Heart of DarknessBy Joseph Conrad
FEW NOVELS have been immortalised on the strength of two words, "The horror! The horror!" Joseph Conrad's most famous, and most controversial tale, first published in 1902, is based on a journey up the Congo River undertaken by him in 1890. The heat, the smells and the brooding atmosphere fester throughout with the sharpness of lived experience. It is a shocking yarn, an adventure which, far from celebrating imperialism and colonialisation, attacks the greed and cruelty of the Europeans who set out to systematically rape Africa. Nor could one claim that Conrad's central character, the enigmatic, deranged Mr Kurtz, is presented as a hero.
Often pointed to as one of the literary achievements of high modernism, Heart of Darkness has also had its critics. In 1973 Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe denounced the novella, by then a classic, believing Conrad to be "a bloody racist". It is difficult to grasp Achebe's objections to the narrative, as told by Marlow to four friends abroad the yawl, Nellie, at sunset, anchored in the Thames estuary waiting the turn of the tide. At no stage does Marlow attempt to either glorify or justify the events. It is a grim story and, sure of his audience, the narrator does not spare the details. Conscious of being the career seaman among weekend sailors, he recalls the difficulty he had securing a job at sea so instead he looked inland, and accepted a freshwater appointment with a continental trading company, replacing a steamboat captain who had been murdered by natives.
Marlow is a good talker and describes setting off for his interview, mentioning that the company doctor measured his skull. Then he is on his way and describes his sensations. "Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you - smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage . . ." Marlow is in love with adventure, though also alert to the differences between the "starched collars and got-up shirt fronts of the company's chief accountant" and the natives' filthy conditions.
Then he first hears of the "remarkable" Mr Kurtz who is stationed, "in the true ivory-country." Some 10 days later Marlow, his head already full of Kurtz's talents and mystery, leaves with a team to walk the final 200 miles to the Central station where his steamboat waits. On arrival, he finds his boat has been sunk. Gradually he begins to realise deliberate efforts have been made to delay his reaching Kurtz. Marlow battles on and finally meets Kurtz, who had been educated partly in England, whose mother was half-English, whose father was half-French: as Marlow notes, "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz."
Kurtz had travelled into the interior, had learned the native ways and had concluded a report urging, "Exterminate the brutes." Borne aloft on a stretcher, Kurtz is, for Marlow, a dying ghost. His delusions are obvious to Marlow to whom he gives the papers for his "Intended". Later, on meeting her, Marlow declines to tell her Kurtz's last words expressed the horror of the reality, of his actions. Instead, he assures her that only her name was uttered. Kurtz the ivory dealer is hypocritical, greedy Western man on the rampage in Africa and Marlow is both witness and consciousness in a taut narrative that continues to shock.
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This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon