Dante's Belacqua in Conrad's Heart of Darkness: Marlow's Journey Toward Rejecting Racism

"We may apply to 'Heart of Darkness' Thomas Mann's words on Death in Venice : a little work of 'inexhaustible allusiveness.'"

—Albert Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, p. 310.

Early in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the narrator Marlow realizes his human connection to the exhausted natives resting near a mine in the Congo, a realization predicated upon a heretofore unrecognized intertext drawn from Dante's slothful character Belacqua in the Purgatorio. This intertext illuminates Marlow's journey from believing he is civilized to a deep identification with the Congolese natives. In this reading, his trip into the Congo starts the process of purging his racism even as he remains fascinated and drawn toward Kurtzian depravity. He finally forsakes this depravity in the conclusion as he gathers together these Belacquean images of the natives with the memory of the native woman rushing to the edge of the river as he departs the Inner Station. In so doing, he establishes a community of the living and the dead into which even Kurtz's shade seemingly enters; occupying this community of words and memories, Marlow strikingly evidences a thoroughgoing empathy with all its members.

Beginning with Chinua Achebe's famous attack on Conrad's novella as racist in a speech given at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1975, a revised version of which was subsequently featured in the third Norton edition of the novel and later reproduced widely, a significant strand of Conrad criticism indicts not only Conrad, but also his characters such as Kurtz and Marlow, for their alleged racism. A counter-tendency arose gradually and may have been most popularized by David Denby, writing in The New Yorker in 1995, where he characterized Achebe's critique as "an act of rhetorical violence" and notes, "I recoiled from it" (256). Denby further argues that through Marlow's experience "of estrangement and displacement," and despite his initially "regarding the African tribesmen as savage and incomprehensible," he "nevertheless feels a kinship with them. He recognizes no moral difference between himself and them. It is the Europeans who have been demoralized" (257).¹

In his Conrad's Trojan Horses: Imperialism, Hybridity, and the Postcolonial Aesthetic (2008), Tom Henthorne has shown how subtle, even disguised, Conrad's critiques of imperialism can be in this middle stage of his fiction, and given that authorial subterfuge, it may not be surprising to realize how little we still appreciate the various ways he achieves that critique, one of which involves his recourse to a variety of intertextual references. Terence Bowers has argued that Heart of Darkness "extensively alludes to, creates much of its astonishing richness from, and provokes a re-thinking of other literary classics of the Western literary tradition" ("Conrad's Aeneid" 115-16). And yet, as he points out, "the intertextual dimensions of the novella […] have been under-explored," in part, he believes, "because of Ian Watt's strictures made in his influential book Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1979) against some forms of intertextual analysis, and partly because teasing out literary allusions may seem to have little to do with […] controversial issues" such as race "and to be, frankly, a bit old-fashioned." I affirm Bowers's privileging of Robert Alter's contention (111) that "[a]llusion is not merely a device […] but an essential modality of the language of literature" (116), and further believe we must erase this artificial wall that many critics have erected between formalist and more topical or historicist approaches to literature; such approaches can be complementary, as I hope the present essay demonstrates.²

Rather than interchangeably employing "allusion" and "intertextuality" as Bowers does, however, I follow Gregory Machacek's helpful distinction between them. Machacek posits that "The terms allusion and verbal echo name a brief, local phenomenon," but certain authors "write poems so densely allusive that one wants a term to capture that frequency—the ubiquity, even—of verbal echoes in their works. Allusiveness is awkward; intertextuality seems to convey precisely this saturation of one text by phrase from the entire literary tradition" (524). Furthermore, Machachek helpfully...