Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

 Dark, brooding, mysterious.  These are the adjectives that come to mind in trying to describe Heart of Darkness.  Perhaps, though, the editor’s introduction puts it better, that what this book “most resembles is a nightmare.”

Marlowe, first name apparently Charlie, is again our narrator but this time instead of taking us into the primitive darkness of Borneo as he did in Lord Jim, Marlowe heads us up the Congo River on a rusty steamer to find Kurtz. Kurtz is a white man, an ivory trader who has set himself up nicely deep in the darkness. What does Kurtz represent?  Where is the darkness?  What does it represent? 

Is Africa a Garden-of-Eden paradise corrupted by Western white men and his so-called morality.  Or is Africa a primitive, amoral wilderness in need of the West and a Western leader, in this case, Kurtz, to instill order?  If so, does Kurtz bring morality and civilization to the darkness? Or does he succumb to and become subsumed by the darkness? (Those human skulls decorating his palisade do raise some eyebrows.) 

If we weren’t living in a cultural era when every aspect of our lives is so racially and ethnically tinged, I would have read Conrad at a fairly superficial level, that is, as a Westerner and a Christian who is deeply skeptical of the wildness and wilderness of the non-Western world of Africa (and, in Lord Jim, Southeast Asia).  I would have simply concluded that Conrad uses these places to represent chaos and amorality where, when the Western world does penetrate, a modicum of order and safety prevail even though civilization never completely converts the darkness.  I might have also said that Conrad was questioning the ability of the human person to be truly moral and civilized.  I even considered that Conrad was questioning whether man can be virtuous, whether evil and darkness can be ever be vanquished, whether the Christian God even exists.

As for trendy condemnations of Conrad as a racist, that discussion is dull and a complete waste of time. 

Joseph Conrad was Polish.  I found that astonishing.  His real name was Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski.  He spoke three languages, presumably Polish, English and French and wrote in English, which I assume was not his native language. He became an English citizen at the age of 29 and he was a sea faring man, a captain, and used his own experiences as the basis for his writing.

Despite not really feeling successful at plumbing the depths of either Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim, I truly enjoyed being transported to Conrad’s darkness in both of these books.