Heart of Darkness certainly touches on manifest greed, whether immediate or at one or two removes – but it plays an insignificant role. It is a footnote to a deep study of the evil of which we, as individuals or as a species, are capable.

Nor do I find self-obsession in this great work. Self-obsession gazes not into the abyss, but into Narcissus’ reflecting pool – leading to a madness or hubris (rather than a nobility) of a very different type.

Perhaps I am missing something in a much-loved work, but I have yet to have it pointed out to me.

Some 20 years before the appearance of Heart of Darkness, Nietzsche published Beyond Good and Evil. One of his most quoted aphorisms (146) might well serve as an introduction to Conrad’s work:

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

Conrad’s genius, in Heart of Darkness, is to use irony – a device at which he was remarkably adept – to show us how irony can itself be easily abused to evince hypocrisy capable of the greatest evils.

Marlow, as we all do at some stage, gazes into and plumbs the abyss to find Kurtz, who feeds on and is consumed by evil. To abuse Nietzsche, Kurtz has become a Faustian monster.

Marlow emerges remarkably unscathed from his journey and his encounters with the many variously evil characters he meets (a small irony denoting Marlow’s apparent goodness).

In Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s characters and, by extension, all of us become characters in Dante’s Inferno – occupying different stations or circles of Hell.

It seems we are good and evil by degree.

Marlow, like us, is apparently merely touched, brushed or stained by an evil redolent of Original Sin, made evident at the close when he is unable to repeat, to Kurtz’s fiancé, his final words.

Yet that small dishonesty has to make for one of the most vicious closes to a novel I’ve ever read – for Marlow’s seeming discretion, i.e. his white lie or insignificant untruth, paints him every bit as vile as Kurtz.

It is his all-too-human discretion – that thin veneer of self-deception that marks a civilised man as surely as it marked Kurtz – that allows Marlow (and all of us) to overlook the overwhelming hypocrisy that enables and excuses the horrific excesses of empire in all its forms.

Conrad highlights how our small deceptions bespeak our all-embracing deceit.

This is surely our greatest irony and the source of all mendacity. Kurtz, the learned man of virtue who sets forth to save the Heathen, finds himself the greatest Heathen. Marlow, who has seen, met and grappled the greatest of evils, turns his back on Kurtz but fails – at the last – to recognise Kurtz in himself.

Heart of Darkness is a profound and utterly devastating work. It forces us confront, much like the French man-of-war drifting off the coast…wait, let’s revisit that passage:

“Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech — and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives — he called them enemies! — hidden out of sight somewhere.”

Conrad forces us to confront our impotence to take on the seeming absurdity of our task of overcoming evil. Ironically, what he depicts in this passage is anything and everything but a French man-of-war lobbing shells into the jungles of Africa.

But that again is irony – the expression of meaning through language signifying something opposite to, or other than, the subject at hand. He paints us incomprehensible; our ensigns limp as rags, taking potshots at the enormous hypocrisy of our greatest dilemma – our capacity for evil.

We must make for a droll and lugubrious sight indeed.

By painting a true picture of us, Conrad causes us to mull his question (unspoken in as much as Marlow’s deception of Kurtz’s intended masks that which we know hangs heavily in the air) : How do we overcome our duplicity so that we may begin to confront and overcome evil?

That, of course, makes for another discussion altogether. For our answers, we need – perhaps, like Nietzsche – to look Beyond Good and Evil. However, as someone who appreciates Conrad, I trust you’ll find my analysis of Conrad’s intent in Heart of Darkness of interest and point out any misconceptions I may hold of this great work.

It’s a pity you didn’t keep the Conrad theme. Heart of Darkness is, at its root, the story of how esurient self-obsession can masquerade as high-minded nobility.

I thought it perhaps better to more clearly illustrate the text by feeding readers the words of Parkscape supporters and strategists who’ve left their footprints all over the Web (and now the Wayback Machine).

I mean, why would the Greaves couple’s most ardent lieutenants leave their plans to

• spend donated money on flights to Pretoria
• lobby politicians (with whom, in the cases of Van Rensburg [2006] and Purchase [2016] it seems they enjoyed remarkable success)
• influence MTO insiders, and …
• work towards “… a working plantation with Urban recreational and conservation aspects all tied in together”

…on the Internet?

And communicate with each other in a Grade 2 language and grammar far divorced from their obsequious official pronouncements?

Are they stupid? And, by extension, are we not stupid for allowing the the same small cabal to get away with this duplicity for more than a decade?

The same names crop up throughout a ten-year campaign to deceive the Cape Town public – which funded their extraordinarily deceit.

That wealthy Capetonians could so easily be suckered into funding and supporting the destruction of a global Heritage Site – containing more endangered species than the total species counts of most countries – is staggering.

A very thorough perusal of the issues -- such as they have been expressed. Thanks for assembling this Mike!