‘Heart of Darkness’ is on one of the defining novels of the 20th century and was written by Joseph Conrad in 1899, the same year as Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.
The narrator Marlow, a sailor, recounts his journey up a river into the heart of Africa, under the old days of Colonial rule, and recounts his experience of the amorality and darkness of those days which Kurtz, a man who he has gone to rescue, perhaps exemplifies.
Kurtz and what he represents are very much ‘out there’ in the brutalities and hypocrisies of colonial exploitation, but he’s also very much ‘in here’. The story is a ‘nightmare’ in which Marlow is in part confronting his own ‘shadow’ (Conrad’s words). Marlow is both repelled and fascinated by Kurtz, loathes him and admires him, and struggles with only partial success to integrate the meanings of his encounter with Kurtz.
We are all, Conrad implies, potential Kurtzes, and the Heart of Darkness is there in each of us, as well as in a particular set of historical circumstances – like those ‘ordinary men’ who participated in the Holocaust. Marlow even says of Kurtz that ‘he’s kicked the very earth to pieces’.
He’s talking about Kurtz’s moral collapse and loss of bearings. But it also seems uncannily prescient that a similar greed, rapacity and lack of recognition of being in the world with others, and other things, something which in Conrad’s time cost at least a million African lives in the Belgian Congo through the ravenous pursuit of natural (mainly rubber and ivory) resources, now threaten the earth’s climate itself. We are all responsible.
Kurtz’s is also very much a tragedy of choice. He arrives in Africa a ‘philanthropist’, ‘a very remarkable man’, an idealist of genius, and becomes the opposite. His dying realization is that he chose this; that it could have been otherwise. This, as much as what he has seen, done and perhaps foresees, is the ‘horror’.
There’s a fascinating phenomenological strain to the story – there are several episodes where Marlow is unable at first to organize meaning from his experience. Conrad was fascinated by the dynamics of human perception, and also by the struggle of the individual to fully communicate his (provisional and incomplete) experience and be understood.
I was particularly interested to discover when researching the novella that the counterpart to ‘Heart of Darkness’ is a book I have always loved called ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe. What immediately jumped out to me in this instance was the parallel between the appalling behaviour and attitude of the Colonialists towards the African population, and the stance taken by the Nazis towards Jews … and so much of the coflict that continues in the world today; the closed mindedness of the Colonialists to the other, their lack of any recognition or openness to the other or another, which Achebe so powerfully brings out.
A great read.
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