Heart of Darkness (MP3 CD)
by Joseph Conrad
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A Captivating Tale (2008-03-20)
The fiction, and the non-fiction. The prose are not for the unexperienced reader. Part of this great story explains of the ills of colonialism at the turn of the century. It posits probably, an accurate account of what one may have seen on the ground and “up country” at that time. Conrad certainly opens the pages of man’s baseness, his sordidness. I eagerly anticipate reading his other works.Human Nature. (2007-11-12)
This book is beautifully disturbing at how well it describes the fall of man to his primal state.“Mistah Kurtz–he dead.” An influential work on five 20th century seminal works (2007-10-20)
I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad’s book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier’s book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott’s poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla’s movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad’s book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle’s Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad’s story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.
Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad’s alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles “an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land” (8). His destination is a post where the company’s brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow’s steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.
Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz’s image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz’s house and then finding that each is “black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth” (57).
I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz’s nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott’s poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier’s book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness!
As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.
The heart of noir (2007-09-24)
This book is not only the Heart of Darkness by title but by influence it is also the “heart of noir.” The mood of the book and the language itself is dense and suffocating, creating an bleak atmosphere that would inspire many film noir movies of the 40s and 50s. (This is not even to mention Apocalypse Now many years later which is not-so-loosely based on this novel, but set in a different milieu.) Consider this book the grandaddy of noir if you will. The ending is as bleak as they come, and I don’t think rivaled by any of its imitators.
Also I only think it fair to mention *twice* just how dense the writing is in this book. Be prepared!
It’s a wonderful experience in a brooding sort of way if you can get through it though and learn to navigate the language like the narrator navigates the jungle.
If you have to read it for class, then my condolences. Under the gun this wouldn’t be that fun of a read I don’t think.
An Adventure Masterpiece of Profound Depth (2007-09-23)
Note: I made some Mormon reader angry over my reviews of books written by Mormons out to prove the Book of Mormon, and that person has been slamming my reviews.
This review of the “Heart of Darkness” is pretty good if I do say so myself. Note the wonderful lines you get to read out of two novels. It was a bit of trouble to find them. I hope you enjoy them.
Your “helpful” votes are appreciated. Thanks.
Don’t be put off by the word “masterpiece.” The “Heart of Darkness” is a great adventure story, but so much more. You will find yourself plumbing its depths as Conrad describes a voyage up the Congo on an old steamer. Conrad’s language is magnificent, and to be savored.
In modern times, Cormac McCarthy (see Blood Meridian) has recast Conrad’s powerful style and made it his own. The following comparison reveals a lot about both writers.
“The Heart of Darkness,” by Joseph Conrad:
“We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, , of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us–who could tell” we were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign–and no memories.”
“Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCathy:
“That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the hoses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked and sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and lived like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.”
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