Heart of Darkness was not required reading in any of my English classes and frankly, seemed like a huge bummer, so I never got around to it. But my husband was a big fan, so 17 years later, here I am, catching up.
It was not what I expected.
Plot: Charles Marlow is looking to make a name for himself as an explorer uncovering new lands, and so, this being the colonial period, he secures an assignment for himself in Africa. He is warned by a friendly physician that this typically ends ill for those who go, either physically or mentally, but who has ever listened to a warning like that? So he goes, and he is at once struck by the horror of the situation. The way the local people are treated as disposable “shadows”, the environmental destruction, even his fellow colonizers, seemingly in charge and yet trapped in a liminal space because they can’t do the things they were sent there to do, nor can they leave. And among the chaos and confusion and horror, Marlow still has a job to do, and most of these tragedies become little more than yet more irritants getting in his way. Shenanigans ensue.
So, the first thing I was struck by was how funny Marlow is. He is deeply self aware and sees both the world around him and his own transformation with completely clear eyes. Even as he delves deeper into the continent and loses more and more of the compassionate, curious parts of him, he faces every situation and his reactions to it with an almost absurdist calm. There is a scene where he and a fellow white man are “leading” a group of 60 black men through the interior (they’re carrying all the stuff), and he finds himself frustrated with their lack of obedience. They’re supposedly cannibals and he figures they haven’t had anything to eat in days because the rhino corpse they brought with them went rancid and they haven’t been able to hunt anything else. Some ran away but what he seems more confused by, even as he yells at them in a language he knows they do not understand, is why they don’t just overpower him and his useless companion, instead of literally carrying the dude because he keeps passing out from the heat. It’s not funny per se, but I laughed anyway.
I was also struck by how, at least before the heat and the deprivation and the frustration got to him, Marlow was able to see these people who were so alien to him that there was literally no way for them to bridge the gap of understanding in a nevertheless kind light. He clearly ached for how the workers were treated. The way he describes the mines, surrounded by the dead and the nearly dead, is probably the most compelling part of the story for me. I like to think we’re all curious and compassionate by nature, and Heart of Darkness is the exploration of how quickly we can become disinterested and cruel if the circumstances are right. That seems like a timely reminder right now.
On reading, what I was perhaps most surprised by is how little this Kurtz dude actually plays into the story. He’s little more than a human mcguffin, a thing for Marlow to head towards. Sure, he’s apparently a divisive character worshipped by a small group of people, but we never really get much of a sense of how any of that came to be or what any of it meant. We know that he either thinks of Africans as in need of civilizing or extermination, but I don’t think that’s what he was telling his followers, nor was he, it seems, in any position to act on much of those opinions. My only takeaway from him, given that I didn’t get the sense that he and his “followers” really shared much in the way of language anyway, is that when a person wants to be led, it matters so little what a purported leader might say that they don’t even need to understand the words. It’s all vibes, man.
As an aside, if you’re looking to revisit this, there is an audiobook narrated by Scott Brick that really does the material justice.