SOURCE: Brown, Tony C. “Cultural Psychosis on the Frontier: The Work of the Darkness in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.” Studies in the Novel 32, no. 1 (spring 2000): 14-28.

In the following essay, Brown maintains that the darkness in Heart of Darkness produces a larger “cultural psychosis.”

Therein consists the most elementary formal definition of psychosis: the massive presence of some real that fills out and blocks the perspective openness which is constitutive of “reality.”

—Slavoj ˘Zi˘zek, “Grimaces of the Real”¹

Heart of Darkness has perversely proved a central document in postcolonial discourse. As Homi K. Bhabha puts it, “the long shadow of Conrad's Heart of Darkness falls on so many texts of the postcolonial pedagogy.”² Notably, Bhabha cites Edward W. Said's Culture and Imperialism as an exemplary example of such a text:

Heart of Darkness is the novel that invites the most comment and interpretation. It serves as...