Joseph Conrad - author review

“Going up that river was like traveling back the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy and sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretchers of the waterway ran on, deserted into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sand backs hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through  a mob of wooded islands, you lost against  shoals, trying to find the channel. Fill you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had once – somewhere – faraway – in another existence perhaps”.

Marlow continues his amusings on the nature of the wilderness. As the river boat goes deeper and deeper into the heart of the continent, he says it goes deeper and deeper into heart of darkness.

“The darkness of the jungle approximates darkness everywhere, adumbrating the blackness of Conrad’s humor, the despair of his irony”.

“The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness”.

He wonders at the primitive people who live along the shore of the river. To Marlow, the most wonderful thing about them is that despite their savagery, they are human. More than that, it is wonderful to realize that we are too savage, in the same way that these primitive people are, but we manage to conceal our savagery. It is ironic, what is dark in the darkness of Africa is not the land itself or the people, but it is the world that was introduced by the colonizers believed to be the savior that bring the light and civilization. Instead, they brought fear, dominance, greediness and untold miseries as well as hardship to the people of the dark continent. Who would believe that the “white man”, believed to be civilized people would practice such degrading, inhumane and savage arts over the simple and den civilized people.

         Beside, from the novel, Marlow and the pilgrims (there are two kinds, there are the one who are in Africa to make fortune and the one who are there with a sense of mission) discover a ruined hut and wood already cut and stacked. There is a note attached to the pile of wood. The note contains both a plea for help and warning. Here we would see that Marlow is amazed and delighted to discover this sign of civilization and order in the wilderness. He has noticed nothing but chaos and disorder for hundreds of miles he has traveled in the Congo until he suddenly comes across a seaman’s manual, an English book, hundreds of miles from England.

“It had it lost its covers and the pages had been thumbed into a stack of extremely dirty softness, but the back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread which looked clean yet. It was an extraordinary find. Its title was, An Inquiry into some points of Seamanship, by a man Tower, Towson”.

“Some fifty miles below the Inner Station we came upon a hut of reeds, an inclined and melancholy  pole, with unrecognizable tatters of what had been a flag of some sort flying from it, and a neatly stacked wood pile. This was unexpected. We came to the bank, and on the stack of firewood found a flat piece of board with some faded pencil writing on it”.

The pilgrims are afraid the natives in the jungle will attack. The cannibals who are working on the river boat hope they will. When Marlow’s asks them why they want to fight the natives, the cannibals reply that they want to catch them and eat them. My comments on this phrase can be divided into two reasons. First, to illustrate Conrad’s idea about cannibalism which was generally accepted in his day although it appears amusing and old fashioned to us. Of course we know that cannibalism is primarily a ritualistic action and has nothing to do with satisfying the hunger for food. Conrad however assumes that the cannibals enjoy human flesh. The second comment is much more important. If the cannibals do enjoy human as food, and we know their own supply for food hippo meat has long since gone bad, what was prevented them from devouring the pilgrims long ago? The only answer to this question must be the cannibals have exercised a very severe kind of discipline over themselves to overcome their own hunger.

“Their headman, a young broad chested black, severely draped in dark blue fringed cloths, with fierce nostrils and his hair all done up artfully in oily ringlets, stood near me “Aha” I said, I just for good fellowship sake. “catch’im, he snapped, with bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth. “catch’im. Give’im to us”. To you, eh? I asked, “what would you do with them? Eat’im! He said crutly and leaning his elbow on the rail, I looked out into the fog in a dignified and profoundly pensive attitude”.

Apart from Marlow’s narrative works, now the next question arise will be the nature of Kurtz’s influencing the natives. What made Kurtz so powerful?  Why was he able to manipulate the natives into becoming his puppets?   Kurtz was able to do this because he manipulates the feeling of insecurities of those less intelligent people.  He portrayed himself as a friend not as an enemy even though he was a “white man”.  This ability to play psychological games on others was a gift for Kurtz and that brought him into power. He was a symbol of power, vain, dehumanized, inhumane, a rule-breaker who had to face his consequences, and a once-great man who was trapped somewhere in the layers of the Heart of Darkness. His prolong stay in the savage jungle dehumanized Kurtz. He was unable to draw line between goodness and corruption, like many others before him. As a result he became “uncivilized”. Now the pilgrims appear, bearing Kurtz’s on a stretcher. Marlow looks through his glasses and describes him. He appears very tall, seven feet and has a bald head and piercing eyes. As the pilgrims descend the hill there is a howl from the natives and they pour from the forest until the cleared space is filled with them. Kurtz speaks to the natives, and they quietly disappear into the forest again

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“Kurt’s crucial role in the tale lies in his symbolic importance: in the representative quality of his history, in his role as a final incarnation of the darkness itself, and as a potential aspect of Marlow’s own self”

The love for power kept Kurtz in the jungle for such a long period of time.  He was determined not to become causality therefore he becomes allies with the natives through fear.  Kurtz is a brilliant man who did not have to adapt to his environment but had it adapt to him.  His hut which situated on the top of a hill is surrounded by the heads of men who have once planned to go betrayed in him some sort. This serves as a reminder to anyone who contemplates going against his wish. The definition of power comes in to play the “psychological relation” even when his body was decomposing his mind was still sharp.  Kurtz’s voice still boomed when he spoke. He still demanded the respect he thought he deserved.  Since Kurtz had terrorized the natives into fearing and respecting him even on his last days he was still powerful. He himself seems to be the one who betrayed the human value and became the darkness out of the ‘civilizing’ mission.  Despite from that, we should consider the existence of a young Russian in this novel. My comment on that will be a question base on what is the function of that mysterious Russian who briefly appears in the middle of the jungle, only to disappear into the same jungle? Probably, is too simple to suggest that he is there to tell us the things about Kurtz that Kurtz himself never tell us. Nevertheless, he does get that much done. Still, on the surface, he might be there to give us a glimpse of a European who was as influenced by Kurtz as the natives were. Now the young Russian enters to continue the information he has given about Kurtz. It seems that it was Kurtz himself who ordered the attack upon the steamboat. After delivering this additionally shocking information, the Russian borrows some riffle shells and tobacco from Marlow and disappears into the wildness.

So the first narrator has been true to his words. But why have Conrad gone to the trouble of introducing a character Marlow, between the story to be told and the author, Conrad himself? One possibility is that Conrad felt he needed an additional character by not identified with the pilgrims. The function of this character would to be establishing a norm against which we can compare the actions of the other characters. Marlow has told one of his inconclusive tales. Tales of two human condition. Kurtz that represents what every man will become if left to his own intrinsic desires without a protective civilized environment. Meanwhile for Marlow that represents the civilized soul that has not been drawn back into savagery by a dark alienated jungle. Every man has inside himself a heart of darkness. This heart is drowned in a bath of light shed by the advent of civilization. No man is an island, and no man can live on an island without becoming a brutal savage. Inside his heart lies the raw evil of untamed lifestyles. From the novel, we are given the pieces to a vast and complicated puzzle. What are we to do with them? As with any puzzle, we examine the pieces to see how they fit together between fictions and reality in this novel.  

 

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