Joseph Conrad
Cuore di Tenebra

Heart of Darkness: ghosts & monsters.

1. (But then it was dark here, and this too was one of the dark places of the earth)

Deptford. The sun set; darkness descended upon the Thames. The great city’s traffic continued along the sleepless river as the night deepened. Marlow recounted to his current crew his memories from the edge of the world, with a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke, recalling the two women who stood guard at the door of darkness. Now all those who listened to him were men enough to face the darkness. Kurtz was, above all, an idea, a hypnosis, a figment. Even his existence had been improbable, inexplicable, bewildering. He had been an insoluble problem; it was absurd that he had existed, that he had managed to go so far, that he had succeeded in staying there, so far that he would no longer know how to get back. Sent into the depths of darkness, he had become himself both the time and place of the darkness. The seductive serpent had fascinated, enchanted, and in the end imprisoned him as well. Kurtz was the white man among black Africa, and he had managed to become a God to them. They obeyed him, but he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired unease, discomfort. Not a distrust—just discomfort. To have ascended that river was like traveling back in time to the very first dawn of the world, when the vegetation ran riot upon the earth and the great trees were its rulers. A great silence and an impenetrable forest. The air was hot, thick, oppressive, dreamlike. There was no joy in the splendor of the sun, Kurtz enchanted and cut off from everything he had ever known—somewhere—far, far away—perhaps in another existence, ascending to the deep darkness of his heart. He was wandering, with his motley crew, over a prehistoric land, a land still bearing the appearance of an unknown planet, of a silent and profound torment. The forest crossed the waters as if to block his way back, as they pushed ever deeper into the heart of darkness. The jungle was desperate, dark, inaccessible to human thought, without pity for human weakness. They could not understand; they sailed in the night of ancient times, those ancient times now vanished. There they saw something monstrous, powerful and invincible because it was free. They looked about them astonished, and began to suspect they were deaf, then as night fell suddenly, they began to think they were blind as well, and everything was utterly still. But that stillness was nothing like peace; it was the stillness of a fierce, ruthless force pondering an unfathomable purpose, and seemed to be watching them with a dreadful air of revenge. On the slopes at the company stations, he sensed that in the blinding sun of those regions he would come to know a flaccid, pretentious, and short-sighted demon, and a rapacious and ruthless madness, as is only right for those who confront the darkness. But in the Tropics, above all, one had to keep calm, because changes happened mainly inside. However, the forest had long since discovered his true nature and had taken a terrible revenge upon him, whispering to him something of itself that he had never known, something he had never suspected until he had conferred with that vast solitude and the darkness of an impenetrable night. His soul, alone in that forest, had looked into itself, and had gone mad.
His was an impenetrable darkness that revealed itself at a supreme moment. Marlow often wondered whether he had ever really seen him, and the sound of that ghost’s voice remained unforgettable, as did the pulsing flow of light from the heart of darkness.

2. (Compelled to live in the heart of the incomprehensible)

Cuore di Tenebra was published by the Scottish periodical Blackwood's Magazine in three installments between February and April 1899, a year from the end of a century. Romantic and modernist, a physical and metaphysical inner journey backward into the primitive human psyche, the book is dense, dark and slow, hypnotic, especially if read on sultry summer nights when tropical temperatures never dip below twenty-four degrees Celsius and the sound of cicadas interferes with the silence, with everything that mimics the atmosphere of the journey along the jungle river, so that the intensity and weight of the setting can truly be felt. Over the years it has been criticized for racism, misogyny, ethnocentrism; yet on the pages of the text it seems the author distances himself from these traits by assigning them to certain characters, and it rather seems a genuine attempt at anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist documentation, exposing the lies of the era masked as philanthropic intentions. Heart of darkness is that of the territory, that of mankind, the well-known and predatory heart of the Western colonizer, the unknown heart of Africa’s regions and peoples, Marlow’s resistant heart, and the desperately corruptible heart of Kurtz—from a man of culture and arts to monster and dictator, a white god come among black men who had never seen such pallor; in all cases, all slaves. All slaves to the great fine business that was to be capitalism, all with their souls under lock and key in their own bitter hearts of darkness. And the parallel worlds of earth evidently exist, the numbers exist: on chalkboards, on notebooks, on tallies, on screens, on mainframes; global finance rockets, speed, the light and river stones have lain there for centuries in peace. A sense of eternity, before the coming of Tristes Tropiques, before the Cargo Cult, before the myth of the noble savage, before the discovery of the leisure society, before the vertical view and the crucial shift from nature to culture, our heart, our heart of darkness, ghosts and monsters, and the dark night of the soul, and the whisper of a voice that speaks beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness.

3. (Looking at the sliding coast from a ship is like reflecting on a riddle)

The conquest of the earth. Foreshadowing change, efficiency, commerce, massacre, blessings. An intense and dejected despair. Marlow watched the station and the men who, praying to the ivory, wandered aimlessly, wondering what it all meant. And outside, the silent forest seemed to him something grand and relentless. He observed those tiny men who tried to cheat time by gossiping and plotting against one another in utterly foolish ways. There was always a climate of conspiracy in those stations which, naturally, led to nothing—except nothingness. It was unreal, like everything else there; they plotted and slandered just for the sake of it. Marlow wondered what they were, they who had ended up down there, with no answer. Youth, seeing things, accumulating experiences, ideas, broadening the mind—all lies, and in lies there was a touch of death, a taste of mortality, absurdity, surprise, bewilderment; they were all prisoners of the incredible. Marlow did not like to work, but he liked what was inherent in work, the possibility of finding oneself. But everything there, every single thing, seemed to him to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. Kurtz, now sick and frail, died on the return journey, just as he was reliving every detail of his earthly existence in that supreme moment of total, real, and definitive knowledge. Truth and sincerity crushed into that fleeting moment wandering at the threshold of the invisible, a thought, just one, sharp enough to pierce all the corrupted hearts like his that beat in the darkness, like the beat on the skin of a Congo drum, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled by distance, pounding like the pulsing of a heart—the heart of a darkness. The heart of Kurtz, and his eyes, which long afterwards Marlow continued to feel upon him, as if they were staring at him with that vast and boundless gaze that embraced, condemned, and hated the entire universe. And what had happened to his heart? And what had he seen down there except the horror? The horror! Yet they possessed evil, and they possessed the cure, to the point of thinking that time was a diabolical concept that had never existed, for the total history of a single instant would suffice for chaos to frighten them with its indecipherability. Nothing existed, there was nothing to communicate, not a shred of anything to recount that meant something; it was nothing, only nothing. There had always only been one immense and profound void; nothing meant anything, nothing would ever mean anything, nothing could be grasped, to totalize was a strategy that did not exist, there existed only nothingness. And what had happened there—to the heart? Some time later Marlow climbed a clean and bare staircase. The building was as silent as a house in a city of the dead. She approached him, all in black, pale, gliding towards him in the half-light, a tragic and familiar shadow on the shimmer of the infernal river, the river of darkness. She shone with a supernatural brightness in the darkness, in the triumphant gloom. She had otherworldly powers, mature powers of loyalty, of faith, of suffering, and with her the room seemed to become even darker. For her, Kurtz had died only yesterday, and he saw her and him in the same instant of time—his death and her pain—her pain at the very moment of his death.
He saw them together, he heard them together. And at that point he decided it was too dark, definitely too dark, and at the point of death, truth was not necessary there in Brussels.