Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Tibor Tóth: Conrad's 'Secret Garden'

II Britain's status as the greatest imperial power of the world brought enormous benefits to the mother country, but it also created a set of disturbing dilemmas. The colonies, those remote countries, following certain anthropological expertise, came to be declared the cradle of human civilisation. Any journey to Africa could then be interpreted as a journey back into the past. There was also the idea of the white man's 'superiority' over the tribes of Africa. The idea that as a result of development the present should be superior to the past is not paradoxical in itself. However, Conrad seems to suggest at the beginning of the story that if one travels from this amoral present into the past there are at least three possibilities the traveller into the past can choose from: it can offer him a glimpse into the source of that amoral status by contrasting it to the moral one; the traveller can choose to abandon the amoral world and live in the moral one; or he can return to the amoral world with the ambition to save the world he started from. All three alternatives fail, because the 'civilised' man is faced with an altered version of his past. Marlow, the son of the good old continent wants to undertake an enterprise which is even more difficult, if not impossible. Henry James's Americans were at a loss when they had to amend the system of values dictated by their home environment in an equally 'civilised' world. Conrad's European cannot cope with the system of values be they moral, ethical, social or ideological - even in his own country. But the endeavour is the projection of a historical fact, it is part of the problems inclusive of Europe's, and implicitly, Britain's colonial expansion, generating an overwhelming anxiety for the late Victorian mind. Conrad insists on the mythical implications of the 'civilised' man's journey to the 'primitive' world and he fully explores the dangers awaiting his characters. In Heart of Darkness, the 'prehistoric' world becomes an expression of a double sense of dislocation in the Congo. Kurtz is the white man who 'went native', but he cannot resist the 'idol' of the white man which is ivory and all it stands for. The basic theme underlying the novella might gain new dimensions, but it remains essentially the same: the collapse of the myths which had postulated the existence of God, the transcendental authority of the moral order, and the privileged position of man 160