ABSTRACT
Kurtz is an agent of extractive industry. Kurtz’s wilderness is the opposite of pristine. The power that draws Marlow toward Kurtz and advances the narrative is not simply Kurtz’s personal magnetism, but rather the imperatives of capitalism at a particular stage of its development, in which the expanding resource frontier led to the “scramble for Africa”. Conrad makes the modernizing unconscious visible, that is to say, conscious. Narrative, like evolution, persists after the end of nature. Wilderness was once celebrated as the ideal landscape, defined as pristine, untouched and unsullied: nature in its natural state. While John Muir’s wilderness has been the one celebrated within environmental thought it is dependent on the division between “nature” and “society” that the Anthropocene renders obsolete. The wilderness is by definition strange, that which lies beyond the frontier of the familiar, domesticated world, a space of danger and transformation, of visions and temptation and, at least potentially, renewal and new forms of possibility.
