I admit to you that I feel a special admiration – what am I saying admiration, a devotion – for Joseph Conrad, whom I always come back to and end up rereading and who never disappoints me, no matter how many years go by and my reader self changes and transforms. Conrad, who is one of the most revered authors in English literature, was Polish, although he was born in what is now part of Ukraine. And his life was also, like his novels, adventurous and traveling. He sailed and traveled through the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the part of Africa that in his time was called "black".
All Conrad interests me, but I have a special weakness for the four books in which the narrator is Marlow, a sentimental stoic, perhaps even a cynic in the noblest sense of the term, which I take to be a transcript of Conrad himself. Marlow is the narrator of Lord Jim, that character who was "one of us" and who will spend his adult life trying to redeem an act of cowardice from his youth, and is also the narrative voice of, precisely, Youth, Chance and, of course, It is, The Heart of Darkness.
In the latter, published in 1899, Marlow recounts the hallucinated pursuit and search for Kurtz, an ivory dealer in the Belgian Congo of savage colonial exploitation. Kurtz will pronounce at the end of this short novel an immortal phrase that sums up the book and the European depredation of the African continent: The horror, the horror!
I think we all have in our retinas the free version that Francis Ford Coppola set, in 1979, in the Vietnam War, with Marlon Brando in the role of Kurtz turned into an American colonel and saying, rather in a whisper, the famous phrase before die.
However, in the book, Marlow opts to lie to Kurtz's wife, assuring her that the last thing her husband said was her name. Humanity and affections are always more sustainable in fiction than horror. And what Belgian rule of the Congo did was beyond almost any imaginable horror.
The reality can be scary. And we have already spent a year of horror contemplating from afar the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and its cruel war, at the same time so close and so remote. We want and we don't want to know the many atrocities that happen in this real scenario that seems fictional to us. And now the earthquake in Turkey and Syria has been added to it. We live with death and destruction, without it mattering too much –although of course it does matter– if the human being is the executioner or it is that force that surpasses us that we call nature.
Journalists, correspondents of wars and catastrophes, flock to places where credibility is suspended and faith in one's own species finds no footing. We read the chronicles in our newspapers and see the images on television. And we seek, like our special Marlow envoys to horror, the human detail that redeems us from so much horror and so much nonsense. We're like Kurtz's wife. We settle for the rescue of a child who escapes from the rubble and death. We admire the resistance of some combatants in whom we do not want to recognize the murderer that the war turns them into.
We listen to or read the stories that we are told from the battlefront or the catastrophe from our living room, attentive to the story, which makes us sure that we are alive and that life is something more than the horror just before death. Marlow is human. And compassionate.
