Boring and racist. 0/10
What, too short? Fuck you guys, fine I'll write more about it.
Let’s get the basics out of the way: Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British author who spent much of his youth at sea, working trade routes around Africa and India through the late 19th century. He took these experiences to paper to ground his books in a sort of realism in a way that made him a contemporary to Rudyard Kipling, himself most known for his (racist) stories set in British-occupied India. And like Kipling, Conrad was to some extent a propagandist for empire and colonialism, a tendency made most apparent in Heart of Darkness.
In Heart of Darkness, Marlow, a recurring character in Joseph Conrad’s stories and essentially a stand-in for Conrad himself, eagerly takes on a job sailing a ship upriver in Africa, only to find that he’s bitten off way more than he’s bargained for. Deep in the heart of the hell world that is the Congo Free State (a colony founded directly by the Belgian king Leopold II for the express purpose of plunder and genocide) is an agent named Kurtz who seems to be highly respected but in truth is a charismatic, raving madman. When Marlow’s steamer arrives he finds that Kurtz has been ill for some time, and so Marlow ferries him back downriver. But Kurtz, who’s been raving all this time, dies along the way, leaving only his famous utterance: “the horror! the horror!” Returning to Europe, Marlow now sees his home continent differently, built on lies, which he himself professes to hate, and he’s unable to reintegrate himself into (white) society. When Kurtz’ grieving girlfriend asks for Kurtz’ last words, Marlow uncomfortably lies, saying “your name.” The end. There, I just told you the story so you don't have to read it.
Heart of Darkness is one of the best examples of “classic literature” that exemplifies everything wrong with classic literature. Despite its over-written prose and substituting ambiguity for clarity, it’s been held up by (mostly white, mostly male) academics as one of the greatest books in the “western” canon, all while having ignored or glossed over the racism inherent to the book for over a century. While most critical editions of the book include African novelist Chinua Achebe’s fiery critique of the book and of Conrad himself, academics still push a narrative of it’s-just-symbolism and “anti”-colonialism.
When I put the “anti” in quotes, what I mean is that while Conrad, through Marlow, expresses a pretty clear disgust with how the Belgian government was committing genocide and plunder, the core message of the book is that Africa was/is a place that brings out the worst in (white) man and should be avoided, leaving its inhabitants to their own devices rather than relying on the traditional colonialist doctrine of the “white man’s burden.” It’s a good example of how anti-colonialism does not mean anti-imperialism: Marlow constantly deplores the excesses of colonialism — the violence, the plunder, the abuse — and yet does nothing about it, and even equates the conquest of Africa to the Roman conquest of now-civilized Britain. (Given how much Conrad tried so hard to integrate himself into British society and remake himself as English at a time when England was intensely xenophobic towards the peoples of the inner continent, this is pretty rich.)
Aside
from the broader issues with the message, there’s also the racism
inherent in the text itself. The n-word appears with regularity, not as
“flavor” text but just plain text, at a time when it was already seen as a slur; the black people in the book aren’t
even characters, but props. They’re not even given the opportunity to
speak for themselves: Conrad, with two exceptions, is careful to never
show Africans speaking as people, they’re simply all limbs and jabber.
The first exception is a cannibal, expressing in English the unambiguous
fact of his cannibalism, thereby erasing any ambiguity, and this book loves
ambiguity. (Hm — H. P. Lovecraft certainly had an irritating propensity
for meaningless adjectives in place of useful description as well. I’m
noticing similarities, here.) The second exception is the manager’s
assistant, who utters the famous announcement of Kurtz’s death in that
simple stereotypical patois that’s been assigned to black people for
centuries. And these two exceptions prove the rule.
Academics will fight each other to be the first to tell you that this book is ackshully totally a subversion on racism and the civilized/savage dichotomy, that no matter how savage these African natives might be, it’s a white guy from supposedly-civilized Europe who’s the worst of them all. Here’s the thing about that: it’s bunk, and so are the academics. The natives, being the caricatures that they are, are not a meaningful contrast to Kurtz. Kurtz is incomparable because there’s nothing to compare him to. He’s not “the worst savage of them all,” he’s just a dude who went insane because he went places white people don’t belong. Africa isn’t a real place in this book, it’s just a stand-in for everything Europeans — particularly Brits — were and are afraid of.
While this book might have been a critique of the methods of colonialism as embodied by Belgium, it’s still racist trash, and in that sense it probably does deserve its status as an exemplar of the “western canon,” willfully unexamined by the academics who gatekeep it.
That's a whole lot of words just to say what I already said about this book: boring and racist. 0/10
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