The Moral Conditions for Genocide in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Scholars may differ in their moral assessment of Joseph Conrad's fiction, but they all seem to agree that morality is a legitimate lens for interpreting the novels. The problem, of course, is specifying Conrad's orientation toward morality, for as scholars consistently observe, unstable knowledge and unreliable perception are persistent themes in Conrad's corpus.2 Not surprisingly, there has been much confusion on the topic of Conrad's moral vision. Given Conrad's rejection of certain knowledge, Ian Watt claims that Conrad develops a flexible moral paradigm, what he dubs "subjective moral impressionism" (1980, 174). This theoretical approach has found its most recent formulation in John G. Peters's Conrad and Impressionism, which articulates an impressionist epistemology that allows Conrad to maintain "moral values" and thereby "avoid the abyss of ethical anarchy and epistemological solipsism" (2001, 135). Like Watt and Peters, Mark Wollaeger intelligently examines Conrad's moral vision in relation to his obstinate epistemological questionings: "A skeptic himself, Conrad nevertheless remained consciously devoted to a moral perspective on life and literature" (1990, 14). Less optimistic, however, is H.M. Daleski, who sees in the fiction a "pervasive moral nihilism" (1977, 24), a view that Dwight H. Purdy shares when he calls the later novels "morally repellent" (1984, 7). In this same tradition is Patrick Brantlinger, who writes about the "moral bankruptcy" of Conrad's "literary project" (1996, 96).In the following pages, I want to demonstrate why the moral interpretation of Conrad's texts is problematic at best and completely misguided at worst. Put simply, to determine whether Conrad's "literary project" is moral or not, the scholar must be strategically positioned to make such a judgment. In other words, the scholar must have an implicit or explicit set of criteria to determine what constitutes a true moral vision. Moreover, this scholar must be in possession of a reliable epistemology that gives him/her access to true moral criteria. Significantly, it was when Conrad was working through the ideas central to Heart of Darkness that he rejected the concept of morality. For instance, in a letter to his dear friend R.B. Cunninghame Graham dated January 31, 1898, approximately one year before Conrad completed the novella, Conrad says: "There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that whether seen in a convex or a concave mirror is always but a vain and fleeting appearance" (1969, 71). This rejection of morality is not a one-time affair, for only five months after Heart of Darkness had completed serialization with Blackwood's Magazine, Conrad makes a similar observation in a letter to Edward Garnett: "I still have some pretensions to the possession of a conscience though my morality is gone to the dogs. I am like a man who has lost his gods" (1986, 2:198). This is a very curious remark. Conrad is certainly not endorsing an inhumane philosophy rooted in moral nihilism; as a possessor of a conscience, he believes in taking personal and political responsibility for one's actions. The problem is that something intrinsic to morality makes socially responsible and politically just action impossible. So, for Conrad, to have a conscience means rejecting morality; or conversely, being moral conflicts with having a conscience.Of course, this strict morality/conscience dichotomy begs the question: what is Conrad's definition of morality? As I will argue in this essay, however, such a question is incoherent. For Conrad, the problem is not defining true morality; rather, the problem is that morality is an empty signifier, a semiotic vacuity that dominant political powers can strategically manipulate in order to justify crimes against humanity. Put differently, Conrad rejects morality, not because it is an essential concept that leads necessarily to social injustice, but because it is such an amorphous concept that political powers can so easily exploit in order to justify some of the most heinous crimes against humanity, specifically genocide. …