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McMinn and Cheese @[email protected] · 2026-06-22 · 11:44 UTC

Let’s talk about Heart of Darkness: part two, the reading of it

Heart of Darkness is just over 38,000 words long, which puts it in company with such classics as J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country and The Great Gatsby. One of those short-but-great works of literature, an antidote to all the doorstoppers.

That said, it’s still a dense text, written in the 19th century, and one of its chief characteristics is long, long paragraphs. Paragraphs so long that you’re in danger of losing your way and having to start over—exactly as if you were a steamship captain struggling up a dangerous river, against the current, with a ratty old boat that might fall apart on you at any minute.

But you’re in safe hands. Conrad is in control. His sentences may flow freely, and his pages are dense with language, but he’ll get you there.

In the early pages, as Marlow and the frame narrator and the others sit on the deck of the Nellie on the Thames, waiting for the tide to turn, there is mention of the Roman conquest of Britain. There’s a fanciful reference to the first Roman galley to be rowed up the Thames, with wild people on the shore and unknown dangers ahead. And here is the theme, and the reason why readers shouldn’t get hung up on words like savages and natives. Because, says Conrad, to the Romans, it was the Britons who were savage natives, reluctant receivers of the civilisation that was being brought, crushingly, to their shores. And Conrad points out, right here at the beginning, that the Roman occupation of Britain was a “squeeze”– meaning a for-profit enterprise designed to soak the natives for their wealth. So there are two parallels drawn: people who think of themselves as “bringing civilisation” to a wild and untamed people whose true motivation is greed: the Romans in Britain, and the Belgians in the Congo. As Conrad puts it, the “philanthropic pretence” of the whole enterprise.

Not that Conrad is so crass as to name names. Brussels is the “sepulchral city” and the Congo Free State is the Company, and the Congo River is just “the river”. But that choice of words to describe the capital of Belgium: a gloomy, sombre tomb. Where our ideas of ourselves as civilised beings go to die.

Marlow, the young adventurer, is looking for a commission, and a relative helps put him in touch with the Company. And all along the way, it’s as if there’s a case of mistaken identity. Because of his family connections, people think of Marlow as somebody important or special, and treat him as such. But he’s just a young Englishman looking for adventure. Along the way he meets people of other nationalities. Mr Kurtz, of legend, is the son of parents, one of whom is half-French, the other half-English. And then there’s the Harlequin, who is Russian, and the overall impression that the Whites in Congo are all fortune hunters, greedy grifters from all over Europe. Fitzgerald offers a similar characterisation of the English men who are guests at one of Gatsby’s parties. Lean, sweaty, desperate.

Meanwhile, the locals, the Congolese, are starving in the shadows, being forced to work in collars and chains, being whipped and beaten and mutilated, all in the name of civilisation.

Marlow, like the mise-en-abyme narrative, travels in stages, getting closer and closer to the heart of darkness in discreet chunks. He meets an Eichman-like character, the personification of the banality of evil: a punctilious accountant, who is the first to mention Kurtz, an extraordinary individual who sends more ivory back than all the rest of the agents put together. And the accountant sits in his office toting up the figures, while outside the whipping and the beating and the enslavement continues, and even while a sick white agent is slowly dying in his office.

Death follows Marlow on his journey through the jungle, to where his steamer awaits. Porters, starving, dying, running away. Marlow is constantly dealing with (entirely justified) mutinies, on the one hand, and corpulent and entitled white people who can barely cope with the heat and the jungle, expecting nevertheless to be carried everywhere. Marlow asks one such why he’s even there, and the reply is simply, “To make money!”

When he reaches his destination, Marlow discovers that the boat he’s supposed to take charge of is at the bottom of the river. Symbolism ahoy. Even when the boat is dragged onto the shore to be repaired, he has to wait weeks and weeks and weeks for rivets to arrive.

There are interesting elisions. Marlow spends some time telling us about the missing rivets, and the various things that do arrive on the donkey caravans. He has long, allusive conversations with various characters, including a creepy character who is supposed to be making bricks but instead spends his time gathering intel and making himself indispensable to the equally upsetting chief of station. But see the rivets arrive and the boat repaired, we do not. The next thing we know, we are heading up river, with the station chief and some “pilgrims”, which is Marlow’s sarcastic description of the greedy whites who appear to worship at the Church of Ivory.

Plunder. All the villages in the forest have been abandoned. There’s a sense that people have disappeared deeper into the interior to avoid enslavement. And all the time, people talk of Kurtz, and what he has achieved. Marlow eavesdrops, gleaning fragments, putting the pieces together. Like Gatsby, we hear all about Kurtz long before we meet him, gaining new impressions, new details, like abstract art.

Marlow sees Kurtz’s painting of a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a torch. There’s a description of how Kurtz almost came back to the central station, but stopped, turned his back on “civilisation” and paddled back upstream, into the heart of darkness. Title!

For me it crawled towards Kurtz – exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.

The heart of darkness is many things. The darkness in the hearts of all men; the evil and brutality just beneath the thin veneer of civilisation; the densest parts of the river and the jungle. All the while, Marlow keeps reminding us that “we” (19th century European colonialists) might call “them” savages, but we are no different under the skin. And there is mordant humour at the expense of this idea: “We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fellows – cannibals – in their place.”

When the locals howl and leap and rage from the shore (because, we are later told, they don’t want Kurtz to leave them), Marlow explains that the only reason he didn’t join in was because he didn’t have the time. The rackety old boat kept him fully occupies. And he links the primitive, superstitious beliefs of the “savage” he has working at the boiler of the steamer with all-too-familiar literary metaphors, pointing out that the unreliable boiler “really did seem to have a devil inside it.”

The overarching question throughout is “who are the savages?” And Conrad’s answer is that the whites are just as “savage” as the blacks, and that all they care about is the ivory and their avarice. If he plays up the “savagery” of the Congolese, it’s in service of emphasising the equal savagery of the white Europeans.

One night, they anchor in the middle of the stream, having been warned to approach Kurtz’s station cautiously, and Conrad’s description of the night terrors and Marlow’s waking in the morning to a thick fog is brilliant. The manager says, “I authorise you to take all the risks” and Marlow replies, “I refuse to take any.” But another elision: the fog doesn’t clear, and the boat doesn’t move. But then suddenly, they have reached Kurtz.

So to the heart of the matter:

All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too highly strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his – let us say – nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites…

Kurtz’s scrawled postscript to this report: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

Marlow meets the Russian harlequin, who is in an abusive relationship with Kurtz. Worships him but is also afraid of him. And even as the harlequin is singing Kurtz’s praises, Marlow catches sight through his telescope of the heads on stakes that surround Kurtz’s cabin. “He’s mad!”

And then finally we meet the great Kurtz himself. He’s been built up, by everyone who talks about him to Marlow. A great man, an extraordinary man, a man with a great future in the Company. And here he comes, on a stretcher: hairless, skeletal, dying; reduced, like Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, to his voice.

Like the boat that was at the bottom of the river. Like the ivory that turned out to be worth less than Leopold II thought. Like so-called civilisation itself.

Marlow thinks about Kurtz’s methods vs the Company’s and comes to the stark conclusion. “A choice of nightmares”

Kurtz is supposed to have a fiancée back in Brussels: a refined, mature woman, a woman of distinction, Kurtz’s social superior; he’d be marrying up. But here in the jungle, he has another woman, a tribal queen, adorned with all the trinkets the company uses to buy ivory, with which Kurtz has gifted her. She commands the tribe. She walks in beauty, like the night, and he gets his ivory by other, violent, means. And only because she lets them go, unmolested, we are made to think, do they get away, with the dying Kurtz on board the steamer and his Queen on the shoreline, holding out her arms.

‘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!”
‘I blew the candle out and left the cabin.’

And back in civilisation, Marlow ends his tale with his meeting of Kurtz’s genteel Intended, who – like almost everybody else – wants to talk about what an extraordinary man Kurtz was. Marlow restrains himself, but his every comment in this scene can be read ambiguously. He utters platitudes which can also be understood as condemnations, and in the end he lies to her about Kurtz’s last words, and describes the eerily similar gesture she makes.

She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretching them black and with clasped pale hands across the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her too, a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this gesture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness. She said suddenly very low, “He died as he lived.”
“His end,” said I, with dull anger stirring in me, “was in every way worthy of his life.”

#bookReview #Books #Conrad #fiction #HeartOfDarkness #Literature #writing

#bookreview #books #conrad #fiction #heartofdarkness #literature