“ Mistah Kurtz. He dead.”
-T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

He came, he saw, he conquered – and then he succumbed and died. Mistah Kurtz. An enigma, who ultimately came to signify the gloomy reality of sin, which closely lurks in the minds of mortal beings and keeps ready to pounce upon the heart and to sink it into darkness at the mere hint of viciousness. Which impatiently awaits the weak moments of vanity, false notions and fickleness to take over control and let humanity die a grief death of hopelessness; A sad departure which is at once trivial and grave. Trivial, for an opportunity wasted and grave, for the fear it raise.

Conrad once said, “The temporal world rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests notably on the idea of fidelity.”He believed that evil lies in every man and constant, unsparing efforts have to be made to keep it from taking over control. It seems difficult to interpret this context of evil. But on my part, I want to believe that that we are more likely to fall victim to our own follies. As a dear friend once said, “Evil is nothing but an excuse on the part of human beings to escape their own responsibility for the results of their own malevolence.”

Our complex minds, subjected to temptations of our own whims, fancies, lust, greed and false notions of superiority, are prone to forgetting these simple ideas and hence, taken over control by darkness, which only leaves its victim when it succeeds in defeating the very essence of being. It renders the mind hollow and catches one totally unaware by its final verdict. In the words of T.S. Eliot:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Heart of Darkness, the novella by Joseph Conrad, is essentially a multi-layered narrative. On the surface it is the adventurous story of Marlow’s search for Kurtz, who for him is a living legend. On one hand it is also a peek into the unconscious of man where darkness resides silently, and on the other, it also brings to mind the glimpses of Dante’s Inferno i.e. the descent to hell. In a very powerful manner, Conrad lays before us the story evoking subjective impressions, as the characters of his story are obscure and their tales are only half-told. Be it Kurtz, Marlow or his native help. Marlow’s search for Kurtz in itself enfolds two interpretations for me. Is it only a search for a company employee who is sick and needs to be hospitalized? Or could it be the search of a man for his ideals? Ideals, which might assure his beliefs?

For Marlow, Kurtz is an enigma, a well- intentioned man who is engaged in the cause of civilizing the natives while still sending maximum ivory to the Company. He becomes perplexed when he learns about the savage ways in which Kurtz engaged himself, like killing people and hanging their heads outside his hut. Kurtz came to the place with good intensions, but being with natives for long, he couldn’t restrain himself and succumb to their ways of life. Ways from which he could never again come out. Dying Kurtz told Marlow that his life had come to nothing and his last words to Marlow were “The horror! The horror!”


These last words send a chill down the spine and make one wonder how helpless a man can become in the trap of his own vice. The only way to evade this cage is to keep guard of one’s thoughts and to cling to the values of good. Simple ideas which are the toughest to follow.

At the Heart of What Matters

It's a long time since I read this novel.
However, its journey into the heart of darkness, not only geographically, but personally, has become one of the dominant themes of western literature and film, and probably music as well.
It might be possible for a book to match Conrad's, but I doubt whether anyone could better it.
"Apocalypse Now" more than does justice to it in the film context, though it obviously had the advantage of visuals not created solely with words on the page.
Conrad was a master of English prose style, even though it was his second language.

After a re-reading, I wrote another review here.

n  

But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad... No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.

n

We all know that this is frequently read as an indictment of colonialism but while that's definitely one of the layers in this dense book, to merely read it in that way is to do it a profound disservice. The text it reminded me of most strongly is Eliot's The Waste Land - only this is written almost twenty years earlier and before WW1. Did Eliot take his title The Hollow Men from this passage?

But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating , it echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core...

Conrad's writing is striking and his insistent motifs of light and darkness, of the river which links the Thames of the opening to the Congo, manage to stay on the right side of over-laboured. There's an interesting nested narrative structure, too, though it's Marlow who remains the most affected by his tale; Marlow who is twice described as a sitting like a Buddha or an idol, linking him proleptically and in retrospect with Kurtz. And those final 4-5 pages are a masterly piece of writing: understated, and shattering in 'the girl's' lack of comprehension. Is that hopeful? Or an instance of refusing to see the vision that Kurtz and now Marlow can never escape? I think it might depend on the mood of the reader and that there might not be the intimations of possibilities that end Eliot's own The Wasteland.

A magnificent possibly nihilist vision in beautiful, beautiful prose.

I've been re-reading this, and listening to it, for the rhythm and density of the language, the dark richness and penetrating insight into colonialism's self-destructive urges and the paper-thin veneer that so-called "civilization" paints over its own savagery.

"Ni tiene confines el infierno ni se circunscribe a un solo lugar: sino que allí donde estemos estará el infierno. Y donde esté el infierno, allí siempre estaremos." Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

Hacía más de tres años que había leído este libro y en su primera lectura no me gustó. Simplemente me pareció sin dirección alguna, algo abstracto y divagante.
Bueno, efectivamente me equivoqué. Puede que tal vez en aquel tiempo yo no había leído tantos clásicos como ahora ni tenía tampoco tan agudizada la capacidad de analizar un texto para elaborar una reseña, por eso sostengo que tanta lectura me hizo bien para volver a leer “El corazón de las tinieblas” y realmente conseguir plasmar otra visión sobre esta novela tan particular.
El relato de Charlie Marlow es en cierta forma una extensión de las propias experiencias de Joseph Conrad en el África, más precisamente en el Congo belga durante sus años de marino mercante.
Todo lo vivido le serviría para plasmar lo que narra en este libro con el agregado de permitirse soltarse y cambiar ciertos aspectos de lo que él mismo vio para darle mayor profundidad y destacar mayores elementos de ficción en la historia que nos cuenta.
A medida que Marlow comienza a navegar en un vapor remontando río arriba para llegar a Kurtz, un enigmático hombre a cargo de la explotación y el comercio del marfil terminará experimentando su propio Descenso ad ínferos de la misma manera que Ulises o Eneas o el mismísimo Dante con la salvedad de que Marlow no tendrá ningún Virgilio para guiarlo en ese, su infierno personal y no elegido, sino impuesto por el azar de su incierta travesía.
Es también digno de destacar el profundo enfoque de introspección psicológica que Conrad le imprime al personaje de Marlow, puesto que con el correr de las páginas, comenzará este a desmoronarse mentalmente a partir de su expedición.
Por otro lado, tenemos la figura fantasmal y omnipresente de Kurtz, ese hombre desconocido para Marlow que comenzará a tener una influencia total en él para terminar arrastrándolo a un colapso inevitable.
Es que, en cierto modo, Kurtz representa lo ominoso, lo poderoso y su imagen desconocida generará tanto curiosidad como un temor inherente en Marlow y esos dos elementos lo empujarán hasta querer llegar a conocer a Kurtz a toda costa.
Kurtz, durante gran parte de esta novela oficia en cierto modo, con su presencia lejana y opresiva de la misma manera que Moby Dick sobre la tripulación del Pequod en la novela de Herman Melville, ya que todos saben que el inmenso leviatán está allí, oculto, merodeando y al acecho y con el mismo efecto logra alterar los nervios de Marlow hasta que llegue el momento indicado y se enfrenten cara a cara.
Y de la misma manera, la jungla, con su poderosa atracción enloquece a Marlow. Todos esos peligros están allí, latentes y le sofocan, apenas le permiten descansar. Cualquiera puede ser el momento en que los seres primitivos que pueblan la selva arrasen con todo y Marlow lo sabe, por eso debe estar alerta, con los nervios crispados ante el peligro latente.
La novela roza también distintos aspectos relacionados a la esclavitud, el comercio ilegal de marfil y la piratería más cruenta ejercida en el continente africano durante el siglo XIX, más precisamente por Bélgica en el África. Dichas prácticas, hoy prohibidas eran moneda corriente para los conquistadores anglosajones que devastaron el continente de ébano.
Habiendo releído la novela descubro su poder de atracción, incertidumbre y curiosidad que genera tanto en el personaje principal como en el lector y es este el mejor elemento del que dispone Conrad para mantenerlo a uno atento a la lectura.
Dice Marlow en un pasaje de la novela: "Quizá toda la sabiduría, toda la verdad y toda la sinceridad están contenidas en ese lapso inapreciable de tiempo en el que cruzamos el umbral de lo invisible. ¡Tal vez!"
Indudablemente, Marlow cruzó el umbral hacia su propio infierno personal y Joseph Conrad lo transformó en un relato convincente.

This is by far the worst book I have ever read in my entire life.

You can't have an opinion on something without understanding it, so I will say nothing on this book. For the hour I spent reading this is precious time that I will never get back. RIP those 60 minutes, those beautiful, precious 3,600 seconds.

There were words on the page, and I was reading them, yet I understood nothing. Nothing at all. This book made me forget that I can read in English. It was like trying to understand Latin or something. I just ... I really couldn't. Unfortunately, I had no choice. This is one of the required readings for my AP English class, which is really unfair because not only did I not understand a word out of this book, but I also had to write an essay about it.

My last brain cell -- screaming in agony. Thank you, Joseph Conrad. Thank you for that.


0.1 star

Blast you, F. Scott Fitzgerald! After reading this book twice, I now have to read this book a third time for "after-effects" on the reader's mind!

Earlier this year, I was reading The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference. In that book, there were two articles that discussed Conrad’s influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Critics said that the influence merely related to the use of Nick Carraway as a narrator, telling a story within a story, a framing technique. In Heart of Darkness, Charles Marlow is on a ship with sailors gathered round to hear his story.

As part of my study, I was highlighting quotes, similes, metaphors, alliteration, and references to light. In Heart of Darkness, these same techniques are utilized. However, Fitzgerald wrote about how Conrad shaped his entire writing philosophy, how he crafted the story so that it would linger in the mind of the reader, that its impact would be enduring and profound.

Heart of Darkness is a bit spooky, and the framing technique isn’t implemented well. In fact, Conrad very quickly reverts back to Marlow in one short paragraph tacked onto the very end of the book. The book is also a bit difficult to read with massive run on paragraphs.

If Conrad laid the seeds, Fitzgerald was Jack and the Beanstalk, cultivating and growing those seeds into something solid and magical.

F. Scott Fitzgerald mentioned Joseph Conrad at least 19 different times in his personal letters.

Here are a few of those instances:

“I keep thinking of Conrad’s N***** of the Narcissus Preface—and I believe that the important thing about a work of fiction is that the essential reaction shall be profound and enduring.”*

*Conrad wrote: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

“The theory back of it I got from Conrad’s preface to The N*****, that the purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which leave respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.”

“The happiest thought I have is of my new novel [The Great Gatsby] – it is something really NEW in form, idea, structure—the model for the age that Joyce and Stien are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find.”

“I thought it was one purpose of critics + publishers to educate the public up to original work. The first people who risked Conrad certainly didn’t do it as a commercial venture. Did the evolution of startling work into accepted work cease twenty years ago?”

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Softcover Text – $9.68 from Blackwell's
Audiobook – Audible Credit (I think this was a freebie but honestly I have no idea-I got a bit too happy deleteing old emails)

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Ship of Fools

The narrator of the framing story tells us early on who is present on board a yacht sitting immobile in the Thames (a river of commerce and pleasure!): the Company Director, the Lawyer, the Accountant, Charlie Marlow, and the unnamed narrator himself.

The narrator seems to represent us, the audience. Marlow does the talking. The group could almost be the executive that runs a trading company, although what unites them is the bond of the sea:

"Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other’s yarns - and even convictions."

And so it is that Marlow (twice removed from Conrad, Mr. Kurtz being thrice removed) comes to tell his tale of the time he once turned fresh-water sailor for a bit.

Bent on Conquest

More used to the sea, he had to go upstream to an ivory trading post in the Congo, the Central Station, a (just one?) heart of darkness, by sailing up a river that is "fascinating - deadly - like a snake."

Ships sailed to Africa and elsewhere once, bent on conquest:

"Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him - all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.

"There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination - you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

For all the romance of empire, it was heartless and brutal:

"They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness."

Perhaps they were equally blind to their own darkness?



Conquerors and Colonists

Marlow differentiates between conquerors and colonists. But he also sees his own group as different from past colonists:

"Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency - the devotion to efficiency."

The first adventurers and settlers were often brutal:

"Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame...bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire…the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires."

Now, more modern colonists were supposedly building businesses.

Slightly Flatter Noses

It's at this point that Marlow makes his most revealing comment, at least one that establishes a context for the rest of his story:

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."

This is perhaps one answer to charges that Conrad (or at least Marlow) is somehow racist. He explains empire and colonialism in terms of misappropriation of the property of other races.

No Sentimental Pretence

On the other hand, Marlow suggests that it (or something) might be justifiable in some circumstances:

"What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to."

So, what is justifiable, and what is it exactly that might justify it?

Is he appealing to some greater authority? Is it God? Religion? Civilisation? Trade and commerce? Capitalism? Improvement?




Savages and Scoundrels

Marlow frequently refers to negroes, niggers, half-castes, savages, cannibals, and scoundrels.

What can be inferred from this? At one time, he even refers to himself as being "savage" with hunger. There's a sense in which the scarcity of food, the desperation of subsistence living makes all people, even white colonists, desperate. They could even be savage with greed.

Still, he assesses the Congolese honestly: "Fine fellows - cannibals - in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them."

Marlow recognises that they are "not inhuman". One was "an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler."

Stately and Superb

They are capable of improvement, even if they have a different sense of time, no concept of change and progress:

"They still belonged to the beginnings of time - had no inherited experience to teach them as it were."

They still did things the same way they had always done. From their point of view, there was no need to change, let alone any need for improvement.

Equally, the word "savage" isn't always pejorative (etymologically, it derives from a word for a wood or forest). Marlow says of Kurtz' mistress:

"She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress."

A savage could be magnificent, stately, noble, superb.

They didn't need to be improved in order to make deliberate progress.

They just happened to live in the untamed wilderness, in the wood, in the forest, in the jungle.

Fantastic Invasion

It's time we met Mr. Kurtz himself.

Like everybody else, Kurtz was in the Congo to make as much money as quickly as possible and get out: "I had immense plans." There was no unselfish belief in an idea worth bowing down before.

Only, the Congo changed him:

"...the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core…"

Hollow Man

So, apparently, as T.S. Eliot would later acknowledge, Western Man is hollow. Yet, for a while, the darkness of Africa allowed Kurtz to rise above his nothingness:

"He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings— we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him."

He had become a Nietzschean Superman in the wilderness. Yet how was that different from madness?

"His soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.

"I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself."

But Which Brutes?

For all the talk of savagery, it is the Europeans who are un-grounded, here and at home.

In his madness, Kurtz writes "Exterminate all the brutes!" and famously declares to Marlow, "The horror! The horror!"

Yet, by this time, it's arguable that he has turned around and is commenting on European Man, ostensibly Civilised Man, and the underlying brutality of his delusions, not the "savages" around him.

Bent on improving others, he has discovered he is the one most in need of improvement. But he might also have realised that it's European brutes who are most in need of extermination.



Artist: Matt Kish, illustration of "Heart of Darkness", page 085
http://www.spudd64.com/hod2_codes/hod...


Something to Say

It's left for Marlow to judge Kurtz:

"This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up - he had judged. ‘The horror!’

"He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth - the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best - a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things - even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot."

Just as Kurtz looked into the universe, he saw himself.

And so, later, inevitably, Marlow learns that "Mistah Kurtz - he dead."

Some Knowledge of Your Self

Now, for Marlow, home again, life is conformist, grey, deluded, pretentious, inauthentic and insincere.

On the Thames, finally, at the conclusion of Marlow's tale, no longer idle, the yacht seems to resume its course "into the heart of an immense darkness".

The heart of darkness is ours. Not Africa's, not the savages'. It isn't the darkness of the wilderness. It's the darkness of the self. Kurtz just happened to confront his in the wilderness, in the midst of the incomprehensible. However, the incomprehensible is just as much inside as outside.

"Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself."



"Mistah Kurtz - he dead"

"Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men"

T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men".

Like contemporaries Haggard and Melville, Joseph Conrad lived the adventures he wrote. He left his native Ukraine to escape the political persecution of his family and became a merchant marine in France, sailing to the West Indies and gun-running for a failed Spanish coup. Soon after, he learned English and became a british citizen, eventually attaining the position of Master Mariner. Had his story ended there, he might have become merely a footnote in history: a successful seaman and minor writer of romantic adventures.

Instead, he took a fateful steamship voyage into deepest Africa, an experience which forever changed him. Like the protagonist of the book which his journey inspired, Conrad found horror deep in the jungles. He witnessed the cruel depth of mankind, and not in the barbaric tribes, but in the colonial whites who ruled them. Far from civilization or law, these men became utter tyrants, mad with power and answerable to no one.

Having lived under repressive colonial forces in his own troubled Ukraine, Conrad's deconstruction of this human subjugation was both sympathetic and satirical. Apparently unable to detect Conrad's sarcasm, Chinua Achebe accused him of the most profound racism. Doubtless, he was tired of his continent being defined in literature by an outsider. Why Achebe then chose to write his own, much more hopeless, racist, and sarcastic book in an attempt to replace Conrad's, it is difficult to say.

When Conrad finally emerged from Africa, he was a different man. He said of the experience that it forced him to cease simply living, like an animal might; instead he found himself saddled with a profound self-awareness. As any writer can tell you, only two things issue from inescapable self-awareness: pain and art.

Conrad's writings took a darker turn, resulting in his most contentious and influential work, 'The Heart of Darkness'. While his other stories are not without death and pain, they tend towards lighter fare, none quite reaching its inexorable brooding. Doubtless this is why it garners the most attention, dealing as it does with messy issues like race, nation, and death. The author's literary catharsis leaves us raw and shocked, but then it was always Cornad's intention to use writing as a means to share real experiences with his reader.

Though often compared to other adventure fiction of the era, such as Stevenson's or Haggard's, like Melville, Conrad transcends his genre. His tight pacing and evocative, poetic prose help to elevate all of his stories, and here, his language is bolstered by an overriding, passionate, personal message. There is an ever-present thread of philosophy throughout all of Conrad's works, but rarely is it as naked and powerful.

In some ways, the great interest paid to 'Heart of Darkness' is unfortunate, as it tends to ignore the rest of his varied and masterfully-constructed oeuvre, but the vast swathes praise and criticism are not misplaced: it is a Great Book.

"I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What was the next definition I was to hear?" Europeans operating at the centre of empire—the heart of darkness—understood the horror of their enterprise. They latched onto any euphemism to absolve their guilt. Yet at death, they judged themselves accurately—they were participants in a barbarous and uncivilised machine. However, the benefactors of empire, often those once removed from the horror, wholeheartedly believed in its goodness. They believed any utterance confirming this worldview—even if it were a lie. They were complicit. Joseph Conrad captures these truths poignantly in this book.

It was a breathtaking read. There are few books which make such a powerful impression as 'Heart of darkness' does. Written more than a century ago, the book and its undying theme hold just as much significance even today. Intense and compelling, it looks into the darkest recesses of human nature. Conrad takes the reader through a horrific tale in a very gripping voice.

I couldn't say enough about Conrad's mastery of prose. Not a single word is out of place. Among several things, I liked Marlow expressing his difficulty in sharing his experiences with his listeners and his comments on insignificance of some of the dialogue exchanged aloud between him and Kurtz. The bond between the two was much deeper. Whatever words he uses to describe them, no one can really understand in full measure what he had been through. In Marlow's words:

". . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone. . . ."

This was the first time I read this book which doesn't seem enough to fathom its profound meaning and all the symbolism. It deserves multiple reads.

When the Thin Veneer Is Stripped Away

Colonial powers have always intervened, occupied, and suppressed the inhabitants in weaker countries for their own reasons, whether it be for gold, oil, saving souls, lebensraum, bases, or "regime change". Their actions, even the massacres and destruction, were always "for the good of the people". No country ever lacked a good excuse to hide their true motives. People in the metropolitan countries have always gone about their business with no inkling of the realities being perpetuated in their names across the seas or over the mountains. The Belgians in the Congo, between 1880 and 1908, created a colonial nightmare, one of the worst that ever existed. Conrad traveled there. HEART OF DARKNESS is a slightly-disguised version of his own experiences, one of the most powerful indictments of European behavior beyond public scrutiny that was ever written. The book is suffused with the feeling of abomination, of unspeakable cruelties being perpetuated by men so banal or greedy that they hardly perceived what they were doing. They talked of philanthropy, but dreamed only of making money and getting out. European behavior in Congo was all a pretence. Shall we talk of Conrad's powerless disgust? How many writers have referred to Conrad's description of a French ship shelling the bush, shooting up the jungle, not even knowing if anyone was there? A senseless act of men who understood nothing of Africa, nothing of themselves. As Marlow, the narrator, tells of the bureaucratic preparations for his voyage to Congo, the reader begins to sink into the pit of No Meaning---the senseless procedures, the absurd warnings and tests. The rusted, crumbling railways in Congo that had never worked, the useless holes, the dumps of destroyed or wasted equipment symbolize, like the endless heaps of slaughtered buffalo on the American plains, the incomprehension of Westerners as to how to deal with an unfamiliar society and environment. Conrad acknowledges early on that he "would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly."

As Marlow proceeds up the river, he comes closer to the world of Kurtz, a mysterious man who had given himself over to elemental passions---violence, greed, cruelty, sex---leaving the world of his past far behind. He is at home there, in the heart of darkness---not Africa, the unjustly-named Dark Continent---but that dark pit that exists in every human's soul. Kurtz had "gone over", allowing barbarous instinct to surface, treasuring them, savoring them. He had gone mad. Conrad writes not only of the madness of Europeans in Congo in the last years of the 19th century, but of the savagery so close to the surface in people of all nations. Do I have to make a list here?
We have seen enough in our own days. Still, Conrad does not condemn Kurtz as the worst, just as a dictator is not the only guilty party in his regime. Kurtz, was at least, true to his nature, while other whites remained evil-doing hypocrites who lived in pretence, refusing to recognize Africans as fellow humans. The last scene brings home Conrad's feeling more than any other and might be familiar to many people who have tried and failed to explain times and places beyond the ken of listeners. Kurtz's intended bride, back in Belgium, is sure that she understood the man better than anyone, saying to Marlow that her fiancé was "a good, talented man". She has not, cannot have, any inkling of his true nature and Marlow cannot get himself to tell her. Asked for Kurtz' last words, which were "The horror, the horror", he reports that Kurtz had murmured her name. And with that, we truly understand that Marlow had looked into the heart of darkness. One of the handful of truly classic works of world literature. It is not so much "the plot", but the style of writing and the psychological depth. You can't afford to miss it.