Just Finished Reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad is one of those classic writers whose works inevitably find their way into high school and college English class reading assignments.  It happened to me in the tenth grade when I was instructed to buy a paperback copy of his novel Lord Jim at the school bookstore, read it, and then summarize it.  I neither bought nor read it...although my summary paper garnered me a "B" grade (talk about winging it).  Since then, 43 years have passed and I finally got around to reading some Conrad, this one his short novel Heart of Darkness.

The 1902 story Heart of Darkness, on which Francis Ford Coppola based his epic 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, differs from the latter in that Conrad's setting is the deep recesses of the Belgian Congo as his hero Marlowe travels up river to encounter the enigmatic ivory trading agent Kurtz (whom I constantly envisioned as looking like Marlon Brando as I read it).  Yes, the quest is similar to the film adaptation's Cambodia-based quest for Colonel Kurtz, there an American renegade soldier...although Coppola was obviously going for a heavy political statement about the American war effort in Vietnam.  In Heart of Darkness, Marlowe is a seaman who wants adventure in his life...and plunging into the depths of Africa's "heart of darkness" to find the ailing Kurtz is irresistible to him.  Along the way he discovers the reprehensible way that the native blacks are treated by the colonialists, with disease, near-starvation, and gross overworking just the most glaring symptoms of their exploitation.  In this sense, this novel was an important eye-opener into how native populations were being abused by occupying colonial powers...in this case the late nineteenth-century Belgium Congo, as run by their King Leopold, being one of the most extreme abusers...

Eventually, as in the movie, Marlowe (or the cinematic character played by Martin Sheen with a different name) meets up with Kurtz and discovers him to be a fascinating combination of idealism, charisma, and utter disregard for others' lives.  The local people living under his rule, also as in the movie, adore him and fear losing him as the traveling party (through Marlowe) convinces him, as he is dying, to go back down river with them.  There is a curious character in the book, a Russian, who, like a similar hippie-like character in the movie, who has lived with Kurtz in his strange, reclusive new society and regards him as a great genius with a flare for poetry, teaching...and instilling terror. Despite knowing what a murderer Kurtz is, Marlowe can't help admiring him and comparing him favorably to the other, more petty-minded traders around him. It is this strange approval of such a sinister character that gave me pause, considering the villains of similar ilk that have victimized the world during the century following the publication of this story... figures like Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and others...who entranced those around them with their presence but who ultimately were agents of destruction and darkness.  Hence, the double meaning of the title "Heart of Darkness".  In one sense, it refers to going to an extremely remote, isolated place, in the middle of an area unfamiliar to most of civilized society.  In another sense, it can mean how one's own heart can be made full of darkness. Perhaps one lesson, intended or not, that can be taken from it all is that trying to effect great changes, no matter the idealism or good intentions behind them, by isolating oneself from the "corrupt" world, also removes the good from that very same world and gives evil and darkness an opening to work its own aims within one's soul...