Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

Back in the first year of my English degree, I was, like most undergraduates across the country embarking upon the study of the literary canon, required to read Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. As I remember, that particular week was a reading week, and I read the novella on a coach between Exeter and London, and I wasn't greatly impressed by it, at first. It seemed to me to be a fairly dull travelogue based plot without much of a pay off. Two weeks of seminar discussion and essay writing failed to make me see what was special about this book many critics see as the first genuinely "modern" novel. Here's the thing about books though: sometimes their effectiveness takes a while to gestate. Such was the case here. With each passing year, my attitude towards the book softened, until I was pronouncing its genius and recommending it to students and friends. C'est la vie.

'Heart of Darkness' offers many possible avenues for discussion. It is a critique of colonialism (or not, more on that later), a look at the darkness at the heart of humanity, a satire, a masterpiece of tense, concise storytelling and the inspiration behind multiple works of film and fiction, not least Francis Ford Coppola's sprawling Vietnam epic 'Apocalypse Now'. The narrative is framed by an un-named narrator who begins and ends the novella upon the trading ship Nellie, which sits at anchor upon the River Thames. One of the sailors on board, an inveterate storyteller named Marlow, remarks that the Thames was once "one of the dark places of the earth", the end of the known world for the Romans who came here in the first century, inhospitable, strange, cold and filled with hostile, savage natives. This leads him to begin to discuss colonialism, how when one looks into the fact of it, there is much that is unpleasant, with only the idea of promoting civilisation to redeem it. All of this is preamble to a tale Marlow wishes to tell about his time as a river captain of a steamer for the Belgian Congo Company. It is this tale that makes up the majority of the novella, with the first narrator merely existing as a means of pointing out Marlow's unreliability as narrator.

Marlow, upon taking up his post in the Belgian Congo, finds that there are several obstacles in performing his role effectively. The other white officials are untrustworthy and conspirational, his ship is in need of repair, and everybody is talking about the charismatic Kurtz, an ivory trader of legendary status, popular among the natives and with a number of skills that seem rather apocryphal (it is claimed that he is a great painter, a journalist, and a musician, among other things). This section of the book contains many subtle criticisms of the colonial experiment: a French warship shelling an invisible enemy, a former company worker who beat a tribal chieftain with a stick in front of his family, the greedy intrigues of the men at the various stations. Marlow describes a veil of optimism and naiveté lifting from his eyes as he realises what he has gotten himself into. The next section takes place upon the mighty river itself and is a masterpiece of tension and atmosphere. The motif of darkness continually recurs, a metaphorical reference to the human soul as well as a nod to the unknown nature of Central Africa in the Nineteenth Century (Africa was, of course, known as "The Dark Continent" throughout this era). Marlow's mission is to find and retrieve both the mysterious Kurtz and his ivory, but when he finally arrives at Kurtz's remote station, things are not quite as anybody had expected...or perhaps others suspected and had not told Marlow...the denoument here is one of the most famous in literature and an absolutely spine tingling moment. I suppose it's indicative of the need of youth for instant gratification that I found the build to this irksome as a nineteen-year-old, but find it genius now...

'Heart of Darkness' has caused much debate in the academic fraternity over the years, not least due to Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's assertion in the 1970s that the book was inherently racist, because it denied the black Africans in the novel both language and culture. He argued that they appear as a homogenous, savage mass, as background texture, as parody of the European idea of an African. While these criticisms are, to an extent, true, I still think the overall effect and intent of the novella is to expose the "scramble for Africa" as the hideous, cruel, greed driven enterprise that it was. Marlow's tone is scathingly ironic when he discusses the colony and its administration and Conrad himself remarked that the Scramble For Africa embodied the "vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration".

Ultimately, there's so much rich, metaphorical detail in the journey to the heart of darkness- physical and figurative- that Marlow undertakes. The language is enigmatic and open to interpretation throughout, the characters equally so. At the heart of it all- at the heart of the novella, at the heart of the jungle, at the heart of darkness- is Kurtz, too physically debilitated to confirm or deny what Marlow has heard about him, but an emphatically charismatic man even on his death-bed, taken out of the village he had made his home, the evidence of his reclamation of his own savagery all around him. It is a compelling picture, one that has stayed with the modern writer ever since. It was true all along: Conrad really was the instigator of modern fiction.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

Each year, my second year A level English Literature students are required to undertake a Period and Genre Study as part of their coursework requirement, and have a great deal of free reign in selecting texts to focus on. Once they've chosen their focus texts, they have a summer to read and prepare notes, with the essay writing starting in earnest in September. The wonderful thing about this is that it forces me to re-read a great many classics so that I can properly advise my students as they write their responses. This year, two of my students have chosen to write about one of my favourite books, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', so without further ado, here are some interesting points raised by my recent re-read.

Fin de Siècle literature is full of seedy locations, corrupt aristocrats, heady excesses and supernatural events, and in many ways, Oscar Wilde's only novel has come to be seen as the archetype of this paradigm. At the beginning of the narrative, a talented portrait artist, Basil Hallward, is showing his new masterpiece to his friend, Lord Henry Wooton. The art work in question is a portrait of an extraordinarily beautiful young man named Dorian Gray. Lord Henry, a dandy and aesthete, is fascinated by the picture, and despite Basil's protests, proceeds to befriend him and corrupt him. Lord Henry makes two key interventions in Dorian's life which prove to be extremely fateful. Firstly, he makes the seemingly offhand remark that the painting will always be young and beautiful, while Dorian will age. This drives Dorian to make a wish almost reminiscent of a fairy tale: that all of the ravages and corruptions of time will be visited on the picture, not upon him. Soon after Dorian mistreats his innocent theatre actress fiancée, he notices the painting has changed. There is now, around the mouth, a cruel twist. Extraordinarily, Dorian's petulant wish has come true, but he should have been more careful, especially given Lord Henry's second intervention, which is the gift of the "yellow book", a French novel full of salacious questing after new sensations. Dorian embraces the philosophies of this book (which, although never named, is Huysman's notorious 'A'Rebours', which also fascinated Pete Doherty of The Libertines and Babyshambles, with similarly corrupting effects, some might say) and becomes more and more embroiled in secrets and scandals, which are darkly hinted at, but never seen "on screen" until fairly late in the piece (in this, Wilde's book follows closely the methodology of the novel it most closely resembles, 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson' which involves a similar identity displacement). Despite all of his crimes, Dorian remains the same physical specimen he was when Basil first committed his likeness to canvas. His soul, however, is a different matter.


The enduring appeal of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is not hard to understand. It is at once a social satire of Victorian polite society (though a rather darker one than any of his comedic plays), a Gothic tale of human corruption and an analysis of the dangers of obsessing too much over beauty and youth. The truth that Wilde hints at is that beauty and youth are powerful because they are fleeting. Extended into middle age, they become parodic and unpleasant qualities, and of course the activities Dorian chooses in pursuing his journey through eternal youth make him a great many enemies as well as causing the eponymous picture to corrupt in the privacy of the locked room it resides in. The Ancient Greeks and Romans knew the danger and indignity of an obsession with one's own beauty, as evidenced by the myths of Adonis (who was loved by several quarrelling goddesses and then killed by a wild boar sent by the jealous Artemis) and Narcissus (who fell in love with his own reflection and died of starvation) and Wilde reminds the modern world of late Ninteenth Century London that this remains true.


Stylistically, the book is very far removed indeed from the stuffy tomes that held sway over the mid-point of the century. The prose is direct, striking and full of seductive irony, and the dialogue, particularly in any scene involving Lord Henry, is often laugh out loud funny, being of course full of Wilde's trademark epigrams. The characterisation is rather two-dimensional, with Basil being the sensitive and emotional artist, Lord Henry the ultimate Wildean aesthete and Dorian the corruptible innocent, but as the book is essentially a moral fable, this isn't too much of a problem, especially when one considers how radically and refreshingly different this approach must have been after nigh on seventy years of novels which essentially trace a single character's entire life journey from birth to marriage or death.


In concluding this little look at a well loved classic, I can only say that this is one of those books which is a joy to re-read, one that has had an enormous cultural impact on the past 130 years, and one which never forgets that examining morality and examining the essential absurdity of life are not mutually exclusive. I'm looking forward to seeing what my students make of it...

Notes From Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

This book blog was born in March and began with an analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel 'Devils', a book that I found compelling and ignited in me the desire to get to grips with Dostoevsky as often as possible. It is therefore entirely apt that five months of successful book blogging later, I've returned to the works of Dostoevsky, specifically, to the short novel 'Notes From Underground', which, like 'Devils', examines the way that Romantic Liberalism leads inevitably to Nihilism. In the case of 'Devils', this transition is metaphorically elucidated through a father, Stepan Trofimovich and his son, Peter Stepanovich, but with the earlier 'Notes From Underground', Dostoevsky has his narrator describe his current feelings of disgust at the futility of man attempting to build the symbolic utopian "crystal palace" through enlightened social consciousness and then move towards narrating three episodes which led to his current nihilistic world view.

Part one of the novel, then, is the ranting, self-pitying, diversionary "notes" of a nameless former civil servant of around forty. He attained the rank of Collegiate Assessor in the Tsarist civil service (a well-paid rank equivalent to the rank of major in the army), which he quit immediately upon receiving a hefty bequest in a relative's will to descend "underground", that is, separate from society and its stupidity, as he perceives it. He poses a number of questions in this introduction which he will come round to addressing in the anecdotes that form part two. Firstly, why do most people find revenge virtuous and just, and easily find the means to take it, when he struggles to find meaning in the act of revenge and only pursues it through meaninglessly spiteful and petty acts? Secondly, why do people find such pleasure in pain and in describing it to others? Thirdly, why are we struck with inertia at crucial moments? Finally, what is civilisation and what is our relation to it?

These questions lead into a series of episodes which occurred twenty years before, events which helped to turn the narrator into the Underground Man. The first episode, rendered by Dostoevsky with typical humour and irony, concerns the narrator obsessively attempting to take revenge on an officer who physically moved him out of his path without a word, only to find that the officer has no idea that the narrator's chosen method of revenge (a shoulder barge in the street) has even happened. The second surrounds a dinner some school acquaintances of his have for one of their number who is leaving town. Despite the fact that he hated them at school, the narrator inveigles his way into the gathering, only to behave towards them with scorn and contempt until they leave to visit a secret brothel without him. The third episode follows on immediately after the dinner, and finds our anti-heroic narrator visiting the brothel; his acquaintances are gone, but he strikes up a conversation with one of the prostitutes and unintentionally sleeps with her and then tells her his vision of society's ills. His behaviour in all three episodes shows a sort of bizarre juxtaposition of bravery and cowardice; bravery because he will not compromise just to fit in and cowardice because he never takes action in the way that he steels himself to. Alarmingly, I rather recognised myself throughout the narrator's misadventures! In any event, these reminiscences give the reader a succinct summary of why the narrator has separated himself from contemporary life.

What is most striking about this novel is the way the idea, tone and style have influenced so much of the literature that follows it. In interrogating Russia's flawed obsession with Determinism, the author anticipates his own 'Devils'. By charting the way that pleasure can be obtained by spreading one's pain, he lays the ground for 'Crime and Punishment', while Dostoevsky's critical response to Chernyshevsky's idealist socially utopian novel 'What Is To Be Done?' is a thread that runs through all of his late masterpieces. The figure of the man underground has been used by- amongst others- Ralph Ellison, whose 'Invisible Man' takes Dostoevsky's concept and applies it to the plight of African-Americans in the post-war United States. The absurdist humour and nihilist themes of Dostoevsky's book are used by Joseph Heller in 'Catch 22', particular in Yossarian, the air captain who points out the essential ridiculousness of the air warfare he's involved in: you'd have to be mad to fly, but recognising this fact simulataneously means you are sane enough to fly. Bret Easton Ellis uses a quotation from 'Notes From Underground' as one of the epigraphs to 'American Psycho' as a way of pointing out the fact that he intends to critique 1980s America in the same way as Dostoevsky critiqued 1860s Russia. Looking at the style, it is so strikingly minimalist in many ways, full of stark, short sentences and proclamations of disgust, self-aggrandisement, self-laceration and poetic social awareness. In Dostoevsky's chosen prose style and narrative voice, one can see how Camus, Sartre, Hemingway and Ellis were his successors and imitators. 

This is a truly important text in the development of modern fiction, and, indeed, modern consciousness. The Underground Man is a compelling narrator, utterly brutal in expressing his views, acting as both a vehicle for Dostoevsky to satirise Nihilism and also as a means to criticise Social Determinism, which he loathed. It's short, tightly focused, experimental and hugely enjoyable. Of all the many European authors of the Nineteenth Century, I feel that it is Dostoevsky who has most influenced the novelists of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries. A grand claim, I know, but when one reads his books, one sees how truly influential they are.