Heart of Darkness

Conflicting feelings about this book.

There's a lot that I did like about it. I liked the story and the meandering structure of it.

I liked the darkness of it.

I liked how dammit it was of colonialism.

But I did not enjoy the writing style very much. I felt overwhelmingly like I didn't know who was saying what, who they were saying it to, what they were referring to.

This feeling grew more and more as the book went on and I suppose that's more or less the point isn't it - that we're feeling the descent into the madness of the narrator. But it was just a challenging read for me, and without enough reward to pay off the effort.

I really wanted to like this book. It's a classic isn't it? You're supposed to like it. Everyone talks about how great it is. But I just couldn't quite gel with it; honestly if it weren't so short I probably wouldn't have even finished it.

I feel that the quotes I encountered from the book beforehand were from a story that was more compelling than the one I actually read.

The prose at its best is incredible, at its worst wordy. It does verge I think towards the purple, but when it hits, it hits hard. "It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core." The sheer imagery in that, the whole psychology and emotions expressed. Conrad has a gift for crafting psychological images.

Marlow carries the story on his back. Kurtz could have been more interesting, but I don't know, I like Marlow better.

I think I would have liked a series of stories where it's just Marlow telling all his experiences as a sailor. Like Moby Dick, but only focused on the sailor as the world transitioned from the age of sails to that of steam. Descriptions of the hierarchy within vessels, types of ships, shipping routes, how a steamboat operates, how they measure distances, what different places were like ... etc.

This guy learned English as an adult and writes so well, I don't feel worthy to review him. I was assigned this book in Freshman English and I couldn't read it then. I couldn't read all that much back then, but finally I'm up to the level of a college freshman.

So here's the idea. Civilization, and sanity is all a lie, as are books and book reviews. Behind it all is an unspeakable reality--an unspeakable horror, and of that which one cannot speak, one must remain silent. Freud's version of this was the ego and the id, or, to translate his German differently, the I and the It. The I suppresses the It. It does this in the name of civilization, but the I is not really in charge. The It drives it from below to force it to carry out it's secret lusts but they are disguised.

The disguise is efficiency and morality and progress and commerce and business and law. The Company employed Marlowe as an agent of civilization and sent him into the African Id with it's alien savagery, which makes no sense to a Westerner. It's animal and insane and must be held in check by brutality that only makes sense if you realize it's frightening alterity. It is so "other" that it could never be understood and even to try is dangerous because that way lies madness.

But, as Marlowe sees as he descends deeper and deeper into the Congo, the sanity being imposed on Africa is a sham. It's no more sane than that which it opposes. What it is, is ordered and familiar, and seems to be almost working if you ignore the parts that ought to be ignored, such as the mindless inhuman suffering imposed on the natives in the process of satisfying the White man's greed.

But ahead of Marlowe on his journey is Kurtz who has, it is reported, freed himself of all restraint. Kurtz answers to nothing and nobody and is worshiped by the natives. He satisfies all his lusts and greeds and would kill anyone who got in his was, or was perceived as getting in his way or just needed to be killed on his whim.

The story is framed as Marlowe telling the story of his descent into the heart of this darkness and his return to the ordinary world, having barely glimpsed what must be fled in terror and bearing witness to the man who didn't flinch from any of it. It's set up like so many horror stories with the naive protagonist seeing the signs of warning which are obvious to us, the readers of the book, but foolishly ignored by him as he proceeds into the Heart of Darkness.

How can a sheltered undergraduate at a fancy university understand such a thing except as an abstract trope? How can a review express it as other than an abstract trope? Well, there, I've done it and we can all go home now.

It's a precious thing to be able to read a 115-year-old story, and one which is based on personal experience, at that. This novella sheds an unflattering light on imperialism, a culture of greed that led some men to travel to foreign places to mistreat, torture, and murder the natives and sometimes each other. Specifically, it recounts the tale of Charles Marlowe, who had had the experience of sailing down the Congo River, in the employ of an ivory trading company, in search of an agent named Mr. Kurtz, who is known to be very ill. Marlowe hears much about this man, but when he actually meets Kurtz, it is obvious that all he has left is his voice; Kurtz has become devoid of any qualities he might have had in his life. He is already dead. Marlowe returns to England a very disillusioned young man, having witnessed the full scope of petty jealousies, greed, and racism inherent in his culture.

I found this to be a powerful read, even though the writing style was an adjustment for me; Conrad does not write in the detail I've grown accustomed to, but then, that's part of the experience of reading a story that's more than a century old.

While Apocalypse Now gave me a vague idea of what to expect in the original novella, Heart of Darkness still ended up pleasantly surprising me.

This book can be best summed up with two key words: tension and intensity. Heart of Darkness reads almost like a Gothic horror novel, with a creepy sense of uneasiness and isolation that grows over time.

After narrator Marlowe arrives in Africa, the reader is treated to a continuous series of vignettes showing the brutal reality of slavery and the methods used to keep the ivory trade going. African characters are presented as bestial savages, but the white characters Marlowe encounters are also contemptible without exception. They're brutal thugs, incompetent stuffed shirts, or conniving cheats. They stand in stark contrast to Kurtz, an almost mythical figure spoken of with awe, fear, and jealousy. With mechanical failures and hostile natives, Marlowe's steamboat trip grows more and more hellish and desperate over time, while Kurtz himself becomes even more mysterious and sinister.

Just as this narrative tension reaches its height, we finally come face to face with Kurtz himself. Despite being weakened by illness and insanity, Kurtz is nothing if not intense. Marlowe finds himself horrified by the jungle theocracy Kurtz has set up for himself, but even he can't help being cowed by his charisma and force of will. Marlowe finds himself marked by his brief contact with the man, and left with a decidedly grim view of humanity as a whole.

Literary ClassicsTM are frequently imposing, monumental works, but Heart of Darkness turned out to be an unexpectedly swift read. So much has been made of the book's exploration of the "duality of mankind" that I'd expected a dry, verbose story, but this wasn't the case at all. Instead, the book was engaging throughout, and its exploration of man's inhumanity to man avoided becoming didactic and impenetrable. I found the book to be much more vibrant than the dense, fossilized analysis and criticism that has accreted around it.

This public domain book is available as a free ebook from the Project Gutenberg web site.

With it being one of the many classics I had left unread, I finally started reading Heart of Darkness a couple of days ago, and quickly moved through this little gem. There are more than enough summaries, analyses and critiques of this story on the internet, so I'll just make a few comments.

On Goodreads, a number of people are complaining about the cliched, cheap use of dark Africa as a metaphor for the darkness of protagonist Marlow's darkened soul. While I don't think it's wrong to see this as a metaphor, I find it a bit superficial to keep it at that. It is the darkness and savagery of the jungle that bring Marlow - and all other characters that venture into its depths - to according states. The African land is not as much a metaphor for, as a causal explanation of the darkness of Marlow, Kurtz and others.

That power of the environment is ultimately the message that Conrad tries to convey. Kurtz may have wanted to bring light to the heart of Africa - so that it may look the way the Thames looks at the higher level of the framed narrative - but instead he became corrupted himself. Enlightenment, it seems, is not in the minds of the Europeans, but in the civilization that they occupy. Once outside this environment, they are as much savages as those whom they try to convert. Take civilization away from a man, and all you have left is a cold, primal core.

Whether Conrad did indeed take such a Hobbesian view of humanity, I don't know. I found it telling that Marlow showed compassion for his killed crew member, saving the corpse from cannibalism because "there had been some mutual dependency". It seems Conrad was also open to the idea that social structure can be sufficient for moral behavior.

In any case, the story has much more to offer than some reviewers on Goodreads are giving it credit for. Heart of Darkness tries to go to the heart of the human condition, and denies the Enlightenment idea of western man having reached a "civilized stage". I don't subscribe to the view of humanity as being fundamentally dark, but I have greatly enjoyed the way in which Conrad tried to make its case. And, given that western powers are still sending troops into "savage lands" in order to export their values and politics, it is worth considering to what extent Conrad was correct.