#8 - Heart of Darkness

One of the classic works of high school English, Heart of Darkness was muttered in the same breaths as Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Brave New World. We were told to be afraid of Conrad's work on the travels of Marlow, and that those 100-odd pages of writing were filled with the darkest, slowest reading we were to find in school. Well, I don't know if it was the Iliad that I was comparing it to, or the Moby Dick I had suffered prior, but I don't believe that it was nearly as bad as people said.

First, a word about Joseph Conrad. Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was a pretty rad dude. Born in the Russian Empire in what is now Ukraine, of Polish descent, dodged the Russian draft by going to France, had learned four languages before even beginning to learn English, and went sailing for about twenty years (including smuggling guns and drugs) before settling down to have a remarkably robust literary career. Basically, he's fairly kickass. And if you weren't already feeling bad, he had inherited Polish nobility, and turned DOWN a British knighthood. Now, many of Conrad's works are nautical works. As I read the first pages and the talk of the wind and the sails, I immediately began to have heart palpitations. This wasn't going to be another Moby Dick, was it? I was panicked, but I kept moving on. Luckily, as Marlow (Conrad's alter ego, used in many of his stories) began weaving his yarn, I was treated to a nice story about terrible anguish, insanity and the depravity of the human condition. Because as much as Conrad's works are nautical, they are also psychological thrillers that dig into the meaning of humanity.

Heart of Darkness is viewed as the pinnacle of Conrad's work. It takes Marlow, a sailor, on a trip up the Congo River to meet a fellow agent named Kurtz. Along the way we see the world through Marlow's eyes, and feel the atrocities that he does. The sarcastic, sneering view of the colonialists, the pilgrims, is a view more vicious than many would have believed possible for his time period. Chinua Achebe, who is on my list for his book Things Fall Apart, claims that Conrad is remarkably racist throughout, dehumanizing black people. However, when I read it, I saw Conrad as being sympathetic to them, and while he did not see them as friends, he saw them as humans and equals. There was no claim of superiority, simply a difference between them.

For the class of the English, the assignment connected to Heart of Darkness was to compare it to either a series of poems, or Apocalypse Now. The latter, a film by Francis Ford Coppola, is a remarkably well-done adaptation that was at the time the most over budget film of all time. It connected visuals to some of the most chilling moments in the book, and turned it from a story about British colonialism, a fairly outdated topic, to American interventionalism, which continues to this day. Together, the two of them were simply shocking, and managed to reach to the core of the issues both times.

I love the smell of ivory in the morning...smells like crossovers.

8/10