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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Heart Of Darkness

  
 
All Acting Regiment
13:53 / 11.05.05
This is the book that inspired Apocalypse now: except it's set in 1890s (written then also) and features a young English bloke on a steamer journey in West Africa during the colnial period.

Everyone agrees that it's a bleak novel about suffering- what people disagree on is whether or not it or it's writer was, as Achebe said, "A Thororoughgoing Racist".

Have any 'lithers read it and what did they think? All opinions/references welcome.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
16:07 / 11.05.05
Been a while since I read it, but let's see...

It's about colonialism. It can be read as a damning critique of colonialism. Unfortunately, it's a little bit more complicated than that. Actually, it's an extremely ambiguous novel. Does the project of bringing 'civilisation' to the 'savages' end up dehumanising not only those so-called 'savages' but also the colonisers because colonialism is itself a savage, inhumane process? Or is it rather that the civilised white man is driven to madness by the 'darkness' of Africa? In other words, is Conrad's Africa a 'dark' place because of what is being done there by the white man, or because of some kind of inherent primitivism that abides in spite of the white man's efforts? By comparison, when we are told that the Thames was once also one of the "dark places" of the world, does that refer to before it was colonised and Londinium founded, or during/after? I think Conrad might have thought he had noble intentions - clearly some of the things being done in the name of civilisation are protrayed as awful. At the same time, some racist ideas of Africa as containing an ancient, infectious 'darkness' does prevail. One could argue that this was partly because Conrad could not escape the racism inherent in language at that time (and still today!) when it comes to describing skin colour and concepts of good and bad: moral darkness and racial darkness don't get separated out in a way that is satisfyingly free from racism in the novel.

Conrad's narrative style hardly helps resolve ambiguities either and that's one of things that means as many people find this book unreadable as think it's a work of genius (I vacillate). He's always going on about unspeakable horrors that are unthinkable and indescribable - it's all very vague and quite easy to parody.
 
 
DrNick
21:46 / 11.05.05
Well, it has been a good while since I read it, but I certainly thought at the time that it was very good, the decline of Marlow was carried off very well and (key point) the book is very very short; if you're a reasonably fast reader you'll easily get through it in a good deal less time than it takes to watch Apocalypse Now.

Racism...well, it's that standards-of-the-time thing isn't it, as the previous reply said. By fin-de-siecle (get me) standards, it was pretty durn progressive stuff. Even if it is remarkably pro-Brit and anti-French (at least I think it was the French. Maybe the Portuguese?) as far as colonial powers go.
 
 
Jack Fear
02:07 / 12.05.05
Neither French nor Portuguese, but the Belgians—or rather the Belgian sovereign. King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, is your essential nonfiction companion piece—your skeleton key—to Heart of Darkness, giving you the necessary historical context.

Basically, Leopold, through his corporations and his soldiers, ran the Congo as a personal fiefdom—treating the indigenous peoples with absolute brutality and with zero accountability, turning the whole country into a slave labor camp. In the thirty years that Leopold ruled the Congo, ten million people were slaughtered—literally half the total indigenous population. Ten million people. That's more than died in the Holocaust.

Joseph Conrad was there, in the thick of it—a steamboat officer, rather like Marlow—and what he saw there shook up his assumptions about human nature.

The ambiguity that the Flyboy so ably sets out is the key here. Some read the story as being about the corrupting influence of being isolated, in a "primitive" land—but I'm not so sure. Conrad is fascinated with how people react to crisis or stress—whether they stay whole, or break. He seems to put a great deal of stock in the notion of strength of character: here's Marlow in Heart of Darkness, meeting the Company's accountant in the Congo...

"[N]ear the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear. .... I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser's dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That's backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character."

In the same demoralizing land and doing the same soul-crushing colonialist work as Kurtz, this prissy little bourgeois manages to keep his head together, while Kurtz becomes a monster. The "darkness" both the corrupting influence of the land, yes, but also the darkness of the human heart—its flaws and weaknesses; and I'd argue that, in seeking to explain Kurtz's evil (and indeed, the overall atmospheric miasma of evil throughout Marlow's river journey), Conrad emphasizes the latter over the former.

The fault lies not in the "primitive" land, but in the human heart. After all, the spider at the center of the Congo's web of evil was, in fact, a respectable monarch sitting on his throne in civilized Europe.
 
 
Jack Fear
02:11 / 12.05.05
Oh, and Fly:

Conrad's narrative style hardly helps resolve ambiguities either and that's one of things that means as many people find this book unreadable as think it's a work of genius (I vacillate).

Remember the mantra: "Almost any interesting work or art comes close to saying the opposite of what it really says."
 
 
wembley can change in 28 days
06:41 / 12.05.05
I haven't read HoD for like 15 years, but I did recently read W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, which has an excellent and very distressing section on the exploitation of the Congo, Conrad's novel, and a British officer who attempted to do something about it and, upon his return home, was denounced as a homosexual. Worth checking out.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:11 / 12.05.05
In the same demoralizing land and doing the same soul-crushing colonialist work as Kurtz, this prissy little bourgeois manages to keep his head together, while Kurtz becomes a monster.

I might be wrong, but isn't the order in which the two are encountered important here? As I remember it, Marlow meets the accountant first - and is the accountant not someone who very much believes in the good of colonialism? - and I've heard powerful arguments that Kurtz actually undercuts the accountant's apparent respectability, making a mockery of the extent to which this impressed Marlow. After all, we're really only talking about the trappings of civilisation here, aren't we? Starched collars and all that.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:51 / 12.05.05
What I don't think we can get away from is that the way that the Africans are described nearly always shows them in a bad light. I think this was what Achebe was describing. The Africans appear as:

a) Drifting, souless, broken people- see the miners at the start of the book. They aren't shown as proud, certainly. Later on we get

b) Agressive, monstrous killers, such as the ones who pelt the boat with arrows from the riverbank, or the ones on the boat with sharpened teeth- "a cannibal". The closest to a positive description we get is

c) Strange, aloof, threatening figures such as the woman who Kurtz may or may not have loved.

Whereas yes, the whites are shown as equally monstrous, but there is the suggestion with Kurtz that they have some kind of civilsation "back home", but they've lost it by coming to Africa.

Is this a reasonable reading?
 
 
Jack Fear
11:04 / 12.05.05
Legba: The "drifting, soulless, broken people" are those most directly affected by Leopold's colonialist adventure. This is not coincidental, I think. The whites may have lost something in their interaction with Africa, but the Africans have effectively been destroyed, as well.

Message clear: colonialism is a horrible dehumanizing experience for both the oppressed and the oppressor—and if you haven't got the strength of character to deal with it, you may well break, or become a monster. This was pretty radical stuff in its time.

Conrad may be considered the anti-Kipling; terrible things happened to Kipling's Englishmen abroad, but they were never broken in the way that Conrad's colonialists are often broken. Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" has an identical premise to Heart of Darkness—a white trader sets himself up as god-king to an isolated tribe—but Kipling's Daniel Dravot is never the monster that Kurtz is. He remains a gruff, hardy Englishman whose greatest sin is that he's a bit too smart for his own good, and who bites off more than he can chew. His downfall comes from without, when he is exposed as mortal by a woman of the tribe.

For Kipling, becoming a god-king is fraught with practical dangers, but he doesn't seem particularly disapproving of the enterprise in itself. Conrad, though, sees and shows that there are moral dangers inherent in the colonalist project itself, and that one undertakes it at peril to one's own soul.
 
 
Axolotl
15:26 / 12.05.05
While I haven't read "the Man Who Would be King" (great film though) and while I wouldn't disagree with your reading of it from my limited knowledge. I would argue that Kipling possibly doesn't deserve all of the criticism he gets for his pro-colonial viewpoints. For example when I read "Gunga Din" I'm much more impressed by him than by the narrator, he's made out to be a brutish man while Gunga Din is made to seem a much more admirable character.
But back to the topic: "Heart of Darkness" is a very strange book, despite its short length I found it quite dense to read, though definitely worth the effort. I got a very strong sense of a fever dream reading it. The camp early on where the accountant is found seems very otherworldly.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
11:00 / 13.05.05
fever dream

Conrad suffered a fever all his time in Africa; he would never recover from it fully and suffered further fever and dyssentry for the rest of his life.
 
 
Jack_Rackem
20:45 / 13.05.05
I found it mostly turgid due to Conrad's bad attempt writing Gothic style fiction and overwhelmingly racist for a book others call, anti-colonial. Again, you get the same old dark, primordial, savage, Africa while all the african characters grunt or speak broken English.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
15:59 / 15.05.05
mostly turgid due to Conrad's bad attempt writing Gothic style fiction

It's probably worth mentioning here that in using English Conrad was writing in his third language (Polish being his first and French his second, i believe) so that could account for some clumsiness in the style. I'm enjoying this thread, will probably be back as I'm going to reread the book on holiday!
 
 
grant
17:58 / 16.05.05
all the african characters grunt or speak broken English.

Been a while since I read it, but the only broken English I really remember is spoken by the mad Russian.

Well, besides "Mistah Kurtz, he dead."

Which is one way of saying that it'd seem a bit unrealistic to have people who are in the first generation to have contact with Europeans speaking European languages with fluency.

Which, in turn, is one way of saying that's just a realistic description of a genuine Other encounter -- I mean the whole idea we have of "Other" & "othering" came from the real interactions Conrad was depicting. Or: I don't think Conrad was participating in colonialism as much as he was naming it.
 
 
Jack Fear
14:18 / 09.06.05
A quick bump: a nice discussion about the legacy of colonialism in the arts (with special emphasis on Heart of Darkness from PRI's "Studio 360."

Chinua Achebe's essay looking at Heart of Darkness from an African perspective—in his case, Nigerian—is online here. More when I've had a chance to read it (which probably won't be soon: I'm on a killer deadline right now...)
 
 
Jack Fear
14:20 / 09.06.05
A reaction to Achebe's contentions here, BTW.
 
 
rizla mission
14:26 / 10.06.05
As I think this thread thus far has aptly demonstrated, it's the ambiguity which is the key to the power of Heart of Darkness.

It's one of those rare books that never fails to provoke thunderously profound revelations - historical, psychological or spiritual - in the minds of readers, and these revelations are no more or less valid than other people's different and often contradictory responses to the same piles of words.

I think it's a lot more subtle than a straight text with a single interpretation - it functions more like a catalyst for challenging and potentially uncomfortable ideas and emotions ; at the end of the day it tries to make you confront yourself, rather than confront Joseph Conrad.

Hope that doesn't sound like too much of a cliche, but youknowwhatImean.

Anyway;

Does the project of bringing 'civilisation' to the 'savages' end up dehumanising not only those so-called 'savages' but also the colonisers because colonialism is itself a savage, inhumane process? Or is it rather that the civilised white man is driven to madness by the 'darkness' of Africa? In other words, is Conrad's Africa a 'dark' place because of what is being done there by the white man, or because of some kind of inherent primitivism that abides in spite of the white man's efforts?

I find the racism angle overplayed to be honest. As has been pointed out, by the standards of the day the book can be seen as admirably progressive. Marlow, and by extention Conrad, is (to my mind anyway) obviously a liberal in the most basis sense - he's sickened by the treatment of the Africans (even though he fails to step out of line by protesting it), and he's repelled by the stupidity and greed of the Europeans. That the Africans are portrayed almost entirely as clueless, passive victims would be questionable in a modern novel, but by 19th C. standards it's a more subtle and compassionate attitude than we'd have reason to expect from most of Conrad's peers.

More to the point though, I think one of the central themes of Heart of Darkness is that of confronting uncomfortable truths and staring them in the face, and let's face it, after a couple of decades of brutal exploitation by an invading alien culture, perhaps they WERE clueless, passive victims..

..and that's where Kurtz comes in - he's the antithesis of Marlow's liberalism, challenging it's logic and idealism with brutal, practical misanthropy. He's obviously too smart to be a racist or an imperialist - he recognises the human misery and cultural desecretion that he and the other colonials have caused and he recognises that the 'wealth' and 'civilisation' they did it in the name of is nothing but shit. But he also recognises the Africans' failure to rise up and present a challenge, the ease with which they let their 'pride' get crushed and their ludicrous willingness to do what he - of all people - tells them to.

I, and I'm guessing most of the other people reading this, would say those things are entirely understandable and forgivable under the cicumstances of oppression, but Kurtz is clearly a tough uncompromising old bastard and thinks otherwise - he sees no hope of redemption for anyone and no reason for mercy, and instead of retreating from the whole grotesque situation he bloodymindedly perpetuates it until the bitter end, and dares Marlow and the reader to tell him which god he's answerable to, and why the hell he shouldn't.

Which is pretty unsettling stuff.

Or that's my interpretation anyway. Phew.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
19:35 / 11.06.05
Do you think Apocalypse Now carried across the themes well? Or is it a different kettle of fish altogether?
 
 
rizla mission
09:15 / 13.06.05
I'd consider it a fairly accurate reflection of the themes of the book, although I can see arguments to the contrary..

All the important elements are certainly IN the film, but I'd suspect that for viewers unfamiliar with the source text there might be a tendency for some of the finer points to get lost amid all the bombast.
 
 
grant
16:30 / 21.06.05
Something bugs me about Achebe's reaction, and I think it's the same thing I was getting at earlier -- I don't think a work's *moral* quality should be conflated with its quality as literature.
I think the reason why the book is great -- and why it's ambiguous, for that matter -- is because it's almost journalism. It's a psychological map for the colonial enterprise.

I'm really interested in the ways the natives are portrayed as not-human... not just primitive or pre-human (the bit about the guy running the engine as being like a dog in breeches), but also as idols or fallen angels. That last might just be Kurtz, actually.

Actually, one of my first reactions was skepticism regarding this bit:

As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad things being in their place is of the utmost importance.

...but (minutes later) I'm no longer sure that's so far off the mark. I just think it's more remarkable, in the 1800s, to even entertain the notion that "primitives" are OK in their place, and that crossing that line -- making one group like the other -- is trangressive/morally wrong.

I mean, you can see the critique of colonialism in there, right?
 
 
Shrug
15:50 / 26.03.07
I think much of the problem assessing HoD comes from the multi-metaphorical connotations of Marlow's journey into the Heart of Darkness. What exactly is this journey?
Is it a temporal one? (Journeying back into some primordial time). Purely geographical?
Is it metaphysical? (Is it a journey into the darkest possibility of the human heart). There's probably a couple of other iterations of what the specific 'darkness' pertains to that I've missed out on. The empty adjectives or exclaimations of "The horror! The horror!" don't do much to clear things up either.
But, I suppose, like Mr. Fear notes in the complexity (or vagueness whatever you prefer) lies the interest.

One of the most important things to note (for me) is that Conrad is not Marlow! Marlow cannot or will not understand the greater implications of his journey. For Marlow, the journey solely casts a "kind of light, like the halo of a moon" around the truth (quotation may be quite a bit off as I'm writing it from memory). Despite his singularity as a person Marlow just can't quite grasp everything and he still believes in the 'idea' of it all, the redeeming 'idea' of colonialism.

But I think Conrad consistently spears any notion of a grand 'idea' throughout the novella. Even with regard the iconolizing of women in Western art (Kurtz's sketch is a hotchpotch of meaning), blind justice bearing a torch of light somehow seems sinister to Marlow. The photograph of Kurtz's Intended falls foul of this too. Marlow sees some kind of passive truth in it too, upon meeting her, those imagined qualities fall flat. Just as Kurtz's civilizing mission can in no tangible way be foisted upon the reality of Africa. Ultimately Conrad's novel denounces the 'idea' of it all.

There's traces/meanderings of things that perhaps exonerate Conrad of writing a completlely racist text. Marlow mulls over the 'restraint' of the African boatsmen, something he regards (and this comes up in Conrad's novels again and again) as key to civilisation. This 'restraint' is specifically what Kurtz lacks according to Marlow. See also: the excessive greed and inhumanity of the other station's populace. Marlow mulls over the various titles given to the native population as a whole 'criminals', 'enemies' etc, to the point where they seem ridiculous. Marlow even strikes up some nascent (although unspoken) kinship with his helmsman (which is far more concrete than his imagined relationship with Kurtz).

Hmmm... well just some random thoughtlets (poorly organised and voiced, I'm sure) to maybe start off the conversation again. There's a lot more to be discussed here (hopefully).
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:28 / 28.03.07
Gosh, I started this a long time ago.

I think it's obvious that, for its time, this is definitely a progressive book - in the simple fact that it makes colonialism problematic, in the sense of 'questionable', 'ambiguous' - whereas the popular view at the time was that while Africa provided a danger, a challenge, this was a clearly delineated one, and answerable: there were monsters, and they were to be killed. I think the whole thing hinges on the difference between 'challenge' and 'problem'.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
15:08 / 22.01.08
Here, by the way, is the ship Conrad sailed on in the Congo, and which was the inspiration for the one in the book:

  
 
Nocturne
19:13 / 25.01.08
What struck me most about the book wasn't the racism, it was his view of women that startled me. He remarks before his departure:

I was also one of the Workers, with a capital - you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet [...] It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be.

After his return, he seems to see women as something almost angelic and powerless, needing protection from the evils that had consumed Kurtz:

They - the women I mean - are out of it - should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse.

I'm not going to condemn him or commend him for this view point. I can only stare and poke at it like some alien thing. Did he expect that only men would read the book?

About the racism, well, I don't remember him saying much about the Africans in the book. He mentioned them as a threat to survival, like a bear or a poisonous snake. Is that racist? They would have gladly taken the chance to kill him, is it wrong for him to merely avoid them in the interests of survival? How could he have described them in a not racist manner? By speaking of their local traditions and legends? He didn't go to the Congo to meet the locals. HoD is a story about a white man going to meet another white man to be about white men's business. And learning the (at the time) shocking truth that white men are every bit as savage as the landscape. The white men, like the women in England, lived in a little world of their own. It didn't have room in it for Africans. It only had a sideline role in it for women.

So it wasn't a cool viewpoint to have and I would be appalled if any of my children grew up like that. That was just the way society was in those days, I don't see Conrad himself as particularly evil.
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
23:16 / 25.01.08
Marlow is not Conrad. Marlow is not Conrad. Marlow is not freaking Conrad!

Did he expect that only men would read the book?

Marlow is a character in a fiction. Fiction often contains, or is even narrated by, characters with views we might find unsavoury, and really that's ok. These characters do not hold public office. They are not in any real-world sense accountable for their views. They do not necessarily, as mentioned up-post, hold views which their creator hirself held, or holds. Above and beyond this, the implication in your statement that I've bolded above that women would run, not walk, from any novel narrated by a character who had a questionable attitude to their gender is, frankly, nonsense, and offensive nonsense at that.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
13:03 / 29.01.08
Yep, the author is not the character, they do not neccesarily share any opinions. Some people put forward the idea, though, that the text itself has opinions - or biases - built out of a gestalt of what the various characters think, what the narrative accepts as true, and so on. Although really it's not so much a case of what opinions are in the text but in whether or not these are presented as valid in the real-world, which is a matter of interpretation rather than text content.
 
 
Nocturne
00:03 / 30.01.08
Marlow is not Conrad. New idea to me, but it makes sense. Thank you for pointing that out.

I was not suggesting that women would run from the narrative. I wasn't thinking that at all. I was wondering if Conrad considered women part of his target audience. If he did, what would he have been trying to say to them? Would he be flattering them, that they represent all that is good in Marlow's world? Would he have been trying to chastise them for being so out of touch with the harshness of reality? Or did he believe his story would appeal mostly to men, and he only mentions women in the book for contrast?

Whether the text itself has opinions, I don't know. I should go read it again with that in mind.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:57 / 30.01.08
I was wondering if Conrad considered women part of his target audience. If he did, what would he have been trying to say to them?

Unfortunately, at the time, it's likely that this sort of book wouldn't have been widely accepted as something suitable for 'women or servants' to read, although I'd like to have more evidence before I put a lot behind that. In his autobiographical books - The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record - Conrad unfortunately says things like (sic) 'A ship must be handled gently and lovingly, but like a woman, it is not untoward that a corrective strike might land on her from time to time' (although he only mentions women twice and otherwise these books are also excellent).
 
 
Captain Zoom
00:33 / 23.02.08
Many moons ago now, I wrote an essay comparing Heart of Darkness and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as journeys into the human psyche.

It was one of those pompous high school essays that impressed my teachers, but that I'd probably cringe at now, but I've always thought that the two had lots of commonalities. Various characters reflecting various aspects of the main character's mind.

That said, I remember Heart being thoroughly bleak.
 
 
mashedcat
01:38 / 18.05.08
i heard that KURTZ was based on the early life of Roger Casement who was born into english aristocracy and later helped the irish in their struggle to free themselves, he was executed by the english and hailed by the irish nationalist movement as a hero. (please excuse the breif history)...he had spent many years in the congo and spoke out about belgian injustice towards the congolese, it was this experience that led Casement to reject his title `Sir` Roger Casement, when he witnessed similar treatment meted out to the irish by the english.

apparently Conrad met Casement and was deeply impressed by him, other writings of Conrad refer to Casement very favouably (sorry no references...bad memory}
 
 
Jack Fear
13:01 / 18.05.08
The passing reference to Conrad in this Wikipedia page about Casement would seem to indicate that "favourably" would perhaps be the wrong word. And if the murderous despot Kurtz is indeed based on Casement, it's a backhanded tribute indeed.
 
 
mashedcat
16:31 / 20.05.08
i beleive conrads view of casement were favourable ,,however he adapted his knowledge of him to create the kurtz character... from what i recall ,casement spent many years in congo and was well known to the indigenous peoples as a dependable and trustworthy individual,, he had a great skill in communicating and survival in ``darkest africa``. he was known to take off for long periods into the jungle and survive where others would have perished,, i agree that taking a positive role model and changing him into kurtz wasnt the most complimentary but it was his starting point.
 
 
Dusto
13:31 / 21.05.08
I heard Casement was the basis for Marlow, not Kurtz. I know Conrad's own experiences were also part of the basis, but Conrad is also a character in the frame story, so Marlow is at least partially external to him.
 
  
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