Civilization and its Discontents

I re-read Josef Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” after many years to see how it has stood up. And it does – very well. Modern critiques of the book have been harsh, but Conrad’s story turned the tables on colonial Europe, suggesting who exactly were the savages.

The story is recounted, as fin de siècle stories sometimes were, as the recollections of a narrator once-removed. The narrator recounts a tale told by a mariner named Marlow, who as a young man had been out of work for some time and had obtained work as a river pilot for a Belgian colonial enterprise.

In Part I of the story, even before Marlow enters the Congo, his first ominous brushes are with the corporation to which King Leopold had given the charter to pillage a massive part of the Dark Continent (an area 75 times as large as Belgium itself). The company Marlow visits when signing on is quartered on a street with grass growing up through the cobblestones – a spent Europe. As if a heroic journey were beginning, in Conrad’s story the building is “guarded” by two old crones who usher Marlow into a perfunctory interview, then a medical examination in which his supposed “English cranium” is measured every which way (phrenology was in vogue and it had eugenic overtones). He next visits the aunt who has secured his position for him, who gives him a lecture on how he is benefitting the savages of the Congo, doing the Lord’s work.

Then Marlow begins his month-long trip up the river, on a French steamer captained by a morose Swede who tells him the story of another Swede who has committed suicide, all along which various European colonial military forces are shooting their cannons into the brush – for no purpose other than to demonstrate colonial power – or building insane projects with slave labor, whose weak and used-up laborers are literally cast upon heaps to die. It’s not a pretty picture of European colonialism. Conrad often describes the natives as “brutes” and “cannibals” and “savages” and his use of the word “nigger” describes the collared and chained people of Africa in the 19th and early 20th centuries: still slaves, though only a legalism alters the true status of people “brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts.” In contrast, the Europeans are described as “pilgrims” – presumably on a quest supposed to be holy.

When Marlow arrives in Leopoldville, he discovers that the vessel he was hired to captain has been sunk, its bottom ripped out on a sand bar, and that he is to proceed to find Mr. Kurtz, an agent many miles inland whose franchise accounts for more than half of all the colonial spoils. Kurtz is legendary and expected to go great places on his return to Europe. And we learn what it is these colonists are up to. “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.” Marlow, in speaking to the station master, sees a portrait of a blindfolded woman holding a torch (very likely Astraea), but it appears sinister to him. It turns out to have been painted by Kurtz, who is believed to be quite the Renaissance man. It seems to at least this reader to be a warning that the practice of foisting Western ways on non-Western people is not going to end well.

Conrad briefly pulls us out of the dark midnight of Marlow’s tale described as a dream. “It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake.”

Marlow resumes his tale, remarking that the minor colonial functionaries ensured uninterrupted trade in worthless glass beads, yet the rivets that could have repaired his boat never managed to find their way to him. Marlow resolves to get them in three weeks, but all that arrives is another colonial expedition looking for more spoils. “Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” Take that, Dick Cheney. Take that, United Fruit.

In Part II, Marlow runs upriver into the “heart of darkness.” It is as if he is moving back into the time of pterodactyls, into pre-history. He considers the thin veneer of civilization that Western man has accreted and the common humanity with the “cannibals” and “savages.” He ponders the ease with which a “cannibal” with a bone through his nose can be trained to watch the pressure gauges on a steamer. On the eve of arriving at Kurtz’s station, they stop at a deserted settlement and find a sign warning them to “approach cautiously.” They stop for the night, resolved to proceed cautiously by light of day. In the morning there is a thick fog and to all the “pilgrims” their steamer is the only object left in the world, everything else “gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.” Marlow asks why the steamer’s native crew (“thirty to five” Europeans) did not eat them. And all the passengers wonder at the unseen natives on the riverbanks: “Will they attack, do you think?” The question is answered the moment the arrows start flying at the vessel and a crewman is killed.

The main narrator then interjects in a sort of flash-forward, to point out that Marlow has lied to Kurtz’s wife – women need to be shielded from the truth – the truth, Marlow believes, is that Kurtz’s bleached skull will be found with a mountain of ivory he has collected. Marlow speculates on the identity of the half-British, half-French Kurtz – mentioning a report Kurtz has written for the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.” It is a magnificent opus, Marlow believes. It suggests that savages can be elevated by the white man. Yet, at the end of the report, in unsteady handwriting, Kurtz has scrawled: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Marlow is faced with the decision to convey the report to its intended readers – or to “lose” it. Mainly he wants to preserve Kurtz’s memory, but he is undecided about the report. The fast-forward ends and finally Marlow’s steamer arrives at its destination and there he meets a young Russian who knows Kurtz.

In Part III, the Russian fills in Marlow on Kurtz and, through his binoculars, he sees Kurtz’s compound walls, surrounded by heads. Now we know the truth about the man. We meet a fierce, beautiful black woman who may have been Kurtz’s consort, and we learn that Kurtz ordered the attack on the steamer. But Kurtz is in bad shape and the natives return him to Marlow, whereupon he is loaded onto the boat and conveyed back out of the heart of darkness. On board he dies after many days, his last uttered words being “the horror, the horror.” Marlow returns to Belgium with Kurtz’s papers and the report (from which he as ripped the final scrawled page) and protectively guards Kurtz’s memory, even lying to Kurtz’s fiancee about his last words. The story returns to the prime narrator, who returns us to the story’s present – an old group of seafarers on a tranquil waterway flowing “into the heart of an immense darkness.”

I love this story because it so beautifully combines the political, the psychological, the cultural, and is written in Conrad’s beautiful language. His descriptions are always rich and thoughtful and – though European (and American) colonialism are officially gone – they linger about, continuing to wreak their horrors on the rest of the world.

This volume also contains three other stories.

• “Amy Foster” – a beautifully-written tale of a Slavic shipwreck victim who marries Amy Foster.

• “The Secret Sharer” – the tale of a ship’s captain who risks everything to help a murderer who steals aboard his ship.

• “Youth” – a wonderful story, with surprisingly modern and very poetic language, about a young officer on board an old ship hauling coal to Bangkok.