I know as an English major I am supposed to find this work brilliant and important, but I just don't. I hate it. I hated it the first time I read it, the second time I read it, AND the third time I read it.

No comment.

I really like the metaphor Joseph sets up of going to the heart of darkness being a drip to the dark jungles of Africa and finding a madman at the heart. He is charismatic and has basically become the leader of a tribe and using them for promoting violence for his own end. Stealing valuable resources.

So many modern stories use this outline to tell the horrors that happen in colonization still. It really is a powerful story.

BUT, I don't think his writing style is very good. I mean, his ideas are great and he has some great lines, but the whole tale is told by the narrator, Marlow and he is telling someone about to go on a voyage this story from the past when he went into the Congo. It's all a story told. Almost all the paragraphs are very long One paragraph could be a whole page long.

In one paragraph, he might have 3 or 4 people speaking and quoting them in the same paragraph and it is difficult to understand who is doing the talking. I mean we know who is talking, but I mean who is saying what in the paragraph. I'm not saying it's the best story, but Anne Rice's 'Interview with a Vampire' does a great job with this way of writing someone who is telling you a story. You can understand what the character is saying and who is talking. I like the way Anne used double quotes and she broke up the paragraphs like someone was speaking. She also comes back to the present and we see what's going on with the person and interviewer before going back to the story to remember the device being used. Joseph has a great story here, but I really don't like his writing style.

I'm not saying my writing is great, but I do read extensively. It was kind of a mess the way he did it. I say there is still brilliance in his writing and the layers he puts in the story. I don't want to take away from that, but his paragraph structure is a mess. I have been told by many people and heard professional writers say that you want to see as much blank page as words on the page, because that means there is dialogue. Looking at the page, it was almost all words. The average page has 2-3 paragraphs.

Anyway, I was going to give this 3 stars or less, but I did discuss this with my dad and he reminded me how much is actually in the book. I had to give it more stars. I still have the problem with his writing structure, but oh well.

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

Much shorter than I had expected from this often studied classic fictionalisation of Conrad's time in the Congo DR, or Belgian Congo as it was unfortunate to be at the time. Leopold was a ego maniacal madman at whose hands the Congo became a plaything to be exploited for his person wealth - but this is really just the background to the part of history the story takes place in.

The writing I found to wonderfully descriptive. I read some reviews by people who dismissed it as poorly written and unnecessarily complex. I think there is a difference between reading of your own free will, and having to read a book for University, and most people bemoaning the difficultly of reading it (it is 101 pages long! (although my copy has ridiculously small print)) are students.

There is simply no point in plot descriptions, there are hundreds of reviews to give that.
Here are a few sentences I enjoyed:

The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. describing the Thames, P2.

Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. in the upper Congo river, P43.

There are only a couple of points I would like to add to this excellent review here - http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... - and even then, mostly nothing of substance. It is twenty odd years since I first read this and didn’t read it again this time, but listened to Kenneth Branagh’s remarkable reading of it. It is hard to imagine this book was written by someone whose first language wasn’t English.

The Company is fascinating in this book – how if you want to create a situation that is blind to the evil it is committing you bureaucratize it. The banality of evil so often comes with printed forms and regulations and far too often we become so maddened by these that we completely ignore the remarkable inhumanity all this supports.

This is a book that refuses to let you forget that it is a remembered dialogue – most of the book is paragraph after paragraph in quotation. But it ends with this ambiguous statement.

Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

And here I am mostly interested in the Director. Here we get to see the response of two people to this most remarkable tale. We have the narrator who has lovingly been able to reproduce it word perfect after one hearing and we have the Director who is, I assume, somewhat annoyed at having missed the first ebb and is keen to be getting on his way. There is no accounting for what will touch our soul and what will resinate.

The most interesting part of the book for me is the Russian. Here you have a man who can look at all of Kurtz’s excesses – and they have been many, and clearly not just the heads on poles all facing his house – a man who Kurtz had threatened to kill, but still someone who considers him godlike. We do so love our heroes to be terrifying. Even Obama in our day with his drones, I’m afraid.

This is a remarkable book. It seems remarkable too that the lines that are remembered most from this, ‘The horror! The horror!’ and 'Mistah Kurtz—he dead.' Might be remembered over say, 'Exterminate all the brutes!’ Perhaps we can only take just so much darkness.

“ 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.

(Required reading for English class)
I found this book really hard to get into. Conrad's writing is very concise and I never really felt like I was given time to get into it because the novel was so short. I liked how it was all a spoken story with interjections from the audience popping up at random times, but I didn't find the story very engaging. It's rare for required reading to catch my attention and stay with me and this was one of those books that just fell flat. Also, after reading this for English class after Beloved, one of my favorite works that we read this year, almost anything would have done so.

I must have picked this book up to read and put it down three times out of sheer boredom! By the fourth time I picked it back up and powered through somehow. What a tedious bore! Why this book is considered a classic is beyond me.

First of all, get this straight: n  Heart of Darknessn is one of those classics that you have to have read if you want to consider yourself a well-educated adult.

    Having watched n  Apocalypse Nown doesn’t count — if anything, it ups the ante, since that means you have to think about the similarities and differences (for example, contrast and compare the U.S. involvement in Vietnam with the Belgian rule over the Congo. Actually quite an intriguing and provocative question.).

    The prose can feel turgid, but perhaps it may help to know that English was Conrad’s third language. His second was French, and that lends a lyric quality which, once accomodated, can draw you into the mood of the story. Once you get used to that, this is a very easy book to read — tremendously shorter than n  Moby-Dickn, for instance.

    Even though it is so much easier to read, this short novel shares with Moby-Dick the distressing (for many of us) fact that it is heavily symbolic. That is the reason it has such an important place in the literary canon: it is very densely packed with philosophical questions that fundamentally can’t be answered.

    Frankly, I was trained as an engineer, and have to struggle even to attempt to peer through the veils of meaning. I’m envious of the students in the Columbia class that David Denby portrays in his 1995 article in the New Yorker, The Trouble with “Heart of Darkness”. I wish I had been guided into this deep way of perceiving literature — or music, or art, or life itself.

    But most of us don’t have that opportunity. The alternate solution I chose: when I checked this out of the library, I also grabbed the Cliff’s Notes. I read the story, then thought about it, then finally read the Study Guide to see what I’d missed. What I found there was enough to trigger my curiosity, so I also searched the internet for more.

    And there was quite a bit. Like, the nature of a framed narrative: the actual narrator in Heart of Darkness isn’t Marlow, but some unnamed guy listening to Marlow talk. And he stands in for us, the readers, such as when he has a pleasant perspective on the beautiful sunset of the Thames at the beginning of the story, then at the end he has been spooked and sees it as leading “into the heart of an immense darkness”, much as the Congo does in the story

    That symbolic use of “darkness” is a great example of what makes this book, and others like it, so great. The “immense darkness” is simultaneously the real unknown of the jungle, as well as the symbolic “darkness” that hides within the human heart. But then it is also something that pervades society — so the narrator has been made aware that London, just upstream, really should be understood to be as frightening as the Congo. And the reader should understand that, too.

    The book is full of that kind of symbolism. When Conrad was writing, a much larger portion of the reading public would have received a “classical” liberal arts education and would have perceived that aspect of the book easier than most of us do today. Yeah, the book is so dense with this kind of symbolism, it can be an effort. But that is precisely the element that made the book a stunning success when it was written. T.S. Elliot, for example, referred to it heavily in his second-most-famous poem, The Hollow Men — the poem’s epigraph makes it explicit: Mistah Kurtz- he dead. (For more of that connection, see this short answer at stackexchange, or track down a copy of this academic analysis. An annotated copy of Elliot’s poem here can be edifying, too.)

    Not all of the symbolism worked for me. For example, my initial take on how ‘evil’ was dealt with seemed anachronistic and naive. Actually, it felt a lot like Wilde’s n  The Picture of Dorian Grayn. In both books, the main character has inadvertently received license to fully explore their evil inclinations without the normal societal consequences, and yet they both pay the ultimate penalty for their lack of restraint. But my perspective on evil was long ago captured by Hannah Arendt’s conclusion after analyzing Eichmann: evil is a “banal” absence of empathy; it isn’t some malevolent devilish force striving to seduce and corrupt us. Certainly, there are evil acts and evil people, but nothing mystical or spiritual that captures and enslaves, much less transforms us from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.

    Golding’s n  Lord of the Fliesn examined the question, but did it in a much more modern manner. (I strongly recommend it.) If people aren’t reminded by the constraints of civilization to treat others with respect, then sometimes they’ll become brutal and barbaric. But is their soul somehow becoming sick and corrupted? The question no longer resonates.

    Even Conrad actually didn’t seem too clear on that question. These two quotes are both from Heart of Darkness — don’t they seem implicitly contradictory?:

    The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

  and

    Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
    ‘The horror! The horror!’

    The former denies any supernatural origin for evil, but the latter alludes to the tragic results of a Faustian bargain — Marlowe sold his soul to see what mortals should never witness.

    After pondering the study guide, I could see the allegorical content better. The mystical side of Heart of Darkness isn’t the only thing going on. Like the kids rescued from the island after Lord of the Flies, Marlow will forever be cognizant of how fragile civilized behavior can be, and how easily some slip into brutality — even those that have excellent motives and apparently unblemished characters. This is why he tells this as a cautionary tale to his shipmates on the Thames.

    Marlow also received a clear lesson on hypocrisy. I hadn’t seen how deeply “The Company” represented European hypocrisy. Obviously “The Company” was purely exploitative and thus typical of imperialism, but in subtle ways Conrad made it not just typical but allegorically representative. One example Cliff mentions scares me just a bit: in the offices of “The Company” in Brussels, Marlow notices the strange sight of two women knitting black wool. Conrad provides no explanation. But recall your mythology: the Fates spun out the thread that measured the lives of mere mortals. In the story, these are represented as women who work for “The Company”, which has ultimate power over the mere mortals in Africa. That’s pretty impressive: Conrad tosses in a tiny aside that references Greek (or Roman or Germanic) mythology and ties it both to imperialism, as well as to the power that modern society has handed to corporations, and quietly walks away from it. How many other little tidbits are buried in this short book? Frankly, it seems kind of spooky.

    The study guide also helped me understand what had been a major frustration of the book. I thought that Conrad had skipped over too much, leaving crucial information unstated. Between Marlow’s “rescue” of Kurtz and Kurtz’s death there are only a few pages in the story, but they imply that the two had significant conversations that greatly impressed Marlow, that left Marlow awestruck at what Kurtz had intended, had survived, and had understood. These impressions are what “broke” Marlow, but we are never informed of even the gist of those conversations.

    But Marlow isn’t our narrator: he is on the deck of a ship, struggling to put into words a story that still torments him years after the events had passed. Sometimes he can’t convey what we want to know; he stumbles, he expresses himself poorly. The narrator is like us, just listening and trying to make sense out of it, and gradually being persuaded of the horrors that must have transpired. (To return to a comparison with Apocalypse Now: at the end of the book, the narrator gazes “into the heart of an immense darkness”, sensing that the evil he’d been told of could lie anywhere. Watching the movie, there’s no narrator to murmur about that.)

    •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

Addendum:
    Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was written in 1899. A critical event which allowed the tragedy portrayed here was the Berlin Conference of 1884 (wikipedia), where the lines that divided up Africa were tidied up and shuffled a bit by the white men of Europe (no Africans were invited). The BBC4 radio programme In Our Time covered the conference on 31 October 2013. Listen to it streaming here, or download it as an MP3 here. Forty-three minutes of erudition will invigorate your synapses.

    Oh, if you liked that In Our Time episode, here is the one they did on the book itself (mp3).
­

“We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

Marlow is not just a narrator or an alter ego of Conrad, but a universal everyman, timeless. And that, to me, is the greatest appeal of this book, it is timeless.

“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

The scene of Marlow sitting Buddha like as the Thames dreams into slow darkness and his voice takes on a disembodied, spiritual cast is iconic and Conrad's vision of history repeating itself as wicked and despotic civilization "discovers" it's ancient cousin is a ubiquitous theme in Conrad's work and one that is masterfully created here. As the Britons and Picts were to the Romans, so to are the Africans to the Europeans and Conrad has demonstrated his timely message.

“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.”

A search for hidden meaning, a quest, mysteries solved and others unanswered, self realization and epiphany. Conrad winds it all up in this classic.

“The horror! The horror!”

***** 2018 re-read

I think there was a recent poll about what was the book you have re-read the most. No doubt for me, it’s this one, read it a couple times in HS, few times in college and innumerable times since. Looks like this is the third in the Goodreads era.

As a scholar I have to be concise and methodical, precisely citing and referencing to a given treatise or authority. When reading for pleasure, I’m much more intuitive, allowing my mind to wander and to muse and to collect abstract thoughts and make obscure connections as I read.

This time around I payed more attention to this story as it was written, a tale told in the gathering darkness near the mouth of the Thames, Marlow’s voice a disembodied narration spinning an account of a time before but one that is ageless nonetheless. The connection he makes between the Romans coming up the Thames and the Westerners traveling up the Congo is provocative and somber.

As always, this is a story about Kurtz and his voice, that eloquent but hollow voice in the darkness, a civilized man gone native, but more than that, a traveler shedding away the trappings of an enlightened age and looking into the abyss.

Whether the natives are dark skinned or white with blue tattoos, the image is the same and the message is all the more haunting.

On a short list of my favorites or all time, this may be my favorite.

*** 2022 reread

I recently rewatched Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant 1979 film Apocalypse Now starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen and so decided it was past time to reread one of my all time favorite books. This is a short work, a novella really, so I should reread this annually.

This time I was confronted with the twin specters of a disembodied voice – the first, our narrator, Marlow, sitting Buddha like on the Thames estuary, the second Kurtz’ voice as remembered by Marlow – and it occurred to me that Conrad may have been alluding to the Gospel of John, as it begins “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Here, Conrad describes for us a Voice, crying out in the wilderness (like John the Baptist) and the word “wilderness” is used frequently rather that the more accurate “jungle” as this is set in the Congo.

I also spent more time considering the end of the work, after Kurtz, when Marlow is back in Europe and his strange eulogy about the fallen man, “Mr. Kurtz, he dead”.

Kurtz was the product of Europe, “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” and so Kurtz embodies the empirical lusts of the “crusading” Europeans in Africa (and historically to the Romans in ancient Britain) though Kurtz shrugs off the moralistic trappings of good intentions. Kurtz’s written statement, “Exterminate all the brutes” is evocative of his apocryphal dying declaration, “the horror”.

A must read.

I still don't know what I read here.

I finished this book with one sort-of word spinning around in my head... "eh?"

I read the whole book. Every page, every sentence, every word. And I couldn't tell you what it was about. I think I must have read more challenging books than this - Ulysses, Swann's Way, etc. - but none has left me so thoroughly clueless.