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'

within the natural and social scheme which has turned him into victim of his own desires and consciousness. Conrad's image of Africa is determined by Western imagination in Heart of Darkness. This allows for its interpretation as a voyage into the unknown, incomprehensible depths of the human self, the already mentioned Biblical dimensions implied. As Goonetilleke puts it, Marlow's sensation that instead of reaching the centre of the African continent, they were approaching the centre of the earth marks, a fantastic intuition on Conrad's part in the light of the current Noah's Arc theory stating that: Humans evolved recently, probably less than 200,000 years ago, in sub-Saharan Africa and then migrated 100,000 years later to take over the world [...] Humanity's ancestral home was Africa - for gene analysis shows African people have a longer evolutionary history than other races and are probably the fountainhead of mankind.

1

' As we have already mentioned in Conrad's time, the 'primitive' occupied an ambiguous place as both the domain of contemporary 'savages' as well as a reminder of the past of Europe itself. Thus the Conradian hero is searching back into the remote past for an image of himself and the Victorian society he comes from. This is why Marlow, the participant omniscient narrator of Heart of Darkness

, has to face the clashing of past and present, individual and society, the 'civilised' world and the 'primitive' world. But the 'prehistoric' world Marlow faces is unintelligible for him. Kurtz, the character purporter of symbolic meanings of the 'civilised' man, has to perish because he is not able to maintain his cultural identity when trying to subdue the mystery of the 'prehistoric' world. The cross-cultural contacts prove dangerous to both the 'civilised' and the 'primitive'. The already mentioned false confidence of the Victorian era, namely that the British were at the top of the world because they were the most enlightened, progressive, civilised race in history, is also challenged by Conrad in the Heart of Darkness

, although the colony visited is the Belgian Congo. 1

7 Robin McKic, 63 161