David Denby and Jungle Fever
... Marlow says to his European crewmates, “You can't understand. How could you? With solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman.” Such a statement illustrates the naivety of the white culture and their selfish inability to comprehend the extremity of Marlow’s quest. Also featured in Heart of Darkness, to discount any racist implications against the natives, is the way in which Marlow refers to European society. Marlow indicates that his home city, Brussels, is the “whited sepulcher” – a biblical allusion implying a place seemingly attractive, but teeming with death and confinement. Denby rightly generalizes that “Heart of Darkness is a representation of the West’s infamy, and hardly as an affirmation of its ‘spiritual grace.’” Edward Said – who does not wish to see Heart of Darkness removed from the cannon – argues that Joseph Conrad based the novel on the glorification of European imperialism, and therefore the book is of lower grade. Said recognizes Conrad’s tragic limitation, in that he “as much as Marlow and Kurtz, was enclosed within the mind-set of imperial domination and therefore could not imagine the possibilities outside it.” Denby, although in concurrence with Said in his assertion of Conrad’s limitation, disagrees with Said’s claim that Conrad glorified imperialism. In fact, Denby maintains that Conrad was actually portraying a negative aspect of imperialism, with Kurtz as its representative character. Kurtz – the personified representation of imperialism – becomes utterly dysfunctional due to his occupation, implied by his final chapter of his manifesto, “Exterminate all the Brutes”, and his dwelling on “The Horror” of the atrocities that occ...