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

If you have ever watched someone reading, on a commute to work for instance, there is an odd disparity between what they look like they are doing, and what must be going on in their heads.  Readers are still, eyes dipped to the page; they are solemn, they may even look asleep.  Yet they are engaged in an activity with the words on the page, and far from switching off, they are active in their own worlds, travelling without moving.

The ways we read can themselves be active or passive.  Reading can be a more or less creative activity for the reader, much like writing can be more or less creative for the writer.  Sometimes this is due to the kind of text involved.  The way I read, for example, Kafka’s The Trial, is completely different to the way I read Iain M Banks’ Use of Weapons.  This latter is an extremely enjoyable, well written sci-fi novel, with huge, mind-bending ideas, but to a large extent I am happy to be taken along with the story as it is on the page, and not look too deeply into the mechanics of how it was written, or what real world and literary references there were in it.  The Trial however, as seen in my previous post, requires some interpretive work to be done by me as I go through it.  A passive reading of The Trial would have left only questions at the end of a long, boring book (not that it is long, but it would have felt long).  The contradictions, absurdity, and gaps between the lines of Kafka would have washed over me in a confused haze – many of them in fact still did, which is why texts that encourage active reading also encourage active re-reading.

English Literature courses don’t only teach you about the history and development of literature, but about ways of reading.  Nor is it confined to books: often they will refer to the ‘text’ that is being read.  The text can be understood as a newspaper,  a film, TV program, advert or architecture; virtually any man-made object or artifact that can be interpreted in some way.

One of these ways of reading is called reading against the grain, or resistant reading.  This kind of reading takes a text and tries to argue for an interpretation that is the opposite of what the author intended.  An elegant example of this is seen by interpreting the phrase “JFK was not a homosexual.” On the surface, the intention of this phrase is clear: the author is saying that JFK was not a homosexual. But now let’s take as our starting point the idea that the author is saying that JFK was a homosexual – how would we argue that interpretation of the phrase?

First of all, JFK’s sexuality is not, historically, something that has ever been seriously questioned.  We know (or are told) of the infidelities of Camelot, but these are all regarding young women, and no men have ever come out as JFK’s lovers.  So the author of the phrase “JFK was not a homosexual” is apparently telling us something that is obvious, that is without question.  Secondly, look again at how it is phrased: the matter of fact tone, as if we are reading from an encyclopedia or a well-researched book.  What purpose could there be to telling us something that everyone knows is true, and furthermore telling us in a way that implies someone has looked into the matter?  By writing this, the author has implied that JFK’s sexuality is something that needs proving, that there is serious doubt surrounding it.  In this way, the result of the phrase is the exact opposite of the author’s intention.

Reading against the grain can be an extremely powerful and revealing tool for people interested in looking at the mechanics of a given text.  In the next few weeks I will give further examples of this in non-book texts, starting next week with Big Brother.