The Heart of the Matter

As I was finishing Madame Bovary recently I found myself dipping into the Conrad collection we picked as a Part 4 text for the class with the Humanities Scholars in it. The thing about a text in that part of the course is that we don't really teach it as such in the old-fashioned 'A' level way. The students decide what they want to focus on for a presentation to the class from a group of four texts - probably just focusing on one - so we do little more than introduce each of the four and give broad guidelines for individual students to operate independently. I mention this partly because in some ways I'd really love to teach the Conrad and have to hold back from delivering it on a plate for the class. So dipping in was a bit painful as I was aware of a lot of material we would most likely by-pass.

The two stories I read at that point I suspect are not likely to attract too much attention and that's a pity because they're so darned good. I reacquainted myself with Youth, which ironically I last read as a youth, and got to wondering whether anyone has done the mystical lure of the Orient better than JC. The answer is no. There's more to the tale than that, of course (there always is in Conrad), the sheer unpleasantness of life aboard a merchant ship for one, but the level on which it operates as a gloriously nostalgic, melancholy mood-piece is unsurpassable. And the first story, An Outpost of Progress, which I'd not read before, seemed the perfect sardonic evocation of the depravity of Empire.

Perfect, that is, until you get to Heart of Darkness. This is the one I think the students who fall under the Conradian spell are likely to go for, and rightly. I can't remember how many times I've read it, but each time is new. I'm now on the final third, with Kurtz encountered in person, insofar as you can call it an encounter, and I'm stunned, again. It's as if Conrad is knocking on the door of some final meaning of things - but, of course, the door will remained closed. There are some texts that seem to take you beyond language, into the heart of things, I suppose. What a journey!