If anyone ever doubted that literature could cut to the very quick of the human soul, they should read Conrad’s Heart of darkness. It exposes the depravity of human thought in it’s portrait of Kurtz, the racist white supremacist whose eloquence makes him great. What is interesting is that this book was written in 1902, before the horrors of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and all the other Kurtzes came to the fore. Thus it may once have been a warning, but now it seems a lament.

Of course, some academics, such as Chinua Achebe point out that Conrad himself is racist. I can certainly see their point: black people are depicted in this book as not human; at many times I was revolted by Conrad’s descriptions. Yet Marlowe is even more appalled by Kurtz, which, for me, blurs things slightly. I do not think Conrad was being racist – when you put it in the context of the era in which it was written – and, in his condemnation of Kurtz, may have been exactly the opposite, in a way. A single reading is hardly a good basis for such things though.

The full text is online here.