PROSE
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
Why this book?
October is Black History Month in the UK. Heart of Darkness, based on the author’s personal experience in the Belgian Congo (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC), provides a devastating evocation of the reality of imperial exploitation and a controversial portrayal of racist attitudes and behaviour.
The story
In 1890, Joseph Conrad was employed by a Brussels-based company as a steamboat captain on the Congo River. Although his job was supposedly to last for three years, he quit after just one trip up and down the river between Kinshasa and Kisangani. It is no exaggeration to say that he was in a state of physical and psychological collapse, brought on by his exposure to a European regime of greed, violence and hypocrisy. Nine years later, he used this experience as the basis for Heart of Darkness.
The writing
This book has become one of the most famous and widely read works of fiction in English. The very title has developed a life of its own and is referred to in discussions of civilisation and savagery, imperialistic greed and domination, violence, insanity, genocide and, in a general way, of human nature itself.
It is a book which has also provoked serious objections. In the late 1970s, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe declared Heart of Darkness to be ‘an offensive and totally deplorable book’, full of degrading stereotypes of Africa and Africans. He condemned Conrad as being a ‘bloody racist’ whose book should be removed from the canon of literature.
Other readers have felt that Conrad is offering a critical view of European imperialism, a perspective on the nature of power which remains relevant today, and that his prejudices and blind spots enable us to explore our understanding of racism and to examine ideas about the hollowness of ‘civilisation’ and a universal potential for savagery. Barack Obama suggested that he read the book not to learn about Africa, but for its insights into white people and their particular way of looking at the world. It has also been suggested that the novel is typical of Conrad’s fascination with ‘human outcasts such as one finds in the lost corners of the world’.
The reading
The variety of responses to the work today reflects the fact that this is a live conversation, in which our reading of the book may participate. Personally, when I try to think where the great power of the book lies, I go to Conrad’s own words about the purpose of the artist as being ‘by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see’.
Some questions you may wish to consider while reading the story:
- What do you see as the dominant theme(s) of the story?
- Where, ultimately, is the ‘darkness’?
- What is the reality of ‘civilisation’ as portrayed here?
- Is the racism inherent in the story an inevitable product of the time at which it was written?
- Do you perceive this as a racist work or an attack on racism?
The author
The son of Polish parents, Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 in what was then Ukraine. Under the influence of his father he began to learn English as a child, reading authors including Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, William Fenimore Cooper and Captain Maryatt. Orphaned at the age of eleven (his mother died of tuberculosis in 1865, his father followed in 1869), he was brought up by his uncle and sent to school in Krakow and Switzerland. In 1874, aged sixteen, he left for Marseille to fulfil his ambition to become a seafarer, joining the French merchant marine. In 1878 he joined a British ship and served under the British flag for the next sixteen years, learning to speak the language in which he would become acclaimed as one of its greatest writers. During his maritime career he sailed from Europe to Africa, Asia and the Antipodes, gathering experiences which would fuel his works of fiction dealing with themes including life at sea, political intrigue, revolution, guilt and responsibility. He settled in England in 1894 and his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published a year later, followed by his celebrated novella Heart of Darkness in 1899 and outstanding novels including Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). Conrad died in England in 1924.
Recommended Edition: Heart of Darkness, Fifth Norton Critical Edition, ISBN 9780393264869
Content courtesy of Keith Fosbrook, Facilitator at the London Literary Salon.
POETRY
William Shakespeare
Hamlet’s Soliloquy
There are actually four great soliloquies in Hamlet, but for this month’s Challenge we will focus on the speech that begins with what are probably the most famous words ever written by Shakespeare or any other playwright:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Hamlet, written around 1600, drew inspiration from the Senecan tradition of the revenge play. An earlier play in Shakespeare’s canon – Titus Andronicus – is clearly fashioned on this model, and examination of the plot line of The Spanish Tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592 (removing some of the limbs and outward flourishes) reveals that it is remarkably similar to the plot of Hamlet.
Hamlet, the student prince, is summoned home from university. He finds his life turned upside down, everything has changed. Once the world was at his feet, now he no longer knows who to trust, who to believe.
Urged by the ghost of his father to avenge his brutal murder, Hamlet resists his first reaction to the story:
Haste me to know it, that I with wings as swift
As meditation or thoughts of love
May sweep to my revenge.
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V
and follows neither the Senecan tradition or his own intention. He hesitates and remains passive for much of the action of the play, reflecting on his position in four great soliloquies, the most famous of which: ‘To be, or not to be . . .’ occurs in Act 3, Scene I. Sent to kill, the Prince of Denmark’s attempt to expose the truth and fulfil his filial duty takes him on a perilous journey through madness, murder, betrayal and lost love.
Shakespeare’s own struggle with the play has resulted in it being regarded as possibly the best known and greatest of all his dramatic works. The opening of this soliloquy is the one line of Shakespeare that everyone knows.
My background is in the theatre and my studies focus on repeated readings of the text. There are many renditions available and if you wish to hear the speech (although I think there is a lot to be said for coming to it in your own voice) it’s wise to listen to more than one reading, thus avoiding fixed cadences and stresses. It’s a great text to speak, sing, intone, shout . . .
Content courtesy of Jane Wymark, Facilitator at the London Literary Salon.
