For "English-y" Types Only: Is "Heart of Darkness" Insipid?
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[Update 2 AUG 07: A much better follow-up post on HOD here.l
A little light summer reading: Joseph Conrad's "classic" Heart of Darkness. Skip it unless you want to defend its merit. I loved it in my 20s, but now it seems such a joke. Anybody want to show me what I'm missing?
Here's my homework for my lovely AP Lit workshop:
"The Horror": Conrad's Smoke and Mirrors?
I just finished the famous last words: "The horror! The horror!"
For the life of me, the only specific images of Kurtz's life that I see don't stack up to the hype (is hype related to hypnotism?).
What are those specifics, when we clear away all Conrad's mystifications?
Kurtz:
1. had an African mate
2. "raided" neighboring areas for ivory
3. killed "rebels"
4. ruled as a chief or something like a king
5. converted to a set of magico-ritualistic beliefs different from those of Europe.
The rest of the Kurtz mystique, I argue, is Conrad's smoke and mirrors with adjectives. So how "dark" is Kurtz? Re: 1-5 above:
1. Only a racist would fault him for having an African mistress (and a hypocrite or puritan for having a mistress at all - if adultery makes us "devils," devils are pretty common things).
2-3. Only a hypocrite would make a special case for Kurtz's wars of conquest for profit. Iraq's oil and the close to one million Iraqi dead since 2003 [update: fact-check at Iraq Body Count: confirmed Iraqi deaths: 75,000; estimated Iraqi deaths: 985,000] is more horrible than Kurtz’s little ivory raids. And Saddam’s YouTube head in the noose is one of a million parallels we can make to Kurtz’s impaled rebel heads. Need another? The CIA cut off Che Guevara’s hands after executing him in Bolivia in 1967, and mailed them to Fidel Castro in a box. Abu Ghraib and secret torture prisons, anyone? “The horror?”
4. Ruling as king? Nothing unusual there either, and certainly nothing specifically “African” or primitive.
5. African religion used antelope horns and feathers and “midnight fires”? How, in any rational way, are they any different from the religious rites and magic of the West, based as they are, as historians and philosophers of religion have noted countless times, on rituals and beliefs based on human sacrifice and cannibalism? “The horror?”
So I don’t buy this novella. I don’t see the “darkness.”
Maybe that’s because Conrad never shows it to us. Instead, he just chants us into an adjectival stupor.
Worse yet, the majority of those adjectives are empty of content because they’re of the negating variety.
The remainder appeal to our own European stereotypes of “evil” and “satanism” that strike me as childish. Marlowe’s/Conrad’s characterization of all Africans as “brutes” and “savages” is ridiculous. Reminds me of my reaction to the Noah/Flood and Plagues of Egypt myths: “Really? Everybody was so ‘ee-vil’ they deserved to be wiped out? A whole world or city? So every single farmer and mother of newborn - every child - was ‘ee-vil’? Makes no sense. Most people are too busy with the necessities of daily living to be such cartoonishly ‘evil’ folks.”
How Conrad expects us to fall for such a caricature of individual husbands and wives, parents and children in villages along the Congo is beyond me. I kept rolling my eyes at his breathless attempts to make me go, “Wow, they’re sooo savage.” Okay, they dance. They dress less in the heat. They use different weapons. They have different moral codes and languages and skin color. They don’t have engines and machines. They live naturally. This doesn’t qualify them as “brute savages.”
I heard “godless Communists” chanted at me from parents, preachers, teachers, teevees and politicians from birth to 30. Then I lived with these “godless” people in China for five years and discovered that, by and large, their civilization was superior to my own. It’s 3,000 years older - and unbroken by any period of Dark Ages, unlike ours - and its religions are based on philosophy rather than magic (ever notice there are no Buddhist terrorists or Crusaders?). Its diet is healthier, its families closer-knit. We should be so lucky.
Conrad traveled the world, didn’t he? Didn’t he notice, as I did with the Chinese and Vietnamese and Arabs, that they’re every bit as normal, and full of good or bad eggs, within their own frameworks, as we are within ours?
If he did, how come Marlowe comes off as such a yokel? Calling African religion “satanic.” Give me a break.
Show me what I’m missing, specifically.
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If I remember my uni lessons, Conrad is considered an important writer mostly for his innovations in the narrative form. But his use of language and of course his political/social views are stuck squarely in the turn of century western european/american camp. His contemporaries, like HG Wells, are hard to read too. To modern eyes, the flowery language and quaintly mannered characters seem to obscure the story, rather than advance it. Not just styles, but also social norms have changed. To critique him based on today’s social norms seems to miss the point of the impact he had on western/european literature.
But I’m assuming you are thinking beyond your own recent experience to how this relates to your own students?
[Reply]
Sylvia Martinez
28 Jul 07 at 11:30 am
I wish the course were structured with the focus on the students, instead of turning us into young scholars all over again.
I was thinking about the “presentism” inherent in my judgments, and of course you’re right. But beyond that, the spell this novel has on the canon - and on English classes in schools around the world - is more what I’m questioning.
The whole book relies on us taking Kurtz’ “vision” of “the horror” as a valid existential statement borne out by his experience. But after taking four slow days to read and annotate each of the 100 or so pages, I’m just not seeing a lot of clothes on this emperor.
The frame device _is_ clever (though the Arabian Nights and Decameron used that trick many centuries earlier); and the prose _does_ have its moments. How can it not, when each page labors at it like a constipated hourglass?
But I’m not going to inflict this one on my students. Gulliver’s Travels and Candide make the same points far more enjoyably, and more clearly. I’ll let the college profs trot this one out.
Thanks, Sylvia
Hey, who are your favorite writers from uni days? Given the freedom, what works would you expose students to (and yes, it has to be somewhat prescriptive, being AP).
[Reply]
Clay Burell
28 Jul 07 at 11:46 am
Hi Clay,
I suppose I’m an “English-y type.” I had to teach Heart of Darkness last year (our sophomores read it). I hated the book when I had to read it in high school & college. I still don’t like Conrad’s style — you are right that it is often too dense. Imagine trying to decipher it as a tenth-grader!
I think you’ve missed Marlow’s irony. While he is a man of his time, he quickly realizes the futility of the attempt to “civilize” Africa. He describes the folly of the white men’s wearing heavy clothing in the heat. He sees that the Africans are tuned into something better than what the Europeans are tuned into. (Think of the passages in which he describes the way the Europeans fire guns into the bush, as if that will do any good, or the description of the dances as accessing something that has been lost to Europe; it’s a bit of a “noble savage” image, which is itself questionable.) I don’t want to defend Marlow too much, because the “noble savage” idea is just as bad as the “ignorant savage.” But I think it is unfair to say that he wholeheartedly buys into the European conquest.
As for Kurtz’s “darkness,” I think you really do have to focus on the text in itself, not try to compare it to modern situation — for one, our society and particularly our communication methods have radically changed since Conrad’s day. Marlow even makes a point of explaining how hard it was to know or hear anything about what was going on. There was no “media exposure.” Yes, atrocities committed since then by the US have been awful. But imagine that all you know about Africa is that there is money to be made there and exploration to be done. And then Conrad tells you about the Belgian Congo, and what sorts of things really happened in the name of European colonialism. Dark, indeed. Africa is not the dark place, the European heart is.
Kurtz himself within the book functions more as a goal, as something to keep Marlow going. You’re right to say that he doesn’t live up to the hype — Kurtz is a metaphor for the exploration and exploitation of Africa. The “horror” Kurtz sees at the end of his life could be at any number of things: the realization that the forces that brought him to Africa will ultimately destroy what ever of beauty he found there; the shame that he feels for committing such atrocious raids even as he wishes to become one of the people (his king-like status); the shame of doing such things in the name of Europe?
Those are my thoughts on your response to the book. I’m planning to teach it again to juniors and seniors next year as part of a postcolonialism course. I’m planning to follow our reading of HOD with a reading of Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” which provides a reading more in line with what you’re thinking (and I’m not sure that I don’t agree with Achebe; there is always more than one way to read a text). The text of essay can be found here: http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/achcon.htm
I think there is a place for Heart of Darkness in schools, but it needs to be contextualized. Otherwise, students will react to it much as you did, with some revulsion, incredulity, and irritation at the adjectives.
Does all that make any sense?
[Reply]
Ms. Metaphor
28 Jul 07 at 2:06 pm
hi ms. metaphor,
HOD for sophomores? The horror!
I know I don’t address Marlow’s irony, and that I’m guilty of presentism, in my post. But I’m aware of the irony. I don’t think it goes so far as to valorize the “noble savage,” since Marlow admits a “resonance” to the drums and such, but praises his own “restraint” in the face of it. But hands down, he does heap contempt on the petty Euro-traders in the bush. But to me, the fact remains that he uses Africa and Africans as symbols of a negative savagery in an unnecessarily arbitrary and simplistic way - even if he does ironically implicate modern Euro-imperialism in that savagery.
Kurtz is a metaphor, and so is his “horror” - agreed. Again, though, it’s the linking of that metaphor to the Africans as a foil to “civilized” Europe (the ideal, anyway) that’s annoying. Europe’s been savage since the start, so the whole “primitivism” locus in Africa is some dangerous denial in my book.
We read Achebe for the workshop, and the only thing I think he fails to do is adequately counter the objection that “Conrad is as hard on the Europeans as he is on the Africans.” He does a great job on the second part of that comparison, but skirts the first part - which is achieved, as you say, by Conrad’s irony.
Swift and Voltaire - and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian are so much more enjoyable - and less racist - attacks on colonialism, I just don’t see the need for HOD to explore it. But the Achebe essay does invite good food for critical thought.
As for my comparisons to the present, it was mostly brought out by Marlowe’s sudden shift to the terms “soul,” “sin,” “hell,” and other European terms in response to Kurtz’ “dark(ie)” “horror” that spurred those little fireworks.
Does this make any sense?
Thanks for playing
[Reply]
Clay Burell
28 Jul 07 at 3:02 pm
Hi Clay,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I can see better where you were coming from. I agree with you that Swift is more accessible and much more fun to read. We’re having the sophomores read Swift next year (but HOD is still on the curriculum). I think I’ll ask them to think of HOD in comparison to Swift. Thanks for the idea!
Ms. M
[Reply]
Ms. Metaphor
30 Jul 07 at 1:45 am
[...] this novel, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This student disagrees. ‘-) And for you “English-y types” from the last post, thanks for your feedback. I try to clarify things [...]
Goodbye, "Heart of Darkness" (or, "Yokels Abroad") | Beyond School
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