Heart of Darkness

Just read through Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness over two nights this week. For those who aren’t in the know, this is a longish short story or a shortish novel written in 1899 upon which Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was famously based. Of course, Coppola updated it to the Vietnam War era. The action originally takes place in the African Congo at the close of the 19th century. Instead of assassinating renegade Colonel Kurtz, who’s gone native and insane, Conrad’s protagonist must find out for an ivory exporting company what’s happened to Mr. Kurtz, who’s gone native and insane.

I think. I read the story, but I am not quite sure what I read.

The same was true the first time I visited the novella, in the late 80s. It was an odd read back then, as if the prose was reading me. I was purely a passive passenger on this trip, and the words flew through me off the page. It was as if I was not consciously doing the reading; the work was, well, working its way through me, I a rat on a treadmill, and damned me if I wanted to slow down or try to comprehend what was unfolding in this imaginal realm.

Perhaps a re-read, now, nearly twenty-five years later, would allow me a mastery of the text, or at least a toe-hold upon it. Twenty-five years more mature, older, wiser, and if not wiser, certainly more experienced.

I was wrong. Same thing happened.

Now, this is not a unique occurrence for me. I get a similar effect reading H.P. Lovecraft. I’d love to read every single thing that author wrote, but whenever I crack open a Lovecraftian work, the same sensation of being read to instead of doing the reading overfills me. Now, Conrad is not Lovecraft (vice versa, rather, chronologically speaking), despite the fascination with both with, uh, darker things of the soul. But there is a similarity in the writing style between Heart of Darkness and any given Lovecraft work that I can’t quite pin down yet I know is there.

Is it the ponderousness of the prose? The characters who speak unlike real human beings speak? The run-on sentences and paragraphs that twist and turn back upon themselves, or else leap-frog over dead-ends in these literary labyrinths into completely different and unrelated channels? Is it the careful analysis of a page-sized chunk of exposition, once, twice, thrice, and the horrible realization that I had no clue what I just read, what messages the author was trying to place in my mind? Was it characters declaiming, “the horror! the horror!” and I, gentle reader that I fancy myself to be, having absolutely no knowledge of horror save my own experiential?

All this, and more.

Ergo, my verdict on Heart of Darkness: to pull out a trite 21st-century-ism – I. Don’t. Get. It.

I have an omnibus of Conrad’s work that feels good in my dry but not calloused hands. There are a couple of short stories plus a few essays that appeal to me, at least from their titles from the Table of Contents. To date I have read no other Joseph Conrad, so Heart of Darkness may be the exception and not the rule to his writing. So, open-minded voyager I am, I will give him another chance. There’s an essay on the Warrior-Soul I may crack, and there’s a famous story of his, The N-word of the Narcissus, which I think I’ll put on the list for a summer read.

So, though I won’t write off Conrad the writer, I give Heart of Darkness, this “great” work of literature, a C-minus. That is, if you’ll allow these few hundred words of hubris from me, a nobody.

(PS – when someone like T. S. Eliot includes fragments from this work in his epic poetry, it makes my skin crawl to type the above paragraph.)