Heart of Darkness

Sandra:  This book by Joseph Conrad placed #67 and #21 on the two lists by Modern Library and Radcliffe's.  I have never read a Joseph Conrad novel but have certainly heard of them -- Lord Jim, The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness all made the lists of greatest novels of the 20th century.  When I picked this book up from the library I was very happy to see it had 146 pages.  That is probably the nicest thing I will be able to say about it.  I think it is supposed to be fraught with drama and adventure but you will certainly have to read between the lines ALOT to find anything suspenseful or exciting about this book. 

Marlow is a sailor in England and is relating the story of his employment in Africa to another bunch of sailors as they wait for the tide to shift or whatever has to happen for them to get on their way.  He tells of the time he took this job piloting a steamboat up a river to go get an employee of some great imperialist company of the time.  The man he is to pick up, Kurtz, is some legendary dude supposedly but someone will have to point out to me the parts of the text that recount anything he does that is remotely daring, wicked or intelligible aside from the fact that he is willing to take a job in the "great unknown."  There is a lot of talk about him but we never see any action:

Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together.  That was not the point.  The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.

 Oh yeah, about the title, this place is dark, dark, dark and Kurtz's heart is dark, dark, dark, lots of darkness and I've got the passages to back that part up in addition to the above:

Light came out of this river since--you say Knights?  Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds.  We live in the flicker--may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!  But darkness was here yesterday. 

Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness…

I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river,--seemed to beckon with a dishonouring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart.

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.

Need I go on?  In case you don't get it the first twenty times, there are twenty more references.  Okay, I got nothing out of reading this book and I hate to have to say anything else about it. I don't know what the point is. 

I've read the critiques that say it is an indictment of the evils of imperialism, trying to expose the hypocrisy of people who are more "civilized" and therefore know better what everyone else should do and how everyone else should act, all while they destory the land and people with no remorse FOR MONEY.  If that is your take, I'd be hard pressed to find you a coherent passage that succinctly does any of this.

There is some horrific stuff about the treatment of the natives by the white imperialists and I think it is and was horrible that there are people who will do this kind of thing for money, but they are still walking around here everyday doing equally horrific things to people on a daily basis and my problem is I don't think Conrad  makes the precise point that it is bad.  It is certainly open to interpretation.  African critics have called this book a racist or colonial parable in which Africans are reduced to a metaphor for what white Europeans fear most in themselves, their "savage" instincts don't you know.  I can certainly see this in the text myself and would agree with that characterization.  This is a bad book if Conrad is truly trying to show the evils of imperialism.



You will find more adventure here than in this novel (and if you have ridden this ride you know that isn't saying much)



Ernie:  With Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad wrote what has to be the most boring adventure novel of all time.  Nothing much really happens, certainly nothing adventurous…or exciting…or remotely interesting.  It is a racist, sexist story narrated by a self-important blowhard who will show up in another Conrad book we are reading.  Oh, boy…I can hardly wait. 

While the story is about Marlow heading upriver to find Kurtz, Conrad writes more about the sitting and waiting to go upriver.  We meet a number of characters but seem to learn almost nothing about any of them. 

The writing is bad.  Throughout the book, I had to read paragraphs two or three times to figure out who was speaking.  Sometimes I never figured it out.  At one point I realized the boat and crew were under attack by fierce enemies.  I had to go back a page or two to see where the attack actually began.  Conrad was a vague writer.

So why did this book make the list???  Why do so many authors refer to Conrad when they discuss the craft of writing?  If this is a great book, then I am missing something.

The plot of the story is often credited with serving as a basis or at least an inspiration for the screenplay of “Apocalypse Now.”  If so, I now understand why I never appreciated that film.

Next week:  Ernie reads George Orwell's 1984