A review by jpegben
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

5.0

We live as we dream — alone. 

I love this book as much as such a thing is possible. I think the basic problem Heart of Darkness faces is it's unsparingly grim. It stares into the void and sees only emptiness. There are no promises of redemption, no reprieves, no salves.  Readers condemn it as racist, misogynistic, anachronistic, amoral, but I think the sense of discomfort and revulsion comes from the fact that it rings with the bell of truth. The pervasive darkness is not merely the darkness of night, the darkness of the tangled branches of the jungle, the darkness of civilisation in retreat. It's not the darkness of the primitive nor is it the darkness of atavistic impulses unleashed. It's a darkness, flickering and inexplicable, which lurks at the very core of human nature. The capacity we all possess to commit the unspeakable, unleash the unthinkable, become complicit in the unjustifiable:

But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be...

 
Religious traditions might describe this as evil, the descent of Man into a fallen state; Hannah Arendt described it as banal  It's sickening because it's too recognisable and too comprehensible. The thing we might call evil, whatever it is that possesses Mistah Kurtz, is shadowy. It slowly insinuates itself in one's bones. It's the latent corruption which lies within.. It's a void and not a presence. It's drawn out of us by our delusions and reflects our weaknesses and temptations. The jungle is a mirror, its "black and incomprehensible frenzy" revealing the inconceivable mysteries of one's own soul. 

HoD is a fable and Kurtz undergoes abject moral collapse. When we imagine ourselves to be noble and righteous, blind drunk on self-deception, we begin to justify anything. He becomes "a paper-machie Mephistopheles", feebly rationalising his self-abnegation as part of the colonial enterprise, the path to enlightenment.  An ivory-clad apostle of empty promises and an emptier vision.:

[The wilderness] had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.

But I think most of all - and this became increasingly clear to me on my third read - is that it's about the inadequacy and complicity of language itself. Language is both mask and mechanism. It is tenebrous, distorting and obfuscating reality. When Kurtz utters those iconic final words - "The Horror! The Horror! - he reveals the inability of language itself to break the veil. It deadens and delays, flattens the visceral and horrible into euphemism and abstraction. Few things are more dangerous than grandiosity and false eloquence because mastery of language grants mastery of an element of reality. There's that brilliant framing passage at the start of the book where the narrator meditates on Marlow and his yarns:

to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

Our experiences, especially our most profound ones, are unspeakable. Language is a translation device left wanting. As Marlow himself says, "It seems I am trying to tell you a dream—and trying to make you believe it". What are to make of the fact that viscerally felt reality might be incommunicable? I find it a daunting and deeply sobering prospect, perhaps more so than anything else this book offers. It's bleak, but in a sense I believe Conrad is right. We are alone in the ultimate sense and I think Marlow comes to understand this. 

I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was ordered I should never betray him—it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I was anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone—and to this day I don’t know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar blackness of that experience.

For me, HoD is one of the most important, influential, brilliant works of modernism and 20th century literature (even though it was published in 1899). It stands as the progenitor of an entire tradition in English-language literature, a substratum populated by Malcolm Lowry, Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee and others. Conrad's writing is stunning. Some call it turgid, but the lyricism of entire passages of this book reach the sheer expressive beauty of the greatest poetic verse. It should chill and nauseate you and if it doesn't, I fear you missed the point.