Unsound Methods in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”

On his journey to the heart of the Congo, Marlow learns of a famed ivory trader named Kurtz— a remarkable man; a “universal genius;” a painter, poet, and musician; a man whose success in his trade has been unparalleled, but whose “unsound methods” have put him at odds with local bureaucrats. When Marlow finally meets Kurtz, he hears firsthand the trader’s essential characteristic: a deep and commanding voice which, combined with his methods, has earned him disciples and inspired local tribes to worship him as a god. But what message does Kurtz speak into the terrible silence of the African wilderness? And what deficiency, as Marlow calls it, might be hiding beneath his eloquence? Wes & Erin analyze Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode. Transcript 0:09 Erin: On his journey to the heart of the Congo, Marlow learns of a famed ivory trader named Kurtz, a remarkable man, a universal genius, a painter, poet, and musician. A man whose success in his trade has been unparalleled, but whose unsound methods have put him at odds with local bureaucrats. When Marlow finally meets Kurtz, he hears firsthand the trader's essential characteristic, a deep and commanding voice, which, combined with his methods, has earned him disciples and inspired local tribes to worship him as a God. But what message does Kurtz speak into the terrible silence of the African wilderness? And what deficiency, as Marlowe calls it, might be hiding beneath his eloquence? Today we're discussing Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:09 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. 1:25 Erin: So I have a confession to make, which is that this is the first time I have ever read Heart of Darkness. 1:32 Wes: Really? Yeah. 1:33 Erin: Which I think is kind of embarrassing, but it's one of those things. Well, for a while, I kind of. I thought that maybe I had read it. You know, sometimes you read Things Don't Remember, and it's such a classic, such a standard book, obviously, in so many high school and college curriculums. But as I was reading it, you know, familiar with the plot, of course, but I was like, I've definitely never read this before. 1:52 Wes: And. 1:52 Erin: Yeah, so the first time was Day before Yesterday, so we'll see. What. 1:56 Wes: That's so interesting. I'd figured you had taught this a lot in high school and that this one would be a breeze for you. 2:03 Erin: Right. 2:03 Wes: You would think I was worried that you weren't all that enthusiastic about doing this. 2:09 Erin: Well, I wasn't because I, you know, I guess I had resisted it. Like, I could have gone to it after college if it hadn't crossed my path earlier. And I haven't even seen all of Apocalypse now, to be honest. 2:19 Wes: Oh, my God. 2:21 Erin: I've seen large chunks of it, but I don't think I've ever sat down and watched it from beginning to end. I think this is the first time over the course of the podcast that I'm actually encountering something for the first time which has been interesting and maybe thematic for the purposes of this recording. 2:38 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I haven't read this since high school. I think the most recent thing I've read for Conrad, which I really liked and analyzed in detail, was the Secret Sharer. That's many years ago. And rereading this, I didn't remember a lot of it. You know, I knew the basic plot. The plot is very basic. 3:00 Erin: Yeah. 3:01 Wes: Anyway. And a lot of it is just a reflection. The only thing I really remembered about the book was the scene in the fog and the attack and the. Well, it's after the fog, actually. But I always imagined it being in the fog and the attack in which the helmsman is killed with a spear. And that's it. That's like the one memory I had of the book. I knew from my reading of the Secret Sharer that Conrad has such an interesting style of writing that obviously has something to do with the fact that English is his third language. It's brilliant. But it's also syntactically complex. So I knew that coming to this, it wasn't going to be. I'd have to ease myself into that. And you. And you sort of pause and reread things. It reminded me of Billy Budd, actually. And I thought, wow, these sailors really, you know, they're into some ornate syntax with their writing. 3:55 Erin: Yeah. Oh, gosh, that's funny. I certainly see some influence from the French in here. There's a sort of pile up of adjectives. It's like a. Like a wreck in the middle of every sentence that all these adjectives have collided with each other. 4:08 Wes: Well, supposedly, Flaubert was a big influence. Right. I don't know a lot about that, but that's. I heard that mentioned, sure. 4:14 Erin: Yeah. But I think it's just stylistically French like to take a bunch of adjectives and kind of string them together. But, yeah, I guess I had a similar feeling as when I first started Billy Budd, which was for the first 20 pages. I didn't find it difficult, per se, but it didn't really hook me. And I wasn't super interested in it. I was like, oh, man, what am I gonna say about this? I don't really like it. And then all of a sudden, I think when the ship that he's on sees the African coast, or I suppose he's along it all the while, but when he talks about dropping off the Frenchman or whoever on the shoreline and, like, not caring if they drowned. And then specifically the image of that man of war ship firing into the continent. I was like, oh, okay, this is really cool. So, yeah, so that was the moment at which I was really hooked, though I liked certain things earlier, but, yeah. And from then on, it was smooth sailing, so to speak. 5:09 Wes: I actually find the beginning kind of enchanting, but it was slow going. And then, yes, as it, you know, I had the same reaction as you as things pick up. I mean, really, the novella is a. Most of it is just a reflection. Right. Most of it is Marlow's reflection on the effect on him of taking this trip up what is presumably the Congo River. This is something that Conrad famously did himself. Right. So this is a very autobiographical novel. Even the whole story about Marlowe's story about being a child and being into maps and seeing a blank space on the map and wanting to go to this one of these dark places. That's something that is actually autobiographical for Conrad. And so, yes, this is all a vehicle for reflection on Conrad's experience of the Congo at a time when it was controlled by Belgium. Well, not even Belgium per se. Right. But it become the private property in 1885 of King Leopold II, who turned it into his fiefdom and ruthlessly exploited it for ivory and then rubber. We hear a lot about ivory in the book. But in the end, it was. Rubber was the big thing. And the atrocities were limitless and unspeakable. Right. Slave labor amputations were widespread. In the end, because there was an occupying military force that, to prove that it had killed people, was supposed to bring back amputated arms of people. And this in part was to make sure that they spent all their ammunition and that couldn't be used for a rebellion, but to save ammunition. There were lots of massacres, but they would also just kill people and cut off arms, and that what ended up being ruthlessness. King Leopold was able to get that fiefdom by arguing to the rest of Europe that this was a humanitarian and philanthropic mission that basically Belgium and the rest of Europe was invited to. Right. It was going to be free trade for everyone was invited in to. Not just to do trade, but to help civilize the natives. So the book is a reflection on that tremendous and tragic hypocrisy. Not just exploitation, but the justification of it as a humanitarian mission. And Kurtz, in a way, is made to personify all of that. He's a gifted person, a painter and a writer and a musician, a Renaissance man who goes in with the highest of ideals. In contrast to a lot of the people there who Conrad calls faithless pilgrims who are just cynically out to get rich, Kurtz was someone different. And then he becomes, in a way, the extreme representative of colonial cruelty. So it's largely a reflection. And actually, I was going to say, towards the end, I find it gets a little bit tedious because it's a very repetitive reflection. I think it's great. It's a wonderful book. But the enchantment part of it wears off. 8:17 Erin: I agree. Yeah, it certainly needn't be any longer. And also the density of. Just as I was reading, you know, I've starred or highlighted or, you know, written in the margins, you know, multiple times on every single page, especially at the beginning. You know, one's enthusiasm for that kind of wears out towards the end. But, you know, there's certainly a lot packed in here. And I like the conceit too, that there's a frame narrative as well, which very rarely enters in. And we have the actual narrator or the original. The OG narrator is on this boat, on this. I think it's a sailing ship, right, the Nelly, with Marlow and a few other unnamed characters, I think a lawyer, an accountant and some director of companies. So people who are, I guess, you know, representatives of London society, maybe. And the narrator is sort of himself, sort of pro colonization, pro England. And then Marlow comes in and sort of gives an alternate reading of that, though. I mean, we can only speculate, of course, about how much Conrad actually believed some of the things that Marlow says and how Marlowe's more nuanced reading of the atrocities he sees and of Kurtz's own gifts is a little bit more ambiguous maybe, than purely sardonic and a sort of condemnation of colonization. 9:40 Wes: Right. So it's clear that this is an anti colonial book and that that's Conrad's sentiment and that's what he's doing with this book, that's not hidden. But yeah, there is a long standing debate about the extent to which we can attribute Marlow's opinions to Conrad, which of course, we can't. We can't even identify Conrad with the original narrator. These are fictional Personas and every author is exploiting the fact of that fictionality. So some people want to accuse Conrad of racism for his depictions of the natives, to identify Marlow's voice with. With Conrad's voice. But I think we can safely say that we should not do that and that there are places where we might get some ironic distance between Conrad himself and Marlow. Marlow himself is a curious character, right, because he comes across in the frame narrative as very brooding and mysterious and, you know, sitting in the dark and lighting up a cigarette and, you know, using phrases like, and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth, you know, referring to the Thames and London. But in his actual narrative, he comes across as quite vulnerable and disturbed by his emotions and willing to describe all of those feelings. So, you know, we start off with the sense that we have an experienced sailor about to tell one of his yarns. Although the frame narrator tells us that, you know, he was not just a seaman, but a wonder, and that his stories don't have the simplicity of a typical sailor story. So the way he puts it is that the yarns of semen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical. And to him, the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale, which brought it out only as a glow, brings out a haze in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. Just to give an example of the wonderful. Conrad's wonderful prose. But that's an apology, right, for. About what's about to come. This is not a plotted, fast moving story. This is gonna be a very. An autobiographical rumination and it's going to involve a lot of someone reflecting on their own inner life. That's what that little preamble is telling us, right? 12:24 Erin: I really like what the narrator says about. He mentions a couple of things about Marlow that are not typical, as you mentioned, the way that he tells stories, but also the fact that he's a man of the world rather than a sailor, which is really interesting. He makes this. This strange distinction between the two because he says. The original narrator says a sailor is someone who basically just stays in one place, right? The ship is their home and they just go around the oceans and the atmosphere of that is relatively unchanging. And the ports that they see all kind of run together, right? But for the most part they're just on the open ocean. And that has kind of a sedentary quality to it. He said, you know, the sea is always the same. Everything glides past. There's nothing mysterious to the seamen unless it be the sea itself. And that has some inscrutability. I was thinking about this, that, you know, the difference between the sea life and what we were talking about in Billy Budd, where it breeds this kind of hothouse quality or like I said, you know, like a boarding school quality or something like that. Whereas this distinction with what Marlow does by taking a steamship and going into freshwater, I think there's a distinction with the kind of craft that, that is obviously like. It's like a steamship is inherently one step less removed from nature. Like a sailing ship has at least you know, to rely upon the winds and currents and various things. And in a certain sense it's just an elaboration on a relatively rudimentary form which we see the natives using, you know, the hollowed out log or whatever that they use at a certain point in the, in the story that Conrad notes. But the steamship is obviously removed from that. It has more innovation and technological advancement behind it. But also by going into the continent on this, this freshwater journey, it's a very different kind of experience. So you could be a wanderer and still travel by ship when you're penetrating into the heart of the continent via fresh water. So it's a very different kind of experience, which I think is. I don't know. That was intriguing to me, that distinction. 14:34 Wes: Yeah. There's not the same sense of this well oiled machine in the case of. The way I've put it is a little ironic, but in the case of a big sailing ship where you have a bunch of, you know, it takes an enormous crew working together cooperatively and some very strict hierarchy going on, it's sort of a microcosm of law and order, as we discussed in Billy Bud, or even maybe the overreaching nature of the law. And the steamer. Right. Is just, he, I think he calls it a tin can. It's. It's just a piece of crap, basically. 15:12 Erin: Yeah. 15:12 Wes: It sinks. You know, the manager tries to take it up the river early and it sinks and then he has to spend months repairing it. 15:19 Erin: Humphrey Bogart pulls it on a rope. 15:21 Wes: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a piece of crap. And he has a few native crew members and then these useless white men, pilgrims, including the manager with their staves. Just this confederacy of dunces, you know, that he's going to carry with him. Yeah, there's something entirely decrepit and impoverished about the whole thing. And the men aboard, of course, are in a way desperate. They're simply mercenary. They're simply after ivory and they don't even subscribe to the official. You know, they may do some lip service to it. But there's a firm distinction between these faithless pilgrims, again, as he, as he calls them, who are not all that Wedded to the humanitarian. The supposed humanitarian mission, and then a true believer, like. Like Kurtz. So, yeah, that sense of rapacity combined with pointlessness, the pointlessness of what's going on. I think the steamboat is a good way to highlight that because it's, you know, as you said, it's a technological advance in a way, but it represents a degradation. It requires less human excellence to use it, and it's less glorious. It's less. 16:35 Erin: And they're able to train the local tribesmen to basically just perform, you know, the automatic and somewhat mindless duties of just, what, like feeding the fire on the steamboat? I guess there's the suggestion maybe that. That the language barrier isn't even an impediment to being able to teach somebody how to work this thing. Yeah, yeah. There are other, of course, elements of supposed European progress that we see are completely useless and broken down over the course of the book. Like, we see the. The fact that they're supposedly building a railway, but they're blowing up cliffs that aren't even in the way of the railway. 17:11 Wes: Yes, yes. 17:13 Erin: The pipes that they've gotten shipped to them that they need for some purpose have all been fallen into a ditch and are all broken and completely useless. He can't get rivets, which. We could talk maybe about the significance of that. Of course, I think it's a little on the nose, you know, to hold things together as they fall apart. Anyway, regardless, one wonders how much of this is. You know, at the beginning of the novel, Marlowe says something like, you know, efficiency saves us. And I think he means to distinguish himself as actually, you know, a British citizen there talking about the British and saying that their love of efficiency provides them with something, some way to. To shore themselves up in the middle of the jungle, the wilderness. Chaos. And so I wonder how much of this is supposed to be a uniquely Belgian lack of. Of efficiency. I mean, obviously, a lot of this is about how European any. Any form of technology will break down in the wilderness. But since Marlow expresses certain sympathies with. With the British way of doing things, I wonder about that. I also wonder about the particular ills of the Belgian Congo and these pilgrims who come. They're jokingly called pilgrims, of course, and they come to get ivory, basically. That's their. Their God. It seems to me that other than that terminology, which is used ironically, and the sort of idea of a general cause and of a kind of civilizing force that the Belgians seem to think that they're bringing, and that Kurtz and Marlow's aunt seem to be advancing. Other than those things, there isn't any missionary force that we see in the Belgian Congo. And, you know, I'm assuming that it's there, but. But that was kind of like an essential component of British colonization. So the sort of lacking of any belief system and of any of this efficiency. I wonder if this is just a particularly corrupt form of a particularly corrupt enterprise. 19:15 Wes: Yeah, I think so. For all the evils of colonialism, I think famously this is the worst. And it's a very different style than British colonialism. Although Conrad does take pains to make Kurtz a representative of Europe. So later on, and you know, he'll say his mother was half English, his father was half French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz. And by and by I learned, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report for its future guidance, which would become important later on. All of Europe is complicit in this, in the sense that Europe gave the green light to Belgium to go ahead with their project. So it is about the evils of colonialism in general, even though it's an extreme example of that. But I think in a sense it's supposed to reveal the core of colonialism which is exploitative. 20:12 Erin: Right. 20:12 Wes: It's just more obviously sinister and exploitative maybe than some other examples. But I wanted to go back to the concept of efficiency versus the incredible impracticality of some of the things they're 20:27 Erin: they're doing before we do. Can I just say. Yeah, I think that, you know, Marlowe's maybe admiration of Kurt's, though, is also an admiration of this Belgian colonialisms, their nakedness and their exploitation of the land, which I think, you know, this. This brand of colonization, I mean, granted it does have some humanitarian aims behind it, but it's not, in a way it's better than. Than a missionary colonization like the British that sort of takes that exploitation, which we may argue is perhaps lessened by that missionary element, you know, so it's not as obviously exploitative, but that takes a fundamental exploitation and kind of baptizes it. So I think that what Marlowe kind of appreciates about Kurtz, maybe. I don't know, I was trying to figure this out because he seems to like people who are just. Who are honest. He hates a lie, as he says, he abhors a lie. And so there's something very honestly disgusting about what's going on in the Congo. And I mean, we could Talk about whether or not Kurtz is a liar or whatever. I know that's a complex thing that I'm just sort of grazing past. But, yeah, the kind of how bad it is and how horrible it is is so naked that there's, at least for the people who are there, a total lack of ambiguity about it. 21:45 Wes: That is a really interesting question, which I didn't. I don't think I gave enough thought to this. But it's. He's disgusted by what he sees at the very beginning. Right. But he's also intrigued by Kurtz from the very beginning, or it sounds like he is. It's hard to say, because he's. You know, by the time Marlow has formulated his story, he's already met Kurtz. And so everything is written through the lens of Kurtz's gloriousness or whatever it is about. Whatever it is about Kurt's point that is attractive. I don't think that occurred to me enough through the story that here he is despising all the atrocities that he sees and yet worshiping Kurtz throughout to the very end. 22:24 Erin: Perhaps that doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. 22:26 Wes: I mean, I think in the end, Kurtz. What interests him about Kurtz, for Marlow, it's a reflection on the. You know, in the beginning, I said this is a reflection on his reaction to colonial atrocity. But it's also. And this is one of the things that makes the book really interesting. It's a reflection on the effect of just being out in the wilderness, being out in the untamed nature. We get a lot of descriptions of the natural world and its effects on the psyche of Marlow and ultimately its effects on the psyche of Kurtz. Those two things go together, I think, often in a simplistic description of the book. The idea is that Kurtz has gone native and that in some way he's been influenced by the natives. But in fact, I think there's not really a lot of evidence for that in the book. It's more about the relationship to the wilderness. The word wilderness is used repeatedly. So that is part of what fascinates Marlow and makes Kurtz, in a way, an alter ego for him. Is this reflection on the effect of the untamed wilderness on a quote, unquote, civilized human being. 23:37 Erin: Yeah, I agree. I didn't find much evidence for the whole going native thing either. 23:42 Wes: The whole reaction of Marlow to the injustice of what's going on happens pretty early on. So as he's taking the French steamer down the coast of Africa towards the mouth of the river. And by the way, Conrad Wright never says Africa or Congo. He leaves everything unnamed and generic. But we're going to just assume for the sake of argument and simplicity that's what he's describing. And they're, you know, they're landing soldiers, they're stopping at all ports and they're landing soldiers. And this sense of irreality comes over him and it's the irreality of being a passenger. There's something unnatural about that because this is on page 14 in my edition. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact. The oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural and had its reason that had a meaning. Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. So then he describes the natives, the natives occasionally approaching in a boat, and describes their wild vitality, as he puts it, an intense energy of movement that was as natural and as true as the surf along the coast. These are the sorts of descriptions, of course, that will get Conrad accused of racism and the identification of the natives with something natural and primitive. So they wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at for a time. I would feel I belong still to a world of straightforward facts. But the feeling would not last long. And that's when we get into the whole man of war description. So it starts out with just this general sense of there's something being unnatural about being a passenger and doing nothing, which I think corresponds to the role of the colonizer, which kind of masquerades as a kind of work of some sort, but is really not, because exploitation is not a real form of work. And that's why we see all this, you know, the signs of impracticality that you mentioned. But now there's this wonderful scene with the man of war shelling the bush. 26:09 Erin: Yeah, I love this. 26:10 Wes: Do you want to read part of it? Whichever parts you think are. 26:12 Erin: Yeah, let me just read some of that. In the empty immensity of the earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible firing into a continent. Pop would go one of the 8 inch guns. A small flame would dart and vanish. A little white smoke would disappear. A tiny projectile would give a feeble Screech and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight. And it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly, there was a camp of natives. He called them enemies, hidden out of sight somewhere. 26:44 Wes: Yeah. 26:44 Erin: I love that. It's so wonderful. And I love the ironic, almost like scare quotes that Marlowe or Conrad put around these terms, like enemies or, at one point, prisoners or convicts. As if these people have done something wrong and deserve judgment from the colonizing force. 27:04 Wes: I think you're right. This is sort of the first place where you know that you're in for something really special in this novella. Just. It's a very poignant description of the craziness of what's going on. 27:18 Erin: Yeah. And right before it, and right before what you read earlier, just one little thing that I wanted to note. He notes the names of the places, and he's still kind of, you know, as he's traveling down the coast, has this sort of sailor relationship to it that the original narrator describes, where he's sort of watching everything go by and imagining and whatever. And he notes that the Trading Places names seem to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister back cloth. So that the coastline is, like, sinister and some. And I really love that, too, because, first of all, because of the theatricality of it and to a certain extent, I mean, how little. 27:57 Wes: And its names are like little Popo. Sorry to interject. 28:00 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Which is like, the absurdity of that is kind of funny. Yeah. In a way, like, the wilderness always remains for Marlowe. Kind of like the way that the sea is described with the original narrator, where it's just this sort of unchanging and mysterious and, you know, silent is used over and over. Silent thing that forms the backdrop for him in the same way that the constant sea is just the constant backdrop for the sailor. But what I love about this is the fact that, of course you're gonna discover that, like, the back cloth isn't what's sinister. Right. What's sinister is what's happening in front of it. It's the colonization efforts are. Yeah, they're farcical, you know, but they're also sinister. You know, the only time that we get maybe a sinister back cloth is when this just reminds me of when they pull up to that inner station and they see the harlequin who's kind of a farcical figure. And, like, behind him, the station itself is where Kurtz is, you know, so the sinister backcloth, if you will, behind the harlequin is the place where Kurtz has penetrated the back cloth. It's not inherently bad in and of itself. In the same way that I noted that when he talks about the map being filled in, this is, I guess, another thing, this back cloth that Africa used to be a blank space, but that it had become a place of darkness. In other words, because it had been filled in and quote unquote discovered by the Europeans, it had taken on darkness. So the darkness therefore, is what it's discovery. It's the penetration of the land by the colonizing force. The darkness is something that the colonizer is bringing into the land with him. It doesn't seem to therefore be inherent in the land or the people prior to that. And the ivory, if anything, is what's being taken out of the land, which is obviously not darkness. 29:57 Wes: On page 23 in my edition, he will talk of the silent wilderness. That quote struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion. And later on, at the very end of the book, he suggests that in a way, what happens to Kurtz is kind of the wilderness's vengeance for the invasion driving of Kurtz mad, if that's the way to put it. Maybe that's not the proper description of it, but. And that the wilderness is something which awakens brutal instincts. And even that the wilderness, in a way, is a replacement for Kurtz's intended. That's what we learn towards near the end of the novel, which is really interesting, is that Kurtz is engaged and she has more money than him. And that's part of what sent him on this expedition, because he felt insecure about that and he wanted to make his fortune, but the wilderness steals him away and makes him bald by sort of patting him on the head, so to speak, and spoils him by giving him as much ivory as he wants. So there's a Circe-like quality to the wilderness. He becomes a kept man of these natural forces. And the other descriptions that I like include this sense of it is not just the darkness, but the soundlessness of it. 31:22 Erin: Yes. 31:22 Wes: And the idea that it's soundless but rioting. 31:27 Erin: Yeah. So he talks about the kind of a dumb immobility sat on the banks, the living trees lashed together by the creepers. And every living bush of the undergrowth might have been changed into stone, even to the slenderest twig, to the lightest leaf. It was not sleep. It seemed unnatural, like A state of trance. Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard. You looked on amazed and began to suspect yourself of being deaf. Then the night came suddenly and struck you blind as well. About three in the morning, some large fish leaped and the loud splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired. So I love that moment. I marked that as a moment in which silence and darkness kind of converge. Then there's the riotousness of the light, fog and the attack, which seems to be contrasted with this moment, but just that fundamental insensibility of the jungle. And, yeah, I think to what you were getting at, I was more intrigued by the silence versus sound dichotomy than the darkness versus light. But maybe they're the same thing. 32:31 Wes: Let me give a few more examples of this. So on page 30 in my edition, the great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life. A rolling wave of plants piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved. Not later on, he'll say going upriver was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. So you'll have this idea that something. There's a secret knowledge hidden in the. In the wilderness. And the sense of the wilderness, as I, as I mentioned before, trying to wait out the invasion, or being angry about the invasion and being able to wreak vengeance for it. And that Kurtz becomes the instrument of that vengeance. So that the darkness here, as you mentioned, is not just so it's there, but it's. It only becomes what it is in relation to the invasion of quote, unquote, civilized people. Because what it does is it combines with that in a sinister way way. And that's the vengeance it takes. Right. So it. And the sinister combination turns out to be something that Marlowe also repeatedly emphasizes, which is the lack of any kind of check on one's behavior, the sorts of things that come from having police around or whispering neighbors. Basically, the fact that our behavior can get out of hand when we are essentially alone in the wilderness without enough consciousness of other human minds to keep our own conscience alive, essentially. So the vengeance that the wilderness takes is simply a kind of absence. It's the absence of the social that's there in the silence. 34:35 Erin: Yeah, I really like that. At some point, too, he talks about how in Europe the monstrousness of the earth has been shackled. 34:42 Wes: Yeah, the earth seemed unearthly. 34:45 Erin: Yeah. So he writes, the earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster. But there. There you could look at a thing monstrous and free. So I really like what you're saying about that because it's as if the backdrop, you know, the monster of nature that hasn't been tamed by any European is also just like the Europeans themselves. It's them. It's their souls. So out here, they could live without. Without shackles, of course, by shackling the native people. But I think that the idea of time travel is really interesting. You could, like, read it, I think, as a time traveling novel. And I think there is a kind of a blindness on the part of Marlowe that has to go into that. Because, you know, the fact of the matter is the babblings, or however he calls it, of the native people. There is a language there, of course, they just don't know the language or they don't think, you know, they're reading a kind of a prehistoric element into the people. Part of it is that they're going back to maybe what an earlier form of European society would have been, or whatever you want to call it, mixed in with this incredibly difficult landscape and all these other elements which are unconquerable to them, but able to be traversed quite well by the tribes and everything. So this idea on Marlowe's part that these people have no language or that they have. That there's some earlier form of man we might say is, you know, rightfully so, we might. We might say is disgusting, but it's something that is. First of all, it's coming out of Marlowe, the narrator's ignorance of the people. And it's also, I think, is expressing something about the Europeans coming into a land where they can't understand the people. The landscape is inscrutable to them. And therefore it's presenting back a sort of image of a more natural state. It becomes a symbol, obviously, of the absence of civilization, quote, unquote, of culture, quote, unquote. Again, because they're insensible to the actual civilization and culture already there because of the language barrier and other cultural barriers. And so it becomes, I think, just a reflection of an essential part of their own nature underneath what within them has been sort of shackled, the monster that has been shackled within them by codes of conduct and various other civilizing forces. Within Europe, Exactly. 37:15 Wes: In this very passage. The idea of the unconquered earth, monstrous and free. Is associated with the wildness and passion of the natives. And the, quote, unquote, terrible frankness of their noise, which he calls ugly. Even though he starts out by emphasizing their humanity. And then kind of regretting and feeling guilty about the suspicion of their not being human. Because it's a disgust at the fact that the instinctual is more on the surface, supposedly. And in a sense. Right. You know, you're pointing out that that in large part is a projection. It has something to do with a reaction of the colonizers relationship to their own instinctual life. And then Marlow himself. And just the same passage will say. The mind of man is capable of anything. Because everything is in it. All the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage. Who can tell? But truth. Truth stripped of its cloak of time. And then the idea is that you can't meet that truth, which is the truth of the instinctual. The truth of us being driven by sex and aggression. And every other instinct you can think of. Despite the trappings of civilization. It's not enough to have fine sentiments and principles. In order to resist it, as we might think in the context of civilization. You need, he says, deliberate belief. That's the phrase that he uses, which. It's unclear what that means exactly. Although later on he'll suggest that what you need is actually, you know, you have to be in a social context. It's not enough to have a conscience. It's not enough to have all this stuff inside you. But you really do need people around you who are behaving themselves. And holding you to certain standards of behavior. Or things get out of hand. And then in his own case, he says he might have gotten caught up in the ecstasy of the natives and gone ashore. Right? Because there. There's at least one description of running into a group of natives who are very curious about the boat. And they're not hostile, but they come up to the boat and are energetic. And he says the only reason he doesn't get caught up in that. And go ashore and start dancing or whatever. Is because he is caught up in work. He is caught up in surface matters and very practical matters like steering the boat, making sure they don't sink, all that stuff, Right? And that is all that keeps him out of that. You know, I think these are some different suggestions about what insulates us from the wildness of nature. What insulates us from becoming. From Regressing deliberate belief is one suggestion. Social context is another suggestion. Work is another suggestion. And perhaps these things go together, but perhaps also they are implicated in the problem. Work is not, as we've seen, it's not real work in some sense, like the ditch and the blasting of cliffs that are not in the way of railroads. It's a work connected to exploitation. So it's a very complicated argument or an attempt at explaining all of this. 40:20 Erin: So I think there's a critique of Marlowe here, actually, in reading the native peoples as being a prehistoric force because of the cipher in the book, right. So Marlowe finds the harlequin's book, and the harlequin is Russian and he's reading an English language book, but there are notes in the margins, and Marlowe finds the book and says, oh, this is really curious. Like, why is there a cipher in a book in the middle of the wilderness? Like, who, who does he think is going to read these notes or whatever? And the cipher, of course, turns out to be Cyrillic. It's, it's. It's Russian. And so that just strikes me as being a very clear parallel with the lack of understanding of the. Of the natives language or languages, depending on how many tribes they come across, that he reads something into it which is incredibly more complex and in a way kind of condescending. Right. Than is actually there, which is just your ordinary sort of language, society, whatever, you know, something that, that, that actually binds us all together. That's not a way to distance, but is actually evidence of a civilization. 41:24 Wes: With your insight here, and that this projection on the part of the colonizers concerning the dangerous, you know, the instinctual danger of the wilderness and of the natives. And then the suggestions about what keeps us in check, work and social context or deliberate belief, when those things are actually the problem. Right. The harshness and the cruelty of the colonizers is actually a function of civilization, a function of conscience. And strangely enough, this is kind of a Rousseauian thesis about how civilization corrupts us. And that's part of. I think we can talk about the many meanings of what Kurtz is getting at with the horror. The horror, that climactic moment. I think one of them is the realization you can look at that as someone peering into the. As coming face to face with our fundamental instinctual nature and seeing civilization as a kind of veneer for that or just the trappings. But you could also see someone coming to a realization that at bottom, it's not just that civilization is a trapping, but that it is the Source of the cruelty. It is the source of much greater cruelty than can come about from the wild and the instinctual. Right. Animals don't do what human beings do. And this goes along with the idea that colonization is a humanitarian mission, being a thin veil, right, for just getting rich, ivory and rubber. More than that, those ideals are actually implicated in the atrocities. So they're not just an excuse, but those ambitions and ideals are somehow implicated. And Kurtz's being a man of refinement and a painter and a writer and all that stuff, again, it's not just in tension with what he becomes, but it's implicated in it. You know, I think that's what you're 43:22 Erin: onto here, with what you're reminding me of is how people say, like, how could Hitler be Hitler, even though he was a painter and a vegetarian? Basically what you're saying is that the fact that he is a painter and a vegetarian is essential to making a Hitler. 43:35 Wes: And if he were a vegan, he would be. 43:37 Erin: Then he would be even worse. Yeah, I really like that. That's great. 43:43 Wes: Right? Because our conscience, what is it? It's, you know, it's a part of us which can tyrannize us. Right? And it can. It's the part of us that not only says no to ourselves. You can't do this, you can't do that, and you're going to be punished. But also the part of us that's related to our ideals, what Freud calls a superego ideal, and to the development of our ambitions. And so if we want to think, if we want to understand the cruelty of colonization, we have to understand the cruelty inherent in civilization and those factors in civilization. Not just the thou shalt nots, but the thou shalls, the ambitions and the ideals. And if you say my goal is to civilize people, my goal is to help people, Even if there weren't also ivory and rubber, even if that were all they were doing, you have to question the motives of the civilizing force. Are they simply trying to control. Are they simply trying to transform other people so that they are like them, to make other people like them, to impose their culture on other people? 44:42 Erin: I think it leads us to something that really intrigued me, which is the idea of the restraint inherent in the African crew members on the steamboat. Maybe we could talk about that and you can help me kind of tease that out a little bit, because it confused me. He's talking about how the Africans on the boat actually outnumber the white people something like 30 to 5. 45:03 Wes: Oh, yeah. This is A wonderful passage, yeah. 45:06 Erin: And they've had some rotten hippo meat that they've been eating, most of which these pilgrims have thrown overboard. They seem to be cannibalistic, and yet they haven't gone after, you know, easily outnumbered as they do, and gone after the white people on board. And so Marlowe's trying to puzzle as to why that is. He says they were big, powerful men with not much capacity to weigh the consequences with courage, with strength even, yet though their skins were no longer glossy and their muscles no longer hard. And I saw that something restraining one of those human secrets, that baffle probability had come into play there. And then skipping down a little restraint, what possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear? Or some kind of primitive honor? No fear can stand up to hunger. No, patience can wear it out. Disgust simply does not exist where hunger is. As to superstition, beliefs and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Skipping down again. And these chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple restraint. I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing me. The fact dazzling to be seen like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma. A mystery greater, when I thought of it, than the curious, inexplicable note of desperate grief in the savage clamor that had swept by us on the riverbank behind the blind whiteness of a fog. Just really incredible. 46:37 Wes: It is, yeah. At the end of that passage, right, we get a callback to what, what's actually going on, which is that they have been hearing these shrieks and voices. You know, they're in fog and they can't move. They're eight way miles away from the Kurtz's inner station, and they're hearing all these scary voices and the whites are kind of panicking and the Africans on the boat are kind of calm. The cannibals are saying, you know, let's eat them if we kill some of these people. And then that's where he gets into this. Some of these thoughts about, these guys must be hungry. They're not being fed. They're being paid in like copper or something, copper wire. Supposedly they're going to use that to eat, but they, they don't. They never have the chance to buy anything. And their hip, their rotten hippo meat was thrown overboard. So really, you know, these, these are cannibals. And they're starving. And why don't they, you know, as you pointed out, kill all the. And they outnumber them. Why not kill all of them and eat them? And as well they should. Yeah, as they should. 47:36 Erin: They would have a moral reason to do that, not just a lack of any kind of stuff. Scruple. 47:40 Wes: And it is a complete mystery. You know, he'll also say it. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one's soul. 47:51 Erin: Just to add a little. A few more notes to this, too. A few lines down, he talks about the manager and says he was just the kind of man who would wish to preserve appearances. That was his restraint. 48:03 Wes: Yep. 48:04 Erin: So for the manager, the restraint is obvious. He's this bureaucrat who is backbiting and trying to advance his way up the totem pole and his only. 48:15 Wes: And he's pretending to care about the fate of Kurtz at that point. That's the appearance he's trying to preserve. 48:19 Erin: Yeah, Right. And his only virtue of success in this climate is his ability to stay alive, which is something else we could talk about. 48:27 Wes: Right. He doesn't get sick. Yeah. 48:29 Erin: But then even a little bit further, he talks about the sound of the steamboat filling the native people with sorrow, which is this incredibly sad moment. The glimpse of the steamboat had for some reason filled those savages with unrestrained grief. The danger, if any, I expounded, was from our proximity to a great human passion let loose. Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence, but more generally takes the form of apathy. So I picked up on, since this is just a little bit further down than the mention of, of course, the African's restraint, the manager's own restraint. I saw the unrestrained grief and thought, okay, is this the answer? Is this the reason why the. Why the cannibals don't just kill the white guys? Is it because they are apathetic to their plight? They've been co opted by the colonizing force and they've now just resigned themselves to. To a kind of hopelessness that doesn't even encourage them to feed themselves. I don't know what we could say about that. I would like to think there's something more noble in their restraint than just the fact that I'm making this connection, which may be a far fetched one, with this idea of grief. 49:42 Wes: Yeah. So in this context, he's connecting grief to apathy. It's kind of a contradictory rumination Right. The other English guys are. Are they English? Why am I calling them English? Have we been calling them English through the whole thing? 49:54 Erin: They might be. I mean, he kind of notes. Marlowe notes when he doesn't speak English with people. So they at least speak English. Right. If they're not just, like traders who are hired by, you know, English people, but hired by the Belgians. 50:06 Wes: Yeah, it's possible. 50:07 Erin: It's hard to tell without a name. 50:09 Wes: Yeah, we're going to be agnostic on that for the rest. Yeah, for the rest of the episode. But anyway, white guys. So Marlowe's trying to explain he himself wasn't all that afraid of those cries. And he's explaining that because. Because there's not. He didn't get a sense of a hostile intention, just the sense that they're full of sorrow. And then he kind of backtracks and says, well, if there is any danger, then it's the proximity to a great human passion let loose. Extreme grief may vent itself in violence, but it may take the form of apathy. So it can go. Grief can go either way. And, of course, it does lead to an attack. And the grief is about Kurtz. Right. They don't want Kurtz to be taken away. 50:48 Erin: Right. I was just gonna quickly interject to say, I think there's something more, too, here, like the fear of the steamboat. Isn't it expressed also as a kind of terror for other tribes or the fact that the tribes move out earlier on? I mean, here he reads it as grief over the colonizers moving in, when, in fact, they're upset that Kurtz is going to be taken. But in other parts, I thought it was also that it was actually grief over the colonizers moving in. 51:16 Wes: Yeah. No, I think it can definitely be read that way. Yeah. 51:18 Erin: Okay. 51:18 Wes: Oddly enough, one is supposed to be related to the other. And the way he describes the attack later on. Right. It's not aggressive and it's not even defensive. It's protective desperation, basically. 51:28 Erin: Well, and ordered by Kurtz. 51:29 Wes: Right, Right. Well, that's what the Russian will say. That's what the harlequin will say later on, that Kurtz ordered it. And, yeah, we assume it's ordered by Kurtz, but also we assume it's their own affection for Kurtz that's involved here. But you can read this as about. As a reaction to colonialism as well, where any violence that the colonizers might identify with something primitive. It's about grief. It transcends even something defensive. But I don't know how to relate that to the cannibals on board and why they don't eat the white men. He leaves it a mystery. Right. He says this is, you know, this is just mysterious. He calls it as more mysterious even than the grief, which we'll get an explanation for. The grief, as it just pointed out, and Kurt's. Whether you want to think of as Kurtz or colonialism. So maybe we are meant, as I think you're suggesting, to identify it with the grief. I think that's like the best explanation we have now that I've tried to reason through this. I think you're right on which is that one form of grief is apathy. And maybe apathy is the thing that can overcome even hunger. 52:32 Erin: Yeah. So in other words, it's not really a restraint at all. Right. Because apathy isn't a restraint. It's the absence of any force that one would need to restrain. Right. 52:42 Wes: Well, it depends on how you read it. Apathy could reflect a lower level tension between the desire to act. 52:49 Erin: Oh, that's true. 52:49 Wes: Something holding it back. 52:51 Erin: This is something that I'm. That I'm now getting a memory of reading about a long time ago. I don't remember where. But the idea of apathy also is restraining the slaves in America, the great difficulty and any kind of uprising, because it was just such a supreme overcoming of grief, really, in order to be able to muster the strength to fight back in any way. 53:14 Wes: Yeah. And there's much has been written as well, I think, about the sense of grief on the part of Native Americans as well. So. Yeah. How did we come to this place 53:25 Erin: here, the idea of restraint and grief. But we've put off Kurtz almost as long as Conrad has, I think. 53:33 Wes: Yes. Where do you want to go with. 53:35 Erin: I really like the. I don't like this. Sorry, that's the wrong way of putting it. But I. I like the. The decorative balls at the top of the stakes around the inner station. And I just knew I was like, what an odd detail. That's going to be something different than what I think it is. And of course, it turns out to be heads, which is shocking. And that's why I don't want to say that I like it, but I like how that sort of rhymes with the description of Kurtz's baldness. So he himself is sort of like reduced to nothingness. And the baldness was. Conrad describes the wilderness. Had patted him on the head, and behold, it was like a ball, an ivory ball. It had caressed him and lo, he had withered it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. 54:30 Wes: This is the point where he's saying that the wilderness has taken the place of his girlfriend, basically, because that's how it starts out. 54:35 Erin: Yeah. Well, and in the form of his mistress, kind of. I take her to be a sort of. Like, if Kurtz is kind of the personification of the colonizer, she's the sort of personification of the colonized. 54:46 Wes: He treats her as, at one point, as a personification of the wilderness. 54:50 Erin: That's kind of what I mean. 54:51 Wes: Yeah. His mistress, who's part of the tribe, the wilderness itself, is the one who's made him bald by patting him on the head and there's. Spoiled him with ivory and has basically replaced his fiance back home. 55:02 Erin: I think it's important to note that his mistress here has, I think, an incredible amount of innate power and dignity. And she's kind of cool, enigmatic figure standing there with her arms flung out. Interesting. But, yeah, I just. I love how it was like. And lo, he became bald. 55:20 Wes: Well, I was confused. This is one of the places where I had to, like, figure out what was going on. Because that whole passage starts out with talk of Kurtz's intended, you know, the fiance. And I'm like, wait a minute. He's talking about the fiance, and then he's suddenly talking about Kurtz being bald. What is he saying? Like, why is he talking about the wilderness now? And if you. You have to, like, study that paragraph for a while to say, oh, the wilderness is the competitor for the girl for the intended, and the wilderness replaces the fiance. And. Which is ironic. Right. Because that's. He goes to the wilderness in order to get money, so he doesn't feel as insecure about being with someone who's richer, higher in station than him. 55:56 Erin: Right. 55:56 Wes: So we get all these different descriptions about what's happened to Kurtz, what motivates Kurtz. There's just tons of it, so we might as well just dive in and into a few of them. And one of them is right here. So right after the baldness part, and it's on page 48 to 49 in my edition, Kurtz refers to everything as belonging to himself. My intended. My ivory, my station, my river. That's a really interesting sequence there. I think it's hilarious. This all ends up being explained by his relationship with his fiance. Actually, it's probably not emphasized enough. And when people talk about this book. But that sequence from intended to ivory is. Is very, very important. And then the idea that everything belongs to him, but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible. It was not good for one either. Trying to imagine he had taken a high seat among the devils of the land. I mean, literally, you can't understand. So that's Marlow talking to the people on the boat now, who must seem incredulous. You can't understand. How could you, with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman and the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums. How can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him into? By the way of solitude, utter solitude without a policeman, by the way of silence, utter silence where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering of public opinion. So I've alluded to all of this in our discussion before as a lack of social checks is a lack of social context. And part of the problem is losing that and losing one's inner restraint because of a lack of social restraints. And then he says something which is, you know, he repeats something that said before, which is that, you know, when these external checks and social restraints are gone, quote, you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. This is an echo, right, of what he has said with the cannibals. How can they restrain themselves? No one has the inner strength for that. And then at the end of that, we get this idea, is that what you need is a devotion to some obscure back breaking business, as he puts it. And again, this is another repetition. We saw before, right, that he had talked about being distracted by work. That's why he doesn't go out and engage in ecstasy with the natives. Or that one must have a deliberate belief in order to have self restraint. All these different suggestions, and I haven't. I haven't been able to think through coherent unified theory of what all this means. But. And maybe there isn't one. Just, just Marlow is throwing different things at us. But yeah, this is one of the explanations of what's going on with Kurtz, which is that he's been robbed, he's been turned into a monster by being coming the wilderness is boyfriend. And being deprived of any social context that might keep him in check. 59:03 Erin: I'm sure a lot has been made of all Europe having gone into Kurtz and of Conrad being really prescient about totalitarianism and fascist dictators and all of these things that the book predicts. 59:16 Wes: Scenes in here that remind you of the Holocaust. 59:18 Erin: Right. The Valley of Death, which is. And I think explicit reference was made there to an inferno on Earth, which was really interesting. It occurred to me that because the river coils and because they're going inwards almost in a series of circles and there are three, it's kind of like a simplification of the nine circles of hell. 59:39 Wes: Right, Right. 59:40 Erin: It seems to me very smart about the way that Europe is. Is going or about to go as a result of. You know, it makes the scramble for Africa seem like the. The Jenga block, you know, that causes the series of atrocities and world wars in the first half of the 20th century. And I think the scramble for possession that Kurtz is maybe obsessed with is kind of predicts all of this. So I'm wondering if by claiming ownership, he's trying to fill whatever the. The vacuum this lack of belief has created in him. If. If we're going to take Marlowe at his word and. And say that the lack of belief underneath it all has gotten to Kurtz as this representative of colonialism. And therefore this desire on Kurtz's part to express ownership over something is supposed to reflect this scramble for Africa, which itself comes from maybe a crisis of faith that's happened as the result of the Industrial Revolution, or whatever the case may be, or of proper work of the movement from the countryside into the cities, and therefore of a disconnect that technology brings between one's labor and the fruit of one's labor, perhaps. And all of these crises that are happening over the course of the long 19th century. So I guess I read his desire to exert possession as a way of filling up his own emptiness, but I don't know if that's what the psychology of that might be or how useful that is or how seriously we should take this idea of belief. Like, is it. Is Kurt's suffering from a lack of belief? Like, what turns him in the jungle? Yeah. Is it actually the lack of dignity inherent in his being an ivory trader, of his methods of exploitation which has allowed him to be so successful in his work? 1:01:36 Wes: This is the central question because it's really unclear. And like I said, I think Marlowe throws lots of different ideas at us. On page 56 in my edition, he will say something like, the appetite for ivory sort of supplanted his idealism. And remember, this is, you know, like the funniest and simplest explanation is that he needed to get rich to impress his girlfriend and then got sucked into being a someone focused on business instead of what he had been focused on, which is the arts and even political idealism. The same thing could happen to us if we just got overly interested in the stock market and said, all right, screw literature and the arts. I'm just going to go make money now. And of course, ironically, today Kurtz could have just started a podcast and he would have been extremely successful because of his incredible voice and his eloquence. So he wouldn't have needed to go hunt ivory. So, yeah, so in a way, he's like someone who gets sucked into the daily routine of making money. Except for him, it's also an extraordinary routine. He suffers the fate that many of us suffer just getting distracted by making a living. But it's this fantastical version of that. This, I think, is the most simplistic of the explanations. You know, the, the lust for ivory supplanting idealism. But I think we get a more interesting idea around 49 to 50 in my edition where Marlowe is talking about, you know, this is just after the talk about restraint and the devotion to an obscure back breaking business and all of Europe's contributing to Kurtz. He's been commissioned by the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs to do a report. And that report is eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, although too high strung, Marlowe says, and he goes on and on about the beautiful writing, and despite the fact that this is written after he's already gone native, after he's participating in unspeakable rites. So there's this idealism in the report, right? The idea that white people in relation to the natives are so much more technologically advanced and that the power that confers can be used for unbounded good. Power for good, practically unbounded. That's the words of Kurtz in the report. And Marlowe says, it gave me the notion of an exotic immensity ruled by an august benevolence. And that made him tingle with enthusiasm, which he then equates with the unbounded power of Kurtz's eloquence. This gives you an idea of some of the complexity to this argument, right? We get this weird elision from the unbounded power of the colonizer in relation to the native to the unbounded power of Kurtz's Own eloquence, which is, of course, the thing that allows him somehow to become a kind of godlike figure among the natives. Which is odd when you think about it, right, because how does that translate? But that's a whole other discussion. The reason I'm bringing all this up is because I think the suggestion here is that the idealism is the problem. As I mentioned before, it's not just a thin veneer for something. It actually is the source of the cruelty and the viciousness and the savagery. Right. The very thing that they want to project onto the natives, their own savagery, is there in the idealism. So the very end of this description, it was very simple. And at 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. Quote, exterminate all the brutes, unquote. So that's that. That famous transition from this eloquent argument for humanitarian mission to civilize the natives, to extermination, and were meant, I think, to associate those two things. And I made some suggestions before about why that might be. You know, it's the desire to culturally transform the natives and maybe turn them into Europeans or to do whatever. Whatever it is they imagined they were doing can be thought of in itself as a kind of extermination. And the impulse to. Supposed altruism may. May just be an impulse to control. You know, there's a lot of arguments about the way the customs were unfair to women. For instance, that argument was used that the customs were very. The native customs were very cruel to women. And that was used as a rationale for intervening so that the impulse is demoralized. And so I think that's, you know, what Marlowe is suggesting is that, in fact, Kurtz was more animated than usual by that moralizing impulse, more animated than usual by the philanthropic aspect of the mission. And that's what distinguishes him, right, from the faithless pilgrims with their staves. He was actually a true believer. And it was because he was a true believer that he could come to personify colonial cruelty most in its purest form. Something like that. Right. Well. 1:06:50 Erin: And as further evidence to your point, when, despite his true belief, I think we're also supposed to see a profound rhetorical emptiness at the heart of that report. Right? There's a lot of grandiose language, but not a lot of there, there. And to further that, I think when Marlowe goes back to England and he meets with several people from Kurtz's past, he meets that journalist who calls Kurtz a colleague, says he might have been a populist politician and says that Kurtz really couldn't write a bit. But heavens, how that man could talk. He electrified large meetings. He had the faith, don't you see? He had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything. Anything. And Marlowe asked, you know, what party might he have been? And the journalist says, just an extreme party. So he was considered an extremist, called an extremist here, when he must have been animated with this. These lofty aims that you're talking about. So on that side, on that quote, unquote, positive side, he was an extremist. And then, as you say, where, you know, sort of where the ends meet, he's become an extremist of another kind after his transformation in the wilderness into someone who. Who uses these unsound methods, which I think is. You know, the manager quite accidentally hits on a really interesting term there, unsound, which I was kind of ruminating on. 1:08:05 Wes: Yeah, what is that? That's such a great line. Yeah. What is that about? 1:08:09 Erin: Right. It seems to be not. Not sound and not voice, of course. I mean, unsound is the opposite of sound, but it's also not quite silence either. Right. 1:08:17 Wes: Well, the manager says he's not. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the company. He did not see that the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously. That's my principle. So the manager is thinking here about Kurtz's kind of revolutionary. Kurtz is a social activist. Kurtz is a social justice warrior. I think that's the irony that can be lost with this book, because it may not translate so well to a contemporary reader, but that's the very thick irony here in the Heart of Darkness, that Kurtz is a supreme altruist and idealist, and that is supposedly what leads to all of this. So the method is unsound. What's great about it is such a euphemism for the insanity that's going on. And the focus of the manager is not on Kurtz's. Is it going native? Or whatever. The one thing he's doing is he's going on raids of other villages. He's implanted himself with one village or tribe, but he's going on raids against other tribes, which is something that did happen, by the way, so that the manager is not focused on the injustice or the cruelty of that, but just the fact that it's not practical, it's not good for business. 1:09:35 Erin: No, I like that. It omits any Kind of morality, obviously, in the same way that, well, it 1:09:41 Wes: treats the altruism as if it were a method. And it makes no attempt to distinguish the original altruism from the degenerate form of it. Kurtz's regression. These are just methods for doing what they're really there to do, which is to get ivory. 1:09:56 Erin: What then do we make of Kurtz's insistence on wanting no more than justice in light of all of this? So Kurtz tells Marlowe on the steamship, this lot of ivory now is really mine. The company did not pay for it. I collected it myself at a very great personal risk. I'm afraid they will try to claim it as theirs, though it is a difficult case. What do you think I ought to do? Resist a. I want no more than justice. And then Marlowe repeats, he wanted no more than justice. No more than justice. So justice for him means what? His just deserts, his being able to enjoy the fruit of his own labor, as it were, and not have it turned over to the company, who has presumably employed him to procure this ivory. It seems to me that he wants to lend his work some dignity by being able to keep the ivory that he's procured by these unsound means. 1:10:48 Wes: Yeah. So it's sort of like a story of someone who becomes miserly or obsessed with wealth, who develops an obsession for something and even money, to the exclusion even of its practicality. Right. Just to have it. So the issue of the ivory, he becomes focused on the injustice of the fact that he simply has to ship it downriver. Right. And wants to keep it, even though what could it possibly mean to him by keeping it? It can't be translated into wealth if you just keep it. Presumably he's getting rich off this already, because that's the whole point of becoming a station manager. And that's what all of those pilgrims really want in the end, is to become a. To become a station manager and to enrich themselves. So there's something completely insane about saying, my ivory, my ivory can't have it. That's not fair, because it's not like he's not. He's not benefiting from it. 1:11:46 Erin: Should we go to the horror of the whore? 1:11:48 Wes: Yeah. 1:11:49 Erin: Which I should have to better enunciate when I say that, or else it'll sound like I'm saying the whore. 1:11:54 Wes: The whore. It was all about whore in the end. 1:12:00 Erin: I mean, what can we say about that? So. So. So I guess this is the subject of the most intense critical debate about this, or the infinite variety of Interpretations that can be teased out of his final words. What is it that makes him say? The horror. The horror. 1:12:17 Wes: So let me. Let me read the passage real quick. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of 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 of some image, at some vision. He cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath. The horror. The horror. At a previous point in the book, he suggested that the way nature, the way the wilderness takes its revenge, you know, it's taken him as husband first, but it takes its revenge ultimately by giving him a kind of insight, or the way Marlowe puts it, is that the soul is made to look at itself and to see itself. I think there. There are many ways to, of course, to interpret this, but the two most general ways to go about this, and there are ways that are in tension with each other are to say, on the one hand, the fundamental realization here has something to do with comprehending what it is to be unaccommodated man, our fundamental instinctual natures under all the trappings of civilization. And the other way to go is to say it's a comprehension of the fact that it's not the instinctual that's the problem, but it's civilization itself. Civilization is the source of cruelty, and the cruelty is there. It's inherent in our civilizing norms, in both our Thou Shalt Nots and in our Thou Shalls and our ideals. Our ideals. We're driven these things by a kind of horrible, horrible cruelty. And those two things are in tension with each other, but they may also be related. Right? The civilizational norms may. May channel the cruelty of the instinctual. So what do you make of that? That's my general attempt at understanding that, because I think it is hard to understand. 1:14:16 Erin: Yeah, I think you're right. This is an encapsulation, too, of. Of Marlow's admiration of Kurtz, right? Because a little further down. So he says he's going to show his. His loyalty to Kurtz once more. And he says, destiny, My destiny. Droll thing. Life is that mysterious arrangement for merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself that comes too late. A crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness with Nothing underfoot with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right and still less than that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. It was within a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that I probably would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that 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 candor, 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. So his admiration of him, then, is to fight the lie that, for Marlow, seems to be inherent in all of the other elements of colonization going on around him. And to call something by its right name or to look into. Into oneself, or. I mean, we could talk, too, about whether he's looking into himself and the emptiness there or commenting on the emptiness of the cause of colonization. 1:16:17 Wes: Yeah, well, I think the two things are related. Right? Yeah. 1:16:20 Erin: Right. Or both. Yeah. And being able to say that it is horrible in a way that no one else is able to strike out and make that judgment and express that belief. So there's something courageous and wonderful in Kurt's, after all, just to name it. 1:16:35 Wes: It's funny because I was thinking of the horror in terms of, you know, the instinctual or the civilizational. And here it sounds like it's just about. It sounds very existentialist, Right. Like life is meaningless. The droll thing. Life is that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose, which is a callback, Right, to all the instances when he highlights the purposelessness of the supposedly purposeful activity of colonization. Right. That stuff you mentioned with the ditch, with the pipes and the blasting of cliffs that are not in the way. So that's one take on the whole concept of having ideals and seeing through them. Right. Because that's what normally gives our life, some sort of Higher purpose, including the justification for colonization, the altruism, the supposedly philanthropic goal, which, if you see through that, as Marlowe does, and apparently as Kurtz does as well, you can take that as a more dramatic instance of seeing through the purposelessness of life in general and having any ideals at all. The sort of illusory nature of those things there sounds like a kind of existentialist redemption and just recognizing that. Right. And being able to name it. Kurtz is able to put words to it. You know, his eloquence comes through in the end. The horror. The horror. The existentialist theme here would be to say that to face up to that meaninglessness is kind of meaning conferring, like we somehow retrieve meaning from meaninglessness by recognizing it. 1:18:15 Erin: Yeah, I agree with you. But I think also, you know, recognizing maybe the foibles and the horrible underpinnings of violence that kind of infect all of humanity is maybe something also that is being recognized here in addition to the idea of meaninglessness. I think that those two things are, as you've said before, are really closely intertwined. So, for instance, you know, the opposite of this might be taken to be the character who I think is the most repulsive in the novel, maybe who's that company accountant in the outer station, the man who is residing right next to the Valley of Death and who has impeccably clean clothes and has taught one of the native women to launder his linen so that it shines and stays impeccably white. And he's trying to write down the figures and is annoyed by the moaning, the suffering of the people right next to him because it's distracting him from being able to write down his figures. That rejection of reality, that inability to see what we could say, on the one hand, is the very literal result of colonization. But maybe what is also, metaphorically speaking, the horrors of humanity that exist all around us and the terrible elements in our own natures and the natures of people around us in the violence that maybe underpins all civilizations. 1:19:38 Wes: Exactly. 1:19:39 Erin: That ignoring it is one kind of cowardly choice. And recognizing it, therefore, as a virtue, too. 1:19:46 Wes: Yeah, ironically. Right. That's supposed to be a form of restraint, he says over and over again. Work being distracted by mundane details, being distracted by running the boat. Or in this case, the accountant being distracted. So distracted by his work that someone dying in his office is just a. An annoyance. That's supposed to be the civilizing force, right? Or part of it, this devotion to work and to efficiency, when in fact it's A source of inhumanity. And I think, yeah, you're right. Part of the horror is to be able to see through that honestly and see that we have to look for. If we're going to look for the sources of evil. We can't just look to the instinctual or to natives, you know, to project and to blame it on so called savages. We have to look at ourselves and so called civilization. 1:20:40 Erin: It reminds me of very early on when he tells the story of Fresleven the Dane, who dies in the wilderness when he's poked by the spear of the native people after getting into a fracas with them over these two black hens. A great image he gives of when he finally comes back to the spot where Fresleven's body has fallen. There was grass growing through his ribs, which was tall enough to hide his bones. And then just two paragraphs later, he's describing going to, we assume is Brussels, to sign up to go onto the steamer. He's going through the street and he sees grass sprouting between the stones. Stones and bones. Right. It might be the bones on which Brussels itself is built. And the connection between those two just really stood out to me. 1:21:30 Wes: He calls it the sepulchral city. 1:21:32 Erin: Right. And then the women who are knitting the black wool are like the two black hens. On the one hand, I think they're supposed to be fates. Like one of them in particular, he says, is uncanny and fateful. She's knitting black wool as for a warm pall. So on the one hand they're kind of spinning out the fate of Marlowe and whoever comes into this office. On the other hand, they're women. And as you note with Kurt's going into Africa to seek his fortune specifically for his intended. And also these curious ideas are interjections that we get from Marlowe a couple of times about women and how, you know, it's a very paternalistic Victorian concept that women have to be shielded from the truth. 1:22:18 Wes: Women are out of it. Keep women out of it is the way he puts it. 1:22:21 Erin: Right, right. And at first it's kind of an accusation on Marlowe's part. Like he says that women live in a dream world essentially of their own making because they can't, you know, they can't handle the truth, whatever. And then of course, later we see that they're deliberately kept in the dark by men. That Marlowe himself will lie to a woman to keep her in a dream world. And of course, in Victorian society there was a lot of, you know, shepherding of women, making sure that they retained their virtue, hiding from them certain terrible truths of civilization. So there's this idea that the black hens over which the Dane and the natives are fighting is also the idea that women are, in a sense, some kind of. Or they are the civilizing force, maybe, or the reason why civilizations are established for certain obvious reasons. And that they are maybe, underneath it all, the kind of bone of contention at the heart of this. 1:23:20 Wes: Women are the heart of darkness. You've gotten. 1:23:23 Erin: No, no, no, no, I'm just kidding. No, 1:23:28 Wes: do come together. That's terrible. No, but no, you are right on. Because that whole thing about women being out of it, that's the segue to the intended, right? And says, yes, women are out of it. In fact, the intended, she was way out of it. He had left her, you know, to go to Africa. When, of course, the irony is that she's the whole reason he's there, because he needs the money, or he thinks he does. He doesn't really, but she's got more money than him, and he's, like I said, goes to seek his fortunes. And then it turns out that the wilderness is the woman who replaces the fiance. So the women are not out of it. I mean, they are in a sense, but in a deeper sense, no, the women are not out of it. They're a driving force. And they're, in this case specifically, the fiance, plot wise, is a driving force behind the whole story. 1:24:21 Erin: It just occurs to me, too, that Marlowe is telling this story aboard the Nelly and that the ships are traditionally gendered as female. So there's something about that craft. The way that they get there is also the driving force, too, is a feminine construction. 1:24:39 Wes: Yeah, I thought a little bit about the desire to escape women. This reminds me of Frankenstein as well, where in Frankenstein, the protagonist is Victor Frankenstein is betrothed to his stepsister from a young age to be married to her, oddly enough. And he kind of rebels and invents a monster that kills her and his whole family, basically, or much of his family. And he has to get himself preoccupied with all of that in order to avoid the domestic scene, Right? So you look at someone who has a fiance and she has plenty of money, what the hell is he doing going off to Africa where people are dying in droves? Right. It makes absolutely no sense. He's avoiding that relationship and he's avoiding domesticity. But of course, he's not really avoiding it. He's being driven into its lap, but in a raw form, Right? In the form of the wilderness, which is at bottom a kind of. A strange kind of domestic scene. Does that make sense? 1:25:42 Erin: Yeah, it does. All of this is a little uncomfortable for me, of course, because it's, you know, what to make of this. Well, because of the inherent misogyny of that or the idea that the terrible quality of the wild place is the idea that it's a feminine place or 1:25:57 Wes: something, but it's the source of life and. 1:25:59 Erin: The source of life. Right, right. Yeah. And I think in a way, of course, the irony of the Victorian sentimentalization of women and all that is, of course, that women are more closely acquainted with life than anyone, I think, you know, and they try protecting woman from the horrors of childbirth, for instance. 1:26:17 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. The word horror should evoke notions like that that should. One should think about. 1:26:23 Erin: Right. 1:26:23 Wes: And the horror of being born, of being separated from one's mother. Right. 1:26:29 Erin: Well, good. I mean, I think that's a good place to step. We've gone pretty far afield now into the wilderness. 1:26:33 Wes: Yes. I think we've gone just as far into the heart of darkness as we should. 1:26:39 Erin: Good. 1:26:40 Wes: And we can, like good, rational people, we can leave off and go home and enjoy the fruits of our. Of our labor. Enjoy our ivory, so to speak. 1:26:49 Erin: There you go. 1:26:50 Wes: All right. 1:26:50 Erin: Thank you, thank you. 1:26:54 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find [email protected] patreon.com/bonus Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full blown A show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersouptextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter joysubtext. And once again, thank you for listening.