Abstract
Joseph Conrad is by far the most critically acclaimed turn-of-the-century novelist to engage with naturalistic cosmology. His moral perspective has been much debated by scholars. This chapter analyzes his self-narrative, and its expression in Heart of Darkness, as a response to the psychological pressures of Darwinism. Conrad envisioned an essentially amoral naturalistic world in conflict with moral ideals, saw the human mind divided between contradictory instincts, agonized over the relationship between human nature and political idealism, and depicted Western civilization encountering its deep past in tropical locales. His puzzling combination of irony and simple morality can be understood as a personal post-Darwinian mythology: a simultaneous recognition of human social dispositions and the amorality of nature, united by the idea of nature as spectacle.
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