Riveting

Or: Fuck you, Joseph Conrad.

So I picked up Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Meant to be one of the all time great quest narratives. Guy travels up a river to meet a guy, who it turns out committed an atrocity. How is this clear, driving goal established?

"In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the news came that all the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate of the less valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the rest of us, found what they deserved. I did not inquire. I was then rather excited at the prospect of meeting Kurtz very soon. When I say very soon I mean it comparatively. It was just two months from the day we left the creek when we came to the bank below Kurtz's station."

No one ever has any discernible goal beyond "talk to cool guy", and even that is hastily dropped.

But I get ahead of myself, something the narrative fails to do. The first third of the book is nameless faceless guy listens to guy we don't care about talk about the time he had to talk to guys he didn't care about.

Then we get the rivets scene. The best part of the book. Marlow requires rivets to fix his boat, but none can be found. Actual conflict! Relevant to the characters profession! Forcing him to interact with people he might ignore otherwise, causing him to discover more about the setting! Then the 'quest' starts in 'earnest', without so much as noting the arrival of the rivets.

Conrad keeps making choices counterproductive to tension or verisimilitude. For instance, the narrator has a monologue about how he hates lies. If you have to jump up and down yelling about how reliable your narrator is, either you're setting up a really stupid twist, or the framing device is not doing the story any favours. The novel also features the worst action scene I've ever read. We have the protagonist, two mauve shirts and about thirty red shirts. They get attacked by a hidden enemy force. Halfway through the scene, nobody has been so much as wounded, and the protagonist has time to wonder if he is actually in any danger. Then a mauve shirt dies. Of course, since the deceased was black, he had no personality or goals, but his death helps the white protagonist sort some of his own issues out. This is one of the least racist aspects of the story.

The edition I read had critical annotations. This made it rather unsettling when the protagonist starts reading an annotated text. The annotations also have to be as obtuse as possible. A map is described by colour of empires. I already knew Britain was red, but turned to the annotations for rest of the code. Of course, one cannot simply say "Yellow = Belgium", but rather the author is alluding to the concept that yellow represents Belgium.

As an aside, this has to be the most homoerotic book I've ever read. 'He invited me back to his cabin ... he was pumping me". "Squirting lead." "We talked of everything ... of love too." Ah, the gay nineties.

To whiplash back to the supposed climax, what happens when man is wholly corrupted by his environment? When he gives over to his baser instincts and leaves humanity behind? He owns six severed heads. That's it. Six. In his career. In the Belgian Free Congo. Where severed hands were legal tender. And the annotations cite a captain who owned twenty-one. Perhaps this is a Psycho/Silence of the Lambs situation, where at the time a watered down version of events was beyond scandalous.

I'm just left with questions. Was Marlow meant to retrieve Kurtz or  just the ivory?  If he wants nothing to do with Kurtz, why does he pursue him? What were his grand ideas? Just genocide, or something more? What are the unsound methods? How is Marlow party to them? Why does he consider himself loyal to Kurtz? Why do the pilgrims consider him loyal? Did they actually try to kill him?

At least now I'm glad Swearengen didn't tell him something pretty.