The method is unsound: the aesthetic dissonance of colonial justification in Kipling, Conrad, and Greene - authors Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene

Style, Fall, 1996 by James Scannell

If Kipling's practical idealism provides such unsteady ground for the colonial project, what then redeems it? In the second section of the story, Conrad offers what he sees as the only real justification for empire: the spiritualism of Arnold and Kipling is rejected in favor of the rich wilderness that surrounds Marlow. Portrayed throughout the story as a dark, unknowable force to be reckoned with, the wilderness, the land and its richness is justification enough for the colonial endeavor:

"H'm. Just so," grunted the uncle. "Ah! my boy, trust to this - I say, trust to this." I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river - seemed to beckon with a dishonouring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart. It was so startling that I leaped to my feet and looked back at the edge of the forest, as though I had expected an answer of some sort to that black display of confidence. (Heart 33)

According to Conrad, the justification for colonialism is the land itself. Its treacherousness requires enormous skill and concentration - the accountant working in the most stressful of climates, Marlow piloting the ship up an unknown river, the native monitoring the boiler - yet such concentration pays great dividends. Kurtz's great material accomplishment, the collection of large amounts of ivory, is belittled by the manager as "mostly fossil," which Marlow glosses as ivory the natives have buried (Heart 63). But his repetition of the phrase transforms ivory into a rich mineral deposit that the land has been made to yield. For Conrad, the colonial endeavor has only one objective: raw material, the natural resources so plentiful in Africa.(8)

Phil Joffe writes that "the disillusioned Conrad, in the last year of his life, wrote of his 'distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration'" (78). But the target of Conrad's critique in Heart of Darkness is not this attempt to tap the richness of the land, but the hypocrisy, the Lie that masks this motivation. As Born writes: "The profit motive for oneself is neatly excluded from this altruistic strand of imperial ethical progress. We can usefully recall here Orwell's telling remark 'that Kipling does not seem to realise, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern'" (110).(9) The colonial enterprise becomes morally dangerous when the profit motive is clouded by all sorts of grand ideals; Kurtz is Conrad's object lesson of the "horror" of that sort of colonialism. Heart of Darkness does not denigrate a colonial endeavor motivated by the richness of the untapped land. The ethical control in such an enterprise is the work ethic itself: only those who know their jobs and do them efficiently can effectively tap these riches. The natives left to die on the hillside are the victims of an inefficient and poorly managed colonial enterprise, one that excavates and blasts a hill for no reason: "They were building a railway. The cliff was not in the way or anything; but this objectless blasting was all the work going on" (Heart 16). Seen in this light, the manager's strictures on Kurtz's behavior, though heartless in their zealous concern only for profit, embody the sort of practical moral safeguard Conrad sees as part of the redeeming nature of work, the ethic of the work ethic: "'Mr. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the Company. He did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously, cautiously - that's my principle. We must be cautious yet. The district is closed to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will suffer'" (Heart 63).(10)