From the Bookshelf of Should have read classics…

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

Start date: February 1, 2013

Finish date: February 28, 2013

Discussion: Group Book Discussions

Why we're reading this: This is the group read for February.
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What Members Thought

May 29, 2011 Michael Canoeist rated it really liked it

It's the incantatory quality of the writing that makes Heart of Darkness stand out for me. Conrad, through narrator Marlowe, keeps invoking the "darkness." It becomes a metaphor for many things, potentially. I read it simply as the evil part of our human hearts. Marlowe says it so many times, in so many ways -- in landscape descriptions; in references to the legendary trader Kurtz; and in application to the African natives themselves. So much carefully crafted repetition makes the concept almost It's the incantatory quality of the writing that makes Heart of Darkness stand out for me. Conrad, through narrator Marlowe, keeps invoking the "darkness." It becomes a metaphor for many things, potentially. I read it simply as the evil part of our human hearts. Marlowe says it so many times, in so many ways -- in landscape descriptions; in references to the legendary trader Kurtz; and in application to the African natives themselves. So much carefully crafted repetition makes the concept almost tangible.

That latter aspect, in relation to the Africans, may be why so many in my book group did not care for this book. I think it made them uncomfortable. Clearly, or it seemed clear to me, Conrad saw the absence of Western civilizing tradition as a huge and scary vacuum in the native African world. To him, I think, the natives were capable of anything because they didn't know any better. That made them unpredictable, threatening, and dangerous -- especially under the sway of an egomaniac, a demagogue, perhaps a madman. Kurtz was dark, or even darker, because he did know better but indulged his worst traits anyway. Of course, he did so while pretending to great virtues of civilization: knowledge, development, aid, enlightenment. And he was enabled by The Company, whose lower management was willing to overlook Kurtz's methods in order to keep participating in his profitable results.

I think it was Conrad's unflattering view of the Africans that bothered other readers from our group. The alternative -- or, possibly, the additional -- reason was that they didn't find darkness and evil a terribly relevant theme. That may be worse; but either way, it was disturbing to me to see a group of educated Americans find this book uncomfortable or irrelevant.

What's disturbing about it? We've spent 50 years in America training people to spot racism anywhere (or at least anywhere with a white skin) and repudiate it thoroughly. But if that prevents readers from appreciating a deeper theme as in Heart of Darkness, that seems both a shame (trading the subtle for the obvious) and something of a shallow reading. If, in alternative #2, they find the theme of evil irrelevant, that seems really odd! So, possibly many readers today don't appreciate the book because Conrad's slow weaving of his tale did not seem hypnotic to them, as it struck me, but merely redundant and repetitious.... which is also a shame. Great literature ruined by PC and Budweiser commercials. ...more

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