I agree with this and Miss Purl McKnittington - Conrad is an idea guy and you can get tangled up in his prose. But there is a paragraph when Marlow rounds a bend in the river and can see Kurtz’s lair, with the spikes with skulls on them acting as a fence (sorry, no spoilers here). He uses that paragraph to explore what it means to have so much power as to go insane - and it is brilliant.
The strength of Conrad’s ideas will keep his work enduring - and unendurable for those of us who just want an interesting read. But lord, don’t try **The Secret Agent ** - what a slog! And yet again another brilliant look at fanatics and terrorists and the banality of war…
I could have written the same as Renee, word for word. I enjoyed Heart of Darkness, but you do have to allow for the fact that it was written in a different time. I think a lot of classics get a bad rap because people aren’t willing to cut them slack for not being written in a style they’re used to.
I also think that television and movies have changed expectations of prose a lot. Think of how the music and visuals serve to create atmosphere and generate mood or an emotional response, even without any dialogue or narration. When such media didn’t exist, I think prose styles often tended toward what we now think of as long-winded or boring but were actually their textual equivalent for those tools. Heart of Darkness is a very atmospheric work, and relies on its atmosphere and ideas more than beautiful prose. I liken Lord of the Flies and 1984 to Heart of Darkness in style, and I’ve seen them suffer from similar criticisms.
I also think there’s a decent amount of dark humor in there, but it can be pretty tough to appreciate humor from another era as well. My best example of that was reading Dead Souls by Nikolay Gogol - probably about a quarter of the way in, a line of characterization struck me and I realized that Gogol was being funny. That changed the way I was reading him quite profoundly.
I really liked Heart of Darkness when I read it for an literature course last year. I think it helped that we’d been reading books from that time period all semester and the lectures we got on it were brilliant.
And the writing isn’t all bad. There is some humor. I love:
“Kurtz - Kurtz – that means short in German – don’t it? Well, the name was as true as everything else in his life – and death. He looked at last seven feet long”
I agree completely. I still don’t see the “Brilliant” aspect if any of the book, though. It may have been ground-breaking for its time, but having seen Apocalypse Now and The Man Who Would Be King (itself based on a story written by Rudyard Kipling 20-odd years before Heart of Darkness), I’d say that a century after it was written, Heart of Darkness has completely lost it’s impact as anything more than “So that’s where Coppola got the idea for Apocalypse Now from. Interesting.”
What is really chilling is that the setting isn’t fictional. Read King Leopold’s Ghost for the background.
Anyway, I am in the minority that liked it.
I though Apocalypse Now, while entertaining, missed somewhat of the point of the book, as it left off the scene in which the narrator finds himself unwilling to abide by Kurtzs’ odd sense of morality - which was based, above all, on being truthful.
To my mind, at the heart of the book (and for that matter Apocalypse Now) is the problem posed by taking “truth” to be of the highest value and holding hypocracy as the worst moral failing–that one risks ending up as an unmitigated monster, if one perceives “the truth” as naked exploitation of others.
Marlowe chooses in the end to preserve the veneer of civilization to avoid shocking Kurtzs’ fiancee - something which Kurtz himself presumably would not do - even though he “hated lies”. Perhaps part of the meaning of civilization itself is in a set of comforting lies … or anyway, such is the theme of the book.
I read it for a class in modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literature, and all I remember is my zany professor saying that perhaps the most subversive tension in the book was found in the black words on the white page.
I know that Chinua Achebe famously said it was racist, but I didn’t think it was, really - I agree with the authour of King Leopold’s Ghost that it was intended as a mostly accurate portrayal of the actual situation in the Belgian Congo. The tone of the book was mostly moral outrage at the atrocities inflicted by Europeans on Africans, not approval of the same.
I liked it, but reading Conrad is unlike reading other authors. It’s a bit like being tossed around in a maelstrom of words, and I’m not always in the mood. When I am in the mood, though, I love it. He had a great knack for letting a situation unfold as though the reader were there. I’ve always loved the scene in which they’re cruising along the river, and:
I love the way he lets us catch on to what’s going on at the same pace that the narrator did. “Little sticks were flying about.” Good stuff.
If anyone’s interested (which does not appear to be the case), you can read the book on-line here. Personally I hate trying to read on-line, but the search function is nice.
Oh, and I think it’s ridiculous to assert that the novel was racist. It was a novel about racists, but that doesn’t make it racist any more than the subject matter of Schindler’s List makes the movie anti-Semitic. (Not the perfect analogy there, I know, but you catch my meaning.)
I haven’t read it in over 15 years so I don’t know what I’d think now, but I loved it. I found the prose and the ideas very compelling. Unfortunately my memory is faulty and I can’t go into specifics. Maybe I’ll give it a re-read.
I think Achebe’s argument was that the metaphorical use of “darkness” and “savagry” as images was racist. Not that I agree with him. I think it was about racism (among many other things).
Count me in with the minority who have a lot of time for Conrad and think he’s a fine writer. I’m sorry you didn’t get more out of HoD, Martini. As we all know, tastes vary and you can’t please everyone all the time.
I have to say I greatly enjoyed both HoD and Nostromo. Conrad was pre-occupied with a range of themes, including the nature of so-called ‘civilisation’ and the conflict inherent in the ‘noble savage’ view of humanity. He found a vocabulary and an imagery that enabled him to explore these themes in narrative form. While this wasn’t always subtle, he did at least manage, IMHO, to do so without allowing the philosophy to displace or overshadow the telling of the tale, and without reducing his characters to puppets with labels on. I suspect that many readers are put off by the slowness of pace, and it’s true that Conrad felt he needed to take his time to create the moods and effects he was after. There are some things you just can’t rush! But I find his novels reward the investment required by the reader, and I’m pleased that HoD attracts the attention and respect that it does - notwithstanding the fact that, as this thread makes clear, it’s not a book everyone enjoys.
Just to clarify, I don’t think the book was racist by the standards of the time. I think it’s certainly racist from our point of view (Conrad’s description of the black fireman as a “savage” and an “improved specimen”, “…as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs”, is particularly abhorrent.) but I also agree that to judge the book by our standards is to do Conrad an injustice. By the standards of his day he was actually rather progressive. Achebe is wrong to call the book racist because he’s not judging it from a meaningful perspective, but by our standards it’s pretty harsh.
Did you watch Apocolypse Now before you read the book? That’s probably got something to do with your review of it.
Me, I read the book in High School (had to study it for a class). It’s chock full of imagery and concepts regarding colonialism, the idea of the ‘savage’, what translates as civilised, etc.
It’s a good book to read for analysis, but I wouldn’t read it for pure pleasure.
We had to read all three of these books in high school and Heart of Darkness was the only one that I didn’t enjoy. In fact, I couldn’t even finish it. I definitely agree with the first sentence and that’s why I couldn’t stand the book. It’s too atmospheric, I kept waiting for something to “grab” me…to make me interested and all I got was page after page of atmosphere.
Yes, I saw Apocalypse Now first, some years before I got around to reading Heart of Darkness. You know that episode of Family Guy where Brian gets a job as a Guide Dog and describes The Blair Witch Project as “Nothing’s happening… nothing’s happening… nothing happens… the movie’s over… everyone in the theatre looks pissed”? That sums up how I felt reading Heart of Darkness.
What does watching Apocalypse Now have to do with reading Heart of Darkness? The basic structure of the one was adopted for the former, both concern imperialism and the heart of darkness, but they are fundamentally different, both in tone and theme.
I haven’t read the book in years, but I remember devouring it the first time, and immediately starting it over so I could pay more attention.
I still find being in a forest on a hot, bright, and humid day unpleasant.
I disagree; I think that above all one must look at the context and purpose of the work.
The whole purpose of Conrad was to explore the themes of “savagry” and “civilization”, and the ways in which these concepts are used and the ways in which the “civilized” reveals “savagry” - all in the context of a colonial system where Blacks were viewed as nothing more than animals to be exploited (as was indeed historically the case in the Belgian Congo).
In that context, it makes perfect narrative sense for the narrator to begin from the POV that the Blacks he meets are “savages” and “parodies” of the “civilized” (that is, White European) humans he knows. It makes his realization - that Kurtz, the “highest” and “most enlightened” example of White European civilization - is in fact the worst savage all the more striking.
In short, part of his point is to look beyond appearances and prejudice. He is saying to the reader: “you think that Blacks are savages because they look savage to you, like dogs wearing breeches? You don’t know what savagry really is. If you want to see “savagry”, look what “White civilization” is doing in the Congo - and then look in a mirror”.
To my mind, that isn’t “racism”, but quite the opposite.
Precisely. There’s a fine line between “savage” and “civilization” and the two territories are always very close to spilling over into each other at any given time. That’s one of the reasons that “we” use those distinctions; to quickly separate “them” from “us”. In reality, there’s little to no findamental difference. The only difference comes from culture, and in the big scheme of things, that’s irrelevant.