Heart of Darkness

Thank God Conrad indulged in some purplish over-drama in the final scene with Kurtz's fiancee or I'd be stuck giving five stars to a book Chinua Achebe first called racist in 1975, and by now everyone agrees with him.

Yes. So much of what is written here is just so uncomfortably crude and offensive to modern ears, when it comes to the African characters.

Even so I think the entire thrust of the novella is to vilify European colonialism, and to show how fragile European values are once the economic and social structures aren't there to support them. Boats don't get repaired without someone to manufacture, ship, and transport a certain kind rivet upstream. Bricks aren't made without someone supplying the right kind of straw. Ivory is of show more no value to you when you happen to die along the way to procuring it. Humans of every color fall ill when subjected to unrelenting labor that offers them no meaning or return.

It's worth pointing out that the Africans who are not a part of "the horror" along the river--who are living independently of the degrading relationships there--are portrayed as healthy and capable. Marlow says: "Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows...They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration...they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away. "

The story is still worth reading, too, for this reason alone: so much of it is written in frankly and unabashedly beautiful prose that left me, well, breathless, as much as looking at a beautiful view or a beautiful painting would leave me breathless. What to do about the fact that these encounters with prose perfection were scattered in between descriptions of Africans with "eyeballs glistening" and "faces like grotesque masks?" Well. I don't know what to do about that. Maybe someone should re-edit Conrad the way they have edited Mary Poppins and Dr. Doolittle, to take out the parts that offend us now.

As I read I thought of the analogous scenes from Apocalypse Now now and then, of course, but even more I was reminded of Werner Herzog's Aguirre--another river journey where the company starts with all the trappings of "civilization," but these trappings are each abandoned as useless objects, one by one, as the journey continues upstream and away from the culture that created them. show less

The heart of darkness that is profusely referred to in this novella could come to mean so many things. And what it really means, what is really meant, why it means so, who means and for whom, to my mind, reflects the appreciations and apparent criticisms of the book.
Man's own capacity; a capacity to corrupt and get corrupted, man's ultimate inability to comprehend and rend the thick shards of ambiguity life catches us in, sort of feeds that impenetrable heart of darkness. Do we not all own it, have it, exhibit it? And then, if that is so, Heart of Darkness is a parable of human nature.
Despite hearing about the reservations on the racist tones and the not so anti-imperialist stance, I feel that there is more to this work than just show more that. Nowhere am I determinedly able to maintain that the text gives way to an authorial voice depicting a for or against sign, let alone some agenda to obey. If anything, it is a rich and complex novella with a promise to yield thoughtful discussion.
Degradation of human beings, material and spiritual, is what is at heart of the tale. And the language that captures the prose captivates aspect and attention with poetical sensitivity.
Still, I can hear reserved echoes of criticisms leveled against the 'dark' heart (particularly in its treatment of the natives of Congo, attributed as well to the racist tradition existent in Western literature). But if the dark treatment of Africa is to be considered as representative, what about the 'light' that is coming from the other side. Is it, in Conrad's view, all the more redeeming or 'civilised'? And can we say then which does the voice means when it sighs profoundly the word, 'Horror'? I don't know yet. In that I find the book more open-ended than we presume probably.
Somehow, style is central to narration and is thus worthy of re-readings. The narrative voice is aptly unreliable. Never do we really get to know what Marlow thinks in his own heart; he is a voice telling but somehow devoid of an intimacy towards readers. Perhaps, through what he sees on the outside, he sees the all too dark heart of his own and is unable to reveal it to us as Kurtz does. Marlow envies Kurtz for "He had something to say. He said it." show less

Here's one of those works traditionally considered a classic that I'd managed to not read until fairly late in life. I was surprised, by the way, at how short it is: only 72 pages in the Dover Thrift edition I have.

I can see where the supposed classic status comes from. Conrad's writing is incredibly evocative. As for what it's evocative of... Well, it's certainly an interesting thing to read this here in the 21st century, on the other side of the colonial era. It is, as they say, very much Of Its Time, but in a complicated way that I find worth pondering. Conrad is writing about the absurdity, the inhumanity, and, yes, the horror of Europeans' exploitation of Africa. He's also writing that criticism very much from inside the cultural show more framework that produced those horrors, which means that there's an incredibly limited effort and an even more limited ability to imagine what things look like from other perspectives. It also means a preoccupation with ideas of "civilization" and "savagery" that seem, now, to be quite simplistic and wrongheaded, but which are explored here in a complex way that gives a genuinely interesting window onto the thoughts and fears surrounding these ideas at the time. And, yeah, let's not mince words: it's super racist. I mean, by the standards of the time, even the repeated insistence that the Africans in the story are completely human may have been unusual, but, y'know, one kinda wants to set the bar higher than that. In my mind, though, the value of reading this doesn't lie in the way it lets us pat ourselves on the back for being more enlightened, but in getting this rather dark and tortured glimpse into that past and into what it looked like to someone who, despite all that comparative lack of enlightenment, was still horrified by it.

I'm not sure if I've expressed any of that very well. I also feel like I ought to have a lot more intelligent things to say about the story and the writing, and especially about the character of Mr. Kurtz. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what to make of the character of Mr. Kurtz. He's not exactly what I was expecting from what I'd osmosed about this piece of writing, either. If nothing else, I was expecting there to be... more of him.

Rating: I'm going to call this 4/5, for the writing, and for how worthwhile it is from a cultural and historical perspective, but, y'know, take that with all the appropriate caveats. show less

A viagem de uma embarcação ao longo do rio Congo traça um terrível retrato dos efeitos do colonialismo europeu no continente africano. Charles Marlow, capitão do velho navio a vapor, é encarregado do resgate de Kurtz, um comerciante de marfim quase mítico isolado centenas de quilômetros rio acima. Lenta e cheia de dificuldades, a jornada vai adentrando a selva sombria, e os recantos mais escuros do ser humano.

Narrado por Marlow, com raros diálogos e longas reflexões, "Coração das Trevas" é um romance curto e impressionante. A narrativa publicada em 1899 foi transposta 80 anos no futuro, e adaptada do cenário da selva no Congo para a guerra do Vietnã pelo cineasta Francis Ford Coppola no filme "Apocalypse Now".

Li show more "Coração das Trevas" na edição da Ubu Editora, com tradução de Paulo Schiller e quase metade das 226 páginas com belíssimas intervenções artísticas de Rosângela Rennó. A edição tem ainda posfácio de Bernardo Carvalho e textos de Paulo Mendes Campos, Virginia Woolf e Walnice Nogueira Galvão. show less

Perhaps we always have a "choice of nightmares". Conrad writes "It is strange how I accepted this unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms."

I avoided reading this reality fiction for years, out of fear. In my bruised old age, I had awakened my Empathy. So I shuddered to immerse myself in great writing about great tragedy. A Review of Conrad's work by Maya Jasanoff forced me to get "over" my trepidation. She had the same fears but overcame them, and gave us an understanding of what Conrad was showing us. Her work is entitled "The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World," Maya Jasanoff, New York, NY: HarperCollins, (2017).

The prescience of Conrad show more is breath-taking. He saw in 1899 the pernicious shadow cast by Leopold of Belgium over the next and last 100 years. Adam Hochschild describes this evil come to us in his 1998 account of Colonial Africa, "Leopold's Ghost". We see this spectre leaping out of his Big Lie (Grosse Luege), through the Nazis and Bolsheviks, to Putin and Donald Trump. For those of us who struggle to understand what possible "appeal" evil holds for any human being, we have Conrad holding up a mirror to the Colonialism he observed.

Through private corporations, who account to no one, and who take over "government" functions, a poison was injected into our Civilization. Conrad describes privatized Colonialism as it was weaponized by King Leopold. Now even more global, the poisoning is a metastasized cancer killing of all civil society. Private corporations account to no one, lie about what they are doing, and permit themselves to be evil and utterly indifferent to consequences.

Conrad exposes the big lies King Leopold told the world. The Big Lie kills "facts". Joseph Conrad was himself from a Polish family born in what is now Ukrainia in a Jewish village which was erased while Conrad lived. He somehow put to sea and travelled the world. He exposed the cruelty of the slave trade, and the pillaging of raw resources. Facts were erased, by method, anonymously, by "these mean and greedy phantoms" whose corporatized pursuits resulted in reducing a great continent to a slave camp. King Leopold himself never cut off the hands of people who failed to bring him his quota of gold, ivory, rubber, and slaves. He was in Europe. But his private corporations did the hiring and incentivizing of the greedy and cruel masters so clearly limned by Conrad.

What? you may ask, is the "heart of darkness"? As he leaves the tributary of the Congo and floats back to the mouth, the Pilot tells us, "“The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz’s life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time." And it is an evil in the greedy heart "which hides in
magnificent folds of eloquence" of a barren darkness.

The book is a discourse, a choking narrative, a long gasp of horror by an eyewitness. He says "Kurtz discoursed! A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart." Conrad even includes a nod toward the extreme difficulty, the kampf, of being evil. "Oh he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now—images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas—these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power."

The narrator carefully adds that "sometimes he was contemptibly childish." Examples of childishness, "He desired to have kings meet him at railway-stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things. ‘You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability,’ he would say." This bizarre association with "profits"--never accounted for, never profiting anyone--and the business of accomplishing "great things" which never happen. Does this not evoke the scarification of our memories of Hitler, of Trump, and of Putin? And the narrator of this story remains bent to the telling by some duty to "dream the nightmare out to the end".

We today continue to live his nightmare and share in his struggle with his and our own Destiny. "My destiny! Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets."

Even today, we are left to join the narrator still holding the dying Kurtz with awe. "This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and hate." Even staring at his own death--"I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say." He finds he must defer to the evil, the thing with vision, even when the vision is a horror. Because, as we find in a subsequent effort launched by one of Kurtz' relatives, "Kurtz really couldn’t write a bit—‘but heavens! how that man could talk. He electrified large meetings. He had faith—don’t you see?—he had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything—anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.’ " Again this is a description of Adolph, of Trump, of Putin. Now let them forever be first to "surrender to that oblivion which is the last word of our common fate." Leopold is dead, but his emulators renew the ugly legacy bleeding us today.

In the final scene, the narrating person is returned to the homeland and is meeting with a heart-broken woman only named as The Intended. Their conversation is about Kurtz -- his "greatness", his great vision of his role in the world, his universal but utterly undocumented talents and sacrifices. She was deeply mourning. "Ah, but I believed in him more than any one on earth—more than his own mother, more than—himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.’

“I felt like a chill grip on my chest. ‘Don’t,’ I said, in a muffled voice.

Of course this is the last remaining function we who survive must perform. To somehow comfort survivors and perhaps by shaping their memories. We often end these conversations with circumcision, as did this Pilot in his visit with the Intended. And the ship must depart before the end of the ebb. I know of few conclusions more moving than this one, in its expansive and granular context: "I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."

Conrad offers this work of connection to steel us for a world ruled by men who have purged themselves of empathy. And yes, they are Males. We must kill the private corporations these malevolent Males hide behind. show less

I see the allure in this book. And I see the criticism in this book. However, the allure far outweighs the criticism.

This book is ambiguous, in the best way possible. The setting is clear most of the time, but the characters that come and go, their interactions, and even whether they are alive or dead, is hard to discern. This would be a negative, however, in the novella format, being less than one hundred pages, I do not mind it at all. I like having to really think about things sometimes, and this made me think.

Yes, this book is rife with racism, however, anyone who thinks that it should be pulled from publication ignores the theme that the racism introduces. The main character is a white trader who embarks on a river journey hundreds show more of miles into Africa, and what he finds is that the darkness present in the jungle is no different than the darkness he can see in London.

The ending, by the way, could be the best ending to a book I've ever read. show less

I had a hard time with this classic, even though I found the prose riveting. I'm glad I knew a little about it beforehand, or I might have been thoroughly confused and not made it through. The narrative is by a seaman telling a story to his fellow sailors about a former trip via steamboat upriver into the depths of the Congo. He was hired by a trading company to travel to a remote post to collect a man named Kurtz who has a load of ivory extracted from the interior. Kurtz is strangely held in awe by many, and when the narrator finally reaches the destination, it's obvious he's been out in the jungle wilderness far too long- he has the native population (depicted in very racist, stereotypical fashion from a nineteenth-century imperialist show more perspective) under his thrall, raves in lunatic fashion and appears to be suffering from some awful disease.

Most of the novella is about the frustrating travel upriver through the dense jungle, suffering frequent breakdowns, lack of materials, poor management, horrific exploitation and suffering on the part of the natives. It's very rambling and dense, a lot of it internal monologue on the depravity of human nature and moves without description or explanation between scenes- so I often had difficulty understanding what was actually going on. In a way it is Kafkaesque, in another way the deeply visceral prose reminded me of William Golding's The Inheritors. Many of the passages also brought to mind Lord of the Flies, and I rather wonder if Golding wasn't heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad. It's a book I found hard to put down even though it was difficult to get through, and one that definitely merits a re-read (or several!) in order to understand.

from the Dogear Diary show less