The Heart of Darkness at Noon

Just the other day, inspired by numerous mentions of “#1” in Darkness At Noon, by Arthur Koestler, I printed out and posted on the wall a picture of #1 himself, Josef Stalin.  No one in my office recognized him, so I wrote this off as “today’s unsolicited history lesson”.  A few hours later I finished reading the book itself.  And few weeks earlier I had completed Conrad’s book with a conveniently similar name.

Heart of Darkness (1899), by Joseph Conrad.  Despite having been aware of this short novel ages ago when the Vietnam war movie came out, I only read it recently.  Marlow, the narrator, is charged with delving deep into the jungle on a river boat to retrieve Kurtz, the manager of an ivory station with whom they have lost contact.  As he ventures further down the river he plunges deeper into a dark place and further away from the light of civilization, e.g. London, where he started out and later finished the story – in fact, from where he narrates the story himself to his fictional audience and the reader himself (or herself).

 

Marlow does in fact find Kurtz and takes him back on the steamer.  Sadly, Kurtz dies on the way back, his last words being “the horror, the horror”.  Back in London, Marlow is dissatisfied at how things turned out and gives Kurtz’s fiancé some other story.  The big deal is the contrast between “civilized” London and the heart of the jungle, the heart of darkness, with Marlow unconvinced the contrast is actually as substantial as the civilized world would like to believe. 

Apocalypse Now (1979).  Remarkably, the most substantial movie adaptation of this story is this movie, with which we’re almost all familiar.  The story is transposed from the Congo to Vietnam, Kurtz turns into a Green Beret (US Special Forces) colonel (Marlon Brando) who went nuts and set up his own personal kingdom deep in the jungle.  It’s up to Marlow – er, Willard (Martin Sheen) – to go up the river and take care of the matter, in fact to kill Kurtz, which he does.  Along the way we experience a full scale attack, with Duvall’s “napalm” remark, a USO show featuring hot chicks, a tiger (!), and overall a surrealistic journey away from civilized Saigon and into the primordial jungle.  In essence the movie is faithful to the basic plot.

Having seen the movie multiple times and finally read the book, sadly I’d say reading the book was a waste of time.  It really gives us nothing more than an alternate context for the same story, and the movie was very well done – with all the extra elements which make the movie more interesting but do not compromise the basic plot.  As a practical matter, reading the book itself doesn’t give you much more than you would enjoy than watching the movie.  I did so out of compulsion to seek the source material, which in most cases gives you something more.  Hell, A Scanner Darkly, the book, even had a few things the movie left out, and I find – as noted – reading the book is worthwhile.  But not here. 

By the way, a few items about this movie I’d like to address before I move on.  First, there’s now an extended cut version of the film, “Apocalypse Now REDUX”, which I have on DVD.  It adds more footage.   This footage is mainly two extended scenes.  First, the boat crew, amidst heavy rain, come across the Playboy chopper and its "mates", and trade fuel for some intimate companionship with the girls.  Second, they come across an isolated plantation of French who somehow stayed after the French officially left in 1954.  They are heavily armed (mostly with M1 carbines), and provide an official funeral for Clean (Larry Fishburne).  The head of the plantation talks about Dien Bien Phu, while Willard enjoys opium and nude fun with the owner's widowed sister.     

The second concerns the circumstances in which I first saw it – not in a movie theater (we were in Paris at the time) but actually at the US Embassy in Paris.  What later became the commercial library was earlier (late 70s, early 80s) a huge, empty room.  They showed movies there, including this one.  We all sat down to watch this, and the opening riffs of “The End” played as the chopper flew across the jungle.  Then BIZLKDFLIT!   The film crapped out.  “Technical difficulties, folks” turned into postponement – many angry and frustrated noises.  Sometime later, maybe a week or two, we all sat down again to see it.  Robby Krieger’s guitar droning again, chopper across the jungle, and BIZLKDFLIT! Again.   Now the natives were truly restless.  The projectionist narrowly avoided a spear impaling him.  Fortunately this time around the technical difficulties were overcome and we were able to see the entire film.  “And there was much rejoicing….”

Darkness at Noon (1941).  Although actual names of places or historical figures are omitted, it takes little imagination to figure out:  Old Leader is Lenin, #1 is Stalin, and “the dictatorship” is Nazi Germany.  The main character, Rubashov, is a veteran Bolshevik who served in the Russian Revolution (1917), the Russian Civil War (1918-22), and eventually winds up on the wrong side of the power struggle which put Stalin in power.  The NKVD arrested him and put him in jail.  His neighbor, with whom he communicates by tapping in morse code on the wall, is a Czarist officer. 

Part of the story is flashbacks to Rubashov’s assignments in Belgium, but mostly it concerns his current incarceration and extended interrogation.  First he’s interrogated by Ivanov, an old colleague from the Revolution who is likewise an intellectual type, somewhat cynical, but they are kindred souls whose positions could easily have been reversed had things worked out differently.  Ivanov is replaced by Gletkin, a newer officer in the NKVD who was too young to have fought in the Russian Civil War.  He has no sense of humor, no cynicism, nor any compassion or humanity, and is brutal in his ideology.  Rubashov refers to his type as “Neanderthal”, and with the older Bolsheviks gradually purged, they become the only surviving type of communists in the regime.  They may as well be robots. 

Eventually Rubashov realizes he’s wrong, confesses completely and participates in a “show trial” in which he accepts guilt for his crimes, or at least the crimes for which he knows he’s guilty, which are substantial enough; these are ideological rather than specific acts.   Needless to say he does not survive.   Much of the discussion is of the nature of the dictatorship, particularly the Soviet dictatorship.   

In particular, Ivanov articulates something Ayn Rand later articulated.   She argued that the differences between Nazism and communism were insubstantial, relative to the difference both had with capitalism.  Under the latter, individuals have primacy and the government’s purpose is to protect individual rights.  The collective does NOT have the right to sacrifice individuals to the “common good”, however that might be defined.  But the former do enslave individuals to the collective, and individuals’ rights exist only at the convenience of the state as representative of the people.   If this means not merely individuals perishing one by one in jails, but millions dying of famine or starvation, or from genocide, public policies with obviously horrendous body counts, well, too bad.  The collective triumphs over the individual.  That is the value judgment of the statist regime, be it Nazi or communist, run by Hitler or Stalin. 

Note that Nazi Germany was the sole totalitarian dictatorship which was NOT communist.  The other right wing dictatorships were authoritarian rather than totalitarian; the regime demanded full political cooperation and tolerated no dissent, political dissidents perished in jails and camps run by a secret police force, but beyond that the regime did not seek to control everyone’s lives literally from birth until death.

There is also this business of the conflict between those advocating world revolution vs. those who assert that the Soviet experiment must survive above all else.  Stalin, and those allied with him, decided that the world was not ripe for world revolution and that the Soviet version must fight to survive in a capitalist world intent on destroying it.  Everything must be oriented towards defending Soviet interests – even if it meant betraying former communist allies to the Nazis, and shutting down any and all attempts to begin revolutions overseas.  The USSR could and would deal with the capitalist countries and even Nazi Germany.  Once that decision had been made, any such efforts at world revolution worked at cross purposes to Soviet interests and thus became considered, de facto counter-revolutionary or reactionary.  Rubashov’s “crime” was to belong to the latter category, despite his impeccable credentials as an old school Bolshevik and veteran of both the Revolution and the Civil War.  He refers to old photos of the Bolshevik comrades during the revolution, who are identified with numbers superimposed above their heads, each of whom could identify the others.  He and Ivanov were both that old school style of communists.    

Koestler wrote this based on his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and it’s not hard to ascertain why.   As with other countries, Spain was considered by Stalin not yet ripe for proletarian revolution, rather it needed to fully develop capitalism.  This is why the PSUC supported the capitalist-democratic regime of Spain and treated POUM and the anarchists as enemies, almost as much as Franco and his minions.  In any case, anyone remotely interested in communism, labor camps, interrogation, the subtle nuances of world revolution vs. let’s just focus on Russia for now, and old school Bolsheviks vs. the new hipster millennials running the NKVD, may be well advised to enjoy this.  I can say I did.