Leonard Gaya's review of Heart of Darkness (original) (raw)

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Leonard Gaya's Reviews > Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness
by

27098959

Blessed was Odysseus, who returned, full of wisdom, after many conquests and adventures to live a peaceful old age with his wife and family. It didn’t go that well for Charles Marlow. Heart of Darkness is like The Odyssey or The Divine Comedy or the story of Sindbad or any hero’s journey for that matter, only upside down. Instead of an adventure that is ultimately a coming-of-age, a homecoming, a blessing, a regaining of paradise, Marlow’s expedition up the Congo River, in search of an illusory Eldorado, setting off “for the centre of the earth”, works as a step “into the gloomy circle of some Inferno”.

Conrad himself sailed up the Congo in his youth, so his novella is, in many ways, autobiographical. In the book, like Odysseus or Sindbad, Marlow tells the story of his adventures, and it, in turn, is told by an unnamed narrator, making it a second-degree account of the facts. We even meet, early on, a group of old women “knitting black wool” like a modern picture of the ancient Fates, dictating the destinies of humans and weaving the story in yet another way. At this point, while we are aware that the whole thing is a piece of fiction, the narrative’s multi-layered structure makes it all the more fantastical and unreal, and the reader is at risk of losing his footing, just like the hero of the story. So much so that, at some point towards the middle of the novel, putting his narrative in doubt, Marlow cries out:

Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream — making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream — sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams…

Heart of Darkness is a groundbreaking text that digs into the dark depths of the human psyche. And while it is written in sumptuous, almost marmoreal prose, it searches for sensations underneath language, nightmares underneath clear thought, the unutterable, silence, darkness. In short, only read Heart of Darkness with a double Polish vodka or a potent antidepressant close at hand!

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe argued that there is more than a whiff of racism in Conrad’s novel — not just because of his use of the N-word (which was commonplace at the time), but because the natives in his fiction, with few exceptions, are little more than animalistic stick figures. In a sense, Conrad is still in the rut of traditional European prejudices, whereby darkness, notably dark skin, is a symbol of ugliness, moral brutality, viciousness, even cannibalism (see Shakespeare’s “Moors”, for instance, Aaron in Titus Andronicus or Othello).

However, at the same time — and this shows how ambiguous and murky this short novel gets — Heart of Darkness can also be construed as a criticism of Western colonialism and a denunciation of White, Western ferocity — in this sense, there is a kinship between Heart of Darkness and Moby-Dick. From the start, Marlow reflects: “when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago — the other day... darkness was here”. Now flowing through one of the most civilised cities on earth, the River Thames was, not long ago, curving and coiling over a primitive wilderness. Besides, as the story later shows, it only takes a few weeks, on the shores of the Congo River, for a “cultured” European to revert into a stinking crook, eaten away by greed, and turn eventually into a beast or a demon or a grotesque deity. “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”

And so, Marlow’s journey through the jungle is also a trip into a primaeval past, before civilisation. But, further still: it doesn’t take the overheated wilderness of a remote, lonely and prehistoric tropical rainforest for the metamorphosis of the European culture into a slaughterhouse to happen. Kurtz, the man who sank into insanity and monstrosity, is described chiefly as “a voice! a voice!” Where that voice comes from is not entirely clear either. Is that just Kurtz’s voice? Is that Marlow’s voice telling his story? Conrad’s voice writing his novel? Or some other deeper voice that surfaces from a hollow, dark, ominous silence?

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.’

Indeed, the last words of Kurtz’s imperialistic manifesto are, as an afterthought, “Exterminate all the brutes!” Conrad was writing in the very last years of the 19th century. But it is impossible, in retrospect, not to think that the “voice” he writes about wasn’t already born in the very heart of Europe; that Heart of Darkness wasn’t a foreshadowing vision of the horror and destruction that would, only a few decades later, cover the European continent.

Heart of Darkness has been an immensely influential novella. Céline possibly drew inspiration from it to write the African episode of Voyage au bout de la nuit. There are also many similarities between the atmosphere of this novel and the sense of cosmic terror that H.P. Lovecraft developed in his novellas. J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World displays some similitude to Conrad’s story as well.

Heart of Darkness has also obviously influenced the cinema, starting with Orson Welles, who unsuccessfully attempted to adapt it. Likewise with Werner Herzog’s cult film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God — an epic movie on insanity set in the Amazon jungle. Finally, Francis Ford Coppola famously turned Conrad’s novel into a staggering, baroque, disturbing masterpiece about the Vietnam War: Apocalypse Now!

Nowadays, the upper Congo is no longer the heart of a ruthless ivory trade. But the region holds vast quantities of minerals that are critical for Western/Asian computing and renewable energy industries. As a result, under the convergence of this new mineral rush, significant financial interests, military conflicts and political instability, this part of the world is once more the scene of human greediness, atrocities, murder, slavery and rape. In a weird way, Kurtz’s whispered cry still resonates with us, “The horror! The horror!”

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Reading Progress

February 3, 2019 – Shelved

April 14, 2021 –Started Reading

April 15, 2021 –Finished Reading

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