HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

"A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last." (110)

New readers are advised that this review makes details of the plot explicit. All page references are for the Penguin Classics edition, 2000.

One of the strengths of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is the sense, pervading the entire film, of Kurtz's presence. Like Orson Welles in The Third Man, Marlon Brando's Kurtz is in only a handful of scenes, yet is somehow in every scene. The other characters orbit around him, and he haunts the entire film.

Apart from the use of the river, this haunting voice of Kurtz's is perhaps the element of Coppola's adaptation that hews most closely to the novel. In it, Marlow is setting off from London with three other colonial adventurers, and tells them the story of his voyage into the heart of Africa, where he was sent on a mission to retrieve Kurtz, an ivory merchant of incredible, almost supernatural abilities. He eventually finds Kurtz, who is desperately ill, and is being worshipped in some way by the indigenous tribe of the area, who have been giving him ivory in offering to him. Kurtz dies on his way back to the outpost on Marlow's steamer, uttering possibly the most famous last words in literature, "The horror! the horror!" (112). Marlow, upon returning to England, meets Kurtz's fiancée, and, unable to tell the truth, tells her that Kurtz's last words were her name.

Marlow, telling us the story, repeatedly emphasises the power of Kurtz's voice. "The man presented himself as a voice" Marlow says of Kurtz, "...the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness." Yet, like Marlon Brando, we actually get very little of Kurtz's voice indeed, and what little direct speech there is is garbled, incoherent. "'Save me! - save the ivory, you mean. Don't tell me. Save me! Why, I've had to save you. Sick! Sick! Not so sick as you would like to believe. Never mind. I'll carry my ideas out yet - I will return" (100).

The voice that is most striking to the reader is not Kurtz's, but Marlow's. Like his fellow travelers on the boat on the Thames, we listen to him telling his story, and it is his voice that is compelling. "It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he [Marlow], sitting apart, had been no more than a voice" (50). This is a direct comment by Conrad on the act of storytelling itself: we cannot see Marlow on the page anymore than the listeners now can, we can only hear him. Conrad is making us think about what it means to listen to a story, and is thereby drawing attention to his own act of story telling. This is called self-reflexivity, and is one of the things that makes Heart of Darkness a modernist novel.

So what does Marlow's voice 'sound' like? To the modern (white) reader, I would liken it to being cornered by a very interesting, tough, funny, ironical man with the politically incorrect-verging-on-outright racist world view of a different era. Some of Heart of Darkness makes very uncomfortable reading, and there is no doubt that were it published today the author would be condemned as a racist on all sides, as it has been by some, most famously Chinua Achebe. (Himself the author of what may be my favorite novel, Things Fall Apart, which can clearly be read as a reaction to the kind of colonial writing that Conrad here is part of.)

Moving away from criticising or defending Conrad, it is undeniable that in Marlow he found an extraordinary person to tell his story. The muscular, masculine prose is interrupted by the fragmentation that occurs when he is swallowed up in the madness of the colonial mission in Africa; he is an active man who is forced into long periods of inactivity and powerlessness; the surety he leaves Europe with is replaced with ambiguity and confusion.

Remembering the self-reflexive element from before, we must see that Heart of Darkness is not Marlow's tale, but is the story of Marlow telling his tale. This story-within-a-story structure does something interesting to the way we conceive of the different elements in the book.

In Marlow's tale:

• The concept or ideal towards which protagonists are striving = the colonial mission in Africa
• The voice = Kurtz
• Adventurer = Marlow
• Listener or reader = Conrad

In Heart of Darkness:

• Ideal = Kurtz
• Voice = Marlow
• Adventurer = Conrad
• Listener = us

In this configuration of Heart of Darkness, colonialism has been lost entirely as an ideal. It is the stated mission of Marlow, but as an ideal for the reader it gets entirely swept away by that of Kurtz - the reader's mission by reading the novel is to find and perhaps understand Kurtz. And, as Marlow modifies his view of colonialism having seen its reality, we become disillusioned when we find the reality of our ideal, the broken man of Kurtz.

The voice is Marlow: it is he who compells us onwards, it is he who we 'hear' in the dark. In the author's note to the novel, Conrad says it is Marlow’s voice, not Kurtz’s, that haunts him: “[Marlow] haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of the tale I am never sure that it may not be for the last time” (10).

But how can Conrad be the adventurer? Again, the author's note is revealing:

"It is a well known fact that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all kinds of spoil. This story...are all the spoil I brought out from Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business." (9)

For Conrad, this is the act of writing: an adventure into the heart of darkness. The spoils of his adventure, with all of the troubling history and morality that comes with it, are still exercising us as listeners today.

Reading Against the Grain - Big Brother

"Big Brother is watching you."

As I said in my previous post Reading Against the Grain, the interpretive work of reading is not limited to books: a text can be a film, a building, or a TV program.  Reading against the grain, or resistant reading, is when try to find a new and often opposing interpretation of a text than that of the dominant reading. This is often done by reading the text against itself. Let's look an example of how we can do this in the case of Big Brother.

The Big Brother TV series when it was first launched in the UK was presented both as entertainment and as a social experiment on the inhabitants of the house.  (This latter element was still there in later series, but was much reduced in place of the entertainment strand.)  The contestants were tested, rewarded or punished, and were watched 24 hours a day by ‘Big Brother’, the audience and the show’s producers.  Every week there would be sociologists and psychologists on the highlights program to explain housemates’ behaviour in light of their various theories.  So, the intention of the program was as an experiment on the inhabitants of the Big Brother house, which would then tell those outside the house (the audience) something about themselves.

Let’s read against the grain, and say that the program was an experiment on those outside the house, which then told the Big Brother contestants inside something about themselves.  How can we support this?   

First, we may look at what in science is called the observer effect.  This is the theory that the thing you wish to observe or measure changes in the observation of it.  The Big Brother contestants are obviously not in a natural environment: they know they are on TV and act accordingly, changing their behaviour in better or worse ways for the cameras.  The intended experiment on the housemates would therefore give bad results.  However, if the experiment was actually on the audience, then a very effective method of tricking them into thinking they are not being observed would be to place them in the apparent role of observer.  Throughout an episode of Big Brother are reminders of the hidden cameras watching the housemates – a few frames of a camera lens, the Big Brother ‘eye’ logo, the CCTV-like footage of empty rooms before the camera ‘finds’ the housemates.  Why have these reminders if it is patently obvious the housemates are the ones being observed?  The answer is that it is a misdirection on the audience to fool them into thinking that the social experiment is not, in fact, on them.

In this reading, now it is the contestants inside the house who are observing the audience.  The way they do this is through the public vote every week.  The contestants nominate the two people up for the vote, and are voted out of the house accordingly.  The contestants’ experiment on the public is in fact a much better model than the one of the audience on the contestants: not only do the public not know they are being observed (reducing observation bias), but there are also a lot more of them (providing a bigger sampling group), and there are only two possible options to measure in who gets voted out (limiting variables).

The results of this experiment are delivered to the contestants weekly by who is evicted from the house.  The results are revealing to the contestants what kinds of people they need to be like in order to win the money at the end (in this reading, the best ‘experimenter’ or interpreter of the results will succeed).  Not having watched enough of the series myself to say, I can only guess at what kinds of people these are: funny, yes, but not offensive, and certainly not racist; homosexuality fine, transgendered no; attractive yes, but not in a threatening or overtly sexual way.

The results of the Big Brother experiment are actually much less surprising or sensational than the program's advertised motives.  From a program that experiments on the contestants in front of an audience with controversial results, we now have one that experiments on the audience in front of the contestants with uncontroversial results. With this reading, it is perhaps unsurprising that the program's producers were forced to throw the contestants into ever more bizarre scenarios, in order to prop up the waining interest in the experiment strand with entertainment, and ultimately for the program to be cancelled as this side reached the limit of its effectiveness with the audience.