Darkness: The Ultimate Barrier

There is a necessity to look beyond, to expand our frontiers, to conquer the unknown. Heart of Darkness, being a tale of discovery, of inner development, seduces us towards this necessity. In much the same way as King Leopold’s Ghost, we are exposed to the difficulties of travelling in the borderline between sanity and insanity, between white and black, the known and the unknown. In the first pages of the prologue, we are introduced to the uncertainties of Africa: “everyone knew that as soon as you passed the Canary Islands you would be in the Mare Tenebroso, the Sea of Darkness” (6). The wording couldn’t be better, we are once again, forced into darkness. The “darkness” of Africa for the Europeans of this era is much the same as the mystery being uncovered by a writer. Innovation in a sense is bringing light to what once was unthinkable, giving birth to new risks that burst with new forms of thinking and life.

Similarly, with the necessity of journeying towards and through the unknown, there comes a sense of curiosity, a thirst for knowledge and intense living. For the Europeans of King Leopold’s Ghost it might have been to know the “source of the Nile, a mystery that had fascinated the Europeans since antiquity,” for Marlow it was finding Kurtz, a truthful voice in a world of the unknown, and for a writer it probably is to relinquish or reveal the darkest memories, thoughts and opinions (7). The darkness filled by light becomes the words inscribed in the page, the knowledge, the observations, the memories immortalized from the ongoing movement of the light, who must find more darkness to absorb, to confess.

Furthermore, there must be a playground for all this activity. The setting for Marlow was the Congo, for King Leopold’s Ghost, the continent, the “faceless, blank, a place on the map to be explored [. . .] the Dark Continent” and for the writer the blank page and the pen (18). Menacing, all these places develop, constantly change, the Congo is not so unknown, the Dark Continent is not so dark, the blank page may not be so blank. Our thirst for knowledge might be quenched by an article, that miniscule goal of understanding how a plane works, might not be so exciting, but the attractiveness of surpassing darkness once and for all and flying further than ever imagined still exists.