"Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad

                                                   

               "Heart of Darkness" is considered to be Joseph Conrad’s major work in his philosophy. The novella has three sections, with much of the things fast forwarded in between. The story is being narrated by a certain Mr. Marlow while sitting on a ship by the banks of the Thames. Mr. Marlow has been a sailor for most of his life, but a different one at that, for he had dared to explore the realms beyond the sea too, making him an adventurer of sorts. He narrates his experience of finding the most enchanting personality of his life, Mr. Kurtz, somewhere in the hearts of the unexplored darkness in Africa (allegedly Congo). The timeline of the story is of the colonial era (published in 1899), and Africa was being plundered for its ivory.

                    

               The novella centres on the efforts of Marlow, Conrad's alter ego, to travel up an unnamed African river on behalf of his employer in order to bring back a rogue ivory trader, Mr Kurtz. Kurtz's reputation precedes him: "He is a prodigy… an emissary of pity and science and progress." Yet as Marlow gets closer to Kurtz, there is the growing suggestion that he has in some way become corrupted and descended into savagery.

               Mr. Kurtz is described as an enigma, a ‘universal genius’, who had been sending large amount of ivory from the hearts of this area to the base station while other station masters were floundering, when they were not dying, or turning senile from the hostile environment. The entire expedition is much for one purpose, that is of finding Mr. Kurtz; while for Marlow - to talk to this enigma is the purpose of this ordeal (not that he had not asked for it). Kurtz is the ever pervading background of everything in this plot, and yet, his active role is too little, at least, too little in description to give the reader a fair idea of his enigma. Marlow hates him, and then he doesn’t. Marlow becomes loyal to Kurtz, even to the dead Kurtz, and there seems to be little reason in it other than that he sympathized with Kurtz and at the same time loathed the general white lot present with him, whom he refers to as the ‘pilgrims’, seekers of ivory.

               Marlow recounts the expedition with such eloquence as to spare the reader, upon first glancing, the true gravity of the situation; we believe Kurtz, or the natives, or the collision of cultures embodied by the juxtaposition of the two, or Empire itself to be the enemy, and they are, except all really turn out to be secondary to that infernal, all-swallowing saturation of anxiety that drives men mad, that drives the beating of Conrad’s Cimmerian heart, a beating which can scarcely be heard beneath the drums and Marlow’s loquaciousness, but assuredly goes on, just as our own heartbeats, hiding just beneath the surface.

                Kurtz was not necessarily an evil man. He did not rise to rank of demigod-cum-warlord for the love of Empire; he succumbed to the constant pressures of his environs, leveraging his formidable societal advantages into corporeal ones. Whipsawed by greed and hubris, he eventually faded away, an emaciated Wendigo who, by the time Marlow confronts him before the forest, trying to break the spell, is “not much heavier than a child.” The only power Kurtz has left, the last thin shreds of his Hermetic influences, lies in the place quotation marks traditionally signify: his voice.

                Overall, the book deals with ‘the heart of darkness’ which, appears to be the listlessness that can sometimes come to pervade our lives. Further, it deals with how most of us are lucky enough to not be confronted by it regularly, for the imbroglio of anxiety, fear, confusion, shortsightedness and shaky faith can wreak havoc on us and what might happen, if we embraced that struggle. We might become a Kurtz but not without paying the price, as Kurtz did with his life tossed away to sickness and disease. The book lays much emphasis on the necessity and power of faith, in at least something, as a guiding force and a source of strength in such moments.

               It is tempting to see Heart of Darkness as a masterfully constructed parable on human nature (witness Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation, in which the action was transposed to south-east Asia) but as historian Adam Hochschild has pointed out in King Leopold's Ghost, about the king's rape of the Congo, Conrad himself was quite clear that it was based on specific events he had witnessed, saying it was "experience… pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case". Despite his protestations, this is undeniably an invaluable historical document offering a glimpse into the horrific human consequences of the imperial powers' scramble for Africa as much as it is a compelling tale.