Heart of Darkness
Although I finished it more than a month ago1, I've been bantering back and forth in my mind about how to write about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. What I'd started as an attempt to gauge a colonizer's perspective2 of Africa became a much bigger journey - a book I thought would be an afterthought in its novella size (only 132 pages of mass market paperback sized reading) ended as a though provoking journey that I kept going back to after I'd finished it3.
Sometimes a book is great simply for the questions it asks. As I found myself reconciling pieces of the book with my own life I escaped what would have been a bad reading of it and saw a glimpse of what Conrad intended: the contrast, irony, and darkness in man, civilized and primal.
Another reason the book succeeded for me was style: it is narrated in its entirety. It's rare to find books of this style - the last I read was The Last Samurai and for those that know me, my affection for that book was, well, overwhelming. There are other things that make the structure interesting: throughout the book, only two characters are formally given names. Others are given only anonymous references, including the primary narrator whose recounting is the book.
It opens with a group of sea farers on their way from the aptly named Gravesend down the river Thames, when one of the sailors, Marlow, tells the small group the story of taking a boat down the River Congo. The journey into Congo eventually becomes a journey in search for a man named Kurtz, a cryptic ivory trader who embodies that intersection between Europe and Africa.
While Heart of Darkness inspired a lot of reflection on my part, perhaps the biggest thought I kept returning to was the notion of truth.
"... No it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone..."
This is a bleak quote, admittedly, and yet in our own hearts of darkness, is it not so? Our struggle to reach across the chasm between us and others, to say who we are - reveal our inner depths, and yet that is so hard. As Conrad wrote, trying to span a world of rules, protocol, and formality - what we refer to as "civilized" - with a world that was abstruse, foreboding, and ultimately lethal - a view of "Africa" - and struggled with this principle. He is quoted as saying:
"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see."
Heart of Darkness ends with the prospect of the sailor, Marlow, telling the truth to Kurtz's fiancé, a feat which he can't quite pull off:
"But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark - too dark altogether..."
In that bridge between worlds, how do we tell the truth? How do we make other see? The Heart of Darkness is a question of art altogether for which Conrad, it seems, left a crushing answer.
1And now it's been a month since I originally wrote this review. Hopefully it's not too stale.
2Just how much of a racist was Conrad? I think he was a man of his time and therefore a racist. Some of his passages made me seeth:
"to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs... He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because he had been instructed... "
Chinua Achebe has famously criticized the book and its attempt to contrast the darkness of Africa2a with the civilization of Europe. While his comments aren't without merit, a short way into the book I began to read it away from this perspective and had better success in getting Conrad's ideas.
2aAnd to say that Africa isn't dark is to deny a very depressing reality. It isn't the only "dark" place out there and there is truly a darkness in the so called "first world" and yet how hard is it to reconcile the world of kid soldiers, ethnic cleansing, AIDS, and starvation with our quiet corners of suburbia? While there is always hope, and while the blame is something for the world to share, this is an honesty I refuse to neglect.
3Part of the reason I delayed so much in posting this is because Heart Of Darkness is such a complex book. There are so many angles from which to approach it that I thought of trying to incorporate some of the other interesting pieces: how Conrad's biography works into the book, how it relates to the darkness of Africa today (and our inability to communicate it), the traveller's nature of the book. People like Paul Theroux and Richard Kaplan quote Conrad with good reason; he travelled as they did: to see. In the end I decided to leave just this impression to keep things concise.
10:14:50 PM 
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