Key themes in this year’s American election includes the role of government in providing healthcare, the scale of our overseas military operations, and of course, taxes. It seems we’ve been debating, essentially, the same things for more than 200 years. Paine’s Common Sense appeared when the young country was still trying to figure out the role of the federal government, and the United States Constitution provided an elegant legal framework that survives today. At the time, “government” was unrecognizably small compared to today; a mainstream citizen probably viewed concepts like standing armies and federal income taxes with suspicion or outright hostility.

Nearly a century later, Thoreau claimed “that government is best which governs not at all“. While he is typically held up as an icon of the liberally enlightened left, living with a small carbon footprint in his Walden cabin, a closer reading of Thoreau suggests he might be a more accurate precursor to the far-right no-government crowd. Perhaps the Greens and the Branch Dravidians have some things in common.

Nearly a century after Thoreau, Warren’s All the King’s Men continues the debate. Willie Stark channeled the resentment of “rednecks” and the disenfranchised into a political platform of using the government to redistribute wealth and benefits from the wealthy to the poor, an impolite if not shocking concept to Jack Burden’s genteel crowd. The plot hinges on the even more radical idea of a hospital for the poor, where anyone can receive care.

While today’s American citizen might be unable to imagine a life without taxes, armies or emergency rooms, we arrived at these permanent artifacts only through centuries of intellectual, and sometimes physical, struggle.

I continue to struggle with the theory that Heart of Darkness exposes Conrad as a racist. It seems impossible to read the story as anything but an indictment of colonialism and imperialism, and the racism inherent in those enterprises. If a reader wanted to accept a revisionist interpretation, Heart of Darkess could be an proto-indictment of “globalization”; the demand for luxury in western countries drives unspeakable acts in the far off sources of the goods. It’s “Blood Diamond“, a century earlier.

Achebe’s chief criticism (originally here) seems to be that Conrad doesn’t accurately or humanely represent Africans. However, that criticism seems to assume that this particular story about the degradation and evil of the imperial enterprise was about the Africans.

But what if the story is not about the Africans, as crucial as they are to the story and as brutalized as they are by the Europeans? What if the story is actually about the Europeans, and the simplification and objectification of the Africans is a narrative device, reflecting Marlow’s peculiar mix of ignorance and irony? While Heart of Darkness may be Eurocentric, I don’t see how it can be read as anything but a condemnation of imperialism and colonization, and it even seems far ahead of its time in connecting the creation of wealth to the destruction it causes at a local level, while objectifying and demeaning all participants.

Some quotes and scenes from the text to support a cynical, anti-imperial reading include:

“The conquest of the Earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much.”

The hiring company is obviously a morally bankrupt organization, with phrenologists, “flabby” employees, and a casualness about the death of its own employees in addition to the local victims of its enterprise.

Multiple scenes of stupidity and futility of European arms in the jungle setting: a warship shelling an empty jungle (while “the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day”), a blasting operation to clear a hillside with no apparent effect, or the crew on the riverboat firing rifles into trees so inaccurately that Marlow watches the treetops sway from the bullets.

When Marlow passes a white man leading a chain gang of Africans, who readies his weapon when he sees Marlow: “This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike a distance.”

Marlow’s first long description and interaction with Africans: “They were dying slowly-it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now . . . Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were allowed to crawl away and rest. . . I found nothing else to do but offer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held - there was no other movement and no other glance.”

The chief accountant character show the absurdity of imposing European customs: Marlow says, “I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear . . . I shook hands with this miracle” . . .

Then when he leaves the station, one company employee lays dying, flushed and insensible; “the other, bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still tree-tops of the grove of death.”

And of course Kurtz, a productive but ultimately uncontrollable tool. Recalled because his methods were “unsound”, leading to the closing of the district and thus lost business, Kurtz is the apotheosis, or nadir, of colonialism.

Heart of Darkness by Conrad has been the most-read book on Ria Press since we started tracking such things. More than a century after publication, Heart of Darkness serves now as shorthand for doomed voyages, man’s savage tendencies, imperialism and racism. Its timelessness lives on in Apocalypse Now and other variations and reinterpretations. Incredibly to me, some modern readers insist Conrad himself was a racist. This seems like the ultimate in academic revisionism and political correctness. Scenes and themes in Conrad’s work are certainly appalling to our sensibilities, and his word choice would probably be beyond publication today. But surely, his constant return to the themes and savagery of racism is evidence of his condemnation of it. The alternative, that he presents this awfulness because he approves of it, just doesn’t seem credible. More importantly, Heart of Darkness is still widely-read and discussed today. Regardless of any post-modern academism about Conrad’s personal beliefs, Conrad’s work lives on as great storytelling, and, ironically (from a post-modern academic politically correct point of view), continues to expose man’s worst instincts. Given that, does it even matter what Conrad personally thought?

For the nautical reader, authenticity is the most-striking element of Erskine Childers‘ spy story The Riddle of the Sands. Written in 1903 and set in the pre-WWI North Sea, the story follows two young sailors uncovering the secrets of the German navy, via their cruising in a modest centerboard sloop. Groundings, navigation, the cramped quarters, even the attire, ring true with specific and believable detail.

But this is no anachronism, like an O’Brien yarn. Rather, at the time Childers wrote, a small centerboard sloop would have been an appropriate vehicle for inconspicuously exploring a tidal coast. And, Childers presciently described a Germany tooling up for war.

Melville, and especially his masterwork Moby Dick, can induce eyeball-rolling in students, imagining an unreadable and unfathomably long homework assignment. But if you haven’t read him since high school, please read him again, maybe even aloud.

I recently re-read Moby Dick as a way to put my infant daughter to sleep at night. She just needed to hear someone’s voice, and Shel Silverstein was getting boring. Reading Moby Dick aloud made it an entirely different experience, vastly better than silently, and makes me wonder if Melville wasn’t considering oral story telling as he wrote. The long, dense sentences and complex vocabularly actually make sense and flow wonderfully aloud. Just a crackpot theory of mine with no evidence to back it up. However, there was a one-man show happening for a while in Brooklyn, re-enacting the preacher chapter, which suggests others see the oral power of Melville.

For another side of Melville, read Omoo. One of Melville’s pre-Moby Dick “romances”, Omoo was more popular in Melville’s time but nowadays is less read. Though less complex and metaphorical than Moby Dick, Omoo oozes irony and sarcasm in a very modern way, making the book seem far ahead of its time, and much more approachable than Melville’s later work.

Alas, my daughter is two now, and she can understand what we read. She seems less interested in Melville. Our favorite book now is “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie“, which also reads aloud quite well.

Welcome to Ria Press. We are lovers of classic books, and our goal is to find great books and make them available to you easily and for free. You will see that most of our books are nautical, but we are slowly adding other categories. Our main thing is to create free ebooks that are optimized for printing at home, because we think most people still want to read things on paper.