Cities of Dreadful Naught: Privative Evil in Heart of Darkness

Abstract

The figuration of evil - whether in the person of Mr Kurtz or in the two cities, Brussels and London, that embody European civilization - in Heart of Darkness is ultimately derived from the doctrine of privative evil developed by St Augustine and absorbed by Conrad from his original and never fully renounced Catholicism. Kurtz and the imperial enterprise in Africa are consistently represented in terms of emptiness, non-entity, consuming greed and hunger, and the gravitational drift toward oblivion that Augustine calls nihilation. Marlow may see his world in Darwinian terms, but he judges it in Augustinian ones, even or especially in the absence of any belief in God that might counter the pervasive presence of evil. This essay explores the effects of that division. In the process, it places Heart of Darkness in the long tradition of Augustinian religious narrative that prominently includes two of its major sources, the Inferno and Faust.