Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 02 Aug 2018

Rereading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

What do Artangel’s installation A Room for London, Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (reviewed HERE on Letterpress) and Francis Ford Coppola’s film ‘Apocalypse Now’ all have in common? Yes, in one way or another they were all inspired by a novella first published in Blackwood’s magazine in 1899 and then in book form in 1902: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There can be few short works of fiction – it is just 130 pages long – that have had such powerful and long-lasting impact, and even fewer that have inspired work in multiple genres.

Many will know the central premise of Heart of Darkness. In 1890, Conrad skippered a perilously worn-out steamboat up the Congo to relieve the manager of a trading post who had fallen ill. These are the factual roots of the book. But in Conrad’s hands the most extraordinary alchemy takes place and the thin base metal of autobiographical fact is transmuted into pure gold – one of the greatest and most devastating indictments of European colonialism ever to have been written. But even this is to sell it short, because somehow rather than a political tract Conrad created one of the richest short novels imaginable, one of the few symbolist masterpieces, some have said, dense in shockingly imagined actuality, yes, but also profoundly metaphorical, steeped in psychological theory and the traditions of Quest literature, an inward exploration. Heart of Darkness is at once an adventure story and a metaphysical masterpiece of fierce admonitory power. It has no parallel in Victorian literature and few in modern literature. And those modern examples that do exist by and large took their lessons from Conrad.

But it seems that while Conrad’s first thoughts were rooted in his own experience of some years earlier, he was also thinking about news then just emerging about what King Leopold’s Compagnie du Congo Belge was doing in the Congo basin where a rapacious quest for rubber and other valuable resources was being conducted with the utmost savagery imaginable – in fact a genocidal project cloaked in an ostensibly philanthropic company Constitution of breathtaking hypocrisy.

The company is never named but in Conrad’s imagination (and in Marlow’s telling) the task becomes that of bringing back Kurtz, a company employee running a trading station on the upper reaches of the Congo. Kurtz has gone ‘rogue’ – he has lost his mind, established a private fiefdom, and is conducting his own murderous reign over the local tribes. But worse than all this, he is enriching himself rather than the company coffers. Senior managers want him brought to ‘justice’ – by which they mean hanged from a gibbet in the jungle, where the company’s writ is more powerful than any mundane, ‘civilian’ law.

The book is one of what might be called Conrad’s ‘Marlow books’ – that is, it is narrated (a single almost uninterrupted monologue) by Conrad’s alter ego Charles Marlow, who also narrates Lord Jim, Chance and The Secret Sharer, although in that he isn’t named. He is one of Conrad’s greatest inventions.

Heart of Darkness opens with Marlow and four companions at the furthest sea-reach of the Thames, on-board a small two-masted yawl, waiting for the tide to turn. Right from these atmospheric opening pages, it is powerfully evident that in all ways – commercially, politically, geographically – the chill, fog-bound Thames leads inexorably to the brutal despoliation of the Congo. Indeed, at one point Marlow says, “A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all…” and this could serve as one of the key epithets of the book, applicable almost anywhere and everywhere throughout the story.

It also serves as a small illustration of the book’s greatness, because once Marlow’s barbed observations are lodged in the mind, they never leave – one sees the world through his troubled eyes. Look around – advertising, YouTube, the self-styled ‘personal brands’ and ‘influencers’ of Instagram, the so-called ‘disruptive’ entrepreneurs of Uber and Amazon and the tech giants that were going to do so much to make not just business but the world a better place: “a taint of imbecile rapacity” blows through it all. Marlow may be a Victorian sailor and a troubled moralist, but my God he is a man for our times.

Anyway, as the company on-board wait for the tide to turn, Marlow begins to recount the story that makes up Heart of Darkness. Whole books have been written about Conrad’s style, methods and moral landscape but I’ll spare you that here. Suffice it to say that few books achieve so much while being relatively speaking so simply written or so clearly and uncomplicatedly conceived. But everything plays its part – the atmosphere, the prose, the interior monologues and Marlow’s quiet, gentlemanly but insistent voice as the darkness thickens.

I’ll leave you to discover the book’s great set-pieces for yourselves – Kurtz’s fiercely argued but of course spurious civilising mission collapsing into monstrousness; the awful postscript he has scrawled across the final page of his report for the company; and Marlow’s own deeply personal reaction to what he sees, and the years he gives to thinking about these events and their human implications…

The great triumph of Heart of Darkness, I think, is that Conrad turned these forbidding materials into the greatest literary fiction – and yet his anger and disgust and repulsion still burn on the page. Of the actual events then unfolding in Africa and elsewhere at the height of European colonialism, I rather think Conrad would agree with what the aphoristic philosopher-writer Sven Lindqvist has said: “You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.”

 

Alun Severn

August 2018