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jenkepesh 's review for:
Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Classics are worth reading for many reasons--the language endures, the depth endures--but also because of the opportunity to reflect upon the way that society has changed. Conrad wrote "Heart of Darkness," condemning the colonialism that raped Africa as an inevitable poisoning of the national/Continental soul as evinced by a single soul's poisoning. But even as he was writing this bitter accusation, he was still part of his own time, and Marlowe, the African steamboat captain who recounts his trip into the deep, "untamed" parts of Africa, describes the Europeans as cold and rapacious but "civilized," whereas his descriptions of Africans all border on--or cross the line into outright--racial contempt. It is not simply the narrator's persona; it is Conrad's perception as well. (The argument rages back and forth about whether Conrad was himself racist or deliberately reflecting racism. I think he was at least somewhat racist.) But another aspect of the whole story that was acceptable to Conrad and his contemporaries but which is deeply offensive to modern sensibilities is the trade in ivory. A few decades ago, a reader might have discussed the racism, the European character, the issues of finding and losing oneself at the end of civilization. But ivory is simply the prized good in this book; in recent years, this may be of equal reprehensibility, or even more, as we realize how the slaughter was carried out on such a grand scale and how we are now fighting for a chance to save African elephants from extinction due to this trade.