I read Heart of Darkness as an undergraduate in
college. The class was asked if the book was racist. I have no idea what academia
thinks of this question now (I have my suspicions), but I recently reread the book and thought it pretty obvious
that it is an indictment of European colonial rule in Africa. And,
furthermore, the story told in the novella, published in 1899, is narrated by a
third character, sailor Charles Marlow, and this simple storytelling technique
distances the author, Joseph Conrad, from the narrator’s views and language.
Marlow’s descriptions of Africans are ugly. They are savages.
But the Africans appear ugly and often inhuman because they are being
dehumanized. Marlow sees the white European bureaucrats as brutal, and Kurtz
is the ultimate company functionary-inflictor. Kurtz was the worst savage of
them all, and no doubt.
The story Marlow tells his listeners is about his
experience assigned as a steamer captain for a Belgian trading company in Africa. When
he sets out, Marlow is advised about Kurtz, an ivory trader working far upriver (probably the Congo River), and the
possibility that Kurtz is sick. Kurtz has reportedly "gone native"
and is the object of Marlow's expedition. Marlow suffers a hellish journey and
discovers the horror of European colonization.
The prose throughout Heart of Darkness is great, although Marlow waxes philosophically during his narration, which can fray
the thread.
‘You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies—which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world—what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose. Well, I went near enough to it by letting the young fool there believe anything he liked to imagine as to my influence in Europe. I became in an instant as much of a pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims. This simply because I had a notion it somehow would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see—you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...’He was silent for a while.‘… No, it is impossible, it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence,—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone …’He paused again as if reflecting, then added—‘Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know …’
Notes:
- Conrad drew on his own experience working for a Belgian trading company, taking a steamer up the Congo River.
- Heart of Darkness inspired Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 masterpiece “Apocalypse Now.” That film is might be the better work—the director’s cut, anyway.
