Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
Purchased back in simpler times when, gripped by a sudden realisation of my having a reading age of about twelve, I thought I'd give this a go because it was the novelisation of Apocalypse Now. You can probably see why I found it a bit chewy first time around.
To be fair to the younger version of myself who probably actually would have considered reading charity novelisations [facetious reference to drivel withheld], I knew Heart of Darkness wasn't the novelisation of Apocalypse Now, and even now that I'm marginally less stupid, I still find it a bit on the chewy side. This is probably down to the method of its telling, narrated to the author rather than by him as an anecdote of improbable length which forms a distinctly impressionist version of events dictated by meaning rather than any conventional sequence, so we flash back and forth - as doubtless would an oral account - examining characters before we've met them or even been told who they are as a sort of narrative cubism; but to settle for a definitive painterly analogy, Francisco Goya seems the closest fit with his sepulchral canvases where night and fog conceal the more tangible horrors.
Anyway, for anyone who still cares, despite having been transposed to Vietnam in the sixties, Coppola's adaptation retains almost all of the details which matter with surprising fidelity - even Dennis Hopper. Kurtz here is an ivory trader who has spent just a little too long gazing into the abyss and by whom Conrad's views on colonialism - amongst other evils - are given voice. Kurtz goes into the night, and then becomes the night which, to expand it beyond just the colonial aspect, seems to have been Conrad's view of the headlong rush of progress which gripped his milieu, not as a refutation of its supposed benefits, but representing its casualties from a fully humanist perspective - the minds, bodies, and even cultures sacrificed in our eagerness to embrace the new century.
Heart of Darkness has been dismissed as racist in certain quarters and its true that it reduces Africa to a dark continent of savage and unimaginable horrors, but in its defence, this is from a colonial perspective, and that's our subject here. The reduction of the Congo to something monstrous says more about the intruders than about the Congo itself, so I would argue that the racist flag might be better planted elsewhere, in something which actually commits racism rather than simply fails to cheer on the perceived victim with sufficient enthusiasm - Edgar Rice Burroughs or Lovecraft for example, neither of whom ever wrote anything approaching the depth of this novella.
It's chewy, but it's short, and your brain will thank you if you can make the effort.
Purchased back in simpler times when, gripped by a sudden realisation of my having a reading age of about twelve, I thought I'd give this a go because it was the novelisation of Apocalypse Now. You can probably see why I found it a bit chewy first time around.
To be fair to the younger version of myself who probably actually would have considered reading charity novelisations [facetious reference to drivel withheld], I knew Heart of Darkness wasn't the novelisation of Apocalypse Now, and even now that I'm marginally less stupid, I still find it a bit on the chewy side. This is probably down to the method of its telling, narrated to the author rather than by him as an anecdote of improbable length which forms a distinctly impressionist version of events dictated by meaning rather than any conventional sequence, so we flash back and forth - as doubtless would an oral account - examining characters before we've met them or even been told who they are as a sort of narrative cubism; but to settle for a definitive painterly analogy, Francisco Goya seems the closest fit with his sepulchral canvases where night and fog conceal the more tangible horrors.
Anyway, for anyone who still cares, despite having been transposed to Vietnam in the sixties, Coppola's adaptation retains almost all of the details which matter with surprising fidelity - even Dennis Hopper. Kurtz here is an ivory trader who has spent just a little too long gazing into the abyss and by whom Conrad's views on colonialism - amongst other evils - are given voice. Kurtz goes into the night, and then becomes the night which, to expand it beyond just the colonial aspect, seems to have been Conrad's view of the headlong rush of progress which gripped his milieu, not as a refutation of its supposed benefits, but representing its casualties from a fully humanist perspective - the minds, bodies, and even cultures sacrificed in our eagerness to embrace the new century.
Heart of Darkness has been dismissed as racist in certain quarters and its true that it reduces Africa to a dark continent of savage and unimaginable horrors, but in its defence, this is from a colonial perspective, and that's our subject here. The reduction of the Congo to something monstrous says more about the intruders than about the Congo itself, so I would argue that the racist flag might be better planted elsewhere, in something which actually commits racism rather than simply fails to cheer on the perceived victim with sufficient enthusiasm - Edgar Rice Burroughs or Lovecraft for example, neither of whom ever wrote anything approaching the depth of this novella.
It's chewy, but it's short, and your brain will thank you if you can make the effort.
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