Heart of Darkness Revisited

By : Frits Andersen

Dommeren (The Judge), original Africa thriller by Lars Bonnevie

In author Lars Bonnevie’s new novel Dommeren (The Judge), the Danish judge Albert Berg travels to Rwanda, where he is to function as a legal expert in the war crimes tribunal following the Hutus’ massacre of the Tutsies. The job terrifies him more than he will admit, and both he and the other characters are forced to confront genocide as a universal problem, a cruel contradiction of the idea of civilization and fundamental Western principals of humane society.

The novel is an international thriller similar in style to Danish author Leif Davidsen’s. The massacre as the theme of the action hovers in the background. But the subsequent political and military development is effectively laid open, however, by virtue of the paranoid plot of the spy novel. Bonnevie exploits the genre’s clarity, solid grasp of the facts and details, together with the cosmopolitan decor: transit spaces, airports, hotels, hustler bars; but does not fall for the temptation to stage his extensive knowledge of the political conflicts of the area in a narrator’s eager interpretations. The narrator is neutral, and instead the author uses his knowledge to withhold knowledge and to set up the pieces of the puzzle logically and credibly.

The massacre in Rwanda, which is not without precedent, is a contemporary historical catastrophe which has been analysed by experts. Also laymen, for that matter, are well-informed concerning the incident itself. The TV reports of the brutal butchering of untold multitudes of people have been followed with horror. Bonnevie’s novel, meanwhile, does not look for scientific explanations, nor does it lapse into a gothic fascination with atrocities. The novel is a historia, a fictional investigation of the unheard-of event.

While there are undoubtedly those who will raise the question whether it is at all possible or suitable to write a novel about a subject so appalling as the genocide in Rwanda, it is precisely the novel’s project to counteract the mental paralysis inherent in this reaction. The viewpoint is that on one hand the horror is present everywhere, and on the other that it is neither mysterious nor unapproachable. As regards Africa, and with some right made topical by the Hutu massacre of Tutsies, the idea of abysmal horror and unfathomable mystery are often linked with the continent in a black/white schematic diagram. "Nameless horror" is a nuclear metaphor which has given sustenance to both euphoric as well as dysphoric allegories concerning Africa: ideas of purification and rebirth, erotic possession, bestial cruelty, and so forth and so on. Joseph Conrad’s famous novel Heart of Darkness dramatizes and tries to be done with these stereotypes, such as where the horror stricken Marlow meets the apotheosis of civilizational brutality in the enigmatic figure of Kurtz. But Conrad, in spite of everything, in a way insists on both the horror and the unfathomability – such as by shifting them into the first-person narrator’s self-interpretation. Lars Bonnevie’s novel also dismantles many of the classic notions, but with his many references to Conrad it can also be read as a revision of Heart of Darkness.

All attempts in the novel to understand the genocide and its consequences fail, which doesn’t make the result just another version of an essentially mysterious and incomprehensible Africa. In the characters’ constellation of individual, stereotyped and abortive interpretations, the "blame" for the tragedy is exposed as determined fundamentally by a "cool" power-political rationale. Neither more nor less. On the other hand, the individual inputs aren’t depicted compromisingly but precisely as viewpoints, limited and human.

When the thriller is used as template in the investigation of a subject so tragic it could be feared that the result might be either misplaced confusion of styles or absurd comedy, or that the trivia genre would reinforce the very stereotypes the endeavor was supposed to eliminate. But even though the novel does contain examples of grotesque comedy, and even though it must necessarily repeat some of the clichés it wants to get rid of, it succeeds in its endeavor to neutralize the diagrammatic conceptions about Africa and at the same time insist on what is so very human in it. Without being superior or profound, without any high-flown or censorious philosophy, any psychology or criticism of civilization, the novel’s risky and original attempt to play the thriller off against Heart of Darkness is carried off both as exciting historia and as impartial analysis.

Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness is an attempt to play through and be done with all dreams of rebirth and civilizational substance in Africa. Kurtz is the ultimate image of a civilizational supremacy in the middle of the Congo, legitimized by referring to the blacks’ own brutal practices. But that image breaks down in Kurtz’s insane dictum: "exterminate the brutes." However critical it is of civilization, Conrad’s novel itself opens for a new, modern mystifying: "The horror" is on account of the language which is split, and the darkness’s heart is localized in an "unreadable" plot which prepares the way for the insanity of endless interpretations.

Lars Bonnevie’s novel represents a desire to direct attention to the almost hopeless demographic and political problem of a region in what, using a recent period’s metaphor, has been called the "forgotten" or "sleeping" continent. Just like Conrad’s the novel is critical of civilization, and likewise it would puncture superior European simplifications. But it is moreover an attempt to close off the mystification Conrad adds onto it. Even though inevitably it is a political matter, Dommeren (The Judge) refuses to see Africa, Rwanda and the massacre as an interpretation trauma for we Europeans. On the contrary, this is completely irrelevant. So saying, when all is said and done Dommeren (The Judge) is perhaps supposed to exorcise Conrad’s metaphor. Africa has no heart and isn’t dark.

Such metaphors, which can never completely be gotten around, are not profound and unfathomable, and they have nothing to do with the country and the people who live there. The metaphors on the contrary are human, shackled to the background and the circumstances, the heart in the body of someone who is awakened by terror.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 15, 1999

Translated by Kenneth Tindall