Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness

Introduction

Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad – you’ve probably heard of it. Based, at least in part, on his own experiences, Conrad’s tale tells the story of a sailor, Marlow, who rides up the Congo river towards the end of the 19th century in search of the mysterious Kurtz. One evening much later, while waiting for the tide to change on a boat with his friends, Marlow tells his story. The horrors of what Marlow finds – Imperialism at its very worst – have inspired countless works of art, including the film Apocalypse Now! and the game Spec Ops: The Line.

But this book does not need adaptation. It remains, even now, a frightening, monstrous, and brilliant story in its own right. And this time, my third time reading it, it shocked me more than ever.

Kurtz

Kurtz, the head of the farthest station along the Congo River, is at the centre of Heart of Darkness like Nostromo is at the centre of his own novel. But if anything Heart of Darkness is the more adventurous work when it comes to characterisation. We hear of Kurtz slowly, as Marlow heads up the Congo river. “Oh, he will go far, very far” we hear from one man. “He is a prodigy,” we hear from another. Once or twice we hear Kurtz himself, from a year ago, his words filtered through someone else. At first positive, later on the reports grow more concerning. It is impossible to know what to believe. What is impressive is the way that we are led, initially, to expect to see in Kurtz the model colonialist. It makes the revelation that he has gone mad all the more horrific.

We find a report, written by him, filled with the hope for positive change that others had so confidently placed in him. He writes that we “must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings – we approach them with the might of a deity”. “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded”. But Kurtz, ultimately, does not exert his power for good. Perhaps he is too taken by the power itself. In a wonderful image, we find that at the bottom of his report he has scrawled the words “exterminate all the brutes!”. It is a wonderful image because we go from the sensible, measured, and hopeful report to the brutal world that Kurtz actually encountered – or made for himself.

Loneliness

“We live, as we dream – alone” Marlow’s words stand at the centre of the book, of its feeling. That Heart of Darkness is not a cheery book is no surprise, but that its bleakness takes the form of loneliness is nonetheless surprising. Marlow’s time in the Congo is marked by his dislocation from other human beings. The other people on the steamer he commands – black and white – have no connection to him. The whites are disgraceful looters, ready to shoot at the slightest excuse and steal without a moment’s thought. As for the blacks Marlow, prejudiced as most of us were back then, has no desire to speak with them, whatever his sympathy for their suffering.

He is alone, and I think it is loneliness that destroys us far from home, not anything else. Kurtz has left “civilization”, yes, but he has also left people: “Being alone in the wilderness, [Kurtz’s soul] had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you it had gone mad!” To the Africans he is a God, not a man – he and they can have no dialogue. The images Marlow uses to describe Kurtz are characterised by their suggestions of distance and isolation. “I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines”. The way that people describe him also distances us from the real man. It’s so hard to see who he really is because we are eternally filtering him through other people’s ideas, and then finally through Marlow’s own increasingly cagey narration.

Conrad’s Style

Conrad’s style, I now realise, contributes greatly to this feeling of loneliness and detachment. Yes, it is turgid, swampy – Conrad is guilty of never leaving a noun without a grave and lumpy adjective. But it is precisely this feeling of swampiness that slows the narrative down, and allows it, at times, to stop altogether, presenting simply an image in all its horror:

“There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow’s lean face appeared – worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame. The match went out.”

Perhaps horror is not right word. Marlow here is frozen apart from us, the only light in the darkness of the boat where he narrates his story. We see him, but even though the image of the face is a close-up, we feel that the distance between us and him is unbridgeable. So it is, Conrad seems to say, between any of us. A photo, a snapshot, is necessarily limited – though we see something, there is no life in it. And there is no way of putting life in it, short of the imagination. And imagination is always personal, subjective, and therefore a lie.

Work

What is it that destroys us? That is the central question of Heart of Darkness. Chinua Achebe might say that Conrad, the “bloody racist”, saw an Africa-made-other and Africans-made-savages to be the source of Kurtz’s decline and Marlow’s teetering. But the truth is certainly more complicated than that, if that is the case at all. I think work, and an idea of work, fits into this. Towards the end of the novella’s first part Marlow says “I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.” His at this point is a naïve view. It mistakenly assumes that the self we find in work is necessarily our “true self.” It allows Marlow to be sucked into the same admiration of Kurtz as many other characters are guilty of.

Kurtz gathers a great deal of ivory – he is, by some measure, a great worker. But he is also, in Marlow’s sense, himself. His life has an apparent authenticity that Marlow’s hesitant, questioning life does not. The constant reverence with which others talk about Kurtz’s ideals only emphasises this. Kurtz is a thinker, a philosopher. Everyone expects great things of him. The belief he inspires is dangerous because for those who have no beliefs, he is someone to be envied, followed, or perhaps even worshipped.

It is only later that Marlow begins to see the full meaninglessness of all that work – when he comes to find Kurtz’s spoils – “Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below ground in the whole country”. The goal has been achieved, the ivory gotten, and yet we are still in a mud shanty, and Kurtz is ill. And all the dead Africans will never get their lives back.

Early on, in the stations closer to the coast, Marlow encountered people without ideas of their own, simply scheming and hoping to gain money. There is nothing noble in that either. What Heart of Darkness does quite well, perhaps without realising it, is demonstrate the sheer bankruptcy of the colonial project. Kurtz, the idealist, becomes a monster and forgets whatever mighty aims had once motivated him in favour of slaughter, while the rest are so concerned only with enriching themselves that they care not for what happens to the Africans around them, so long as they get paid. Both Kurtz and the others ultimately come to see people as means, rather than ends.

Marlow

And Marlow? Marlow can only observe, report back to us. He is overwhelmed by the world he discovers – by the strangeness of Africa and its people, black and white. He achieves nothing at all except his own survival, and even that is tainted in its way by his own complicity in Kurtz’s world. Heart of Darkness simply ends. Marlow meets Kurtz’s intended wife and hands over his final papers, but he fails to tell her the truth of his life in the Congo. His final action in the story is one of cowardice – or perhaps of kindness. In not telling her of Kurtz’s breakdown or challenging her ideas of him Marlow continues to let the myth of the noble colonist survive to destroy further lives.

Towards the end I kept coming back to Yeats. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity”. What is frightening about Heart of Darkness for me, an educated Westerner, is the paradox of those lines. Everyone truly believes that Kurtz is a great man with a great future before him. His passion, his beliefs, are contagious. And yet this man, who should be the best, turns out to be the worst of us. And if he is the worst, where does that leave the rest of us? Useless, weak, able only to not do evil ourselves, we have not the strength to stop it. We are the bankrupt heirs to a bankrupt world.

When I look inside myself I see very little to cheer me. Hatred, violence, and despair are at the heart of my soul. I do not know another’s heart upon this earth; I feel the sheer loneliness that Marlow’s story speaks of. So in the end I can only assume that others are just the same, constantly engaged in the battle for their own souls, restrained from committing horrors only by their flagging willpower and fear of the shame that comes from turning away from civilisation and their fellows. It is not a pretty picture. I am perhaps being dramatic. But also, in a way, honest too.

Conclusion

“Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope for is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of unextinguishable regrets.”

On this blog, unconsciously perhaps, I prefer to write about books and stories that are less well known. With many books, I have a feeling that everything has already been said. Heart of Darkness is certainly such a book. But I have felt this book. It is really quite extraordinary how, the third time through, Conrad’s story has affected me. Chinua Achebe lamented that Conrad had turned all Africa into “props for the break-up of one petty European mind”. If I wanted to argue with him, this post would look very different. I have a petty mind, a petty European mind. I cannot say whether this book speaks to others as it does to me. But for me it has been like a bolt of lightning, a frightening horrific flash of knowledge. But in that that horror – of all I am, of all I may be – there is something else:

There is joy. Heart of Darkness is absolutely fantastic literature and I can’t wait to read it and love it again.

For more Conrad, I have a piece on Nostromo. For another book which also looks at our inner darkness, John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing is great too.

Passion Put to Use: Richard Holmes’s This Long Pursuit

Richard Holmes is an extremely dangerous writer. He is dangerous to your wallet and to whatever fixed notions of a literary canon you may have. My copy of This Long Pursuit, a kind of companion volume to Footsteps, which I reviewed earlier, was a gift from my friend James, who is between blogs at the moment. The British are the main focus of this volume of biographical essays, though Holmes spends time with French-language writers too.  And as ever, Holmes is circling around that historical sweet spot, somewhere between 1750 and 1850, when the Romantics were busy being Romantics.

But “Romantics” not only in the sense of poets – though here we have Keats, and Coleridge, and Shelley – but in the sense of a worldview. Scientists are not excluded, and nor are the many women who have historically been locked out of the pantheon. Holmes, with his sympathetic biographer’s eye, makes everyone interesting. And in this lies his greatest strength – he makes us aware of the value of biography. Perhaps even more so than literature itself, biography teaches us that everyone, great and small, has an exciting history of their own. He makes us look at the world and people around us, and care.

Confessions

This Long Pursuit is broken up into three sections. The first of these, “Confessions”, is Holmes at his most personal. Firstly, he reminds us of his biographical principles. The first is “the Footsteps principle”, which states that “the serious biographer must physically pursue his subject through the past”. Footsteps saw Holmes tracing Stevenson among the French countryside; This Long Pursuit has him chasing Coleridge, though without any opium, through England, and Keats and Shelley through Italy. As readers, the text that Holmes presents is heavily influenced by this principle – we have a sense of the subject’s world as something lived in, precisely because Holmes has done just that.

The second principle is that of “the Two-Sided Notebook”. What this means is that Holmes devotes one half of a notebook’s page to the objective facts of his quarry, as he researches them, and the other half to the impressions and feelings that come to him as he does the work. This creates a subjective and objective biography, and the resulting work is a synthesis of these two strands. But their very existence means that reading Holmes is never dull or clinically lifeless as certain academic texts undoubtedly are. 

In the five essays of “Confessions” Holmes explores directly what a biography is, or ought to be. It is a thing that asks us “What was this human life really like, and what does it mean to us now?” It is not simply about trying to work out the past as fact, but rather there is an element of “imaginative faith” involved, for otherwise we would never realise what the past means to us now. Elsewhere he talks of biography’s “humanist ambition” – it aims to inform us of “a common human nature”. Holmes’s style, with regular quotations from the primary sources, serves this idea well. We always have a feeling that the people he is writing about are alive and are being brought back to life before our eyes. But not as pedestal-bound demi-gods so much as human beings.

Restorations

“Restorations”, the second section, is about precisely that. Holmes takes figures who have faded over time and recovers them, as best he can, from obscurity. And in “Restorations” his focus is on the women of the age. I remember reading a scathing review on Goodreads of Footsteps, in which the author denounced Holmes as a terrible sexist because of some off-hand remark that only became offensive a few decades after the book was written. It is ridiculous because focusing on such petty details obscures the great spirit underlying Holmes’ work in both Footsteps and This Long Pursuit – namely, to treat the inhabitants of the past with respect and justice. He rescues people like Madame de Stael or Zélide who I may have heard of but certainly wasn’t planning on reading, simply by engaging with them and relating their value.

One of the things I found most disheartening was the way that many of these women had been famous in their time, but had had their respect worn away by centuries of men deciding who was worth reading. Holmes goes from popular science, with Mary Somerville, to literary and philosophical reflections with Mary Wollstonecraft. He focuses on the heroism of these women at a time when they faced huge difficulties to finding success, but found it anyway. When describing the scientists, Holmes writes that “precisely by being excluded… they saw the life of science in a wider world”. For example, I had no idea that popular science writing in English was essentially the creation of a woman, Mary Somerville!

But Holmes does not shy away from darker themes either. His essay on Mary Wollstonecraft is particularly shocking. Wollstonecraft, who is famous for her “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, is perhaps the coolest of the characters featured here. But she had a difficult life, as Footsteps made clear, and an even less pleasant afterlife. Holmes describes how her husband, the naïve but well-meaning William Godwin, wrote a biography of her that was so honest it scandalised society and ruined her reputation for over a century. If this seems like an exaggeration, Holmes finds some choice quotes to back his assertion up. I particularly “liked” one newspaper’s comment that the biography was “the most hurtful book” of 1798. Ouch.

Afterlifes

Going back to the past in search of a new way of looking at people does not only extend to those who have been almost forgotten, though when we deal with canonical figures there is much less urgency. In the final five essays under the heading “Afterlifes” Holmes deals with the classic figures – Keats, Coleridge, Blake – who had sat out of the earlier sections. But rather than go over the lives once more, he is more interested in how their lives were treated once they were beyond the grave. This is all fascinating stuff. The case of Shelley is a good example. His tragic death and classic Romantic death by drowning became a biographical leitmotif. People could no longer look at his life except as something tending towards an early grave, giving it a sense of predeterminism that in reality it lacked. This rather obscures who Shelley really was, at least in Holmes’s eyes.

He traces the first biography of William Blake and the figures, male and female, who made it possible. (I had heard of Anne Gilchrist in connection with Walt Whitman, but I had no idea that she had also wrote part of the biography that perhaps saved Blake from being forgotten forever). He explores the joy of friendship that animated Humphrey Davy and Coleridge’s scientific experiments together, and the ebb and flow of the painter Thomas Lawrence’s reputation.

Conclusions

And he does all this with grace and humour! The entirety of This Long Pursuit is a joy to read – as a writer Holmes is every bit a match for his subjects. Of the Scot, Oswald Lord Nelvil, he writes that his is “a name truly redolent of damp tweed”. One of Blake’s old friends is described as “a well-meaning but gushing middle-aged raconteur, who embroidered freely on the facts”. And then there is this magnificently pithy description of a mental crisis Thomas Lawrence underwent in 1797: “What exactly this involved remains obscure, except that he embarked on a strangely melodramatic affair with both of Sarah Siddon’s daughters simultaneously, and then threatened to commit suicide”.

Holmes, better than any historian, makes the past and its characters alive. And in so doing he does something more than just entertain – he teaches us. This quote from Coleridge is perfect for describing what makes This Long Pursuit special: “Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love”. Holmes’s sympathy and love for his subjects makes us more engaged than even the most incisive monograph ever could. I finished the book determined to read Keats, Coleridge, Blake, Zélide, Madame de Stael, and all the rest as soon as possible. This is why Holmes is so dangerous. He shows us that reading and learning are truly never-ending processes. That there is always someone new to discover, another writer or life worthy of attention. Every single one of these essays bursts with passion. And Holmes’ passion is absolutely contagious. Read it!

Race and Redemption in Marilynne Robinson’s Home

Phenomenal, unbelievable, awesome: Home is one of those books I cannot recommend enough. In many ways a quiet, boring affair, much like Gilead before it, Home is so deeply packed with life, lived and felt, that it expands inside us like the impression of tree does, the moment we stop walking and start to give it the attention that its complexity and majesty undoubtedly deserves. Home takes place almost contemporaneously to Gilead, and the characters are shared between the two works, but the tone is very different. Gilead had seen the aging Reverend Ames writing letters full of love to his young son, consigning his own failures and guilts mostly to the margins. But Home, which takes us into the home of Ames’s friend Reverend Boughton as it deals with the return of a prodigal son, Jack, and a failed daughter, Glory, is a much more ambivalent tale.

The book is filled with tensions, with guilt, with shame, with pain. But at the same time it shines with the radiance of love, conditional and unconditional, and faith and grace. Unlike Gilead, where Ames’s occasional digressions on doctrinal matters such as baptism may have turned off readers with limited exposure to the Christian tradition, Home is a much more down-to-earth book in terms of its religious fundament. The central questions concerning redemption and grace are, I hope, a little more palatable to people, and more relevant to their own lives.

Glory

“Home to stay, Glory! Yes!” Her father said, and her heart sank.

The opening line of Home is brutal, and immediately informs us of the pain at the centre of the novel. Glory is the youngest daughter of Reverend Robert Boughton, youngest of eight children, and almost forty when the book begins in the late 1950s. Where other brothers and sisters have made successful marriages, or started successful careers, Glory worked as a teacher while engaged in a long courtship with a man who ultimately abandoned her. Apparently married, she could not even return to her teaching job. And so she has returned home, the only place that will offer her a refuge.

Her father, Reverend Boughton, is not the sprightly, young-at-heart man that Ames was. He spends most of Home being carried from chair to bed to chair. He retired from the pulpit ten years before the story begins, and his mind has declined where Ames’s remains nimble. But he is determined to make his home be a place where his children are welcome, and to show them the unconditional love of parents towards their children, no matter what they have done. Glory has come home, and she doesn’t really know what to do with herself, so she gives herself up to her father, caring for him as best she can, cooking and cleaning and doing the practical chores he is too weak to do. But she is desperately lonely. In the town she grew up in, all she has is the radio for company.

The Prodigal Son

That is until her father receives a letter from Jack. Jack is the prodigal son, the vanisher – he hasn’t been home in twenty years. As a child he was the only Boughton to scorn the church and steal and hide away. Eventually, he turned to alcohol too. What hangs over him, at least in the eyes of others, are two particular acts, committed long enough ago. The first is that he seduced and then abandoned a young girl, whose child later died; the second is that he did not return home for his mother’s funeral either. But he is his father’s son, and Boughton is determined to show him kindness.

The letter that arrives says Jack will be home soon. Boughton’s joy is so simple, so pure: “This letter is from Jack,” he said. “I know his hand. This is his hand… I’ll be needing a handkerchief, Glory, if you don’t mind. They’re in the top right-hand drawer… So we know he’s alive. That’s really something.”

And though he delays, and sends further letters, Jack does eventually come:

Then they heard bedsprings and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory! I believe we do! Yes!” And then the slippered feet and the cane.

Robinson has an eye for the perfect detail. The action of Home takes place almost entirely within the walls of the Boughton home, and between these three people. But Robinson uses every sense, every minor gradation of feeling, to paint an extraordinary picture of family life in all its painful, wondrous, complexity.

Jack

Jack is back for his own reasons. For Glory, her older brother’s return is in a way a blessing. “At least I know what is required of me know, and that is something to be grateful for”. They have not seen each other for years, and Home is a record of intimacy gained, lost, fought for. Where Glory was duped, Jack is guilty. Most of all, he is battling against the notion of predestination, the idea that his life has already been decided for him, and that no matter what he may do he is doomed to hellfire because of something incorrect in his nature, in the very nature that God had given to him. He is a modern day Ivan Karamazov, knowledgeable about God and the Bible but unable to accept them for his own reasons, even as he rages against the despair stemming from having a terrible black hole inside him.

Jack comes home, he tends to the garden, he fixes the family car. He drinks, he hides, he hurts himself. His alcoholism is one part of his character, but in a way, as an addiction it sums up the heart of his problem. Anyone who has faced addiction will know the way that it can feel like predestination to fall back into old habits. No matter how we try, it seems as if an external force, like a cruel god, drags us back towards our vices. When faced with addiction, it’s sometimes impossible to feel that we can ever change, that we can ever right our course. While the two reverends discuss the thorny nature of predestination within their respective churches, it is Lila, Ames wife (and heroine of Robinson’s third Gilead novel), who steps up to reassure Jack. “A person can change. Everything can change.”

Like Jack, Lila has spent most of her life as an outcast. But after she meets Ames, something we only really hear about vaguely in Gilead, her life changes for the better. She is, in a way, saved. Does Jack redeem himself? Does Jack get saved? I’m not sure these questions are the point of Home. Jack comes home, and he leaves again. Life is not neatly tied up, and Home recognises that. In Jack’s story – here, in Gilead, and no doubt in Robinson’s latest novel, Jack –what matters is the process. Jack’s life is a swinging between salvation and perhaps, as he claims, perdition. And in our own lives, full of mistakes and guilt and yet bursting with beauty and always with the possibility of making things right again, Jack appears as a thoroughly human, thoroughly sad, brother.

Race and Religion in Home

Last summer I read a lot of books about race, but Home is probably more effective than any of them. At the end of Gilead we learn about why Jack is interested in racial tensions, and in Home this information is once again saved for the end. But early on, when Glory finds him reading W. E. B. DuBois, we have a sense that even though the village of Gilead is made up of traditional rural white Iowans, race will someway figure in the novel. Later, to entertain their father, Glory and Jack get him a TV set. Home is set during the height of the American civil rights movement, and Jack has spent a lot of time in the South. His father, meanwhile, appears scarcely to have even left his state.

Now, I confess, being not an American, I know little about the civil rights movement, so I may get a few bits wrong. As they watch the television, and read about protests in the newspaper, a division appears in the family.

After reading about white police with riot sticks attacking black peaceful demonstrators, Boughton speaks to calm his son: “There’s no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it.”

But Jack replies. “Some people will probably remember it.”

Boughton is a religious man, but he is not necessarily a wise one. His vision of the world is small. The idea that the African Americans who were suffering may have slightly longer memories than his own, watching them on the television, is not something that comes naturally to him. It is less hypocrisy, than ignorance, but it remains a problem. When Jack cries “Jesus Christ” after a particularly brutal moment, Boughton’s anger is aimed at his blasphemy, rather than the actions of the police. Eventually, he attempts to be conciliatory. “Young people want the world to change and old people want it to stay the same. And who is to judge between thee and me? We have to forgive each other.”

At times like this Robinson describes Boughton as “statesmanlike” – she uses this adjective several times, and in a way that is far more ironic than anything else. Boughton asks who can judge, but the answer, for readers, is clearly that we can. We know better, we know now the suffering of black Americans thanks to social media and publicised brutalities. We know that the civil rights movement has not finished, and Boughton’s faux-conciliatory remarks which paper-over real and legitimate suffering are just the same ill-judged remarks we hear today, from certain sections of society. The blacks were rioting, they were violent. But even when disproved we continue to hold fast to these lies. I don’t mean to disregard the violence of certain protests last year, only to indicate that there is a continuity not just in terms of the problems, but also in how they are represented and dealt with.

Robinson’s story reveals that underlying hypocrisy. Yes, we should avoid judgement in many things. But in matters of racial justice, at least in the sense that we shouldn’t tolerate brutality, refraining from judgement becomes a moral stance. And we know, I hope we know, enough to know that things that were wrong then, in the 1950s, must still be wrong now.

Conclusion

Gilead was in many ways a paean to the blessings of the everyday little things that make life so magical but which we often pass over without a thought. And Home is filled with that same, slightly religious sentiment. But Home goes further than that, in that it asks moral questions too. Are we managing to be good people, even as we enjoy the world? Is there a chasm between our beliefs and our actions? Are we Christians or whatever to all people, or only to a few? In its portrayal of Jack’s tortured complexity, both his good and his bad, and his struggle for what perhaps we could call redemption, Home is a much more gritty book than its predecessor. But it is a book whose message is every bit as important as that of Gilead. Perhaps, unfortunately, given the world we currently live in, it may be even more so.

But either way it’s fantastic, brilliant, and well worth reading.