Review of HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

Just as the methods of civilization are as unequivocally manifest as the power of nature, so in humans there can be a capacity for restraint that is just as immanent as the impulses toward avarice and aggression. Societies reinforce the restraints they sanction in numerous ways, but when such external supports are eliminated, civilized men easily regress towards an atavistic primitivism. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s journey up the Congo introduces him to the foreign world of unbridled nature and into the nature of humans. It is a trip backward in time, to a primordial phase in social development, as well as a journey within, to what lies obscured under the veneer in civilized men. Marlow learns that although humankind has ostensibly moved far beyond its primeval origins, human beings revert to the primitive when they are removed from their cultural milieu and are no longer subjected to various sanctions.

When Marlow journeys to Africa, he departs a familiar setting and arrives in a world which becomes progressively more foreign and tenebrous. However, Marlow is not disconcerted by Africa but by the actions of his fellow Europeans, which he thought would make sense (“For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts” (Conrad 79)), and when they do not, he feels that he is losing touch with the real world. He is prepared for the natives, but not prepared for the spectacle of a French man-of-war “firing into a continent” where “there wasn’t even a shed” (79). Also, he had not expected the barbarous profiteering and exploitation of the natives he finds in the Congo. In an African setting European mores have mutated into something inane; and Marlow identifies with the natives, who are likewise languishing from the unfamiliarity and unintelligibility of the fractious world into which they have been conveyed. The dissolution of civilized morals is best evinced by the station’s manager and his uncle, the chieftain of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition. The manager has attained his station of authority even though he has no wisdom, no intellect, no gumption, and no managerial instincts. What he has is “triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions” (89). While those around him sicken and expire, he is never unwell. His clout originates from his animal health and his depravity, from the fact that he is one of the vacuous men. The manager’s uncle is equally unscrupulous. The members of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition are “sordid buccaneers” whose desire “to tear treasure out of the bowels of the land” has “no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe” (101).

The journey to the Central Station heightens Marlow’s sense of the disarray into which the Europeans have fallen and the disorder they have instigated. Marlow meets a white man flanked by an armed escort, who claims that he is “looking after the upkeep of the road” (87). The discovery of a negro with a bullet hole in his forehead three miles yonder makes a mockery of this statement. Marlow ponders if the cadaver is to be considered “a permanent improvement” (87). The frailty of civilization and its liability to disintegrate are on full display at the Central Station. The steamer Marlow has come to command has been carelessly fractured, and it is impossible to procure the rivets needed for its repair. A copious supply of rivets was scattered about in the first station where they idly lay without being used; but all that can be acquired from that station is a spate of flimsy wares to be bargained for ivory. When a hut full of the wares conflagrates, a man tells Marlow that everyone is acting excellently, as he ladles river water into a pail with a porous bottom. Marlow had received a similar assurance about everyone’s behavior when the steamer was sunk. There is a brickmaker who, lacking a crucial ingredient, has not been able to make bricks. Finally, there are the plotting agents (“the pilgrims”) who make a “philanthropic pretense” and a “show of work” (93) while being guided exclusively by rapacity and never lifting a finger effectually.

Review of ALL THE PRETTY HORSES by Cormac McCarthy

When characters are forced to confront the vagaries and consummate powers of nature, they are galvanized by an elegiac yen to repeat the entrenched patterns and plots of the past. The present is essentially an illimitable process of repetition. In All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, as John Grady Cole gradually starts to realize the frailty and hypocrisy of his life, he attempts to return to the imagined innocence of the consecrated cowboy of the mythic past, only to find out that such a return is unfeasible.

John Grady’s life on his family’s Texas ranch is a romantic fiction, a façade barely concealing the falseness at its core. From the outset, John Grady is an idealist who believes in an imagined code of justice and honor in a universe founded upon iniquity and immorality. Like the peasants in Alfonsa’s parable who try to sell things no one wants, John Grady embraces the values of a myth that obscures the true nature of the world. He does not realize that the falsity of the sacrosanct cowboy is tantamount to the broken pieces of machinery the peasants collect from the roads. The peasants’ belief in a myth (that all things of the industrialized world have value) yoked with an abysmal ignorance of the true nature of that world both fortifies them and dooms them. Duena Alfonsa advises our protagonist to view the world sans ignorance and sentiments, however alluring they may be. What John Grady and Rawlins encounter in Mexico is similar to what they left behind in Texas – cowboys, horses and grullos, ranches and haciendas. Mexico illumines the phoniness of the American myth. Like the young Alfonsa, Alejandra and John Grady both view the world through a rosy filter, from the privileged stations of their social status, insulated in their ranches where the descendants of the people their ancestors conquered and whose land they purloined are now servants and pariahs. Alejandra and John Grady are like the peasants of the countryside who cling to bolts and “wornout part[s] of a machine that no one could even know the use of” (McCarthy 231). In their fragile paradises, neither of them realizes that what may appear innocuous or true may be unsound and defective; an illusion. Alejandra ultimately recognizes the futility of refusing to choose “between the dream and the reality.”

After his odyssey in Mexico and his conversations with Duena Alfonsa, John Grady concludes that the individual is alone in a callous world. He must forsake his blind belief in a mythic construct that conceals the true nature of the universe as well as the knowledge of his rightful place in it. By the end of All the Pretty Horses, John Grady starts to see the inanity of the myths into which he has poured his faith, as he becomes imprisoned after the knife fight and feels a child’s anguish surfacing within him “but it brought with it such pain that he stopped it cold and began at once his new life and the living of it breath to breath” (203). Duena Alfonsa tells John Grady that to discern what is true from what is convenient to believe is to abandon all the myths of one’s culture, and to lead a solitary life, countering hopeless bitterness with courage.