Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

One of the problems with "classics" is that the themes have been done to death in other people's novels and in motion pictures. When you see the movie Clueless, you're seeing Jane Austen's Emma transferred to southern California, and translated into Valley Girl speak. When you watch Apocalypse Now, you're seeing a take-off of Heart of Darkness. When you add to this the undeniable fact that the English prose style of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries is often prolix and boring for modern readers, it's easy to see why motion pictures such as that can be popular, while students groan under the onus of being assigned a "classic" novel to read.

The racism of novels such as Heart of Darkness is rather obvious, but this is a fact of life of the ear in which they were written, and for someone such as me, who reads such literature as much to put meat on the bones of history as to enjoy the work, it can be viewed as a clinical expression of people's attitudes. What happens to Kurtz is that he becomes as "depraved" as the people whom he despises--although this suggests still some racism, and that the civilization of modern man is only a veneer, beneath which the savage still lurks, it is also a subtle condemnation of the brutality of the regime in Africa of the Belgians, whose colonial practices were particularly brutal. Conrad is rather remarkable as a prose writer in English--he didn't learn to speak English until he was an adult. The "mood" of the beginning of the novel is intended to be depressing, and it is rather effective at that. But, for the modern reader, it can be more boring than depressing, both because the mode of expression is become "antique," and because the themes are not new to us, as they were to readers of the day.

I don't know what to advise you--i love 18th and 19th century novels, although i can often understand why people find them boring. I am also not a universal fan of "classics"--much of George Eliot is tediously moralizing and melodramatic, and Don Quixote could have told the same story with as much hilarity (of which there is little, to my mind) in a quarter of the pages. I hesitate to recommend any of these to you. In Conrad's opus, i particularly liked Lord Jim (which is a subtler and more fully developed evocation of the themes of The Heart of Darkness, published in the following year) and The Secret Agent, as well as the novella (or "long" short story) Youth.

As for the casual racism of the 19th and 20th centuries, that is almost inescapable. I have recently read many of the novels of Harry Leon Wilson, who is still known to some readers today for Ruggles of Red Gap. The racism in his writing is never blatant and "in your face," but it is there, it is obvious and it seems that it was probably unremarkable in its day (Wilson wrote into the 1930s). As for being boring, it is impossible to avoid the fact that people had different expectations of writers and novels in decades gone by, and successful writers wrote what people wanted to read, in a style which would appeal to them. (Stevenson's Jeckyl and Hyde was considered shocking and racy in it's time.)

Different strokes . . .

I grew up on this stuff and don't have a problem with the prose. And I actually don't have a problem with the racism either. It's a novel, and given the time and subject it is to be expected (one needs no more than the title to remind you of what's coming).



How does that go? That sounds like it may be interesting.

Sorry to sound like a dick, but . . . read the book--it ain't that long. Remember Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now?

By the way, for my personal tastes, i recommend just about anything Conrad wrote.

I've always wanted to skipper the Patna . . .

My Conrad's preferred is Typhoon..

Actually, I don't. That's one movie I owe myself.

I have only put down 3 books that I remember in my life. All three mentioned here (Heart of Darkness, Don Quixote and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and if I don't find anything interesting to read in the next weeks (I have a few days worth of reading material and will probably find some more at the airport on Sunday) I'll probably end up reading it since, as you note, it's short (if it were interesting it would be a 2 hour read at most).

Setanta covered much of what I was going to say when I read your opening post. Kurt's decline -- starting probably not far from where you are now -- is the best part.

Kurtz decline=British Empire decline
coincidence?

One thing which might spark your interest in Conrad's works[/b] might be to see them in a different light than one might garner just from reading here and there among the body of his opus. A major theme in almost all of Conrad's work is alienation, or to put it less pedantically, the outsider. Kurtz, for example, is an outsider among the Africans, but his "depravity" makes him an outsider among Europeans, too. The better developed Lord Jim has this aspect, as well, with the central character making an outsider of himself because of his actions while on board S.S. Patna*, and of course, he is an outsider when he goes to live among the "natives" of the mythical island in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) which Conrad creates for him.

The novel The Secret Agent is the only novel in which Conrad attempts a fully developed female character. There are three characters central to the story, and they are all, in one way or another outsiders. The secret agent himself is obvious. He is married to a classic English type of the late 19th century, the prim woman risen from the working poor who aspires to a decent life not only in material terms, but in moral terms. She is a type of outsider herself, because she would not have married, and probably would have lived a ghastly life of drudgery, had her prospective husband not agreed that her brother live with them. The brother is an outsider because he is a moron in the legal sense--he is an adult male with the mind of a small child. The story in Typhoon, which Francis mentioned, is also of an outsider, the captain who is estranged from his family, and from his crew.

All of this becomes more interesting if one considers Conrad's own life. Born in Poland, he and his sister moved to Paris when he was an adolescent. There they lived a comfortable life, if not a wealthy one. Having, however, no expectations (in the sense of income or fortune), Conrad went to sea when he was still a teenager, sailing in French bottoms. When he was about 21, he began sailing in English bottoms, and he quickly picked-up English, a language in which he would achieve the rare distinction of a non-native speaker who becomes one of the greatest masters of the language which he has learned.

In the opening of Lord Jim, the narrator, Marlow (who is the title character in Youth and acts as narrator in a few other of Conrad's stories) says of Jim that "he was one of us"--meaning the child of a prosperous and socially correct white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant family. Conrad was "one of us" in the sense that he achieved celebrity and a modest monetary success which enabled him to live the life of middle class comfort; and he enjoyed social success, being welcome in high social circles which appreciated his art, and his correct manners--he being "well-bred." But Conrad was not really "one of us." He spoke his excellent English with a Polish accent all his life, and his correspondence (in the account of others, i've not read his correspondence) reveals that he felt himself the outsider to at least a certain extent all of his life. Among the English middle class and aristocracy of that golden age of empire, one could be superficially "one of us"--but if one was not actually native to England, and not a product of the Public School system (what we would call private schools in the United States), one was really never one of us. I think Conrad felt that all of his adult life (which is not to say that i think it greatly bothered him), and i think that is why the outsider is a persistent theme in all of his writing.

It is very possible that modern media have reduced our general tolerance for the relatively slow development of context, background and scene in literature. We are adapted to absorbing parallel channels of sight, sound and words, and going back to the one-dimensional development through the written word requires some readaptation. It is worth the effort.

I believe Conrad was one of the best of an excellent crop of European novelists of the late 19th century. My father had a complete set of his works and I started through them - from Alamayer's Folly through to Nostromo at a young age. Like Setanta I suggest you just wade through Heart of Darkness, reminding yourself that it defined a type and still carries relevance to us, even beyond the obviously racist residue of that colonial era.

There are a couple of interesting Spanish writers of the about the same generation (actually a few decades later) whose works may interest you - Miguel de Unamuno and Pio Baroja

Have you read Dostoyevski's "Crime and Punishment"? It isn't so insuffrably long as the other (equally worthy) Russian classics of the era, and, once you have broken the code on first names, family names and patronymics, it is easy going and modern in tone. A complex morality story embedded in a fairly good detective story. Very relevant today.

If shorter works are more attractive to you, consider the Short Stories of Checkov, Maxim Gorky, Guy de Maupassant, and almost any English anthology. I have found they are often a useful guide to related works.

I forgot to include my "footnote" in the last post:

*The opening incident of Lord Jim is taken directly from the news of the day. There was a pilgrim ship, the Steam Ship Jeddah, which left the Dutch East Indies with nearly a thousand pilgrims bound for Mecca and Medina, of whom more than 200 were women and children. S. S. Jeddah was owned by an English shipping company. She encountered heavy seas, and almost constant foul weather for the first week at sea, and one of the boilers was unseated, and the hull was started in several places. As she began to ship more and more water, the English officers decided she would founder, and resolved to abandon ship--and to abandon the now hapless pilgrims to their fate. They took with them only one of the pilgrims, a young man who was the son of a wealthy and powerful Muslim in the Dutch East Indies. When they made port, they claimed the passengers had become hostile and had attacked them, and that they had abandoned ship fearing for their lives. They believed that Jeddah would founder, and no one would be able to contradict them.

But fate was unkind to them. A French steam ship encountered S. S. Jeddah as she wallowed in now more or less tranquil seas, put a few crewmen on board to man the pumps, and towed her to Singapore, saving the passengers. Conrad simply changes the name of the ship to S. S. Patna, and the names are changed to protect the guilty.

In addition to what O'George has recommended, i would add Emile Zola. Even though it would be much more rewarding to read them in the original, his novels stand up well to translation into English. He wrote a series of 20 novels (in addition to many other works, including other novels) called the Rougon-Macquart series, which tells the tale of the members and children of two families from the south of France in the period of the Second Empire (1850-1870). I highly recommend them.

You guys should just say it gets interesting! I'll read it already, if only because it should take less than an afternoon and because I may spend as much explaining why I haven't yet done so.



I had intended to pick up some Spanish literature, my first real attempts (just learned to speak Spanish in the last year) and I'll make sure to look these up when I do.



The last time I was in a bookstore I was holding it. I've avoided it for years in a vain hope that I'd learn Russian one day and read its original. I probably won't be learning Russian anytime soon so I may as well go for it. Books are expensive here (I just spent almost $50 on two horrible novels by King and Koontz and they are paperbacks!), except for the classics and it's one of the few I can find here that I haven't read. Since it's only a few bucks I'm certainly going to buy it next time I see it.



I don't really like short books. The only short book I remember liking a lot was The Catcher in the Rye. But I'm coming back to reading after a long absence and am trying for lighter initial loads.

Thing is, I was ready to start on even Harry Potter or the Rings but couldn't find the first of either series in English in any of the bookstores (in Costa Rica). Those are some of the best selling novels in history and have recent popularity and I can't find them. So you may imagine a lot of this has to do with not having a lot in way of options.

Smiles... I can't find Harry Potter 1 (don't know what the title is). I can't find Lord of the Rings 1.

All I can find is a weird selection of some modern novels and Penguin Popular Classics (not the more inclusive Penguin Classics series).

If I get a Kindle or go to the States I can take recommendations outside of what I can find here but right now I'm stuck begging others to convince me to read the meager offerings I have access to.

These are things that you can't expect the rest of us to know. I am never much interested in gossip, and the last time i paid any attention to the subject, you were in California attending university.

My, how time flies . . .

Well I didn't mean for it to work out that way. I wasn't really expecting recommendations. I was hoping that someone would make the few books I have access to sound interesting. That's worked. You told me that he breaks down and that has to be more interesting than the period piece portrait that I'm already familiar with. I know as little as I can about the book (even a book jacket can ruin some books for me) and didn't want to look up the plot but that was just right.

When recommendations for other books came I felt like explaining why I can't do much with them unless I know where to find them. They will, of course, come in handy once I find out how to get my hands on them and I will start seeking them out but I just started reading literature again on the 12th of this month and have only gotten 3 books under my belt (all poor).

When I'm back to my regular pace (should be soon, as I'm adopting a no-computers before bed habit) and can find a way to get books I'm going to be all over those recommendations. I'm just struggling with coming back to an old habit I've been away from and not being able to pick what I want to read.

It's resulted in putting down two books already, one I didn't even buy (a visitor left it) and this was the other. I've only put down one novel I had chosen in my life (Don Quixote, which as you noted should be a quarter as long as it is) and was hoping someone could breathe some life into this one.

I think what you and Sozobe said worked. My problem with it isn't the language, the prose, or the racism (that's actually the most interesting thing so far) but I wanted to know if it became a "human" story at some point because I'm going to find that easier to read right now. I knew it was somewhat autobiographical of Conrad but don't know enough of him to know whether it will be interesting.

I'll read the damn thing and let y'all know what I think.

Robert - this old thread by Fbaezer might be a help for suggestions for literature in Spanish..

http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=46413&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

I don't know how they come translated in English but as I have the 20 of them in my own library, I would second Setanta in his recommendation.

They are, almost all, a thrilling experience from a historical, social and human point of view...

I have only seen one of them in English--Germinal, which i saw in a bookstore about 15 years ago. I picked it up and began reading the beginning, and it set the mood and drew the characters well. That's my only experience of the novels in English--but others have told me they enjoyed his novels, which tells me, at the least, that they weren't badly translated.

I attempted to read all 20, in order, in French. I read l'Assomoir and Germinal, and realized that the "hero" of Germinal is the boy who disappears after a brief appearance at the beginning of l'Assomoir. It was then that i decided to attempt to find and read them all in order. I got through La Fortune des Rougons, La Curée, Le Ventre de Paris and a couple of others, but it's been long enough ago that i don't recall the titles, or the order. I'd like to start all over, but even in Canada, it's hard to find the whole series in the original language.