Sometimes there's just too much to think about in a book. While perusing over the Scmoop entries on Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, a dozen different blog topics came to mind. Should I focus on Conrad's diction? Or how about his style for this book, which isn't so much "poetic" as it is ruminative? Or maybe about the way Marlow's narration sets the mood? Or about themes of imperialism, humanity, madness, honesty/dishonesty and evil?
Rather, I've decided to talk about context, the circumstances surrounding both the author's life and the author's society that ever even allowed such a book to be contemplated, nonetheless written.
And about book-picking—that is, why we choose certain books to read at certain times. In this case, it was Christmas vacation! A time of silver bells and cookies and presents and people sharing love and joy and—yeah, time for some Heart of Darkness...
So, back to context.
First, what do I know about Joseph Conrad? Not much. In fact, the only reason I've ever even heard of the book is through one or more American movies. But why did American directors want to make movies using this book? Why America? Because Americans are inheritors (as well as instigators) of centuries-worth of Western imperialism?
Hmm...
The Heart of Darkness is riddled with contradictions, with irony and with sick jokes; with meaningful actions effecting just meaninglessness; with well-intentioned actions achieving only evil; with military actions being described as "incomprehensible" and as "insanity"; with the "restraint" of a cannibal, shown when he does not eat the passengers on the steamer, pitted side-by-side with the "restraint" of the Manager which is revealed to be comprised of no more than his "civilized" good manners and habits; with missionaries, ambassadors, benefactors revealed as exploiters, executioners, rapists.
These contradictions serve a purpose, for Conrad. They set the stage for the madness. For Kurtz. For what's pushing Marlow to continue doggedly up the river to him.
Oh yeah...what is that exactly? What is pushing Marlow?
Well, unfortunately, it's nothing noble. It's nothing even outside the hypocrisy of Western imperialism that Conrad's work strives so hard to spotlight. In fact, what's pushing Marlow is right there at the very core of imperialistic tendencies. Of human tendencies to overpower. Because it is power itself which is driving Marlow to seek out Kurtz. The allure of power. A power, to be precise, that Kurtz has. Over the natives. Over himself. With words. With ideas. Different versions of power, too. Where Kurtz has the choice of assuming a high position back in Europe, in society, or of staying in the wilderness, communing with that unnameable power of darkness.
Unfortunately, it's all poppycock. Any resonance between Marlow and a modern-day reader should be condemned.
Conrad is an author unable to step out of his own time and place—namely, 19th century Europe. His own context. His work, The Heart of Darkness, for all its attempts to flagellate and expose the ideals of 19th century Western European society as hypocrisy—still, The Heart of Darkness is a product of that racist, sexist, xenophobic society predominately bent on expanding its power and conquest over other lands and other people already in those lands.
Why Americans were interested in reliving this tale (reinventing it in multiple movie remakes and giving the book renewed life during the 1960's by making it mandatory reading across so many college campuses) can be inferred. A society interested, to say the least, in power.
And that's scary.
Because that means we are still burdened with the same imperialistic, prejudiced worldview as our progenitors. That Africa is a "dark" place. That the heart of Africa is even "darker". That jungles and tropical places (though, indeed foreign to so many originating thousands of miles north of the equator) are places full of only disease, darkness and savagery. That these "uncivilized" places are wholly incompatible with "civilized" ones, and therefore, we should seek only to visit, take what we came for, and then leave. Insecure places where we must only send our armies, until we've gotten our fill of adventurism into our own darkness within and then abandon the "wild" peoples to their "wild" ways. (They were already messed up before we got there, weren't they?) So we can then head back home to our little dinghy on the Thames and tell ponderous, horrifying stories that are mostly about ourselves and our own experiences, and are not an exercise in empathy at all but in ego, and thus, offer our ultimately abusive misrepresentation (or"evil" characterization) of other people and their cultures to the world to show just how arrogant we truly are and always have been. /endrant
Unfortunately, Marlow's viewpoint, and by extension, Conrad's, yet resonate.
So, did The Heart of Darkness successfully counterbalance the joviality of my Christmas? You betchya. Made me want to denounce the viewpoint of this book. Again. And again. And again.