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.