Last year, in honor of the 125th anniversary of its publication and the centenary of it’s author’s death, I decided to reread Heart of Darkness. I went in search of the copy I was sure was buried somewhere in my living-room library. I looked first for a slim binding—coming in at a mere seventy or so pages, Joseph Conrad’s classic is more novella than novel. When that search proved futile, I began to skim my volumes’ spines. At last I found it, buried indeed: in a Norton’s Critical Edition, a tome of more than five hundred pages in which the original text has the feel of an afterthought.
A quick look at the table of contents revealed that Norton—and, we may assume, the academy at large—wishes for us to approach the text in a very specific state of mind. For starters, there are seven primary sources on “Imperialism and the Congo,” followed by six commentaries from the likes of Darwin and Hegel under the heading “Nineteenth-Century Attitudes toward Race.” Predictably, a full fourteen of the fifteen “Essays” also dealt explicitly with the subject of racism (one even purported to analyze Conrad’s treatment of the African woman, although, after flipping through the pages several times, I almost missed the single cameo appearance by an African woman in the book). Finally, there is an essay titled “Should We Read Heart of Darkness?” which strikes me as a disingenuous title for a work of literary criticism. Clearly, to the academic establishment, Conrad’s classic is a work not so much to be read as to be properly understood in the light of current political opinion. Serious readers only, please.
None of this should have come as a surprise, of course. Heart of Darkness, the story of steamboat captain Charles Marlow’s voyage up the Congo River in the late 1890s in search of the enigmatic ivory trader Mr. Kurtz, is, according to Harold Bloom, the most analyzed work of literature in American colleges and universities. It is also a favorite work in translation for students of English and modern literature around the world. For the college reader everywhere, then, Heart of Darkness has long since ceased to be an à la carte intellectual experience. It is instead but one dish in a set meal, with critical readings on Western colonialism, Modernist theory, and Freudian analysis serving as the real entrée.
It is against this backdrop, then, that my memory of reading Heart of Darkness for the first time has about it the whiff of confession. I was in college, yes, but my copy was an out-of-print Dover Thrift Edition: a cheap, just-the-text-ma’am version with a mere paragraph’s worth of biographical sketch by way of “commentary.” I set off downriver with Marlow entirely unprepared and free of all expectations. And after a bumpy start—a near-universal experience when it comes to Conrad, whose dense prose and ponderously long sentences can easily put off the less determined reader—I found myself, quite simply, hooked. Or to be more precise, I was utterly in stitches. In the woke atmosphere that hangs over today’s universities, smothering any sense of humor that might prevent our self-flagellation, that kind of engagement with a text seems out of date indeed.
Conrad’s masterpiece is many things. And one of them, I contend, is a plain old good read. Far from the purely cerebral experience academia seeks to engineer, reading Conrad’s masterpiece was far livelier and more emotional—and much more hilarious—than your average syllabus favorite has a right to be. This raises the question of whether our approach to reading Conrad could use some rethinking. Perhaps, if we allowed the text itself to be our guide, traveling to the heart of darkness would not only be more enjoyable (although it certainly would be that). It would also, I believe, be more edifying, and less of a missed opportunity to let the story achieve its intended effect—one that is much more powerful than Norton’s critical sermonizing.
In his preface to his early work The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Conrad wrote that his intention as an artist was “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel . . . before all, to make you see.” With Heart of Darkness, Conrad aimed to make us see that there is in truth little difference between so-called “civilization” and the individuals Europeans described as savages. Moreover, he believed that those same Europeans’ shockingly and often pointlessly brutal treatment of the natives under their control put the lie to their claim to be “remote from the night of first ages.” All of this is well known. What is noteworthy, however, is that it is precisely the senses on which Conrad says he tried to play.
Conrad’s masterpiece is many things. And one of them, I contend, is a plain old good read.
An intellectual appraisal of the subject, he believed, would not—could not—compel readers to undertake their own journey of self-reflection, the metaphorical parallel to Charles Marlow’s foray into the Congolese interior. Readers need more, as Marlow once says dismissively of Kurtz, than “splendid monologues on, what was it? On love, justice, conduct of life—or whatnot.” Instead, Conrad seems to insist, if we are to reach illumination, we must arrive by way of bewilderment. We need our attention grabbed and our perception of reality shaken. To confront the horror at the heart of the human condition, we also need a good dose of humor.
Dark humor, to be sure, of the sort that another Joseph, writing a half-century later, would hone to perfection in the anti-war satire Catch-22. But in Conrad’s classic, too, are all those difficult but rewarding literary devices that make for mental stimulation and the delight to be found in deciphering deeper meaning: absurdity, incongruity, deflation, contradiction. An example from early in the narrative, soon after Marlow’s arrival at the Company’s Outer Station, is the sudden, inexplicable combustion of a shed—a structure whose purpose is entirely unclear, and whose salvage is as impossible as it is senseless:
One evening a grass shed full of calico, cotton prints, beads, and I don’t know what else, burst into a blaze so suddenly that you would have thought the earth had opened to let an avenging fire consume all that trash. I was smoking my pipe quietly by my dismantled steamer, and saw them all cutting capers in the light, with their arms lifted high, when the stout man with mustaches came tearing down to the river, a tin pail in his hand, assured me that everybody was “behaving splendidly, splendidly,” dipped about a quart of water and tore back again. I noticed there was a hole in the bottom of his pail.
As an introduction to the vanity and uselessness of the imperial enterprise in Africa, there could be no better analogy than a hole in the bottom of the pail. That same masterly tango of futility and absurdity, calm and chaos also hovers over Marlow’s impartial description of the Company’s railway construction:
A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy and dull detonation shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were building a railway. The cliff was not in the way or anything; but this objectless blasting was all the work going on.
It is precisely Marlow’s dispassion that makes his story so jarring, and hence so compelling. Indeed, this deliberately distant tone cinches Conrad’s standing in the annals of Modernist literature; from here to Meursault’s discordantly impassive “the trigger gave” in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger, it’s practically a straight line under the sun. Time and again, the disjunction between the story told and the emotional affect of the storyteller makes for surprising, even shocking comedy. We see this, for example, in Marlow’s description of the death of his African helmsman during an attack on his steamer, a sudden, surprising injection of action into an otherwise languid narrative progression. “The man,” he writes,
had rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both his hands clutched that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that, either thrown or lunged through the opening, had caught him in the side just below the ribs; the blade had gone in out of sight, after making a frightful gash; my shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming dark-red under the wheel.
And then, from this satire-free description of the blood-soaked floorboards, related in staccato-like short clauses that build toward a climax, we move with all the grace of an automatic gearshift to an utterly deflating denouement:
“Can you steer?” I asked the agent eagerly. He looked very dubious; but I made a grab at his arm, and he understood at once I meant him to steer whether or no. To tell you the truth, I was morbidly anxious to change my shoes and socks.
If anything, in these moments, we should despise Marlow: for his detachment, his unrelenting, crass honesty in the face of tragedy, and his inability or refusal to transcend his own perspective when the situation surely demands it. And yet, we may find ourselves identifying with him, whether it be his passive appraisal of the absurdity of the colonialist enterprise or his human, all-too-human admission of disgust at his blood-soaked socks. When it comes to the marriage of crude action and subtle psychology, no one does it better than Conrad. Was there ever a writer better able to juggle the often opposing extremes of the human experience?
If there is a single, overriding challenge in the reading of Heart of Darkness, it is not—as some may insist—the length of Conrad’s sentences. Rather, it is the need to come to terms with that unsettling, inconvenient ambivalence that is at the heart of life, and that Conrad’s comedy makes abundantly plain.
Take Marlow’s description of the meticulously groomed chief accountant, who has imported his European conventions into the African interior. The disjunction between his “starched collar, snowy trousers . . . and varnished boots” and the primitive conditions around him—never mind the swarms of natives slowly dying of disease and starvation outside his door—is patently, comically absurd. Conrad seems to delight in pushing the ironic envelope with this most outlandish of his European characters:
I had to wait in the station for ten days—an eternity. I lived in a hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos I would sometimes get into the accountant’s office. It was built of horizontal planks, and so badly put together that, as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight. . . . I sat generally on the floor, while, of faultless appearance (and even slightly scented), perching on a high stool, he wrote, he wrote. Sometimes he stood up for exercise. When a truckle-bed with a sick man (some invalided agent from upcountry) was put in there, he exhibited a gentle annoyance. “The groans of this sick person,” he said, “distract my attention. And without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this climate.”
If we allow ourselves to snort at the image of a trussed-up dandy amidst the absurdity, the chaos, and the heat, it is, we are aware, a laugh at the horror at which Conrad only hints—say, in the image of a native too malnourished even to lift the biscuit Marlow has handed him to his mouth—but which we now know to have been all too present in the colonial project. Yet Marlow calls the accountant “a miracle,” and makes no bones about his respect for the man. After all, Marlow seems to imply, he has survived, survival being no small feat in these parts. If unrelenting adherence to even the silliest of conventions is what is necessary to evade the twin evils of death and madness in the jungle, the jungle that refuses—despite the imperialists’ best efforts—to be tamed, how can Marlow help but be impressed? And more so, how can we?
And then, of course, there is the enigmatic Mr. Kurtz, the search for whom drives Marlow’s steamboat down the river and into the darkest recesses of the soul. Our first introduction to Kurtz is through a painting of his that Marlow sees hanging at the Central Station. It features “a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre—almost black.” Like many of history’s imperialists, Kurtz’s stated intentions were humanistic in nature. As he wrote in his initial report to the Company, he sought to complete great acts of “humanizing, improving, instructing.” Yet once he tasted the power that could be had—on which his very survival depended—in the jungle, Kurtz’s ideals fell from his shoulders like the cloak of civilization itself. By the time Marlow finds him, wasted away, seemingly deranged and dying, he has set himself up as a god at the Inner Station, using barbaric force to exact from the natives his reward in ivory. Marlow’s shocking discovery of the heads of natives Kurtz has had impaled on spears, leading like macabre tiki torches to his home, reveals just how rickety was the foundation on which Kurtz’s good intentions once rested. It has also revealed the dark impulses couched in the hearts of all men, if only circumstances would release them. But Marlow’s admonishment of Kurtz’s methods is mixed with admiration. “He was a remarkable man,” says Marlow, and with these five words we have the entirety of the conundrum that is Conrad’s great classic. Can a work of social commentary suffice with open-endedness? Can fiction be both edifying and enjoyable, at one and the same time? Can we be so intrigued by Kurtz and what he represents that an emotion as clear-cut as contempt seems, simply, impossible?
It is appropriate that Marlow’s tale is told on the deck of another ship to an assembled audience of sailors. A tale within a tale, Heart of Darkness ensures that readers not miss the central fact of its existence. It is a story, first and foremost, and like all good stories, it’s meant to grip us and hold onto us until the end. It is meant, as does Marlow, to take us along for the ride.
Stories envelop us into their world in different ways, but the most successful ones are undoubtedly the least didactic. If in real life the impulse is toward the declarative and the definite, in the realm of literature, the opposite is the case. It is the job of the writer not to tell us what to think or how to feel, but to enable us to think and feel for ourselves. If contemplation comes at the expense of clarity, so be it. The goal of a great book, Conrad seems to say, should be not to resolve ambiguity but to reveal it, and to make it ours to turn over and over in our heads. The Italian author Italo Calvino, in his book Why Read the Classics, writes that “a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” That seems to me the real strength of Heart of Darkness: Conrad is not afraid to leave things unsaid, and thereby let us fill in the blanks ourselves. In so doing, we make the conclusions we reach our own.
This, then, is my problem with Norton’s approach to Heart of Darkness—and by extension with the approach of much of academia today. In aiming to garner a specific response from the reader and direct her toward a predetermined conclusion, something important, even critical, is lost. Permission to laugh, for a start. If I know from page one that I am meant to be horrified by colonialism’s evil deeds, do I dare allow myself a chuckle at an especially absurd scene? Do I dare become so enthralled by the story that its subject fails to elicit the “right” response? And do I dare derive pleasure from a story with such an evil setting?
To the ancient Greeks, literature was of value only insofar as it improved one’s character. By the end of the Middle Ages, that purpose had become more nuanced: While still largely guided by the Christian teaching that true literature imparted a moral thought, works that delighted through style and form were valued for their role in enticing to further learning. By the nineteenth century, entertainment had come to be recognized as the best weapon against prejudice. (Thus did the author of another now-controversial classic about racism warn his readers, as they embarked on yet another journey down a different river fourteen years before Heart of Darkness was published, “Persons attempting to find a moral in [this narrative] will be banished.”) To be sure, the impulse to read Conrad’s work as a political pamphlet is understandable, and there is value in doing just that. After all, if we cannot look to the great writers for edification, then to whom can we look? Such was the criticism lobbed against Conrad’s masterpiece by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe: Conrad should have known better. In his effort to examine the European psyche, Achebe argues, Conrad failed to render the African in all his humanity. To praise the loftiness of his mission, in this view, is to exempt him from the obligations due his talent: “I expect a great artist, a man who has explored, a man who is interested in Africa, not to make life more difficult for us.”
True, Heart of Darkness failed to demand the dismantlement of the edifice on which European racism and imperialism were constructed. To see this as a missed opportunity is to understand the proliferation of criticism that has grown up around Conrad’s classic in the 125 years since its publication, as well as its presentation, in many college courses, alongside other texts that raise Conrad’s story to the level of moral lesson. But the truth of the matter is that Heart of Darkness is not a moral lesson. Conrad chose, first and foremost, to write a story, and that story’s special magic resides in its ability to bring the reader in close and leave him with questions rather than preach right-thinking answers.
Too often, politics trump our instinctive attempt to find pleasure in the experience of reading. Yet that link is the first step toward enabling us to take in a work of literature and make its characters, their trials, and the worlds they inhabit a part of our inner lives. And the promise of that journey, I would argue, is the last hope for prompting us to keep reading Conrad, a century after his death. It is also the best reason to come face to face with the horror—in the heart of darkness, and in our hearts as well.
