Can high school students and—yes—even university students, understand Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? Here is a masterpiece borne from the mind of a man for whom indigenous cultures and Western civilization had no appeal, a man once involved in gun-running and political conspiracies, who spent nearly two decades in a merchant navy and who bore witness to the horrors perpetrated by Europe in Africa; now, compare such a man to our students:—generally speaking—a class of pampered and privileged children raised on games, noise, and ignorance of silence and suffering. Now, I do not wish to argue that we are bound by experience and that the Heart of Darkness cannot be grasped across time and space, but, please, let us be realistic.
We do not enlighten the “heart” by leading students to treat the Heart of Darkness as a work of historical fiction. Text-based questions cannot serve to comprehend the Heart of Darkness. It is not merely a story about the heart of Africa, of Kurtz, or of Marlow; the darkness at the core is also the darkness at the core of every human enterprise, and, it is also the universal darkness of the interminable, monotonous, ungraspable Other that is death, the death that challenges and tests human understanding and deserves not essays or courses but entire universities, entire civilizations. Indeed, according to one psychologist, everything human already exists for this purpose.
Although Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can be treated as a work of historical fiction, to treat it as such is to do it a disservice. If we are interested in teaching about the crimes committed by King Leopold against the people of Africa, then we should examine Mark Twain’s neglected, far less ambiguous, far less amoral and far more vitriolic “King Leopold’s Soliloquy.” In contrast to Conrad’s work, Twain’s work does not sound a deep existential note, nor does it indulge in narrative niceties; Twain’s work is a moral assault that condemns the privileged class and exposes how easily a religion of love is adapted to the purposes of horror.
To be fair, Joseph Conrad did not neglect the religious dimension of the historical horror. “Kurtz” is a cryptogram for “Christ.” He comes from the east, from Germany, to Belgium, where he seeks success. Filled with resentment for the aristocratic upper class, he sails to the Congo, to make his mark as King Leopold’s merchant of ivory. However, as Jesus rejected Hebrew law to establish a mythology around his own crucifixion, Kurtz soon departs from the methods and policies of the imperial company, establishes even more violent methods of operation, and becomes the center of a cult. Finally, as Christ’s body symbolizes food, in the minds of the natives—Kurtz’s body was fit to eat, especially on account of his persona.
Conrad’s decision to focus his tale on the aspirations of a merchant instead of on King Leopold, the historical “heart” of the problem, is prophetic. Today, kings are largely symbolic, nearly non-existent. In their place, a new class of conquerors has arisen: the merchant class, the capitalists, the industrialists, the entrepreneurs and the robber barons and financial elitists, all people who, without swords, often without guns, produce a greater swathe of death and destruction than any king ever dreamed of. And yet, are these facts taught in our classrooms? We do our best to avoid it by reducing the Heart of Darkness to an aesthetic object and a historical-moral lesson that has no bearing on the ongoing crimes being perpetrated in the Congo, in Africa, and throughout the World of Darkness.
Yes, yes, obviously Marlow’s adventure is loosely based on Conrad’s own life; but he is also a Kurtz figure, another man from the east.
To misread the heart of darkness is to become Kurtz’ widow, someone too deluded and too deeply in love to see anything else but her delusions.
