Jim Fonseca's review of Heart of Darkness (original) (raw)

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Jim Fonseca's Reviews > Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness
by

A re-read for me from many years ago. We all know the basic story. A small river steamship captain, Charles Marlow, commands a ferryboat up the Congo River (as did the author). Marlow, like many others in the story, has become fascinated with a guy named Kurtz, a mythologized, legendary trader of ivory who lives in the interior and has ‘gone native,’ as the expression goes.

There are thousands of reviews out there, so I will just add my two cents to the debate about the meaning and value of the book.

We see the miserable conditions the native peoples live in – they are essentially enslaved - and we read passages that are racist. A well-known critic of the book is the famous Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, author of many books set in Africa, most notably, Things Fall Apart. Achebe basically said the book is a typical work of 19th-century racist colonialism and we should stop considering it a classic and stop assigning it in college courses.

And yet the book is also fundamentally a critique of the colonial system, highlighting the brutality, materialism, greed and inhumanity of the Europeans. In a way, it’s about man’s inhumanity to man and the common flaws of humanity that we all share in. So in that sense, Conrad was relatively ‘woke’ for his time (published in 1899) and the book helped push the needle forward on the scale of enlightenment.

I personally believe that regardless of how ‘woke’ we think we are, we all engage in things, hold beliefs, say and write things that will shock our grandchildren. “How could he think that???”

I’ll let Harold Bloom have the last word. He wrote that Heart of Darkness had been analyzed more than any other work of literature that is studied in universities and colleges, and he attributed this to Conrad's "unique propensity for ambiguity." Learning about ambiguity is a good thing.

Top photo from warontherocks.com
Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) from litariness.org

[Edited 7/28/23]

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Reading Progress

July 13, 2022 –Started Reading

July 16, 2022 – Shelved as:slavery

July 16, 2022 – Shelved as:africa

July 16, 2022 –Finished Reading

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