“It Was the Stillness of an Implacable Force”: A Lyotardian Study of Ecology in Heart of Darkness

Abstract

This essay examines nature in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the light of Lyotard’s discourse of ecology and his other philosophical ideas. His postmodernist criticism of conformity and representability, as asserted in his notion of ecology and implied throughout his whole philosophy, provides a lens through which to see nature as an unruly agent that challenges Western development in epistemological and linguistic terms. Such an understanding of nature, Lyotard suggests, necessitates the deconstructive power of avant-garde art, especially literary writing, which Conrad’s 1899 text best prefigures. Set mainly in the wilderness of colonial Congo during the nineteenth century, the widely acknowledged postcolonial novella at once invites an ecocritical reading of how European developed culture struggles and eventually fails to prove mastery over African nature.