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The Equivocal Ecology of Heart of Darkness: Dialogues with the Spirit of Negation

The rounded snout of the Congo River fish Caecobarbus geertsii is distinguished by its lack of visible eyes. Known as the “Congo blind barb,” this fish lives in caves in the lower Congo. Now classified as “vulnerable,” one notch below “endangered,” the species has approximately seven thousand remaining members. Sold as an “aquarium novelty,” it is often exported to industrialized countries such as the United States.1 As its Latinate designation suggests, its commodification is an outcome of European colonialism in the Congo. The projection of “blindness,” which implies a defect, onto this highly adapted being provides us with an illustration of the “blindness” to which Homo sapiens frequently succumbs. Goethe, in Faust (1808, 1832), brings this foible to light. To the famulus Wagner’s assumption that epistemological certainty is possible, the scholar Faust retorts, “Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heißt,/ Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist,/ In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln” (“What’s called the spirit of an age/ is in the end the spirit of you persons/ in whom past ages are reflected”).2 Hence, Europeans are assumed to have “discovered” beings such as Caecobarbus geertsii, in this case, the Belgian-British zoologist George Albert Boulenger, whose documentation of the fish in 1921 brought it into a cognitive realm of existence that amounts to a container of sorts, limited in the terms in which the fish is conceived. Chinua Achebe seems to perceive this sort of problem when he argues that Joseph Conrad is a “racist” in Heart of Darkness (1899). The Nigerian novelist contends that “this simple truth is glossed over” in the critical reception of the novel