The Gospel of Work in Carlyle and in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

A central concern of Thomas Carlyle’s and one that was widely pondered by subsequent Victorian writers was the existential importance of work. Without work, or the right kind of work, life was hellish, productive of morbid introspection and paralytic inaction. Carlyle’s first commandment, pronounced in Sartor Resartus (1831-32; Bk. II, Ch VII) and Past and Present (1843; Bk. III, Ch. XI) was: “Know what thou canst work at”. It was a riff on Socrates’ “Know thyself” but it had very different implications. Socrates’ injunction was about thought; Carlyle’s was about action. Carlyle was of a generation for whom thought, reflection, introspection and self-consciousness – all of which had been taken to hitherto unknown extremes by writers and poets of the Romantic school in the late 17th and early 18th century – were decidedly double-edged swords.

Carlyle reacted against Romantic doctrine by declaring that “the sign of health is Unconsciousness” and that “[t]he healthy know not of their health, but only the sick (“Characteristics“, 1831). If one’s psyche was healthy, then, one just did not think about it or reflect on it. One did not know it; it just was. How did one escape self-consciousness, the disease of the Romantic temperament? Through work: “Man is sent hither not to question, but to work” (“Characteristics”). Therein lay the key to contentment and feeling at one with nature and one’s surroundings.

It was an influential notion, sometimes known as the “Gospel of Work“, and several notable Victorian novelists, such as Eliot and Dickens, reflected substantially on its implications. In the work of Joseph Conrad, too, the importance of work to one’s life experience is central. Marlow, the narrator of most of Heart of Darkness (1899), is particularly preoccupied with this. The experience he recounts in HoD is substantially about what it means to be a worker, to be devoted with one’s work, to face disillusionment about the goal of that work and how to respond to that disillusionment.

When Marlow contracts the job of captain of a ship which is assigned to sail up the Congo river, he is relieved, but struck also by the discourse surrounding the job he is to do:

It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. 

Heart of Darkness, Ch. 1

Marlow identifies that there is something quasi-religious in the discourse: “emissary of light”, “apostle”. This recalls the “Gospel of Work” and the capitalisation of “Workers” also suggests the famously erratic capitalisation habits of Carlyle, who does capitalise “Work” and “Workers” at times in Past and Present. Marlow is somewhat skeptical of the whole thing, disassociating himself from such language.

His skepticism is confirmed when he lands in Africa and one of his first experiences is the famous grove of death scene. A few pages later he returns to a contemplation of the nature of the “work”:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

HoD, Ch. I

Here “The work!” appears as a single sentence fragment, the exclamation mark serving to contrast the reality – slavery and slow, brutal death – with the sanctified talk Marlow had been subjected to earlier. The Gospel of Work is so divorced from reality as to be both tragic and ridiculous.

As the story progresses, however, it is by no means so simple. Marlow cannot quite dismiss the notion of work as the essence of life. He tries to articulate his position:

I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

HoD, Ch. I

It is a rather delicate distinction. Marlow does not like work but he likes what is in the work. Without work, one sees only mere show and cannot tell what it really means. Work, then is the way to true knowledge and is the way to find yourself. This, in fact, has brought us very close to Carlyle’s position again, wherein work is the central activity for a properly developed self.

Even having seen what he has seen of the imperial work in the Congo, Marlow is still attached to the notion of work. He retains an optimism about work as embodied by the Great Man, Kurtz. The first section of the story ends with the observation:

I was curious to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there.

HoD, Ch. I

That illustrates the difference between Kurtz and the functionaries of the rubber company Marlow meets. The latter believe in money; Kurtz believes in the civilizing mission. Kurtz’s work is for the betterment of humanity. When confronted with what is actually going on in the Congo, so different from the talk in Europe, Kurtz is too honest to go along with it and descends into a mostly undescribed madness. Marlow is less idealistic than Kurtz, though, and throughout keeps his head. How does Marlow stay sane in that atmosphere of horror? It is simple: through attendance to his work.

I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day’s steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckiIy.

HoD, Ch. II

Work, then, keeps away “the inner truth”, and for Marlow that is a good thing. At the end of the story, Marlow returns to Kurtz’s Intended, and tells her the same lies he was told before he went to the Congo. His take on the Gospel of Work, then, is a) it is a cover for exploitation and greed which does not reflect the real world; and b) it is a necessary fiction to keep at bay the horror of the imperial mission and preserve the illusion of a beautiful world. Marlow goes along with the rhetoric of he Gospel of Work and becomes a liar. Conrad evidently put a good deal of himself into Marlow, but it would not be fair to say he goes along with Marlow’s dishonesty. If he did, he would never have described the grove of death or the other horrific realities he had experienced in the Congo.