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In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, the narrator, Marlow, recounts his journey up the Congo River in quest of Mr Kurtz and his heap of plundered ivory. Marlow's story is enigmatic, obscure, stressing the strangeness and inscrutability of the colonial encounter with Africa: ‘We were’, he insists, ‘wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet’ (Conrad, 2008, p. 138). As the boat creeps towards the corrupt heart of darkness, the European ‘pilgrims’, lusting after ivory, watch the ‘swaying’ ‘bodies’ of ‘prehistoric man’ pass them by on the shore (p. 139). Marlow describes a sense of utter estrangement, a sensation of being ‘cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings’, which leaves the Europeans feeling ghostly, ‘like phantoms’, gliding past, ‘travelling in the night of first ages’ (p. 139). The earth, Marlow insists, ‘was unearthly and the men were -’; he stumbles, ‘No they were not inhuman’, no, ‘that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman’ (p. 139). For Marlow, what is ‘thrilling’, what is frightening, is ‘the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar’ (p. 139).
It is, as Chinua Achebe pointed out, this threat of ‘kinship’ with the Africans that is so troubling to Marlow, not their difference (Achebe, 2010, p. 1615). Travelling to the heart of darkness, Marlow finds the familiar lurking in the unfamiliar, he finds ‘remote kinship’ with those people his narrative works so hard to dehumanize and disavow. Marlow is subject to what John Zilcosky describes as a characteristically turn-of-the-century uncanny encounter.
In Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity, Zilcosky examines popular travel writing (Norbert Jacques's Hot Land: A Journey to Brazil is the chief example) and ‘high’ European modernism (Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Robert Musil), as well a