Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
This post is part of Commonplace Classics, wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love.
I studied Heart of Darkness in high school and it was extremely hard going. It was without question the most sophisticated book I had encountered to that point, the narrative essentially a monologue with very little dialogue and infrequent paragraph breaks, the language ambiguous and difficult to parse. Doubtless this is why we were studying it in the first place: although short, Heart of Darkness is a dense book, with plenty of big themes and symbolism to tease out in class.
Adding to the difficulty was my - and I assume most of my classmates' - almost complete ignorance of Africa generally and the Belgian Congo specifically, not to mention the complexities of European imperialism, fin de siècle racism, Kipling's "white man's burden", and so on. Watching Richard Attenborough's Gandhi over four consecutive Year 10 history periods was about all the education I'd had about such things - hardly the intellectual foundation for appreciating Conrad's complicated legacy.
And boy is it complicated. Heart of Darkness must be one of the most contested works of the modern era. The issue of whether the book is racist, and if so how much, and in what ways, has been argued over for decades. It's a text that can support, or at least provoke, multiple, often contradictory, interpretations. As Camus said of Kafka's The Trial, "It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of that work that it offers everything and confirms nothing."
That said, in some respects Heart of Darkness isn't ambiguous at all. Whether or not Conrad was a "thoroughgoing racist", in Chinua Achebe's phrase, he obviously felt profound moral disgust at the crimes of European imperialism. As Sven Lindqvist points out, Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in the aftermath of the so-called Battle of Omdurman between the British and a Sudanese Mahdist army, which saw at least 12 000 Sudanese killed and as many grievously wounded by British rifles and machine guns1. (Fewer than fifty British were killed and it is said that no Sudanese made it to within fifty metres of the British lines.) Earlier, he had spent time in the Congo Free State, an experience that inspired the pointed 1896 short story, "An Outpost of Progress", which tells of two ivory traders who descend into avarice and violence.
As for Heart of Darkness, it is hardly a ringing endorsement of the racist-imperialist project. Conrad's protagonist Charles Marlow has barely arrived in Africa before he is confronted by a mass of dead and dying slaves:
They were dying slowly - it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now - nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air - and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young - almost a boy - but you know with them it's hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede's ship's biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held - there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck - Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge - an ornament - a charm - a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas.
Marlow's seen some things in his time, but already he foresees that "in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly."
Personifying these qualities is the ivory agent Kurtz, "an emissary of pity, and science, and progress", who "had come out [to Africa] with moral ideas of some sort." But Kurtz has gone rogue, not to mention insane. When Marlow eventually arrives at Kurtz's trading station, he finds the man dying. Oh, and his hut is surrounded by severed heads on pikes.
I want you clearly to understand that there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only showed that Mr Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him - some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last - only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
Heart of Darkness might have been written in response to specific, late-nineteenth century events, but it is remarkably prescient about the horrors to come. Genocidal Kurtz is the archetype of the twentieth century demagogue, a poster boy for the Age of Extermination. Another European informs Marlow that "Kurtz's proper sphere ought to have been politics 'on the popular side'."
...Kurtz really couldn't write a bit - 'but heavens! how that man could talk. He electrified large meetings. He had faith - don't you see? - he had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything - anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.' 'What party?' I asked. 'Any party,' answered the other. 'He was an - an - extremist.' Did I not think so? I assented.
I think this is the fourth time I've read Heart of Darkness, if we include that initial baffled trudge in high school, and it's the first time I have felt more or less equal to the task. It's a dense and dark book - the clue's in the title - but worth the effort. I ought to read more Conrad! The only other novel of his I've read is The Secret Agent, later adapted by Hitchcock2; of Typhoon and Lord Jim and the novel with the extremely unfortunate title I know nothing. But before I start on any of those books, I had better finish my next Commonplace Classic, which is (heavy sigh) another tale of colonial Africa, and a pretty dubious-sounding one at that: She by H. Rider Haggard. Honestly, who picks these books.