Heart Of Darkness

Heart of Darkness (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism)
$4.95
I read this story in 1976, actually the Bicentennial year, in a closet cupboard office of my high school English teacher in a book he'd assigned to my "advanced" one person class. The story was in a remarkable classic collection he had used in college called Prose and Criticism. At the time I understood myself to be in a dangerous world, a place of dichotomies, understood myself uneven to the task of interpretation of the pieces we read, naive, read within his constructs of "good" and "evil" in man and looking at works this teacher felt spoke to human nature,human choices, capacities, human thought, writing, best efforts to capture who we are.
As good an English teacher as exists.

I recall curling in a chair at home a wing back chair opening the book and falling into a trip down or rather up a river into the heart of the unknown.

It's the kind of story I suspect once you start will grip you until it ends. I was "spellbound."
I didn't know then that later it would be revisited with Brando giving a fairly interesting re-enactment when I decided to take my younger brother to a movie that so disturbed him he ran out to run home turning and braking an ankle that never again allowed him to play sport.

But what of the story? One of the few problems I have writing here or anywhere about a book is that I feel that the writer or reader might judge a piece better not by a summary, or not only by a summary, but by its affect on a reader. It seems that is useful to me. That evidentially offends some. But it is all I have.


I had known of this incredible darkness within my father. I'd witnessed his struggle with civilizing, with his climb into academia, the poverty of his birth, his amazing capacity with numbers, teaching, with leadership. He had a life within "hallowed halls" but my insights came as well from setting this against the "other," from a man I watched with a perspective and tone not unlike this narrator has, I watched, seeing that as I aged/he aged my dad seemed to reveal to me the bleak darkness of his humanity. His ability to access his troubles and fury and spew it on a family, to twist, devolve, become unrecognizable. Violent, unreasoning. I'd seen and avoided, or endured a ride into the heart of his self loathing, his capacity to become able to take a shot gun and fire it at a friend of my brothers, missing him, but to terrorize us as he blamed, obfuscated, wrenched and allowed violence to find a seat in his soul. And the story talked to me about this. The primal. One devolution leading to another.

No, I am not talking about a father that was news at 11, but I am talking about one that would slap you into smiling for a picture at three. So reading as the book falls away the civilizing, as you enter the jungle heat, on the ship of fools, I felt I entered the darkness of the soul. It served as an explanation for me of my own observations, artistic, yes. Art does this for me. It glimpses the unsayable. It reads between the lines. At that point in my life just the tension of my daily life was a thing that couldn't be "spoken," I'd have lacked words. Still lack them for this, distrust them. It seemed to me this piece of literature spoke to the dual nature of my own life.

I've often felt like Goldilocks or a Germanic fairy tale. Setting out into the heart of the dark forest, erring for lack of application of some stated rule or precept not understood as rule, finding the dangers and the realities in nightmarish form burning me alive with the truths. Burning bushes. Have you ever considered that one part of the biblical tale, that this bush utterly nuked the one that encountered it? I have. I have. I learned a tremendous amount from that early life to apply into my work and life looking,thinking, much later- not least of which is this view of the human turned away from mitigating anything from the primal drives.

Heart of Darkness spoke to me about the battle waged and ultimately the reasons to take my life and go into teaching, to make choices that were not about living unaware. It actually served me well.

Would I say it is a metaphorical piece, actually I would, commentary on colonialism too and other follies of man, yes in some respects, full of offending characterizations-sure- but it was for me as if I'd gotten gripped by the horror of something that stole into a day, and bled it until I understood better the depravity, and perhaps as was the case with my kin what had blackened and been beyond that parent. As he faced his life fouled and fouling. Written to the ultimate extreme. Brando captured that because he knew it in himself. Clearly.

Right after reading I was assigned an essay on man, What is Man and failed the paper for a comma splice.
Ultimately my only conclusion then, and my only conclusion now, with the splicing a representation of my faulty receptors, is a being can control his responses in situations, where he cannot control the hands dealt. This story assisted my crystallization of those understandings.
The Life of Pi, The Open Boat, both seemed to hold me in that wing back in similar veins though different times.

Not that this could get any more personal, but at this time I was grappling, as were many teens, with the horror of reading and learning of the concentration camps of Germany in WW2, reading Frankl. And it happens then released just soon, soon after my reading to public TV in America for the first time was the footage of the scenes seen by our soldiers as they entered and liberated the camps. Withheld all those years. I watched that too, then, in that time of America's two hundredth, held by the reality, over held by the prose. In my time of feeling far from invincible, yet a teen. Knowing with simple truth there in those piles were the beings that had beheld the horror of the capability of man gone utterly to the extreme of his capacity to hate. Perhaps family (of mine/of yours), perhaps the most needed alive to speak to us, we as witness? to live their stolen lives. And what of those capable of all of this. Were they too kin? Of a kind in a "race" I inhabit? Is that possible. Heart of Darkness poses this. But we as a people lived it. I sat as I went metaphorically up that river of suffering and pain seeing my life as a potential to affect others with creativity, with my capacities, with a desire to eschew this nightmare.

It is a book that rides this river. A sacred knowledge that allowed me insights at a very formative time. Art.

Heart of Darkness and The Congo Diary (Penguin Classics)
$9.00
"Heart of Darkness" was originally published as the second of a trilogy of novellas structured as the 'three stages' of a human life. I have understood this 'challenging' story much better since I re-read it in that context. Here's my review of the whole trilogy.

Three Stages of Man... Seaman, at Any Rate:
The three long stories in this volume include two of Joseph Conrad's most familiar - Youth & Heart of Darkness - which have been detached anthologized and assigned to high school lit classes ad nauseam, but in fact the three were published together in 1902 under the title "Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories." Conrad scholars maintain that the author originally intended "Lord Jim" to be the third of three tales told in the voice of Captain Marlow, but that Lord Jim got too massive on its own account, necessitating the substitution of "The End of the Tether," a classic third person narration. "Youth" marked Marlow's debut as a narrator within a narration, relating his own first great adventure to a small circle of friends, one of whom is the nameless author, presumably Conrad himself; thus we get a first-person framework around an extended quotation of a first-person yarn. One has to wonder if readers in 1902 were daunted. If so, they had NO idea how involuted Conrad's narrative structures would become, beginning with Heart of Darkness, and reaching an apogee in the later novel "Chance." The barest explanation for Conrad's increasingly indirect style of narration is that he couldn't accept his own authorial omniscience, that he needed a kind of vivid uncertainty and contingency in order to portray the reality of human existence as he felt it. Even the straightforward narrative of The End of the Tether requires the artful withholding of a key piece of information until the story is three-quarters told. (Warning: Do NOT read the intro, or any other reviews, or even the blurb on the back cover before reading The End of the Tether!)

Despite the absence of Marlow from the third and longest story, nonetheless, this collection has important qualities of structural unity. 1. All three stories are set on steam ships. 2. The first and the last report horrendous accidents in which the ships sink. 3. Most important, the three stories represent the three stages of an adult man's life: youth, midlife, and old age. You can translate those three stages into the language of psychologist Erik Erikson, as "confidence vs avoidance", "certainty vs confusion", and "serenity vs despair." More or less, anyway; Conrad is anything but reductionist.

"Youth" is a gripping tale of the testing of a young man's mettle, a headlong rush of a story that shouldn't need any analysis, but critics have tormented every line of it for hidden meanings and fracture lines. Marlow's occasional interruptions of his narration, to say "Pass the bottle," have been teased into post-modernist assaults on Conrad's latent discomfort with his surrogate's sentimentality. Huh? "Pass the bottle" is Conrad's translation of the old Viking toast: SKULL! Any son of the baltic Sea would take it as such. And believe you me, "Youth" is Conrad's purest Viking saga!

"Heart of Darkness" could just as easily be titled "Heart of Obscurity." It is obscure as well as dark, a tale of insanity and brutality with no heroic redemptive margins. It begins with Marlow once again yarning to his friends, aboard a ship on the Thames, about an ordeal -- to call it an adventure would be misleading -- as the captain of a river steamer in the Belgian Congo. Marlow's reminiscences are stimulated by his thoughts of the impression the Thames would have made on the first Romans who invaded Britain as civilizers. That brief revery sets ups Conrad's agonizing descriptions of the corruption of modern colonialism, specifically in Africa. "Mr. Kurtz" is only one of the civilizing monsters in this story, though his figure has received the most critical scrutiny. There are also the odious company agent and his nephew, the ragamuffin Russian 'explorer' who idolizes Kurtz, and Marlow himself. And there's a cast of "African masks" - semi-naked savages so incomprehensible that they seem more like carved idols than actual humans. Last, least, but urgently significant, there are two women ostensibly attached to Kurtz, one white and one black. Teachers! Please! Don't assign this story to your classes! Let the students find it for themselves! I know it's a powerhouse, a veritable treasure cairn of ambiguity, but it's too intimidating. The reader should need a special chauffeur's license before driving in that darkness.

It must have come as a relief to the readers of 1902 to confront the reassuring virtues and dignity of Captain Whalley, the intrepid but superannuated hero -- yes, Hero! -- of The End of the Tether. A famous seaman in the days of sailing ships, Whalley has come upon poverty and irrelevance in his later years. His single remaining purpose is to provide for his only child, a daughter married to a fool and cripple in Australia, whom he hasn't seen in years. To do so, he enters a bizarre partnership with a despicable half-crazy engineer who happens to own a rust-bucket steamer. But Captain Whalley has a secret.... and that's why you shouldn't read any spoilers; this is surely the only Conrad story that depends on the reader's surprise for its effect.

Heart of Darkness With Study Guide
$4.95
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.

Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical Editions)
$5.99
It is well written. The idea of a storyteller in the story is not unique but very effective. We could ponder over the word darkness for quite some time. The best way to ponder is with Cliff's Notes. Personally I wanted him to get on with it. I guess I was a little impatient for the action and the conclusion. If it hadn't been for cliff notes I would have missed haft the things he was implying.

A merchant company is missing an agent Kurtz, and Marlowe must find him. Traveling though harsher environments than he imagined possible he may have found what he was seeking. As with many of this type of epic the physical distance or direction is not as important then the transformation it plays on ones soul.

I missed this book somehow in school. The reason I started to read this book before actually I actually became immersed in it, was to see how close it came to the movie. No not the movie you are thinking of. "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death" (1988) ASIN: 6305078599 . The film was shot primarily in the avocado groves maintained by the University of California at Riverside (UCR), which the university uses for horticultural experiments. Adrienne Barbeau is Dr. Kurtz.
The horror.....the horror.....

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death