The Heart of Darkness and Nature
Paper instructions:
Reading Heart of Darkness from an ecocritical perspective, Michael Mayer argues that the “novel powerfully depicts African nature as functioning as a massive force against the thrust of
colonialism.”
Taking the passage below as a point of departure, discuss the significance of this view for an analysis of Conrad’s portrayal of the natural world in Heart of Darkness.
Sometimes we came upon a station close by the bank clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel with great gestures of joy and surprise and
welcome seemed very strange, had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ‘ivory’ would ring in the air for a while – and on we went again into the silence, along empty
reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of our winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense,
running up high, and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very
small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on – which was just what you wanted it to do. Where the pilgrims
imagined it crawled to I don’t know. To some place where they expected to get something, I bet! For me it crawled towards Kurtz – exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we
crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into
the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high
over our heads till the first break of the day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell.
(p. 35, Norton Critical Edition, 4th Edition)
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