Book: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I listened to a few other Conrad's fictions on tapes a few years ago, but was never fully engaged. This time I had a lot of difficulties getting into this book. Took me over a year to complete this short book. Maybe it was the narratives in the beginning. It was a story within a story within a story--"we" listening to a story told by Marlow about his story with Kurtz. If I had not seen Apocalypse Now, I would not have followed the story initially. Only toward the very end, when Marlow was confronting Kurtz, I became involved in the narratives. Then I found the power of the language and the imagination.

Interestingly, I read this book back to back with The Quiet American by Graham Greene. That was a story about Vietnam, same location as Apocalypse Now, so when I was reading Heart of Darkness, I was only able to imagine the Vietnam war era.

The Secret Sharer is in the same book. It was a little shorter and easier to read. I enjoyed it greatly. The back cover says: "The saga of a young, inexperienced skipper forced to decide the fate of a fugitive-sailor who killed a man in self-defense. As he faces his first moral test the skipper discovers a terrifying truth--and comes face to face with his secret self." and describes Conrad as a major psychological writer. Very true especially to this story, which is psychologically intense.

"[Mr. Kurtz] began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, "must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings--we approach them with the might as of a deity. By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded." ... From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence--of words--of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: " Exterminate all the brutes!" (p.84)

I think I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I didn't believe them at first--the thing seemed so impossible. The fact is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What made this emotion so overpowering was--how shall I define it?--the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly. This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and then the usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the possibility of a sudden onslaught and massacre, or something of the kind, which I saw impending, was positively welcome and composing. It pacified me, in fact, so much that I did not raise an alarm. (p.109)

One gets sometimes such a flash of inspiration. I did say the right thing, though indeed he could not have been more irretrievably lost than he was at this very moment, when the foundations of our intimacy were being laid--to endure--to endure--even to the end--even beyond. (p.111)

I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

"The horror! The horror!" (p.117)

Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up--he had judged. "The horror!" He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth--the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best--a vision of greynees without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things--even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry--much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal. (p.119)

She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. (p.126)

-- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad