Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Heart of Darkness, is pretty much all ‘tell’, with very little ‘show’. We follow Marlow, a rudderless young man, with a well-connected aunt, who tells his own story to a boat’s company, while becalmed in the Thames estuary. Marlow recounts his search for adventure and purpose, when he joined a commercial company out of Brussels, to captain a steamboat heading inland on the river Congo, in order to further despoil the river’s hinterland of its wealth, notably ivory.
Matters are vague from the outset. It’s not clear as to the specific purpose of the trip. The use of the term ‘pilgrims’ to describe the colonial officials, traders and adventurers, working for and leeching off the Company, among whom Marlow lives and works, is confusing. Are we in search of a holy site? Does Conrad want us to think we are?
And yet the deified figure, Kurtz, the end of this putative pilgrimage, while praised for his wisdom and his eloquence, never substantially manifests either. Is Kurtz modern English literature’s first reclusive celebrity? He’s not the leader of a cult, though suggestions that he is esteemed, feared, even venerated by local people, are hinted at, but never actually shown. The appearance, on two occasions, of a splendidly described local woman – lover? intended? shaman? - is just one instance of dimness. Who is she? What is her relationship with Kurtz? What actions does she take?
“Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, at the same time the swift shadow darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace.”
There are, as you’d expect with Joseph Conrad, many such glorious sentences, in what was his third language.
“The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling waveof plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.”
The ‘us’ here is the steamboat’s company and an instance of Marlow’s view of everyone else as an ‘antagonist’, to the journey and the search.
The greed for ivory - read ‘oil’ in today's colonial commercial onslaughts. Soon oil will be overtaken by data as the treasure most craved - is the clearest driver in the story. Marlow’s almost sneering purposelessness is no more than common or garden collusion in a rapacious colonial enterprise.
Conrad’s story, a novella of 38, 000 words, has a significant impact on 20thand 21stcentury writing. Journeys, real and metaphorical, abound in novels since then. Searching ‘within’ forms the plots of many modernist texts. ‘Inner darkness’ is a widely visited locale for such journeys and searches, presenting in fiction, poetry and drama, often without showing, or telling, what is meant by the term, beyond a vague illusion to a spiritual vacuum.
An attempt by Francis Ford Coppola to show the story and the character of Kurtz in his sprawling Viet Nam war film Apocalypse Nowcomes across as heartless and dim. The star actor, Marlon Brando, mumbles his way through scenes that are less than certain and clear. It is as if the film-makers have taken over Conrad’s extensive use of un- and in- adjectives and adverbs, to timorously present the actuality of the characters and their actions.
The use of a colourful character lifted from Conrad’s story, as the boat arrives at Kurtz’s camp, maintains the distancing and the telling, until we arrive at the Brando scenes, which, depending on your view, are either acting and directing masterclasses or gormless ramblings, saved from incoherence by good editing.
Conrad uses the seanchaí approach, the embodied narrator, in other work, most notably in the adventures of Lord Jim. Is this distancing device intentional or is it a subtle manifestation of Conrad’s unease with his ability to write as well as he wished in his third language?
Joseph Conrad was Polish and learned French as a second language, while growing up. He learned English as an adult, working and reading widely when ‘before the mast’, in his early twenties. He later collaborated with Ford Maddox Ford, as they strove to write fiction in a form they called, in French, “progression d’effet, words for which there is no English equivalent.”Conrad asserted that English words are“instruments for exciting blurred emotions” and that “no English words have clean edges.”
Some readers and writers consider such attributes a boon, rather than a flaw.
Much has been written about ‘otherness’ and ‘foreignness’ in relation to Conrad’s work. Rudyard Kipling, when reading work by Conrad, felt that he was “reading an excellent translation of a foreign author.” Bertrand Russell, his friend, refers to Conrad’s “highly accented English”. Lady Ottoline Morrell, who had Russell as a lover, said of Conrad
“He talked English with a strong accent, as if he tasted his words in his mouth before pronouncing them; but he talked extremely well, though he had always the talk and manner of a foreigner.... He was dressed very carefully in a blue double-breasted jacket. He talked... apparently with great freedom about his life – more ease and freedom indeed than an Englishman would have allowed himself. He spoke of the horrors of the Congo, from the moral and physical shock of which he said he had never recovered.”
As a Pole, with nationalist leanings in the face of Russian occupation, he naturally tended towards emerging stances critical of imperialism. Yet with the arrival of post-colonial discourses in critical readings of Conrad’s work, Chinua Achebe was searingly blunt, referring to him as “a thoroughgoing racist”, in particular in his situating of Africa as an “other world”. In an interview, Achebe said:
“Although he's writing good sentences, he's also writing about a people, and their life. And he says about these people that they are rudimentary souls... The Africans are the rudimentaries, and then, on top, are the good whites. Now I don't accept that, as a basis for ... As a basis for anything.”
My latest novel, MAKARONIK,is in Irish, my second language. Writing it, I experienced a form of internalised ‘otherness’, a sense that, though the words and the sentences were my own, they were, to a degree, foreign to me. Is this an inversion of Conrad’s experience? He lived and wrote in a foreign language. I live and write in native languages, my second made foreign by the first and by colonialism, as experienced and lived through by Conrad.
I hope MAKARONIK has a heart and a clarity, even though it is a work in a second language, a language with “no clean edges” and many glittering facets. Like all languages.
The Heart of Darkness; Joseph Conrad; Penguin English Library; London, 2012; with an essay by Paul O’Prey
The arrival at Kurtz’s camp, from Apocalypse Now(Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
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