Joseph Conrad Archives - Page 2 of 3

The Nihilistic Storytelling of Far Cry 2

Among other things, a good story is one that is effective. It aims at an effect and then employs various tools at its medium’s disposal to achieve it. I tend to see stories as reflecting a creator’s worldview, as making a certain argument about how we should see the world. I agree with the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, however, that there are certain times when a given work can reflect multiple worldviews, but these are rarer cases. Either way, a work is an argument about a worldview, whether with itself, or with the reader, or both. And a good work attempts to argue well.

Some stories are simply better told in certain mediums. Fiction has a great many limitations, just as much as do film or television, while also having its own advantages. The potential for videogames to tell good stories – and indeed, stories that can only be told well as videogames – has been overshadowed by the way that unfortunately most games don’t end up telling particularly impressive stories. Videogames are generally popular entertainment, and that’s absolutely fine. Like a good Marvel movie, there are a huge number of highly effective simple and fun games where committing acts of violence is pleasurable and “good” triumphs over “evil”. I enjoy playing those games as much as I enjoy watching Marvel’s offerings. And they sell like hotcakes.

But there are serious games – ones that strive for every bit as much moral complexity as do good works of literature, with every bit as much flair and depth. The best games combine an awareness of the medium’s limitations with a sense of its potential. Games suffer from an unavoidable problem – they have what is known as “gameplay”: the moments where the player is in control. The need to provide gameplay is generally what kills the effectiveness of a game’s story, rather than harmonising with it. This is particularly the case with shooting games.

“Ludonarrative dissonance” is the name that game designer Clint Hocking used to describe the problem. You play a game, with occasional cinematic intervals – cutscenes – where the story is expanded without player control. The dissonance that Hocking describes is when the impressions produced by the two parts – what the player controls as they play, and what they do not – contradict one another. In a shooting game one regularly massacres entire armies. At the end of a mission the game will then inject a little story, expecting us to care about some comrade who has fallen or some love interest we fight for. This really does not work. The character cannot be like that – not the one we have controlled thus far – they are coldblooded and soulless as we are while we control them. Their gameplay has ensured they must be like that. The cutscene feels like cheating, emotional manipulation. That’s because it generally is.

A similar problem exists in superhero movies – our heroes cannot feel okay from all that killing, not inside their heads at any rate. But the mental health effects of regularly murdering hundreds never crop up – in part, perhaps, because the heroes tend to kill aliens or other superpowered villains. When we do not kill a part of that whole to which we belong – humankind – there’s less possibility for reflection. In videogames these issues are harder to displace partly because of the obvious contradiction between what we do and what the game does for us (as cutscenes), partly because our enemies are people just as much as they are monsters, and partly because games have a particular talent at getting us to identify with and connect with our player characters. We control them, after all.

Games at their most interesting find a way of combining the stories they want to tell with the gameplay they use to tell it. And there is perhaps no better example of this than Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2.

Far Cry 2

As it happens, Clint Hocking was the creative director and scriptwriter for Far Cry 2, a videogame published by Ubisoft in 2008 and one which plays interestingly with these ideas of ludonarrative dissonance. Or rather, a game which refuses to play at all.

The game is set in Unnamed African Country, during a period of civil war sometime before the present day. The player is one of a selection of mercenaries from various countries with a history of armed conflict. Their goal is to hunt down the arms dealer known as The Jackal, whose guns have made the collapse of the country possible. Through working with the warlords of the two opposing factions, the player gradually accumulates titbits of information about The Jackal, until eventually they are in a position to locate him. On the side, the player interacts with other mercenaries, an underground movement attempting to help citizens escape the country, and a reporter trying to gather information on The Jackal for the world outside. There is nothing more to the story. Using an array of weapons, the player indiscriminately kills people to progress through the world.

Indeed, the plot is even more barebones than my description suggests. The supposed titbits about The Jackal which the player wants to get from the warlords never really materialise – instead, the player simply becomes a tool for their war against each other and, indirectly, the country itself. Whereas other games give missions with a sense of purpose, Far Cry 2 seems deliberately not to. We destroy oil pipelines, blow up bridges, cut off food and medical supplies to the vulnerable population. Most of the missions involve some sort of war crime. This is not standard territory for games – at least, they always try to gloss over the war crimes! Far Cry 2 doesn’t care – that’s what is so impressive. It doesn’t even condemn them – it’s less immoral than amoral. The feeling is less of a naughty pleasure in doing bad than a weary disappointment at the impossibility of doing good.

Progress for the player consists in unlocking new weapons. Since the plot doesn’t really go forward the only sense of change is the player’s increased ability to murder. We have to ask ourselves what the value of all this is. We follow the game’s suggestions, doing missions, expanding our arsenal. But instead of stopping the war, we only make it worse. The game’s second act finds us in a new province in the country, where a ceasefire has been agreed between the factions. Our first mission there consists of breaking down the ceasefire by ourselves bringing a new shipment of weapons into the province’s capital. We must become an arms dealer to kill an arms dealer – the logic somehow isn’t quite there.

The characters are empty too, amoral freaks. They are simply warlords and underlings. Overheard dialogue consists of characters planning their next murders and nothing besides. In addition to the arms deliveries, we help assassinate the warlords so that their deputies can take power. But there is nothing of consequence that comes from this except another mission to do, another hundred men to kill. We lose our hope in positive change. Our actions at every turn are denied value, significance, meaning. Our choices consist of determining the order we do missions, and our precise approach once the mission begins – do we light a fire with a flamethrower, use a sniper rifle from a distance, or go in on a truck, guns blazing? The game is mechanically sound – it’s a pleasure to engage in such destruction and we want more. The physics for fire in particular were well ahead of their time.

Our desire for killing is at least compensated in most games by a sense that we are doing the right thing. We are saving the world from aliens or fighting for those that we love. Far Cry 2 offers nothing of the sort. It offers only the possibility of sating our bloodlust without any kind of soothing of the pangs of conscience that same bloodlust might be connected to. Another brilliant game of that era, Spec Ops: The Line, problematizes the player’s desire for violence by having the main character become increasingly unhinged as the game progresses, visibly rejoicing in the killing of his enemies. Far Cry 2 is a first-person-shooter, so we see through our character’s eyes. We do not hear them – they do not speak. Silence – the eerie absence of any decent justification for our actions – is the tool by which the game works upon us.

Early on in the game’s second act, after we have restarted the civil war, we find ourselves in the mercenary bar outside of the city which serves as a kind of safe haven for the player. I left it and began walking towards my next mission location. As I did so, I noticed on my map markings suggesting nearby buildings. Outside of the cities, such markings indicate a guard outpost in Far Cry 2. By killing the men, I would gain data for my map about the local area, and possibly find some rough (blood) diamonds, which are used as the game’s currency. I approached over a hill, my assault rifle at the ready.

But there was nothing, nobody, there. Instead, there were rows and rows of graves. Fresh, hasty, wooden crosses marked the places where men and women were buried. I had arrived at a sacred place with the intent to kill and a weapon in my hand. I discovered that I was, to all intents and purposes, a monster. And the game in that moment forced me to confront that terrible fact. This is environmental storytelling at its very best – and environmental storytelling is what makes games very special as a medium for telling stories. I had stumbled upon this for myself – I was in control, and so I was responsible. Just as I had killed hundreds of people without thinking, now I was made to feel that. And all of this in complete silence.

The Jackal, our arms dealer, meets us occasionally, whenever we are otherwise incapacitated. He gives speeches and mocks us. He quotes Nietzsche, but unlike when angsty teens butcher the philosopher, The Jackal’s willingness to quote maxims about the world’s violence and valuelessness are far more poignant. The Jackal has power, and he has adopted a terrible worldview to justify using it in the most horrific ways. Never mind that Nietzsche spends most of his books specifically arguing against the suggestion that there is nothing in life beyond increasing one’s power in the sense of violence and control over others. What matters is that the game presents us with a character who believes something – with a voice, however horrific, that seems to have thought behind it. And a voice, well made, is a worldview and an argument for that worldview.

At the end of the game the player ends up working with The Jackal. The Jackal talks a lot about disease and contagion. He sees the violence his weapons have made possible as something inevitable in the world and not his responsibility. He thinks it is something that must be isolated and exterminated. Together with the player he works to get the last of the refugees out of the country, with both of player and Jackal dying in the process. With the refugees free, all that remains is for the soldiers left behind to shoot each other until nobody is left and peace can once again dawn.

Far Cry 2 presents The Jackal as an antagonist, but the game does nothing to challenge his worldview. Instead, it draws the player into it, making them complicit in the same acts of brutal and pointless violence that The Jackal is supposedly responsible for, and no different from all the soldiers and warlords supplied by him. We kill for little reason – there’s no reward except (blood) diamonds, which can only be exchanged for weapons. The Jackal’s own weapons. The missions neither bring us tangibly closer to stopping him, nor tangibly closer to resolving the civil war.

Occasionally, in a loading screen, we get a feel for what the character thinks – our only suggestion of any kind of interiority on their part. But what we read only reinforces the game’s suggestion about the world. Here’s an example: “It wasn’t so long ago that this was another one of those dirty little wars that barely rated a sidebar. There was an arms embargo in place, and everyone back home could just cluck their tongues and plan their next tax-deductible donation…” Instead of trying to give us a likeable player character, the game gives us a mercenary – in other words, someone who doesn’t care. And since the player’s character doesn’t care or find any value in the world, we – the player – cannot find that value either, try as we might.

There is no ludonarrative dissonance in Far Cry 2 because the meaningless violence of the player’s actions is the game’s argument about the world. The world (of this kind of civil war), it suggests, is valueless and brutal. There is nothing to hold on to. There is no good, and the only pleasure comes in destruction. It’s an argument that is compellingly made because the player feels it. For we only play the game because the destruction is good – the game strips away any other worthy motivations from us.

We may disagree with the picture of the world that the game proposes – I certainly would like to – but that is to miss the point. There are two reasons for thinking, as I have for so many years, about Far Cry 2 – the first is that it is a fascinating example of how games can harmonise the stories they want to tell along with the tools they employ to tell them. The other reason is that as I wrote at the beginning, any piece of art is an argument about the world, and I think a responsible human being should engage with as many well-put arguments as possible. Far Cry 2’s argument, like those we find in Joseph Conrad (a key influence on the game) or Cormac McCarthy, is disagreeable but it is not bad. Unfortunately, it often explains the world all too well…

Anyway, I finally finished the game earlier this year, after a great many failed attempts, and I thought it deserved the piece.

The Letters of Joseph Conrad

I read Conrad’s letters because I find him a powerful if at times impenetrable artist. Unlike with other favourites, whose works may be complex but nevertheless generally manage to be at least somewhat clear to the reader, Conrad’s tales often are opaque in both language and content. I wanted to see whether his letters would help clarify matters. Another reason is that Conrad is one of the English language’s most interesting stylists. His tales are dark, gloomy, illuminated only by brief flashes of lightning. I thought that perhaps by going behind the scenes I might discover the system of cogs and wheels that made possible such great works as Nostromo and Heart of Darkness.

Over the course of five hundred pages we get to know Conrad reasonably well. The author, who spent the first half of his life at sea, has few surviving letters from that time, making him as much of a biographical mystery as any of his characters. Instead, we read the letters of Conrad the writer. These are at times touching, as when he writes to his wife, or funny, as when he writes of his critics (“There is even one abandoned creature who says I am a neo-platonist. What on earth is that?”), and at times merely dull. As with Dostoevsky, Conrad spent most of his life without much money and was always asking to borrow some from his friends. I also got almost as fed up of Conrad denying he was a writer of the sea as he got from being accused of it. And as for his gout…

The letters are interesting to people who want to get a feel for how Conrad created his own works. I particularly liked his comment on Lord Jim being but “a hash of episodes, little thumbnail sketches of fellows one has rubbed shoulders with and so on”. But they are more interesting for providing clear – for Conrad – statements about how he wrote and what he thought. Such things we might pick up from his work but when laid out here they may still be useful or at the very least interesting. It is around these areas which this piece will be structured, with the result that my comments will be limited. Conrad can speak, or rather write, for himself.

Life

Conrad’s view of the world is often described as pessimistic, even nihilistic. Fate is cruel, merciless, and incomprehensible. This comes across in his letters too, although it is more pronounced earlier on – at the time of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim – than when he was more established as a writer:

“Life knows us not and we do not know life – we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow”

A certain lack of faith in humankind is the keynote. He writes of injustice that the best way to deal with it is to accept it. We might say that he is realistic, rather than pessimistic. It is of no great consequence either way, for a man with a “deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world”.

Our problem, as he sees it, lies in our being conscious of the world. Unlike the brute beasts of the earth, humans are aware of the world’s terrifying valuelessness and suffer all the more for it: “What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.” This is a view shared by other pessimists like Thomas Ligotti or Arthur Schopenhauer.

How does Conrad fight off this gloom, what does he believe in? Certainly not Christianity – “Christianity is distasteful to me. I am not blind to its services but the absurd oriental fable from which it starts irritates me”. Instead, Conrad clings to traditional values as his ballast: “What I believe in most is responsibilities of conduct.” When spelled out, his values are spoiled by the sense that they are impossible things, lying beyond our reach:

“I respect courage, truth, fidelity, self-restraint and devotion to the ancient ideals of mankind; and am sorry that, like most men, I fail in the practice of these simple virtues.”

We learn of Conrad’s politics, which are fairly sound. He has sympathy for the Africans and other non-white peoples, even though his views would be old-fashioned today, and his views on slavery are a little tainted by his experience growing up in Poland-Ukraine. Mostly, his politics is marked by the same sense of tireless hopelessness as the rest of his views:

“Every cause is tainted: and you reject this one, espouse that other one as if one were evil and the other good while the same evil you hate is in both, but disguised in different words… What you want to reform are not institutions – it is human nature. … Not that I think mankind intrinsically bad. It is only silly and cowardly. Now You know that in cowardice is every evil – especially that cowardice so characteristic of our civilization”.

Work

So much for Conrad the man. Now we must get to Conrad the writer. This was what I enjoyed the most. Conrad comes across in these letters as a thoroughly human writer. He goes from hope (“labouring against an anxious tomorrow, under the stress of an uncertain future, I have been at times consoled, re-assured and uplifted by a finished page”) to despair (“…writing as I did with a constant, haunting fear of being lost in the midst of thickening untruth”), he struggles with English – his third language – but at no point does he give up completely.

And so, what is his advice to us humble novices?

On le mot juste:

“No word is adequate. The imagination of the reader should be left free to arouse his feeling.” Instead, what you want is “a picture of a mental state”.

On scepticism and truth:

“The fact is you want more scepticism at the very foundation of your work. Scepticism the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth – the way of art and salvation. In a book you should love the idea and be scrupulously faithful to your conception of life. There lies the honour of the writer, not in the fidelity to his personages.”

On the use of detail for establishing reality, and the truth we must hold to, consciously or not:

“A picture of life is saved from failure by the merciless vividness of detail. Like a dream it must be startling, undeniable, absurd, and appalling… Our captivity within the incomprehensible logic of accident is the only fact of the universe. From that reality flows deception and inspiration, error and faith, egoism and sacrifice, love and hate. That truth fearlessly faced becomes an austere and trusted friend, a companion of victory or a giver of peace. While our struggles to escape from it – either through drink or philanthropy; through a theory or through disbelief – make the comedy and the drama of life. To produce a work of art a man must either know or feel that truth – even without knowing it.”

In short, what he recommends is a fidelity to one’s convictions, to one’s vision of the world (though we should know it before we write):

“Everyone must walk in the light of his own heart’s gospel. No man’s light is good to any of his fellows. That’s my creed – from beginning to end. That’s my view of life – a view that rejects all formulas dogmas and principles of other people’s making. These are only a web of illusions. We are too varied. Another man’s truth is only a dismal lie to me.”

And his other useful advice is to be careful about the creation of mystery:

“Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion”. Explicitness concerns spelling things out, it does not mean that we must rely on deliberately confusing language. On the contrary, “in letters suggestiveness itself – a great quality – must be obtained by precise expression”. There are a number of times when Conrad advises his friends by doing some close reading on a few of their sentences, and changes them to make them less obvious, but much more powerful suggestive, by adding in a perfect turn of phrase.

Conclusion

However much we may struggle at times with Conrad’s own style, and I know I do, it comes from a particular worldview, and fits that view like a glove. The dark world is depicted with a dark and flickering style. And that is what, to me, makes Conrad so great. For it is a style that has only grown more effective over the years and it is the style that is best suited to our own day, with its ambiguity, its dashed hopes, and its great uncertainty.

For readers who have no sympathy for Conrad’s writing, and for those who do, I end on an amusing quote from him about Nostromo, which he had edited lightly over ten years after it had first been published:

“A paragraph of about ten lines has been taken bodily out, for the simple reason that reading it after ten or twelve years I could find no intelligible meaning in it.”

Who has not felt that with Conrad? But who has not, at the same time, felt that even in the vaguest, the most tenebrous of phrases, there lies a suggestion of the dark forces that, like it or not, bubble underneath our world? He’s alright, Conrad, really.

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 19^th 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.