The Horror

(Yes, I hear you, Dear Reader, exclaim, “What about Sydney Carton?” “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Quite famous, to be sure. But, Carton didn’t actually say it.)

Heart of Darkness is a work of genius on many levels. Mencken summarized it thus:

I give you “Heart of Darkness” as the archetype of his [Conrad’s] whole work and the keystone of his metaphysical system. Here we have all imaginable human hopes and aspirations reduced to one common denominator of folly and failure, and here we have a play of humor that is infinitely mordant and searching.

It’s a short novel, but Mencken is right about its laser-like ability to concentrate the energy of the human experience into a small area. What do we find at the center, at the heart of humanity? Darkness. Now begins the fascinating question: what is in that darkness at the heart of humanity?

Mr. Kurtz knows about that heart of darkness. An ivory trader who ventured upriver and ended up as a godlike ruler engaged in barbaric acts of brutality, he has slipped the bonds of the civilization in which he grew up. Marlow, that narrator, is sent to fetch Kurtz, and on the way back, Kurtz shuffles off this mortal coil, gasping his famous last words on the way out. The horror.

One of the many brilliant aspects of the novel is that it is never quite clear what exactly the horror is. Kurtz knew; he peered into the darkness and saw it. He told us what he saw, and we mere mortals are left to figure out the implications of that revelation.

Marlow is greatly disturbed by the revelation, but not by the content of the revelation. His immediate concern is with something else:

I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I 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.

There is your challenge. You are on your deathbed; you have time to say one thing. You can give one message to posterity, one thing you have learned in the course of your life that is worth sharing with the rest of the world. Do you have something to say?

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 candour, 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. And it is not my own extremity I remember best—a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry—much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.

Presumably most people do not actually decide in advance which words will be uttered with one’s final breath, mostly because it is generally difficult to know when one is drawing one’s final breath. But, it’s still an interesting thought experiment. Based on your life to date, what words would you utter if you knew it was the last thing you would ever say?

Obviously, your final words would be different if you believed that they would be broadcast to the world or if you believed that only whomever is standing nearby will hear them. So, for the sake of the thought experiment imagine that your words will be shared far and wide for generations to come. What would you say?

As I thought about it, it became a very depressing exercise. None of my ideas stand up as something worthy of being memorialized in such a manner. “I love you, Long-Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator”—she would presumably be charmed, but it is hard to imagine anyone else would be. “Christ is Lord” makes a nice message to the world, but it is hard to believe that anyone would find that worthy of thought simply because it was someone’s last words. “Read more Wodehouse” has the advantage of being novel and it is certainly good advice, but it seems to be lacking in gravitas as the summation of one’s life.

As Marlow said: “I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.”

Kurtz had something to say. The horror! The beauty of that exclamation, the reason is resonates so deeply, comes when you ask yourself, “To what is Kurtz referring?”

The sharp divide in possible answers is whether he is referring to something outside or inside of himself. How you answer that question probably says a lot about how you thing about the horror of the world in which you live.

First Kurtz could have been talking about things outside himself, talking about society. Here though there is still yet another divide. To which society is Kurtz referring? Is it the utterly barbaric society he was leading deep in the jungle, full of blood and heads on spikes? Or is it the Western Civilization to which he was returning? Are blood sacrifices by a fire in a jungle at night or balls in drawing rooms in European capitals the horror?

There is yet another related possibility which the very clever Conrad casually tosses on the table. After returning to Europe, Marlow tracks down Kurtz’s fiance to tell her about the death of her beloved. She asks Marlow what were the final words uttered by Kurtz. His reply? “Your name.”

On the other side, the horror may not be external at all. Lying on the boat transporting him from one world to another, did Kurtz look deep into himself and see the horror within? Here he was, the pride of Europe heading off to the jungle where he became a god, this hero of two civilizations, and yet when in that liminal space that is neither here nor there he looked into his heart and all he saw was darkness.

I like that last explanation the best, but like I said above, that may well be more due to the fact that such a reading fits my theological priors. One of the beauties of the book is that it can just as easily be read as an indictment of European Civilization or of civilizations who have not yet adopted Western norms. (The condemnations of this book as if it can only be read as an expression of the glories of Western Imperialism truly fascinate me. How can anyone read so narrowly?)

“The horror! The horror!” Coppola ending Apocalypse Now with Brando’s voice uttering those words is surely one of the most brilliant directorial decisions ever. It is a haunting refrain, worth a lifetime of contemplation.

(An appendix: as all right-thinking people know, Apocalypse Now is one of the greatest movies ever made. There is a fabulous documentary about the making of the move: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. If you love Apocalypse Now and have never seen the documentary about making it, you really owe it to yourself to hunt it down. The short version: it is truly amazing this movie ever got made—a complete train wreck of a production process.)

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