"Unspeakable Secrets": The Ideology of Landscape in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

perience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."2 Yet, there is equally a highly important sense in which the Congo of Heart of Darkness is not the Congo of any history book. That is to say, the apparently innocent activity of source-hunting masks a number of serious methodological problems. Perhaps the most important of these can be broached by invoking Conrad's contemporary, Nietzsche, for whom "there is no set of maxims more important for the historian than this: that the actual causes of a thing's origins and its eventual uses are worlds apart."3 Put in another way, between the text and its historical origins, between Heart of Darkness and the events in the Congo, there lies an area of ideological shadow. So as to confront this shadow, I will explore Conrad's troubled representation of landscape as one aspect of the ideological terrain of Heart of Darkness. If, as Octavio Paz would have it, "a landscape is not the more or less accurate description of what our eyes see . . . [but] always points to something else, to something beyond itself ... [as] . . . a metaphysic, a religion, an idea of man and the cosmos," then, at the simplest level, I will be exploring what idea of the cosmos Conrad's landscape secretly figures.4 More specifically, I will argue that Conrad draws on a number of different representations to image the Congo and that these appear, on scrutiny, to be curiously contradictory. They alternately figure the universe as penetrable, as impenetrable, as absurd, as anthropomorphic, as malign, and as primitive. A historical account of the ideological contradictions that these representations betray may restore the book more productively to its historical moment. Near the beginning of Heart of Darkness, when Marlowe voices his uneasy suspicion that he is about to set off for "the centre of the earth," he is invoking