The horror! The horror!
For the Africa Reading Challenge.
If the term "spoilers" can be used in the context of a book published in 1902, there will be spoilers ahead.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
To me, this is a primary text to read to understand the way that Europeans and those of European descent have viewed Africa: a volatile source of inextricably combined wealth and madness. I’m glad to have taken the opportunity to read the book - novella really, it’s short - and not just to continue to rely on what I know about Apocalypse Now* to understand the heart of Conrad’s text.
One of the controlling tropes in the field of American Studies - at least when I was doing them - was the struggle between Civilization and Savagery, writ large especially in the genre of the Western.** Conrad explores the same ideas in Heart of Darkness, but there is no triumphalist march of conquest inevitable in his vision of the encounter between Europe and Africa. Indeed, his point is that Europeans carry in them just as much savagery as the savages themselves, in most cases just waiting for the spark to the tinder to set it ablaze. He makes this clear at the beginning of the story, when Marlow starts his story about his trip up the Congo - the river into the dark continent never named outright - by talking about the way the Romans had traveled up the Thames into their own dark and frightening wilderness.
Where is civilization actually located? It cannot be carried successfully into Conrad’s Africa. The darkness at the heart of the continent contaminates everything it touches, apparently, or at least turns the world upside down. Kurtz is the emblematic figure of this process, going native and going insane, but at the same time, scrawling the final footnote of his Report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs: “Exterminate all the brutes.” Kurtz is the brute who ends up dead in the end, living on only partially and inaccurately in the memories of those who knew him.
Overall, reading Heart of Darkness is like wading into a fever dream. The jungle looms as a dark presence at every turn. The incomprehensible behavior of Africans and Europeans alike confound Marlow throughout his journey. Conrad’s Africans are mysterious and incomprehensible, of course, but in the end, no more so than the white men. The accountant in the Company station is an absurd figure, making meticulous entries in the account books while carefully maintaining his European style of dress and behavior. The cannibals who work on Marlow’s steamer suppress what might be considered their own darkness by not turning on the handful of white men they work for, even while they slowly starve to death. Nothing that anybody does makes sense, it just is.
Marlow, too, is contaminated and nearly killed by the darkness. In the final pages of the book, he makes clear that he still has some allegiance to light and reason, when he visits Kurtz’s Intended, to return her photograph and letters. Throughout this passage, there is this really fascinating description of a physical struggle between light and dark in the drawing room - is there any more civilized space in Europe? - where they sit.
The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me.
The eerie atmosphere of the scene inscribes a final encounter between reason and unreason. A choking gloom gathers in the drawing room, while Kurtz’s Intended tells Marlow that she understood Kurtz better than anyone else in the world.
“You knew him best,” I repeated. And perhaps she did. But with every word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white, remained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief and love.
We know that her claim is false, completely and utterly false, and Marlow is put in the position of confirming or denying her truth when she asks what Kurtz’s final words were. Marlow lies and tells her that Kurtz died with her name - which we never know - on his lips. Reason only apparently triumphs, but that triumph is based on a lie that papers over the truth of Kurtz’s - and Europe’s - savagery.
* I haven’t seen this either. Now I want to.
** Yes, this is a crazy dualism based on reifying European notions of Civilization. That’s why they’re capitalized. Call it the way we have of pretending that these terms mean things, even when meaning is supplied by us. History, winners, blah blah blah.
If the term "spoilers" can be used in the context of a book published in 1902, there will be spoilers ahead.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
To me, this is a primary text to read to understand the way that Europeans and those of European descent have viewed Africa: a volatile source of inextricably combined wealth and madness. I’m glad to have taken the opportunity to read the book - novella really, it’s short - and not just to continue to rely on what I know about Apocalypse Now* to understand the heart of Conrad’s text.
One of the controlling tropes in the field of American Studies - at least when I was doing them - was the struggle between Civilization and Savagery, writ large especially in the genre of the Western.** Conrad explores the same ideas in Heart of Darkness, but there is no triumphalist march of conquest inevitable in his vision of the encounter between Europe and Africa. Indeed, his point is that Europeans carry in them just as much savagery as the savages themselves, in most cases just waiting for the spark to the tinder to set it ablaze. He makes this clear at the beginning of the story, when Marlow starts his story about his trip up the Congo - the river into the dark continent never named outright - by talking about the way the Romans had traveled up the Thames into their own dark and frightening wilderness.
Where is civilization actually located? It cannot be carried successfully into Conrad’s Africa. The darkness at the heart of the continent contaminates everything it touches, apparently, or at least turns the world upside down. Kurtz is the emblematic figure of this process, going native and going insane, but at the same time, scrawling the final footnote of his Report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs: “Exterminate all the brutes.” Kurtz is the brute who ends up dead in the end, living on only partially and inaccurately in the memories of those who knew him.
Overall, reading Heart of Darkness is like wading into a fever dream. The jungle looms as a dark presence at every turn. The incomprehensible behavior of Africans and Europeans alike confound Marlow throughout his journey. Conrad’s Africans are mysterious and incomprehensible, of course, but in the end, no more so than the white men. The accountant in the Company station is an absurd figure, making meticulous entries in the account books while carefully maintaining his European style of dress and behavior. The cannibals who work on Marlow’s steamer suppress what might be considered their own darkness by not turning on the handful of white men they work for, even while they slowly starve to death. Nothing that anybody does makes sense, it just is.
Marlow, too, is contaminated and nearly killed by the darkness. In the final pages of the book, he makes clear that he still has some allegiance to light and reason, when he visits Kurtz’s Intended, to return her photograph and letters. Throughout this passage, there is this really fascinating description of a physical struggle between light and dark in the drawing room - is there any more civilized space in Europe? - where they sit.
The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me.
The eerie atmosphere of the scene inscribes a final encounter between reason and unreason. A choking gloom gathers in the drawing room, while Kurtz’s Intended tells Marlow that she understood Kurtz better than anyone else in the world.
“You knew him best,” I repeated. And perhaps she did. But with every word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white, remained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief and love.
We know that her claim is false, completely and utterly false, and Marlow is put in the position of confirming or denying her truth when she asks what Kurtz’s final words were. Marlow lies and tells her that Kurtz died with her name - which we never know - on his lips. Reason only apparently triumphs, but that triumph is based on a lie that papers over the truth of Kurtz’s - and Europe’s - savagery.
* I haven’t seen this either. Now I want to.
** Yes, this is a crazy dualism based on reifying European notions of Civilization. That’s why they’re capitalized. Call it the way we have of pretending that these terms mean things, even when meaning is supplied by us. History, winners, blah blah blah.