The Light Heart of Darkness

After finally watching the magnificent Apocalypse Now I found myself correcting one of the many holes in my literary knowledge and picked up J. Conrad's Heart of Darkness (my school curriculum of books was limited to Goethe, Gerhard Hauptmann and Bert Brecht). One of the characters that struck me most - in both film and book - was the Harlequin...

Maybe even more than the meeting with Kurtz, Marlowe’s meeting with the young Russian that he calls the Harlequin is the part of Heart of Darkness that holds the most fascination for me. He seems a strange and oblique mirror image of the narrator. Marlowe is driven by an unalterable and undeniable internal world – he, too, is a kind of fanatic and more than anyone else’s heart his own is filled by the eponymous darkness. He is introduced to the reader as an almost Buddha-like figure and as such he exemplifies a man who makes sense out of the world through his suffering. The fever of his trip to the heart of the jungle almost always borders on the edge of what can be borne, yet he remains, even through his anger, impassive, unattached to everything but his aim. The world is a horror only to be met by resistance and contempt and supreme thought.

Now enters the Harlequin. The holes in his clothes patched up by mismatched coloured rags, exalted and – to Marlowe – almost admirable, insane and dangerous, he seems like a clown saint, someone who has come to terms with his own fundamental ridiculousness and fickleness. Marlowe sees his devotion to and exaltation of Kurtz as the most dangerous part of him – yet it is what makes him seem invincible to the primal world around him, just as Marlowe’s own dark exultation drives him all the way to Kurtz’s camp. Marlowe seeks invincibility in his fear and the heightened sense it brings to him, and so someone who ignores fear almost entirely or uses it merely to fuel his sense of devotion, can only arouse suspicion in him.

But, in fact, those two have come here in the same manner and for the same reason. One could even say that Marlowe is the more devoted of the two, since his entire voyage is steered by thoughts of Kurtz, while the Harlequin was brought here completely by chance and simply took up the devotion where he found it.

To me the Harlequin is Marlowe turned inside out. Marlowe fearfully guards his human core against the primal assault of the river and the jungle and the Harlequin nervously, thoughtlessly spills this core in order to be able to go on. He is Marlowe without a fear of death. A mad mystic, half swallowed by wilderness, in stark contrast to the sad thinker who strongly clings to his sense of civilization and contempt.

The Harlequin does not have Marlowe’s staunch and almost fanatic moral convictions. He leaves with a few cartridges and his book on sailing in his mismatched pockets – a wandering fool, a strange breath of thoughtlessness and optimism in the dark tale.