dishonesty: “Of all writers under the sun, the poet is the least
liar, […] other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things, can, in the
cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies. But the poet […] never
affirms” (132).
Conrad did not only view the creative writer as the most rather than the least
honest artist. Many of the implicit and explicit references that we find in Heart of
Darkness to the Platonic tradition convey a skepticism which recalls Aristotle’s scientific
reservations towards his teacher’s more moralistic or mystical philosophical views. Thus,
when Marlow expresses surprise at the Company doctor’s never having ventured out into
the tropics, the latter replies with the popular adage, “I am not such a fool as I look, quoth
Plato to his disciples” (HD 37), which mockingly anticipates Kurtz’s intellectual
ascendancy over his various disciples in the Dark Continent. In reference to Kurtz’s
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midnight discussions on love, the Russian assures Marlow that, “It [wasn’t] what you
think […] it was in general” (HD 94): a statement which alludes to Platonic love while
also playing on the proverbial link between homo-eroticism and philosophical instruction
in ancient Greece. Marlow consciously takes Kurtz’s as a test case for the morality of
colonialism and is “curious to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with
moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all, and how he would set about his
work when there” (HD 62). If Kurtz is meant to represent a kind of Platonic philosopher-
king who rules with an iron fist while delivering “splendid monologues” on “love,
justice, conduct of life” (HD 98), the thought experiment fails. Also, if we take the
light/shadow binary from Plato’s famous cave allegory (Republic VII), to represent
truth/falsehood, respectively, Heart of Darkness can be said to reverse or confuse their
conventional associations: the torch-bearing Europe penetrating the Dark Continent in
Kurtz’s oil painting is blindfolded while, as Marlow discovers following his Congo
experience, “the sunlight can be made to lie, too” (HD 115).
Yet, any essentialist questioning of surfaces is also rendered problematic in the
novella which does not finally leave the reader with any safe ontological ground. In a
passage which seems to allude to Plato’s cave allegory, according to which most people
are trapped within the deceptions of the phenomenal world as in a prison, Marlow says
that his journey down the coast “seemed to keep [him] away from the truth of things,
within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion” (HD 40). There may be nothing “so
unreal” (HD 52) for Marlow as Europe’s civilizing mission, yet there is no transcendent
or essential reality in Heart of Darkness to set against this mendacious phenomenon,
because the darkness or wilderness that seems to constitute its conceptual opposite is void
of content. Worse than the “inner truth” being “hidden” (HD 67) and beyond human
apprehension is that it may be non-existent. Thus, as with Conrad’s essentialist
pronouncements that “fiction […] is but truth,” there is a powerful need to affirm some
kind of universal reality in Heart of Darkness—like that which appears to be reflected in
the dancing of so-called “prehistoric man” on the river bank that Marlow describes as
“Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage […] truth stripped of its cloak of time” (HD
69)—coupled with a skepticism as to the possibility of doing so.

Myth and plot in Aristotle and Conrad

The dancing natives on the river bank in which Marlow identifies something essentially
and universally human, besides referring to the earliest forms of mimetic performance
that, according to the Poetics, gradually evolved into tragedy, also relate to Modernism’s
interest in primitive, myth-based cultures. Throughout the 19th Century, myth represented
what European culture appeared to have lost as a result of the inexorable march of
scientific progress, and it was felt that “modern literature lacks a centre, such as
mythology was for the ancients” (Schlegel 312). Heart of Darkness, visibly influenced by
this zeitgeist, has been found to contain allusions to a vast range of mythological figures
(e.g. Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Silenus, Prometheus, Satan, Cain, Aeneas, Odysseus,
Penelope, Oedipus, Dido, Faust, Mephistopheles, Lear, and the Ancient Mariner, etc.).
This over-abundance of mythological reference suggests that a culture which has lost
faith in its own grand narratives requires a plethora of diverse mythologies to make up for
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its spiritual impoverishment. Indeed, Conrad’s novella can be considered an early

example of what T. S. Eliot called the “mythic method” of literary Modernism, “whereby
references to ancient myths could coordinate works which addressed ‘the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’” (Watts 40).
Conrad’s treatment of myth in Heart of Darkness is more complex still. On the
one hand, the mythological references in the novella are designed to highlight, through
their seeming incongruity, the disenchantments of secular modernity. On the other, while
highlighting the spiritual crisis in modern culture, such references also seem to reflect a
metaphysical nostalgia typical of the fin de siècle as well as a protest for the loss of the
real. A case in point is the Scotch sailmaker in Heart of Darkness who is prepared to fight
anyone that disputes his firmly-held belief in the existence of people on Mars. However
eccentric it may appear, the sailmaker’s modern secular faith in extraterrestrials is typical
of the need of almost all the characters in the novella to sustain some kind of personal
mythology in the face of universal unbelief, even to the point of self-delusion.
What is interesting is that the word myth in the Poetics is not used to mean what
we might expect. As Else points out, “Mythos as Aristotle defines it is not […] a
traditional story which may or may not be true. It is a fact that Greek heroic legends
normally had some basis in history. But for Aristotle (unlike Plato) the historicity of the
mythos is not an issue” (105). This recalls Conrad’s statement that, in Heart of Darkness,
experience is “pushed a little […] beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly
legitimate […] purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers”
(Author’s Note to Youth). Historical verisimilitude is clearly not an artistic requirement
for Conrad, any more that it was for Aristotle. Moreover, as Heath explains,

…while philosophy is concerned with universal truths, what lies behind an

effective poetic plot may be a universalized falsehood; [so] Aristotle has
no objection to plots based on traditional beliefs about gods, even though
he would dismiss those beliefs on philosophical grounds. (xviii)

Thus, Heart of Darkness presents Kurtz as someone who has sold his soul to the devil
and his followers as voodoo practitioners, regardless of whether Conrad himself believed
in satanic pacts or witchcraft. In keeping with Aristotle’s theory, the author’s personal
religious beliefs, or lack thereof, would have been no obstacle to him exploiting a
widespread superstition in order to construct an effective plot. Not only were Aristotle
and Conrad secular humanists with a skeptical attitude towards religion, but, for them, the
truth value of creative writing did not lie in its literal or even representational veracity.
As we have already mentioned, the topic of the Poetics is not so much poetry in
its conventional sense, but poietiki, which R. P. Hardie defines as “the art of
composition” in any medium (352). Thus, the poet for Aristotle was not merely a
versifier or producer of fine-sounding speeches, as Plato had disparagingly claimed, but a
maker of plots, a creator in the etymological sense of the word. A myth is, of course, a
kind of narrative which contains a plot, and literary plots were traditionally based on
myths in Aristotle’s day, yet the Poetics is the only known text from antiquity which
defines mythos as plot (Halliwell 1987, 11). Aristotle may have chosen this word to
emphasize the ambivalent nature of plots which, like myths, occupy a liminal position
between fact and fiction, history and story; or he may have wanted to counter Plato’s
 10

criticism of existing poetry due to the spurious religious myths on which it was based. In
any case, the term refers to a kind of mimetic activity in which the real is neither
perceived to exist independently in the empirical realm, nor divinely given, but
constructed by the poet in collaboration with the reader in a way which conforms to
societal norms.
One could argue that this resembles the way Conrad too understands artistic
representation. As Katherine Isobel Baxter observes, the modern poet is a fully-fledged
creator in his own right and “no longer named the object before his eyes but became its
originator” (9-10); similarly, Anita Lindskog has argued that, in Heart of Darkness,
“There are no clear boundaries between the words spoken and the reality being narrated”
(58). Aristotle’s concept of mythos incorporates this notion of art as a signifying rather
than merely an imitative activity, embodying an important principle of modern aesthetics
more than two millennia before the official linguistic turn in culture. As with the delayed
decoding technique in Heart of Darkness which suggests that meaning is not inherent but
must be constructed, it is a moot point whether what is imitated in the Aristotelian plot—
the ambivalently termed mythos—constitutes the product of imagination or apprehension.
Contrary to received opinion, Aristotle’s theory of mimesis is not beholden to the very
primitive view of the artist as a mere counterfeiter of the real, but follows the aesthetic
practice of the Greeks who use the external world as a backdrop to the human action that
always occupies centre stage (Butcher 124), and which, of course, cannot simply be
captured by a work of art as one might take a photograph. A different kind of
representation is therefore central to both Aristotle and Conrad: one in which imitator is
simultaneously creator.

Aristotle’s tragic mythos in Heart of Darkness

In the Poetics, the mythos is identified as the formal cause or “soul” of poetry (50a),
while tragedy is defined as “an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and
possesses magnitude” (49b). Let us see how the plot of Heart of Darkness fares in this
regard. The concept of completeness relates to what Aristotle famously called “a
beginning, a middle and an end” (Poetics 50b), before and after which nothing of
importance is omitted. This rule seems fairly self-explanatory, leading some critics to
assume that Aristotle is referring to the story. However, what Aristotle means is that the
plot must needs have nothing superfluous in it from a conceptual point of view—
regardless of what actually happens in the story. Propp’s and Shklovsky’s seminal
distinction between sujet and fabula is particularly pertinent here. Thus, in the
predominantly cerebral narrative of Heart of Darkness, neither frame narrator nor
protagonist-narrator actually move, even if the action imitated has followed a cyclical
trajectory, from London, to the Dark Continent, and, via Brussels, back to London again.
As Peters has observed about Heart of Darkness, “The chronology of the story is a direct
indirection in which […] The narrative proceeds not according to the sequence of events
but according to the sequence of Marlow’s thoughts” (2006: 55). Although, at first sight,
such a narrative appears anti-Aristotelian, this is not actually the case, since Aristotle
regarded the “episodic” plot—where the incidents follow a predominantly chronological
order rather than one dictated by causality—one of the most defective kinds of plot, as it
 11

neither produces the right emotional, or intellectual effect (Poetics 51b). One could argue
that, given the intimate albeit subjective psychological connections between the events
narrated in Heart of Darkness, Conrad is more Aristotelian than most realist writers who
are more constrained by episodic considerations in structuring their narratives.
Many modern critics and writers have raised objections to the centrality of action
put forward in the Aristotelian model (“the poets imitate people doing things” [Poetics
48a]) preferring psychological exploration in art, or even stasis—the prime example
being the work of Samuel Beckett. But this may be a false dichotomy, since, as Gassner
argues, “Is not even a succession of moods ‘action’ and is not the organization of the
mood—with a ‘beginning, middle, and end’ with a rising intensity and a final discharge
of tension—‘plot’”? (in Butcher liii). Thus, an overly literal interpretation of Aristotle’s
concept of “action,” or praxis, may lead us to miss the Aristotelian quality of the plot of
Heart of Darkness, which seems to be concerned primarily with Marlow’s moral
education. Moreover, Aristotle is not ignoring the moral or psychological aspects of
poetry when he says that tragedy is “an imitation of an action” (Poetics 49b), and the one
need not exclude the other. As one of the foremost authorities on the Poetics points out,
“An art viewed merely as an external process or result, one of a series of outward
phenomena, is not the true object of imitation. The praxis that art seeks to reproduce is
mainly an inward process, a psychical energy working outwards” (Butcher 123). What
actually happens to Marlow may be less important than how he perceives, interprets, and
communicates it, yet we are no less confronted with a single “action,” or unified narrative
movement in the novella, nevertheless.
In placing the emphasis of the plot on action, Aristotle is simultaneously focusing
on the actors (“Tragedy […] on account above all of the action […] is an imitation of
agents” [Poetics 50b]). This is not merely because they are interdependent, but also
because all art was traditionally viewed by the Greeks as representing the actions of gods
or men in some way (Battin 296). Conrad too, in his non-fiction, emphasizes the practical
aspects not only of literature but of life, and distinguishes himself from other modern
writers by virtue of the fact that his work “is not an endless analysis of affected
sentiments but in its essence it is action…nothing but action – action observed, felt and
interpreted” (CL2 418). Critics have often traced Conrad’s penchant for the active life to
his experiences at sea, but an emphasis on action or applied theory was also an important
part of the Greek philosophical tradition to which, as we have seen, Conrad seems to
have been exposed from an early age.
Aristotle observed that “the imitation is one when the object imitated is one”
(Poetics 51a) and unity of action, the only genuine Aristotelian unity, is of some
importance in Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s letters from this period clearly suggest that he
had a central “action” in mind which he wanted to convey in Heart of Darkness and was
not just presenting the reader with disjointed incidents or creating atmosphere. Thus, as
he wrote to Blackwood on 31 May 1902, “the interview of the girl and the man locks
in—as it were—the whole 30,000 words of narrative description into one suggestive
phase of life” (CL2 417). The fact that Heart of Darkness ends not with Kurtz’s death,
but with Marlow exorcising his “dark gifts with a lie” (HD 84) suggests that this is as a
story predominantly about the latter, rather than a tragedy about “a man who went mad in
the Centre of Africa” (CL2 417), as Conrad ironically summarized the story to
Blackwood. However, the important thing here is not that the novella focuses on the
 12

adventures of a single individual—Aristotle claimed that such a focus offers no guarantee

of unity on its own (Poetics 51a)—but that we have a coherent psycho-moral narrative
which progresses logically from the protagonist’s naïveté in Europe, to his nausea in
Africa, and concludes with his semi-enlightenment as a “Buddha preaching in European
clothes and without a lotus-flower” (HD 31).
The central idea of Heart of Darkness is not immediately apparent, however, and
readers face the hermeneutic challenge of attributing to a seemingly incoherent series of
characters and incidents the conceptual and aesthetic unity which the classical plot
requires to render up its mimetic pleasure and instruction. As Marlow, himself,
repeatedly asks, as though trying to construct a plot out of his chaotic experiences in the
Dark Continent, “What?” (HD 80), “Why? […] Was there any idea at all connected with
it?” (HD 45), “What is the meaning?” (HD 74). Thus, in reading Marlow “reading” the
darkness, as it were, Heart of Darkness constitutes a comprehensive simulation of the
hermeneutic process, or anagnorisis, to use Aristotle’s term. Aristotle claimed that a plot
is convincing because it “expresses universals”; i.e. it imitates the way a given character
would be expected to react in a given situation (Poetics 51b). However, these universal
patterns of human behaviour are not true to life so much as true to the cultural fictions
(e.g. the seamen’s “yarns”[HD 27]) with which a particular community orders the natural
chaos of experience. This, in turn, suggests that a poetic mythos is realistic not because it
conforms to an a priori reality, but because reality itself is mythical, i.e. a cultural
construct. As Ricoeur observes, “the intelligibility characteristic of dissonant
consonance—what Aristotle puts under the term ‘probable’—is the common product of
the work and the public” (49). Similarly, in Lord Jim, Marlow affirms that “the last word
is not said” (LJ 208), because it rests with the reader.
Conrad’s alienating narrative in Heart of Darkness seems to anticipate the
Russian Formalist notion of “defamiliarization” which refers to those devices that
interrupt and delay the narrative, preventing the reader “from regarding the incidents as
typical and familiar” (Selden & Widdowson 34). Yet, it could be countered that Conrad
deliberately muddies his narrative waters in the novella in order to enhance the cognitive
process of reading. Thus, as he confided to his publisher, on 31 December 1898, “The
idea is not as obvious as in youth—or at least not so obviously presented” (CL2 139),
while he wrote to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, on 8 February 1899, that “the idea is so
wrapped up in secondary notions that You—even You!—may miss it” (CL2 158). This
seems to emphasize the writerly aspect of the novella which requires the active
participation of the reader to provide the plot with coherence. It follows that the
“inconclusive” (HD 32) experiences which the frame-narrator anticipates hearing from
Marlow at the beginning of the novella is little more than a red herring designed to
encourage the audience to work harder at understanding the elusive meaning of this
untypical seaman’s yarn. Meaning is very much present in Heart of Darkness, but it is
neither self-evident nor produced by the writer independently of the reader and then
simply communicated to him/her.
According to Aristotle’s basic definition of tragedy, “magnitude” is the third most
important quality of a well-made plot—after completeness and unity of action—and
consists of its ideal length. Aristotle explains that the upper length-limit of a plot is
determined by what an audience can easily visualize at any one time, i.e. what they are
able to remember coming away from the performance (Poetics 51a). In contrast to some
 13

of Marlow’s other story-telling marathons, the compact narrative of Heart of Darkness

makes it relatively easy to recall the major incidents that make up the story and is
therefore not too long, according to Aristotle’s criteria.8 Concerning the question of the
ideal lower length-limit of a plot, Aristotle tells us that this is determined by the need for
a plot to show a change of fortune from bad to good, or vice versa (Poetics 51a). This is
where the construction of Heart of Darkness comes into its own and resembles the finest
examples of tragic art from antiquity. The tradition of Attic drama favoured relatively
short plays which showed only the crisis and the nemesis. By reporting and intimating
rather than actually showing Kurtz’ rise in fortune, while only presenting the character
himself shortly before he dies, Conrad does something very similar in Heart of Darkness.
Kurtz is set up as a “remarkable man” just long enough for his subsequent fall to produce
the necessary tragic effect. The reason why such a structure is superior for Aristotle has
to do with the pleasure of mimetic art as a whole, as well as the superiority of tragedy
over epic. As he explains, “Tragedy has everything that epic has […] Also it has
vividness in reading as well as performance [while] the end of imitation is attained in
shorter length; what is more concentrated is more pleasant than what is watered down by
being extended in time” (Poetics 62a). Thus, a story which limits itself to the resolution,
like Heart of Darkness, offers a more intense and therefore pleasurable experience than
one represents all the various stages, of the hero’s career, from the rise in fortune, to the
fall, and the catastrophe.
Besides unity and magnitude, the best kinds of tragic plot also possess what
Aristotle calls peripeteia and anagnorisis, commonly translated as “reversal” and
“recognition,” respectively. Reversal should not be confused with the basic change in
fortune represented by all dramatic poetry, since it is only a characteristic of what
Aristotle calls the “complex plot” of tragedy, while a change in fortune is also a feature
of simple, as well as comic plots. An example of such a basic change in fortune is the
way Heart of Darkness depicts the rise and fall of a remarkable person. Like a typical
Aristotelian tragic hero, Kurtz is one of those people who are initially “held in great
esteem and enjoy great good fortune” (Poetics 53a), but who subsequently undergo a
dramatic reversal, potently depicted in Kurtz’s transformation from a civilized European
with high ideals into a savage reprobate with no morals or “restraint.” The kind of
peripeteia which characterizes the “complex plot,” on the other hand, is defined in the
Poetics as the astonishing inversion of the expected outcome of an action (Poetics 52a),
something very close to what we would term situational irony. There is no shortage of
memorable reversals of this kind in Heart of Darkness: e.g. Fresleven’s demise after the
argument over the black hens, Marlow’s disappointment to discover his steamer has been
wrecked, and the cannibals’ inexplicable self-restraint.
When referring to the plot, as opposed to the cognitive function of imitative art,
anagnorisis is associated with two kinds of recognition in the Poetics. The first pertains
to the acquisition of self-knowledge by the tragic hero which leads to some kind of moral
enlightenment. In Heart of Darkness this can be seen in Marlow’s claim that Kurtz
discovered in the wilderness “things about himself which he did not know” (HD 97): an

8
In Lord Jim, of course, Aristotle’s rule of magnitude doesn’t apply: neither the real or implied audience—
nor even the narrator—could possibly hold the entire story in their mind’s eye, and Conrad exploits this
fact to produce an even more ambiguous and open-ended tale by giving the final piece of Jim’s puzzle to
the so-called “privileged man.”
 14

experience which signals the protagonist’s Oedipal self-recognition, or “change from

ignorance to knowledge” (Poetics 52a). The second type of recognition relates to the
discovery of intimate bonds, both friendly and hostile, between the various agents in a
drama, especially those volatile blood ties that typify the old tragedies (Poetics 53a-b).
The Poetics therefore gives particular importance to the oikos and the associated concept
of philos which in Modern Greek means “friend,” but in Aristotle’s time meant
something closer to “kin,” not only because kindred relations usually have a direct
bearing on an individual’s good or bad fortune, but also because they are emotionally
charged, and therefore inherently dramatic: the implication being that a tragic plot is
more likely to evoke fear and pity if a person inflicts harm on someone close to them
(Heath xxxiii). In depicting one extended unhappy family converging upon a tragic
paterfamilias, Heart of Darkness can be said to reflect the central importance of the oikos
in tragedy as well as the typical reversals/recognitions pertaining to Aristotle’s “complex
plot.”

Genre in the Poetics and Heart of Darkness

Paradoxically, although Aristotle’s favourite poet was Homer, tragedy rather than epic
was for him the superior genre, since he deemed it more pleasurable, while developing to
the highest degree certain Homeric concerns and techniques. Epic comes from the Greek
epos, “that which is uttered in words, speech, tale” (Liddell & Scott 676), and originally
referred to the recital of heroic deeds, in contradistinction to lyric poetry which was
designed to be sung and emphasized subjective emotion. Thus, epic and tragedy are
connected via their common preoccupation with heroic action—hence Aristotle’s
definition of tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is admirable” (spoudaios). Tragedy
and epic are also related on the level of narrative, since as Butcher observes, “owing to
the number of minor characters, the epic, while keeping its essential unity, contains the
plot of many tragedies, as in the phrase of Aristotle polymythos” (286). Heart of
Darkness also contains a wide range of secondary characters all of which can be said to
possess their own self-contained miniature narratives or story lines. In terms of content,
too Heart of Darkness displays a variety of epic elements: from the frame-narrator’s epic
preamble about “the great Knights-errant of the sea” (HD 29) to its mythic quality, and
the many direct and indirect references to famous epics such as the Divine Comedy, the
Odyssey, and the Aeneid.9
However, despite these more or less superficial affinities to epic, Heart of
Darkness constitutes more of a parody of the genre or, as Thomas Cleary and Terry
Sherwood observe, a kind of “ironical epic” (183). Firstly, the heightened historical and
anthropological consciousness which results from Marlow’s epic journey to the Dark
Continent is undermined by the polyphonic quality of the novella which problematizes
the cultural assumptions of Marlow’s narrative community, destabilizing the
epistemological and ontological certainties which classical epic was wont to provide
(Bowers 135-36). Secondly, as Sid Ray has observed, Marlow’s lie to the Intended “casts
“doubt on the reliability of any narrative that is told from a single point of view or for a

9
See Terence Bowers, “Conrad’s Aeneid: Heart of Darkness and the Classical Epic,” Conradiana 38.2
(2006): 115-142.
 15

specific purpose such as the Aeneid” (154). Thus, just as direct contact with the mission
civilisatrice tends to undermine the ideological and moral foundations of empire, so
Marlow’s personal experience of the so-called “conquest of the Earth” (HD 31) in Heart
of Darkness does not allow him to tell a straight tale of his meeting with Kurtz, even as
he desperately attempts to reaffirm the values with which he set off for the Congo by
imposing some kind of coherence onto his chaotic experience.
The mixture of different genres that are found in the novella reflects the diverse
and often conflicting points of view from which the tale is told; from that of the wide-
eyed young Marlow dreaming of adventures at sea, to the realistic captain looking for a
job with the Company, and the jaded ex-colonist who relates the story back home while
faithfully reproducing his earlier states of mind. Thus, in Heart of Darkness we have a
mixture of both diegetic and mimetic narration, with Marlow as actor-narrator oscillating
between knowledge and ignorance, while communicating this (mis-)understanding
through regular dramatic foresights. Marlow continuously anticipates talking with the
ailing Kurtz, who it is hoped will survive long enough to make some momentous
pronouncement in Marlow’s presence and within the audience’s earshot. The protagonist-
narrator of Heart of Darkness also shares with the reader his cinematic flashbacks, as
when he envisions the “knitting old woman with the cat […] as a most improper person
to be sitting at the other end of such an affair” and recalls “the pilgrims squirting lead in
the air out of Winchesters held to the hip” (HD 106). We could say that Marlow’s
imagination operates proleptically and metaleptically, giving the impression of both an
epic story narrated in past time and a tragedy experienced in present time.
Besides tragic, epic, and mock-epic elements, we also find comic or tragicomic
elements in the novella which seem to associate Heart of Darkness with the theatre of the
absurd. As in “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), one of Conrad’s closest literary
experiments, the colonial enterprise is presented in the novella “as a sordid farce acted in
front of a sinister backcloth” (HD 40). Marlow encounters farcically named trading
stations such as “Gran’ Bassam, Little Popo,” and witnesses absurd military-industrial
operations characterized by “a touch of insanity” and “lugubrious drollery” (HD 40). In
the great “madhouse” (HD 69) which the colonized Congo represents, natives are made
to dig holes for no apparent reason other than the “philanthropic desire of giving [them]
something to do” (HD 44), and company agents perform “monkey tricks” while
attempting to put out fires with buckets that have holes in them (HD 52). As though
mocking the high seriousness of the tragic mode, death in Heart of Darkness is presented
as meaningless, comic, or banal, with no transcendent or heroic elements. Thus, the heads
on stakes around Kurtz’s enclosure seem to be “smiling continuously at some endless and
jocose dream of that eternal slumber” (HD 97).
However, if human death does not possess any special significance or ethical
value, neither does life: a fact fatal to tragedy. Thus, in Europe’s “merry dance of death
and trade” (HD 41), white men hang themselves because “the sun is too much for them or
the country perhaps” (HD 42) and get killed in quarrels over hens. Although men in
general are called “the less valuable animals” (HD 66) in Heart of Darkness, the life of
the natives is cheaper still: they are either worked to death and “allowed to crawl away
and rest” (HD 44), or shot in the head as a so-called “permanent improvement” (HD 48).
Marlow responds to his helmsman’s pointless death by “tugging like mad at the shoe-
laces” (HD 82) in a farcical attempt to change his blood-soaked shoes and socks, while
 16

Kurtz’s own death is announced by the Manager’s boy with the bathotic and
ungrammatical “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” (HD 112). The anti-heroic Marlow finally
opines that the individual’s “wrestle with death” on which tragedy as well as epic
depends is…

the most unexciting contest […] It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with
nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor,
without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat,
in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism. (HD 112)

The tragicomic element is also evident in the novella’s resolution which

resembles what the Poetics regards as the “second best kind” (Poetics 53a) of tragic plot,
i.e. that which ends with good fortune for the virtuous characters and bad fortune for the
evil ones. As Aristotle writes, this kind of poetic justice may cater for the audience’s
weaknesses, but it “is not the pleasure which comes from tragedy; it is more
characteristic of comedy” (Poetics 53a). Endings which feature the demise of over-
ambitious white explorers in darkest Africa and the survival of their faithful friends and
paramours back in Europe are entirely in keeping with the conventions of the imperial
romance. Yet, Heart of Darkness is unusual on account of the price which its narrative
exacts for its ‘happy ending,’ since Marlow barely escapes with his sanity from the
nightmare of the Congo and the Intended’s “great and saving illusion” (HD 119) is spared
only at the cost of a downright lie. Although Marlow may appear to have attained a
certain peace of mind in his final pose as a meditating Buddha, this constitutes a Pyrrhic
victory for the reader since the many ethical and epistemological issues which are raised
by the novella are not satisfactorily resolved in the end. Thus, we have not only a mixture
of narrative styles which correspond to both tragedy and epic, but also a composite kind
of plot resolution which combines tragedy with comedy in a way that undermines both
genres together with their ethical assumptions.
Since the 19th Century, literary criticism has abandoned the idea of poetic
decorum which was thought to reflect immutable natural and social hierarchies, and holds
that the “modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to great abuse
in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle” (Shelley 214). It
is not only assumed in contemporary theory that to analyze a work on the basis of genre
is to limit it, but that there are more similarities than differences between different types
of discourse; thus, not only may comedy and tragedy be not so very different, but non-
fiction may be a species of fiction, and vice-versa. As Todorov argues, we tend to talk
today either about individual works, or literature as a whole since every new book that is
written posits the existence of two genres: “that of the genre it transgresses, which
dominated the preceding literature, and that of the genre it creates” (43). This claim may
be particularly relevant to Heart of Darkness which seems to bring into being a new,
hybrid genre: the skeptical or modernist romance.
Contrary to received wisdom, in the Poetics, Aristotle does not propose a
unqualified division between the different genres which he traces, after all, to those
primitive performances which expressed the same imitative impulse in human nature:
“from the beginning those who had the strongest natural inclination towards [melody and
rhythm] generated poetry out of improvised activities […] this is true of tragedy, and also
 17

of comedy” (Poetics 48b, 49a). Moreover, Aristotle does not view tragedy as a finished
literary form: as he states from the onset, the Poetics “is not the place for a detailed
investigation of whether or not tragedy is now sufficiently developed with respect to its
formal constituents” (Poetics 49a). Even taking into account the “natural state” (Poetics
49a) which the art appeared to have arrived at within the context of a highly sophisticated
theatrical production in 4th-Century BC Athens, it was clear that further developments
were theoretically possible. This did not mean, however, that certain basic principles
regarding poetic imitation could not be deduced through the systematic analysis of
existing genres. Although Aristotle had his own literary preferences in the form of
Homeric epic and “complex tragedy,” he did not exclude lesser examples of poetic techne
from his analysis, such as what he called “simple tragedy,” “tragedy of suffering,” and
“tragedy of character” (Poetics 55b-56a)—nor indeed possible convergences between
them. Besides the fact that comedy avoids pain and destruction (Poetics 49a), while
tragedy revels in these elements as a means of producing catharsis, the main difference
between the two genres, for Aristotle, was the character of the agents imitated, with
comedy representing “people worse than our contemporaries, [tragedy] better” (Poetics
48a). Epic is considered to be akin to tragedy in this regard, since it shows characters
which are, on the whole, of the superior kind.

Character in Heart of Darkness and the spoudaios-favlos dichotomy

Let us compare, then, Aristotle’s analysis of character in the Poetics with Conrad’s
treatment of the same subject in Heart of Darkness to ascertain the degree to which they
differ or converge. Firstly, Aristotle’s term ethos is a problem in itself since, like other
crucial concepts in the Poetics (e.g. mimesis, catharsis, and hamartia), there is no exact
equivalent in English. Although it is usually translated as “character,” it actually means
the moral predisposition (prohairesis) of an agent that is always apparent through his or
her actions—never hidden or latent, as in modern psychology. As Malcolm Heath
observes, “when Aristotle talks about character he is not talking about the quirks and
details of someone’s individuality, but about the structure of their moral dispositions in so
far as it becomes clear thorough what they say or do” (Introduction to Poetics xliii).
Seeing literary characters as universal types, the Poetics aligns itself with the Greek
dramaturgical practice of first conceiving an agent with a view to his or her plot function
and only subsequently giving them a name (51b). Thus, Aristotelian ethos can be said to
resemble the old-fashioned concept of “moral fibre,” or “mettle,” as opposed to the
highly individualized character found in the bourgeois novel. As Roland Barthes points
out, classical tragedy employed “actors” rather than “characters,” but in later times,
“character was no longer subordinated to action; it became the instant embodiment of a
psychological essence” (256). This trend begins to be reversed with the advent of
structuralism which avoids defining character in terms of psychological essence and
speaks instead of agents or “actants” within a given narrative structure. The impersonal
view of character can also be seen in a variety of traditional narratives such as folk tales,
in which, as Todorov observes, “the word ‘character’ signifies something altogether
different from psychological coherence or the description of idiosyncrasy” (66) because
moral predisposition is translated immediately into action. Broadly speaking, therefore,
 18

modern narratives proceed from character to action, whereas classical narratives proceed
from action to character.
Conrad’s method of characterization in Heart of Darkness borrows from both
traditions. For one thing, the novella is not primarily interested in the events of the story,
but in the way they affect the characters and register on their consciousness. Woolf
remarked that, “For the moderns […] the point of interest lies very likely in the dark
places of psychology” (108), and this certainly seems to apply to Conrad’s brooding,
introspective narratives. Yet, Heart of Darkness is curiously lacking in psychologically
realistic characters. For one thing, only Marlow, Kurtz, and Fresleven are given names.
Both the passengers on the Nellie who represent typical middle-class professions and the
various company agents Marlow encounters in the wilderness (collectively termed
“pilgrims”) resemble generic types rather than individuals: a fact which de-emphasizes
their psychological verisimilitude and highlights their symbolic function. Kurtz too is
presented as a kind of mythical being, something between “an angel and a fiend” (HD
57), while also symbolizing “the high point of Western civilization” (Peters 2006: 60) to
which all Europe is said to contribute.
As in Greek tragedy where the names of the characters are of secondary
importance and what is paramount is their mythical or structural significance, Conrad’s
narrative agents in Heart of Darkness are essentially unknowable; consequently, it is very
difficult to ascertain a character’s ethos from what he or she does. For example, the
motive behind Kurtz’s rejection of European civilization, represented by his turning his
face towards his “empty and desolate station,” is impossible to fathom; as Marlow
speculates, somewhat naively, “perhaps he was just simply a fine fellow who stuck to his
work for its own sake” (HD 64). Marlow too, the ostensible focus of the novella,
functions primarily as a narrative device or dramatization of consciousness in the
Jamesian mode, rather than the typical protagonist-narrator of realist fiction. In a way
which compromises its psychological and narratological coherence, the captain’s Congo
experience is related both a-chronologically and extra-culturally, so that, in the end, he is
little more than a disembodied voice, i.e. no more “real” than Kurtz. Thus, although
Heart of Darkness is concerned less with physical than with psychological action, as we
have seen, it is not with a view to construct believable person-individuals, but to explore
the way literature may be made to imitate consciousness and reflect on its own mimetic
processes.10
For Aristotle too the representation of character is not the most important thing in
tragedy, but rather a by-product of the plot which represents “the soul” of creative
writing; as he writes, “there could not be tragedy without action, but there could be
without character” (Poetics 50a). Much critical ink has been spilled debating this bold
statement which seems to contradict everything that modern literature stands for. Henry
James, for example, in The Art of Fiction (1884), made a point of partially deconstructing
this crucial Aristotelian distinction while simultaneously reversing Aristotle’s priorities.
As he writes, “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but
the illustration of character? What is either a picture or a novel that is not of character?”
(37). Frank Kermode too, in The Sense of an Ending (1966), expanded on the
inseparability of plot and character by proposing the concept of “aevum” which

10
As Richard Ambrosini has demonstrated in Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse (1991), the novella
produces a “mirror effect” to reflect upon its own literary and rhetorical strategies.
 19

represents the “doctrine of perpetual transition” in which all fictional things are ever
evolving, so that to develop a character means developing a plot, and vice versa (100).
One could argue that ethos is only demoted in the Poetics because Aristotelian
ethics are action-based—we are what we habitually do—while happiness or unhappiness
results not from any pre-existing moral essence in the subject, but from choosing one
course of action over another: “Well-being and ill-being reside in action, and the goal of
life is an activity, not a quality” (Poetics 50a). Another reason for Aristotle’s
prioritization is that Attic tragedy was traditionally short, so there was less space for the
development of character, but ethos is still deemed more important in tragedy than
reasoning, diction, song and spectacle. Moreover, as Heath points out, Aristotle’s praise
of Homer’s characters (c.f. “none of them are without ethos” [Poetics 60a]) suggests that
the philosopher “recognizes the contribution which character makes to the quality of a
poem” (Heath lvi). Even the idea that character may not form the basis of a tragedy is
qualified in the Poetics when Aristotle refers to the lost play Women of Phthia as an
example of “tragedy of character” (Poetics 55b). Thus, just as action was not the most
important thing in Conrad, so character was not trivial for Aristotle’s either.
Besides the importance of character in general for Conrad and Aristotle, another
question that needs to be addressed is the kind of moral disposition, or ethos, which
typifies the classical genres in contrast to that represented in Heart of Darkness. Aristotle
claimed that the agents imitated in tragedy/epic are “admirable” (spoudaios) while those
imitated in comedy are “inferior” (favlos), since “everyone is differentiated in character
by defect or excellence” (Poetics 48a). The absolute ethical dichotomy between
spoudaios and favlos with its class associations was a crucial component of the Greek
aristocratic code, and Aristotle adheres to it as a matter of course (Else 75), but it is a
distinction which contemporary egalitarian culture—and by extension modern
literature—cannot sustain. Most characters in modern fiction correspond to Aristotle’s
category “of the same sort,” not only because reader-character identification is crucial to
the genre, but also because it is difficult for modern subjects to conceive of any other
kind of ethos than the average.
In Heart of Darkness, most characters are of the favlos variety because they are
implicated in King Leopold’s ruthless exploitation of the Congo Free State and the large-
scale genocide of the African people during Europe’s Scramble for Africa.11 Thus, the
company agents are associated in Marlow’s mind with the overall tenor of his nightmare
experience in the Dark Continent: i.e. “one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid,
savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense” (HD 84). Yet, even when a character
is not so obviously “inferior” in the generic sense, he or she falls short of the ideal
standard of “goodness” stipulated by Aristotle for tragic agents (Poetics 54a). Marlow’s
own behaviour is evidence for this, as when he confesses that his childhood fantasy of
exploring the dark places of the Earth prompted him to employ female connections to
obtain a command on the Congo River: “I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work—to
get a job. Heavens! Well, you see, the notion drove me” (HD 34). The flawed ethos
characteristic of the novella and modern literature as a whole is also evident in the

11
It would be interesting to explore the difference in the representation of European and non-European
characters in Heart of Darkness from an Aristotelian perspective, but that would require a post-colonial
critique of the novella which is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that, although Heart of
Darkness contains very few realistic or semi-realistic characters, most if not all of them are Europeans.
 20

didactic vignette of Marlow’s predecessor, Fresleven, who, despite being “the gentlest,
quietest creature that ever walked on two legs,” is described going native one day and
hammering “the chief of the village with a stick” (HD 34). Kurtz too falls into the same
ethically mixed zone by virtue of the fact that he is both better than the average man and
worse, i.e. simultaneously spoudaios and favlos. As a result of this Jekyll-and-Hyde
quality, critics have seen in Kurtz the typical hero-villain of Gothic fiction as well as a
species of Nordau’s “highly-gifted degenerate” (c.f. Watts 46-47).
On the basis of Aristotle’s analysis of ethos, however, the moral-social leveling
implied in Marlow’s claim “most of us are neither one or the other” (HD 86) renders
generic differences untenable, thereby making tragedy—traditionally the genre with the
highest degree of signification—difficult to achieve. Heart of Darkness seeks to remedy
this problem by offering Marlow “a choice of nightmares” (HD 103) that correspond not
to the difference between good and evil, as such, but between the aristocratic code
represented by the individualistic Kurtz and its populist antipode represented by late-19th-
Century corporate culture. Marlow thus turns “mentally to Kurtz for relief, positively for
relief” (HD 102) which, as John Peters observes, lies “in the world of morality and
immorality that Kurtz represents as opposed to the amorality that the Company Manager
and the company agents represent” (2006: 61). For Conrad this is essentially a choice
between generic differences and meaning in art, as opposed to absurdity and
meaninglessness; but in a world deprived of God, it is also a choice that necessarily
entails a degree of make-belief. Thus, just as in Lord Jim Marlow wants to see an
essential moral difference between the young second mate of the Patna and his fellow
accomplices in crime, regardless of whether such a distinction actually exists, so he sets
off on his colonial adventure in Heart of Darkness (which he knows to be about profit
and not “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways” [HD 39]) with the
desire to see whether Kurtz, “who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort,
would climb to the top after all, and how he would set about his work when there” (HD
62).
In contrast to the Manager of the Central Station whom Marlow calls
“commonplace in complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice” (HD 50), Kurtz, we
are told, “was not common” (HD 87). Yet, this uncommonness of Kurtz’s resides more in
word than deed: “The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the
one that stood out pre-eminently,” observes Marlow, “was his ability to talk” (HD 87).
Like the Belgian company which employs him in the Congo and all previous colonizers,
both ancient and modern, Kurtz’s modus operandi is virtually indistinguishable from
“robbery and violence, aggravated murder on a large scale” (HD 31). Thus, when he runs
out of goods to trade with, he resorts to more rudimentary bargaining methods. Kurtz
even indulges in the time-honoured imperialist practice of demonizing his opponents,
labelling the skulls which adorn his enclosure “the heads of rebels” (HD 98). “What
would be the next definition I was to hear?” asks Marlow. “There had been enemies,
criminals, workers—and these were rebels” (HD 98). In Kurtz’s case, the valorous deeds
of the hero are conflated with the wicked deeds of the villain making the two
indistinguishable.
Although Marlow claims to “hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie,” he goes “near
enough to a lie” (HD 57) for Kurtz’s sake, while representing the latter to his friends and
acquaintances in Europe in a way which the reader is encouraged to find discrete yet
 21

mendacious: “‘And you admired him,” inquires the Intended; “He was a remarkable
man,” replies Marlow “unsteadily” (HD 118). Yet, it is not Marlow alone who seems to
have vested interests in mistaking and misrepresenting Kurtz. Most of the characters in
the novella similarly idealize this so-called “special being” (HD 55), suggesting that the
need to believe in great men—for aesthetic or psychological reasons—has not completely
waned in modern culture. The pilgrims call Kurtz “a first class agent” (HD 46), “a very
remarkable person” (HD 47), and “a prodigy,” (HD 55); while the Russian, for whom
Marlow suspects Kurtz was “one of the immortals” (HD 103), claims “You can’t judge
Mr. Kurtz as you would an ordinary man” (HD 95). Taking his cue from Kurtz’s main
disciple, Marlow chooses to lionize Kurtz and elevate him above ordinary ethical
standards, sustaining in this way Europe’s saving illusions while at the same time making
tragedy possible through the affirmation of the spoudaios-favlos dichotomy. This is
ultimately the reason for the captain’s moralistic interpretation of Kurtz’s ambiguous last
words: “He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man.
After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction,
it had the vibrating note of revolt” (HD 113).
The need to idealize the tragic protagonist has moved some critics to see in Kurtz
an existential hero in the same tradition as Prometheus or Milton’s Satan. As Cedric
Watts has observed, echoing the thesis of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

‘Heart of Darkness’ had suggested the appalling paradox that whereas the
majority of men who lead secular lives are heading for a death that is extinction,
Kurtz has at least the significance granted by the intensity of his evil. If he has
sold his soul, at least he had a soul to sell. (51)

This paradox is actually in keeping with Aristotelian theory since, besides confirming the
spoudaios-favlos dichotomy, the tragic hero has to evoke an ambivalent emotional
response necessary for catharsis. In the Poetics, everything is seen to depend on the need
for tragedy to first arouse and then purge fear and pity in the audience which is
considered by Aristotle the “peculiar pleasure” provided by the genre (Poetics 49b).
Thus, the agents “whose lot it has been to experience something terrible or perform some
terrible action” must be like us in order for identification to be facilitated and fear to be
provoked (Poetics 53a), but also better than us in order for the tragic action to be
sufficiently dignified and awe-inspiring. It is interesting to note that Aristotle does not
differentiate between a character performing or experiencing “something terrible” in the
Poetics because the production of tragic emotions take precedence over questions of
agency.
The overriding importance of the cathartic experience also adjudicates the
question of hamartia, or the flaw/error which Aristotle associates with the tragic
protagonist and which has instigated considerable debate over the centuries. Although the
Greek term literally means “missing the mark” and Aristotle rules out any serious “moral
defect or depravity” (Poetics 53a) in the protagonist, it would be a mistake to view
hamartia as a simple miscalculation, since that would make the hero’s nemesis appear
almost accidental. As Stephen Halliwell observes, “Hamartia involves a piece of
profound rational-moral ignorance on the hero’s part which reveals the limits of human
power and self-determination […] It reflects human vulnerability and the hero’s moral
 22

complicity in his own suffering” (16, 17). The way Aristotle conceptualizes the typical
tragic reversal is related both to his secular-scientific interest in making poetry intelligible
and therefore philosophically legitimate, as well as to his subscription to the Platonic
dictum that no evil can befall a virtuous man. Thus, as Heath points out, the tragic
protagonist must be neither exceptionally good nor downright wicked, since

…the fall of an outstandingly virtuous character into misfortune is morally

repellent and disgusts us, while the fall of a bad character into misfortune is
morally satisfying and pleases us; in both cases, the response of pity is blocked by
a contrary reaction. (Introduction to Poetics xxxi)

Besides engendering catharsis, the tragic hero’s hamartia is necessary for the
reversals and recognitions in the plot to convey important moral lessons about the human
condition. Conrad seems to have had precisely this formal requirement in mind when he
writes of Kurtz that he “lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts […], there
was something wanting in him. […] Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t
say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last” (HD 97). It is
curious, however, that the heads on stakes around Kurtz’s enclosure, which most
strikingly reveal this vital “deficiency” in the hero, are positively contrasted by Marlow
to the so-called “flabby devil” (HD 49) of colonialism, so that they seem somehow
preferable (“I want you to clearly understand that there was nothing exactly profitable in
those heads being there” [HD 97]). What could Marlow mean by such a strange
assertion? Again, this seems to be related to the spoudaios-favlos dichotomy on which
Aristotelian tragedy is based and implies that, depending on a character’s moral-social
standing, there is the potential for different kinds of evil. Aristotle in fact posits that the
characters in a tragedy must possess the “appropriate” ethos of their class, i.e. be as good
or bad as their status would allow (Poetics 54a). Thus, a man like Kurtz who is able to
knowingly make a bargain for his soul with the Devil and can take “a high seat amongst
the devils of the land” (HD 85) is presented as generically/morally superior to the
pilgrims who are impotent to lift a finger in pursuit of what they want, but have “a way of
looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick” (HD 54).
If this is so, the question which arises is how can a more wicked character be
considered superior, or at least more attractive, than a less wicked one? The answer to
this question is provided by Schiller who, contrary to Aristotle’s theory of catharsis
which effectively conflates the aesthetic and the moral response, argued that…

Theft for example is a thing absolutely base […] and aesthetically speaking, a
thief will always remain a base object […] But suppose this man is at the same
time a murderer, he is even more to be condemned than before by the moral law.
But in the aesthetic judgment he is raised one degree higher. […] He who abases
himself by a vile action can to a certain extent be raised by a crime, and can thus
be reinstated in our aesthetic estimation. […] In presence of a deep and horrible
crime, we no longer think of the guilty but of the awful consequences of the
action. Directly we begin to tremble, all the delicacies of taste are reduced to
silence […] In a word, the base element disappears in the terrible. (qtd in Butcher
315-16)
 23

Notwithstanding Marlow’s and the Russian’s attempts to vindicate the “remarkable

man,” with “unsound methods,” Kurtz’s behaviour is no less morally reprehensible than
that of the other company agents whom he despises. The only difference between Kurtz
and characters like the Manager or the brickmaker is that the former’s criminality loses
its “philanthropic pretence” (HD 54) early on and openly appears as the naked will-to-
power of the aristocratic rebel and arch-individualist known as the modern Superman.
Kurtz, like many modern protagonists, is both spoudaios and favlos, both hero and anti-
hero, but because the tragic genre requires a clear-cut distinction between these two
moral predispositions, the narrative of Heart of Darkness attempts a kind of “rescue
work,” similar to what we see in Lord Jim, designed to redeem the central agent and
mitigate his moral failings. The ultimate purpose of this is to reaffirm generic
distinctions, circumvent absurdist ethics, and preserve the vital fictions of individuals and
communities alike, for, as Gassner points out, the tragedian “may not believe in God, but
he must believe in man. Tragedy is then a profession of faith” (lxix). The interesting
thing about this particular tragic tale is that the hero, a fusion of Nietzsche’s Übermensch
and Nordau’s highly-gifted degenerate, embodies both his culture’s greatest hopes and its
most troubling anxieties.

Conclusions

Returning to our original question as to the degree to which Heart of Darkness follows or
departs from Aristotelian poetics, we would have to say that—notwithstanding those
features of the novella which emphasize epistemological and ontological doubt—the
similarities are greater than the differences. This can partially be explained by the fact
that both Aristotle and Conrad were secular humanists who viewed creative writing as a
particularly important techne that fostered ethical understanding and communal cohesion.
Setting aside the question of Conrad’s formal education and the scope of his classical
learning—it is clear that the “Battle of the Books,” as well as the old quarrel between
philosophy and poetry, preoccupied him not a little. In Heart of Darkness, for example,
Conrad seems to adopt an Aristotelian as opposed to a Platonic literary strategy
characterized by the liberation of writing from non-aesthetic concerns and the privileging
of fictive over non-fictive discourses.
In terms of poetic mimesis too, Conrad does not assume a superficial
correspondence between the object and its representation, as we find in Plato’s theory of
Forms as well as 19th-Century realism, but a more socially dependent likeness which
depends on the semantic collaboration of author and audience in what could be called a
speech community. Thus, it can be argued that, in both Conrad and Aristotle, a plot is
believable not because it corresponds to what is vulgarly termed “reality,” but because its
meaning is culturally constructed, i.e. fictional. At the same time, although modern
narratives question the importance of action and place greater emphasis on psychology,
we could argue that this is a false dichotomy and that modernist works like Heart of
Darkness still represent action, albeit of a primarily cerebral nature: the eye is merely
turned inwards. Moreover, although Heart of Darkness is not a play, its philosophically
realist import in conjunction with the characteristic pleasure/learning which it offers via
 24

catharsis and anagnorisis associates it more with Aristotelian tragedy than with
postmodern narratives that emphasize indeterminacy of referent and failure of
communication. The classical quality of the novella is further enhanced by the structure
of the narrative which, on account of its unity, magnitude, and tragic reversals, follows
closely the analysis of mythos found in the Poetics.
However, the above qualities are not sufficient to allow for a neat generic
categorization of Conrad's novella in accordance with the Aristotelian model. Those
aspects of the novella which seem to depart most from the classical principles of creative
writing, as delineated by Aristotle, have to do with the interrelated categories of genre
and character, since tragedy and epic are said to deal with “superior” (spoudaios)
characters, while comedy has to do with “inferior” (favlos) ones. Besides its tragic
constituents, Heart of Darkness is seen to contain epic, mock-epic, comic, but also
absurdist elements in a way which reflects not only the mixture of different styles that is
characteristic of the novel, but also the undermining of generic categories in modern
literature as a whole. This generic hybridity of Conrad’s novella emerges from the
different and often contradictory points of view from which the tale is told, the
trivialization of death and life in the narrative, as well as its “mixed” or open ending
which resembles that of a problem play, since—unlike Marlow in the pose of a
meditating Buddha—the audience is not finally afforded the Aristotelian cathartic
experience, but is unsure of what its moral or emotional response should be.
Conrad’s method of characterization in Heart of Darkness is seen to resemble
both the classical conception of ethos as the “mettle” or “moral fibre” of impersonal
dramatic agents and the 19th-Century notion of character as a unique personal
predisposition or potential which may or may not translate into action. Nevertheless,
despite the modern privileging of character over action in Heart of Darkness, the novella
is not primarily interested in psychological verisimilitude in the realist sense, but in the
way literature can be made to reflect on its own signifying practices as well as the way
events register themselves on human consciousness. Thus, it is argued that neither is
Conrad over-emphasizing, nor is Aristotle ignoring the importance of character in their
respective works, while neither saw genre distinctions in a purist or absolute sense, since
as Todorov claims, every new literary work that is produced affirms the existence of two
genres: “that of the genre it transgresses, which dominated the preceding literature, and
that of the genre it creates” (43).
However, the most crucial difference between classical and modern aesthetics,
reflected in the Poetics and Heart of Darkness respectively, concerns the question of
“superior” and “inferior” ethics: the so-called spoudaios-favlos dichotomy. Whereas for
Aristotle fictional characters “must be better people than we are, or worse, or of the same
sort” (Poetics 48a), for Conrad they could be all of these, or none. Although this is partly
in keeping with the ethical ambivalence associated with the tragic hero which Aristotle
claimed was necessary to provoke the necessary emotions of fear and pity, in Heart of
Darkness this “mixed” morality seems to extend to human nature as a whole. Τhe
problem though, is that such an ethically indeterminate notion of character leads to
absurdist art in which there are neither protagonists nor antagonists, primary or secondary
characters, heroes or villains, because both the belief in good and evil and our ability to
distinguish between them are lacking. This makes tragedy, the genre with the highest
social and psychological value for Aristotle, impossible to attain because, even though it
 25

does not necessarily presuppose religious faith, it requires faith in human nature and the
possibility of meaningful action in life as in art. In order to avoid absurdity and allow for
tragedy, Conrad has Marlow affirm the spoudaios-favlos dichotomy by agreeing with the
Russian and insisting, against the evidence, that Kurtz was “a remarkable man.” This
indicates a regressive strategy in Heart of Darkness which relates to the re-enchanting
project of literary Modernism: the idea that a return to myth was the only way to restore
meaning, value, and presence to a world that had lost its illusions. As Michael Bell points
out, “the central paradox of Modernism” is the notion that “the most sophisticated
achievement of the present is a return it, or a new, appreciation of, the archaic” (20).
Taking all these into account, we might be justified in asserting that Heart of Darkness
represents less of a radical break with the past than a creative development of existing
aesthetic and cultural norms, and that Conrad was not so very “modern,” nor Aristotle so
very “classical.”

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