Beyond School

I’ll probably get another B+ for this. Teacher loves 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 here.

More homework from my AP Lit workshop. I worked harder on the style and ideas for this one. It’s my summing-up after finishing the blasted thing.

The grass was wet with dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague notion of . . . giving him a drubbing. . . .I had some imbecilic thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair.

Not your most pointed example of European “darkness,” but I liked it all the more for that. All this blood, rapine, and devastation implicates even our grannies (and yes, English teachers, the allusion to Clotho and Lachesis, the Greek Fates, didn’t escape us. Pretty obvious, really, isn’t it? The denotative suggestion is more interesting here. The old lady is living off her country’s profits from Kurtz and his ilk. It’s the same today in the developed world. We just use the WTO and IMF.).

We could multiply more obvious examples. No point, though. They’re obvious.

What’s maybe not so obvious is one last piece of trickery that furthers my judgment of Conrad, not Marlowe, as one sorry world traveler - a yokel abroad.

It has to do with that Buddha image that opens and closes the novella. It’s easy to throw allusions in, as Conrad apparently understands to excess. It keeps the English teachers and literati happy, gives them something to gush about. (Reminds me of Joyce saying about either Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake, I forget which, “I put enough symbols and allusions in there to keep the professors working for centuries,” or something to that effect. He knew the game.)

But it’s harder to intellectually justify your allusion-play with your ideas. Conrad fails here. His Buddha allusion, like so much else of his novel, is shabby, exploiting (as usual) obscurantism to suggest a depth that’s not there.

My evidence? Marlowe, when he finally encounters Kurtz, suddenly shifts the balance of his diction toward the old-time religion of his homeland. Examples (italics added):

“[Kurtz's] soul was mad.” (There’s no “soul” in Buddhism. Self and identity are illusions. Enlightenment is knowing precisely that fact.)

“I had - for my sins, I suppose - to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself.” (”Sin” is a Judeo-Christian-Islamic - an Abrahamic - notion. The closest Buddhism comes to this idea is fear and desire as the causes of suffering, and the Noble Eightfold Path as an ethical, not a metaphysical, set of guidelines to reduce suffering and lead to Enlightenment and Nirvana.)

“I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.” (Buddha warns against “faith” - again, a theistic notion bound most closely to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - and teaches the opposite: to not believe his (Buddha’s) teachings without confirming them through one’s own experience of their truth, through practice. Buddhism is based on Knowledge, not Faith.)

“[T]he deep murmers of the [African] crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany.” (There is no “god” of evil, or god period, in Buddhism. There is Mara, the “demon” of “fear and desire,” but this is a psychological reality, not a metaphysical one - an explicit metaphor for our own mental habits that cause us and others to suffer. As for condemning other religions, Buddha was too civilized for that. He is said to have taught, instead, “Don’t mistake the finger for the moon” - all religions being the “fingers”, attempts to point to Truth(s) beyond words, “the moon.” He would have seen the African religion as yet one more finger among the handsful of the world.)

So for all Conrad’s mumbo-jumbo about Buddhism through a couple of cheap allusions, we see, when Marlowe finally gets off the boat and actually joins an “Other” culture - instead of yammering about it incessantly from the safety of his boat - that he carries the full baggage of his hometown biases with him. He’s a provincial traveler, a traveler in body, not mind.

He’s not a Buddha. With all his praise of deliverance through mechanical work, he’s more of what I can’t help but call a “Calvinist Ulysses.”

Too bad he couldn’t read Weber’s On the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

But I guess describing Marlowe as sitting in the posture of Calvin wouldn’t have sounded so “deep” and mysterious.

There are better books - more enjoyable, clearer style, leaner prose, less confused and racist - to use for colonial literature. Gulliver’s Travels is brilliant, if we’d only read it without visions of Disney in our heads, and damns colonialism with a sharper moral vision, a more savage punch, a better plot, and best of all, a barrel of laughs. A Passage to India fits the bill for a rough contemporary of Conrad. And again, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian will win him a future Nobel, if that body’s worth its salt.

Unfortunately, Conrad’s turgid work will probably survive in the canon. Teachers were told it’s great when they were students, so they’ll assign it when they’re teachers. It’s short, too, which helps us in our unnatural “factory schedule” schools.

It’s a shame, though. Because worse than anything else, it probably makes most students think a) literature has to be migraine-difficult to decode; and b) Conrad’s style is good writing.

(For the record: yes, Conrad has some fine stylistic moments in the novella. When you strain like a constipated hourglass on every page to produce such moments, of course you’ll squeeze out a winner occasionally.)

Restock your aspirin for some purple student prose for the year after they read this work.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

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