8
May
2009
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Have you seen Apocalypse Now? Good, then you already know the story of Joseph Conrad’s most famous novella. No? Then DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WATCH THAT MOVIE UNTIL YOU READ THIS BOOK.
I’m going to only give the bare bones of the plot here, because it is a story about nothing and everything. I remember sitting at Denny’s at 4 AM with my friend Kelly working on a project for this book for our A.P. English class. She said, “You know, it’s true that you can have a book without a plot, but you can’t have a book without symbolism.”
The narrator is sent to find a wayward ship captain down a river in the Congo. The captain, Kurtz, has “gone native” (as they used to say).
But’s so much more than that. It’s the journey that matters, as with so many great books. Kurtz, if not “gone native” has certainly gone nuts.
The Horror! The Horror!
The title is two-fold. The heart of darkness was a term used by colonists to describe the unknown interior of Africa. It’s also the journey of man’s own dark nature. The unknown interior of the Self.
Now, if I recall my A.P. English studies correctly (thank you Ms. Schneider, wherever you are!) this book works on a multitude of levels. There’s the perfunctory plot level. There’s the social critique of Colonized Africa. There’s the allegory of Human Nature. And through it all, there’s a little bit of Cosmic wonder, however dark it may be.
This is possibly the most symbolic book I’ve ever read, and still one of my favorites. It’s a novella, but don’t let the short length fool you–its not a light read. I’m amazed by just how much I have starred and highlighted throughout it’s 72 pages. And sometimes I have crazy things written in the margins like, “porn inuendo?” which I solidly blame on Denny’s acidic coffee and lack of oxygen in the smoking section.
Francis Ford Coppolla did a better job than most could have, adapting the turn of the century novella into Apocalypse Now and bringing social commentary of the Vietnam war into it, but when a story–any story–changes medium from written form, to audio-visual form, something is inevitably lost. And it’s usually the beauty of the prose. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but in the hands of a master like Conrad, it might be the other way around. Here’s one of my very favorites:
“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there–there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were– No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it–this suspicion of their not being inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it–this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity–like yours–the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you–you so remote from the night of first ages–could comprehend. And why not? The ind of man is capable of anything–because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage–who can tell?–but truth–truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder–the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff–with his own inborn strength. Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags–rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row–is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who’s that grunting? You wonder I didn’t go ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no–I didn’t. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam pipes–I tell you…”
If that doesn’t convince you to read this book, well, then nothing I could write will.
If you like this book, you might like:
T.S. Eliot: Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (P) by T.S. Eliot
A Bend in the River (F) by V.S. Naipaul
Moby Dick (F) by Herman Melville
Slaughterhouse-Five (F) by Kurt Vonnegut
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (F) by Ken Keasey
Deep River (F) by Shusaku Endo
Siddhartha (F) by Hermann Hesse
The Poisonwood Bible (F) by Barbara Kingsolver
The Road (F) by Cormac McCarthy
The Aventures of Huckleberry Finn (F) by Mark Twain
On the Road (F) by Jack Kerouac
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (NF) by Joseph Campbell
Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell
The Stranger (F) by Albert Camus
Things Fall Apart (F) by Chinua Achebe
What Is the What (F) by Dave Eggars
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (CNF) by Ishmael Beah
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (NF) by
Lord of the Flies (F) by William Golding
Notes from the Underground (F) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (F) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Saving Fish from Drowning (F) by Amy Tan
The Inferno (EP) by Dante Alighieri
The Odyssey (EP) by Homer
Deep Survival (NF) by Laurence Gonzales
Into the Wild (CNF) by Jon Krakauer
Midnight’s Children (F) by Salman Rushdie
Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner: The Novelist at Sea (NF) by Peter Villiers
Joseph Conrad: A Biography (NF) by Jeffrey Meyers
Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (CNF) by Ford Maddox Ford
Other works by Joseph Conrad:
Lord Jim (F)
Almayer’s Folly (F)
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Other Stories (F)
Under Western Eyes (F)
Victory (F)
The Secret Agent (F)
Chance (F)
Nostromo (F)
Typhoon and Other Stories (F)
An Outcast of the Islands (F)
The Shadow Line (F)
The Rescue (F)
The Arrow of Gold (F)
The Mirror of the Sea (CNF)
The Rover (F)
Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel (F)
With Ford Maddox Ford:
The Inheritors (F)
Romance (F)
The Nature of a Crime (F)
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