“The conquest of the earth,” declares Charlie Marlow, principal narrator of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, “which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” “What redeems it,” he continues, “is the idea only.” Thus does Marlow look back on his voyage up the great African river, at the moment when the King of the Belgians was tightening his grip over what he called the “Congo Free State,” at the cost of close to six million African lives. The remark comes at the opening of Marlow’s extended “yarn,” both a bitter memory and the canny opening gambit of a master storyteller. Marlow’s first words represent the closing remarks of a history whose moral climax turns on the evasion of last words. Though he has witnessed the horror that resounds in the life of that “remarkable man,” Mr. Kurtz, Marlow’s “inconclusive experiences” in Africa are – so we are given to understand – not amenable to final judgments.

Heart of Darkness is, for better and worse, both a chillingly clear-sighted account of imperial violence and a self-implicating instance of the moral blindness it denounces. Conrad’s story raises the discourse of empire to an excruciating pitch of self-consciousness. Deliberately provocative and self-loathing, the text combines a frank acknowledgment of colonial brutality with an exquisite aversion to moral judgments; and it opts, ultimately, to align itself with what it sees as the corrupting lie of “civilized” morality.