Book #30 of 2020: The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

There is a long-running debate about Conrad's little novel and what it means. Any work of lasting quality should have such a debate (there's a nice exploration of the salient points here). Was Conrad racist, and was he using tropes of 'savage Africa' in indefensible ways? Was he against one form of imperialism but for another? Was his work reinforcing European superiority?

I'd argue that Conrad was 'woke,' and was laying the groundwork for what it means to be 'woke' today, over 100 years ago. He was trying to express his burgeoning anxiety, an anxiety that all the structural underpinnings of his society and culture were based in immense criminality and shocking cruelty, and that the vast majority of people who benefited from these systems of oppression were blithely unaware of this reality. All the myths and propagandistic 'history' and the 'heroic' actions of admirable men were laid bare for him, and this cast him into a void. If the civilization whence all your morals and beliefs and knowledge derive turns out to be devoid of morals and built on lies, what next? Heart of Darkness is full of the radical tension that results when perceived truths and conventional wisdom are stretched taut and burst over the raw red wounds of slavery, butchery, conquest, and exploitation. Suddenly the heroic and civilizing are revealed as the truly barbaric, and one is confronted with the questions: Whose side are you on? How best do we confront this?

For Conrad it was to reveal "The horror, the horror" in a rich and demonically ambiguous work. It's impossible to revisit it without the ghosts of Apocalypse Now--many times when picturing scenes or characters as I re-read it, Dennis Hopper or Martin Sheen or Laurence Fishburn or Marlon Brando would intrude. That film used Conrad's novel to punch holes in the myths around American imperialism.

Yesterday in Baltimore a statue of Columbus was pulled down and cast into the Inner Harbor. Young people are feeling the anxieties which drove Conrad to write more than a century back, and they are acting on them. They are writing their own reactions to "The horror." Will this lay the foundation for new, more just economic and governmental structures, or will there be a harrowing collapse into chaos or reactionary violence? Time will tell.