Heart of Darkness

I knew this book by reputation for many years and thought that I knew the ending having studied A Handful of Dust for ‘A’ Level. It lived up to its reputation and I can imagine spending many hours thinking about it. It is beautiful and bleak. Full of existential horror and vivid detail. It conveys what I imagine it must have been like for the first Western European men to explore the heart of Africa. It uses language and expresses attitudes consistent with a time of great ignorance and intolerance but without giving a sense that these are acceptable. Indeed it is sympathetic to the people that were first encountered by explorers at the same time as portraying their complete ‘otherness’ to the type of man used to plundering for wealth and having his word accepted as law.

As a yacht anchors in the Thames and the crew settle down one of them, Charles Marlow, recites an experience he had when he took to sailing on freshwater. And so we have here one of Conrad’s most read and studied works, although this is only a novella. First published in serial form in Blackwood’s Magazine this tale still has the power to provoke and stimulate discussion. Obviously inspired by and based in part on the author’s own experiences this is a story that really grips you. As Marlow takes a job to captain a steamboat up and down the river between trading posts in Africa, he is employed by an ivory business. As Marlow keeps hearing of the genius Mr Kurtz, he is intrigued. But when he actually meets Kurtz things are not what they seem. Taking in Imperialism and the rapacious way of companies to drain areas of natural resources for their own profits this is something that we are still dealing with today. With the native Africans treated like dirt and looked down upon we also see how the Europeans employed by the company come in different guises, from lazy incompetents to those greedy for profit and gain, all backstabbing each other for their own personal advancement. We see that Kurtz is from a new way of thought, with the idea of suppressing the native religions and superstitions and trying to make them more like ‘civilised’ Europeans. This novella has come under attack at different times due to such things as supposed racism and so on, but personally I along with many others have found this to be slightly erroneous. Conrad firstly was writing in the language and prejudices of his time, and he does portray the inhumanity shown towards the native population quite graphically. His story also makes us think and question what right we have to change a whole people’s ideas and beliefs just to make them the same as ours. In all Conrad shows us here the cruelty and greed that we can show to one another, and how the real world is, which makes this so powerful and intense a read.

As a yacht anchors in the Thames and the crew settle down one of them, Charles Marlow, recites an experience he had when he took to sailing on freshwater. And so we have here one of Conrad’s most read and studied works, although this is only a novella. First published in serial form in Blackwood’s Magazine this tale still has the power to provoke and stimulate discussion. Obviously inspired by and based in part on the author’s own experiences this is a story that really grips you. As Marlow takes a job to captain a steamboat up and down the river between trading posts in Africa, he is employed by an ivory business. As Marlow keeps hearing of the genius Mr Kurtz, he is intrigued. But when he actually meets Kurtz things are not what they seem. Taking in Imperialism and the rapacious way of companies to drain areas of natural resources for their own profits this is something that we are still dealing with today. With the native Africans treated like dirt and looked down upon we also see how the Europeans employed by the company come in different guises, from lazy incompetents to those greedy for profit and gain, all backstabbing each other for their own personal advancement. We see that Kurtz is from a new way of thought, with the idea of suppressing the native religions and superstitions and trying to make them more like ‘civilised’ Europeans. This novella has come under attack at different times due to such things as supposed racism and so on, but personally I along with many others have found this to be slightly erroneous. Conrad firstly was writing in the language and prejudices of his time, and he does portray the inhumanity shown towards the native population quite graphically. His story also makes us think and question what right we have to change a whole people’s ideas and beliefs just to make them the same as ours. In all Conrad shows us here the cruelty and greed that we can show to one another, and how the real world is, which makes this so powerful and intense a read.

A long journey with no payoff. We spend the whole book waiting to meet the profound, genius, great man Mr. Kurtz, who has the amazing power to influence people with words, who emanates greatness, gets more ivory than everybody else combined etc. etc. etc. When we meet him in the last 10% of the book, Kurtz speaks about two un-profound lines and dies, and then the rest is a long, vague, angst-ridden retrospective about how profound the meeting with Mr Kurtz was, how powerful their (untold) conversations were, how the narrator loved him like no other man, but how he went to the dark side of darkness of human shadowy dark-dark and that we're all essentially evil in our dark misty hearts. So much abstract pontification about Kurtz with so little actual appearance of him in the story and dialogue - oy. Any profoundness here must have been supplied by the subsequent academic overanalysis of it.

The title says it all. It's a very dark look at how humans can rationalize anything, but still struggle with their buried consciences. It's quite sobering to realize that all of the atrocities Conrad describes in HOD really occurred - he witnessed them when he was a steamboat captain in the Belgian Congo. I actually got the idea to read this book while I was reading King Leopold's Ghost, which is a historical account of his (he was The king of Belgium) formation and rule over the Belgian Congo colony. In this book, it was explained how Joseph Conrad witnessed and corroborated the widespread atrocities the Belgian (and other European and American commissioners) committed on a routine basis. For me, that gave this book added impact - but it's also interesting to note that this story was used as the basic storyline for the film Apocalypse Now. Same scary trip up a river, even the name of the commissioner to be brought back by the boat captain was the same: Mr. Kurtz instead of Colonel Kurtz. All that aside, HOD is a very dark look into the human psyche and worth reading on that basis alone. The fact that Conrad basically just described what he had himself witnessed certainly raises the importance of this book a hundredfold.