Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

[SuduNona]

About superstition, resilience in a hostile environment, unsavoury aspects of colonialism and the Ivory Trade, this book published in 1902 not only fascinates but repels. Through the narrator, Marlowe, who is new to the Belgian Congo and employment as a boat captain for The Company, we see as if observing from above, how the heat, biting insects, petty rivalries and struggles for status eat away at common decency, respect for others and justify a way of living and working with local people that abuses all human rights.

Cannibalism is so much believed that when one man dies on the boat up river, Marlowe instantly throws his body overboard to prevent it being eaten by other members of his native crew, as no food has been provided for them in the many days they had already been out.

The self imposed rites and rituals of close quarter living up river on a quest to rescue Kurtz, a successful Company ivory hunter, lay bare what remains when you take a European away from his culture and thrust him into a wild and inaccessible jungle with only his own resources to fall back on.

I was reminded very much of Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies where people become tribal, bestial and feral, turning in on themselves while criticising local people for being so. Under these circumstances, the Company men invent their own twisted codes of life and sometimes, like Kurtz, go native and are worshipped by locals while white men judge him to have gone mad.

When this book was first published it was attacked as being ‘racist’, but others such as TS Eliot Graham and George Orwell used its themes in famous novels of their own and it also inspired the Francis Ford Coppola 1979 film, Apocalypse Now.

I have lived in similar circumstances and seen people crack up in the hugeness of wild landscapes, suffer panic attacks in the vast blackness of the night and become hysterical in the endless miles of forest. I know what it is like to be unable to understand the local language, feel not part of a community but outside of it, to be seen as ghost like for my white skin and blue veins, so I readily identified with this book and found it entirely authentic and frighteningly real.

This book has stood the test of time and its issues are still as contemporary as in 1902. It challenges our perceptions of so called inferior native lives, criticises our continual assumption and consumption of under developed areas of the world. By taking us up river and stripping away layer by layer the edifices of western culture and beliefs to the point where we too are in a dazed stupor and are glad to be rescued and brought back to our familiar worlds, we are hopefully, wiser and more thoughtful about our impact. I give it 4 out of 4.

[Fran]

Duplicated see
forums.onlinebookclub.org/viewtopic.php ... f+darkness