Not quite what Conrad had in mind...
Conrad’s tale is a classic explorer tale in some ways, often spoken of as a descent into madness, but whilst the psychological observations are astute there is no real descent on the part of the narrator. Marlow instead offers us a commentary on the distant object of Kurtz, who is actually a fairly thinly sketched character when we finally meet him, after a long build up, but the subject of a lot of mythologising on the part of the other company agents. The more superficial of us, (Dave and I!) managed to resist the temptation to make too many comparisons with Coppola’s classic film Apocalypse Now, which is, of course, heavily based on this book, but the difference in how much time is spent with Kurtz is striking. In the film a lengthy section ponders on the nature of Kurtz’s depravity and how it affects those around him, whilst Conrad spends much less time on this. The film, I always felt, is about half an hour too long and could have done with being structured more like the book, but we speculated that Marlon Brando wouldn’t have appeared in such a minor part.
The nature of Kurtz ‘madness’ is also unclear, at least in the book. Whilst the film seems to have him stripped of civilisation to reveal his heart of darkness, and a very real madness, but the book is less clear as to the nature of his depravity. Marlow says: “And I wasn’t arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear – concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear;… but his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.” (p107, Penguin 1995 edition)
The story as Conrad tells it is more one of travel, into the Dark Continent and into the heart of darkness. The narrator, Marlow, is engaged to captain the river steamer and travel to the far reaches of the river, based on Conrad’s own experiences in the 1890s. My own interest is in the history of colonial expansion, and when I first read this book I also went out and bought the excellent history of the Belgian exploitation of the Congo , King Leopold’s Ghost, which is a fascinating and horrifying episode in history. If you’ve never heard of what happened there, and most people haven’t, I would recommend it.
The portrayal of Kurtz, in actuality a monster, though revered by those around him who bought into a collective mystique, was felt by our little group to presage some of the dictators of the twentieth century, whose cult of personality was certainly in sharp contrast to the horrors they perpetrated. In this sense we wondered about which other figures in history had a similar underlying ‘heart of darkness’ to he greatness that history portrays. Certainly one can argue that to achieve greatness an individual has to be very driven and singleminded, and how this affects their relationships is only glimpsed amidst how history mostly chooses to record their lives.
The idea that Heart of Darkness is a racist text also come up, but that was not a feeling that we had. Certainly the language is contemporary in its usage, reflecting the attitudes of the early twentieth century, and the change in attitudes over those hundred years is huge. But Conrad is actually dismissive of pretty much all human suffering – he is callous to the suffering of the Africans in the story, but is similarly dismissive of the suffering of the Europeans at the station, who seem also to drop from phsyical illness and are left to whither away. Again this attitude to human life and its worth has changed over the last century, and was not unknown in history that whilst writers would wax lyrical about the individual suffering of heroes and heroines, the supporting cast are almost unregarded in their sufferings.
We had some division of opinion as to the quality of the language that Conrad uses. Kevin is a purist and felt that the language at times struggled to flow, and betrayed its origins, that Conrad wrote in English, but it was not his first language. My feeling was that the poetry of the prose, though a little unusual, stood up to the test of time. Whilst unusual it is hard not to admire the craft and descriptive power of much of the language used, and nearly every page has turns of phrase which are evocative and powerful: “And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.” (p16)
Paul was inspired by rereading this text to do a review for the Madness and Literature Network, which you can read here. The network website is well worth a look and joining up if you are interested in some of these themes.
For next month Kevin has chosen Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer, which should give us a radical change of direction. I shall be reading it whilst away for a few days on a canalboat on the Welsh borders, along with the paranoia-inducing ‘The Dying Light’ by Henry Porter, which was recently reviewed on Simon Mayo’s book review section.
Still talking about getting more folks to join our little band – more on this as we get it 🙂 We have a couple of people in mind, one of whom is called Charley, but we don’t know if she surfs or not.
Oh, and one last disappointment with the book – where was that great sequence with the helicopters?
Ride of the Valkyries anyone?
A New Lunar Society 
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