Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness is a curious little book. In some ways simple enough to be deeply anticlimactic in its final pages and in other ways complex enough to have captivated critics and inspired many a far-reaching interpretive and very possibly agendist essay, it is despite its story-within-a-story structure fascinating more as a piece of craft than as a narrative tale, and shows once more how realising a character with minimal detail can make him seem, rather than simple and uninteresting, enigmatic, powerful and complex.

This tiny novella revolves around the character of Kurtz. The first two chapters build up to Marlow’s meeting of this strange figure and the third shows us what happens when he does. We hear a lot more about Kurtz than we see, including, quite cleverly, the fact that his ideological beliefs have changed over time. We don’t need to be made aware that Conrad lived a very similar experience to this story himself; everything seems so real, even the recollections of things that themselves seem unreal.

The real marvel, though, is the language and construction of the work, given that it was written before the 20th century had even begun. The naturalism that creeps into the dialogue, the clever similes, the interplay of ordinary speech and eloquence all seems so ahead of its time, giving us gems of passages like this one: -

‘I fancy I had some vague notion of falling upon him and giving him a drubbing. I don’t know. I had some imbecile 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.’

And yet the attitude to the ‘savage’ natives of Africa remind us that this book was written during colonial times, when Europeans considered it their right to brutalise and misuse black people – though it’s worth noting that Marlow tends to objectify everyone he describes.

Occasionally lacking in subtlety, sometimes too caught up in its tangents and really despite its status as a classic story rather unfulfilling in terms of narrative, it certainly seems like a milestone in English literature, and is both a fascinating read and a clever piece of craftsmanship. Not, I feel, worthy of the empty academicism flung at it, though. Psychoanalysing Kurtz the way you wish to psychoanalyse him is easy, because he’s left inchoate, with just enough of shape that moulding the details becomes a simple task.