A little over a century ago, on August 3, 1924, he died Joseph Conrad at 66 years old after a heart attack. He left around thirty books, among which are some of the most beautiful and complex novels of the last century: Lord Jim, Nostromo, The secret agent, The rope around the neck, Victoryto name just a few. Any one of them would be enough to secure him a lifelong position of honor in English letters, but, more than a hundred years later, a handful of pages continue to resonate in our consciousness with a prophetic and evil echo, a short story whose spell goes far beyond the technical perfection of your invoice: “Heart of Darknessperhaps the most intense of the stories that the human imagination has created,” said Borges.
Born in 1857 in Berdyczew, a small Polish town that is now Ukrainian, Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz-Korzeniowski always it was a bad ass seatsomeone who felt like a stranger everywhere and who looked in the sea, first, for an escape from the tedium that shrouded his youth, and then, when he decided to dedicate himself to literature, an immense stage, the great tragic theater of fear, courage, cowardice and all human emotions. He adopted the English language as an instrument, evoking his father’s translations of Shakespeare into Polish, in the same way that he ended up being an officer in the British Merchant Navy, but in his voyages throughout the globe, calling at the ports of the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the Atlantic, he soon began to understand what was hidden behind the civilizing efforts of the British Empire: “For the most part, the conquest of the land consists of nothing more than taking it from those who have a different skin or nose slightly flatter than us”.
The journey he undertook in 1890 aboard the steamship Roi des Belges in the Congo River assumed a brutal awareness of the horrors of colonialism on the personal estate of King Leopold II of Belgium, site of one of the largest and most infamous genocides in contemporary history. “A great melancholy descended upon me,” Conrad writes, “as I realized that a boy’s ideals and dreams had been displaced by the activities of Stanley and the Congo Free State; by the unholy reporting of a tabloid newspaper and by the unpleasant knowledge of the vilest of plunders in the history of geographical exploration and human conscience.”
Conrad, who did not usually take notes or notes, He kept a diary of his navigation of more than 1,600 kilometers along the Congo Riveralthough the letters he wrote during the trip are quite eloquent of his emotional state: “I am truly sorry for coming here,” he writes from Kinshasa to Madame Poradowska. “I really regret it bitterly. Everything is repellent to me here. Men and things, but especially men. And I am repellent to them too.” Greed, slavery, torture are nothing but words. Conrad saw native heads impaled on posts and palisades made from human limbs.
The discomfort of that atrocious discovery materialized in a series of physical ailments—neuralgia, rheumatism, dyspepsia, asphyxiation attacks— that they would no longer abandon him. He knew he had to write something about his descent into the hells of the Congo, a physical journey that was also a moral immersion in the darkness of the human heart. He also knew that the simple documentary account of the atrocities committed by King Leopold’s envoys was not enough. To tell the whole truth, I had to turn to fiction. To tell it firsthand, he had to turn to his alter egoCaptain Marlow.
In the first pages of The heart of darkness, Captain Marlowsitting on a sailboat anchored at the mouth of the Thames, thinks of the great British sailors, of Drake and Franklin, and suddenly murmurs that London has also been “one of the dark places on earth.” The story that follows then about His experience in Africa always swings between two poles, light and darkness, civilization and barbarism.suspended over a physical space, the Congo, which is much more than a physical space: a moral abyss, the infernal river at whose end it is located Kurtzthe crazed commercial agent that the natives worship like a god and who has lost any hint of human compassion.
On my first trip to Auschwitzin the midst of those bare barracks that bear witness to the Nazi holocaust, I remembered with a shudder the skill of Conrad in baptizing the abominable demon of his novel. Kurtz It has a German name: The Congo genocide had moved to the very heart of Western civilizationin Conrad’s native Poland, just as today the Congo remains an unimaginable hell of greed immersed in a forgotten war. How much we need another Conrad to wake us up from our enlightened dream, another Captain Marlow to illuminate those hells that we do not want to see, in the Congo, in Gaza, anywhere, if only to discover that what beats in our chest It is a heart of darkness.
#heart #darkness
