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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Recommend the Trilogy, April 29, 2009
"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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
It Didn't Grab My Heart, April 14, 2009
I'm somewhat torn. The English Major in me would really like to give this book a higher rating. The reader in me has a hard time doing so.
I read this book back in High School and could honestly not remember anything about the plot, the reading or the discussions aside from the fact that the story was about some guy on a boat going deep into Africa and that I distinctly remembered struggling to stay awake while reading it.
I thought that approaching it a second time as a seasoned English Major would result in a better perspective. Admittedly, I think I got more out of the plot this time and see much more depth and symbolism in the book...but I still found myself struggling to stay awake at times.
What's sad is that this is not necessarily a slow paced or boring book. It's filled with exploration, political intrigue, violent deaths, savage attacks and other moments of suspense and tension. And yet, it is also filled with lengthy monologues on the nature of man and the perspectives of our narrator Marlow (who is actually a secondary narrator if you want to get technical, since he's telling the story to an unnamed narrator who appears very little in the book at all...a very strange setup).
The craft or structure of this novel is intriguing and I suspect is a large reason why this is such a classic. As I mentioned briefly above, the narrative style is a little different. The "official" narrator of the book is an unnamed man sitting on a boat. However, the meat of the story is actually told by another man on the boat (Marlow) who is actually telling this story to our unnamed narrator. There are also segments where Marlow is re-telling something someone else said to him or something he read, thus leaving us three or four times removed from the actual events of the story. His spoken narrative is also sometimes a little disjointed and sometimes conversational as though he's lost his train of thought while telling the story or he's distracted or interrupted by something or someone on the ship with our actual narrator.
The book is full of symbolism and allusion. It can definitely be taken as a commentary on many different aspects of Africa, colonialism, Imperialism, savagery, humanity, principles, beliefs, truths, and many other high level themes. However, the book doesn't seem to come up with any concrete answers about any of these and even leaves us in the darkness as to exactly which commentary we should be paying attention to. Truly, many social commentaries leave off just short of prescribing a plan of action, but they generally make their arguments fairly clear. In the case of Heart of Darkness, I feel like I came away more muddled than when I began. Yes, I acknowledge that oppression of so-called savages is not to be condoned, but I knew that ahead of time...and honestly, I'm not entirely sure that oppression is the core meaning of the novel.
I appreciate that this novel has depth to it that I don't understand. It's definitely a difficult novel that's hard to truly access. It's high level plot and themes are intriguing, but I don't feel that they stand well enough on their own to warrant an outrageous following. In order to truly appreciate this book, I feel that it requires very in-depth study and discussion of weeks or months. Maybe I'm just looking for too much, and if that's the case, then my view of the book goes down even more. Maybe I'm just obtuse and missing the point, which means my review is unfortunately lower than it should be.
Whatever the reason, I don't love this novel and don't anticipate reading it again. If somebody else reads it and loves it and wants to discuss it with me and turn me around, I'd gladly open a discussion, but for now, I stick by my rating.
***
2.5 stars out of 5
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Literature as Philosophical Anthropology, October 5, 2008
Conrad's novella contains an almost endless fount of symbolic allusions. One of the most important series of allusions occurs early (in the frame narrative) and ties the symbolism of darkness, finitude, the mystery of the labyrinth and death to the images of the lunar cycle, the tide, yarn and narrative.
"The yarns of seaman have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted) and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine" (6).
Conrad appears to be indicating that the seaman is closer to the "state of nature" because of his intimate relationship with the primal cycle of the tide (eternal recurrence). Melville certainly indicates as much in Moby-Dick. The natural rhythm of the sea forces the seaman into greater harmony with nature, thus enabling him to see more clearly the natural state of man--helping him to see into the darkness. The allusion to natural cycles at this point interestingly connects with the later mention of "unspeakable rites" performed for Kurtz by the natives (61), for religious rituals are very often tied to the cycle of the moon. For example, Easter is always on the first Sunday following the first full moon of the vernal equinox. The moon represents death and rebirth because it is born, grows, declines and dies, only to be reborn. Each day the moon is killed by the sun, the light; but the light of the sun only temporarily illuminates the darkness, i.e. darkness (ignorance) is the more natural state. Mythologically the animal associated with the sun is the lion, whose golden face resembles the sun; the animal associated with the moon is the bull, whose horns represent the horns of the moon. Thus we have the many references to the sacrifice of the bull in almost all "primitive" religions, imitating the death of the moon. The Minotaur (bull-man) is conspicuously brought to mind at the beginning of Plato's Phaedo (58a9-b3) in relation to Socrates, death and sacrifice. The lion's roar scatters the horned beasts of the prairie, imitating the power of the sun's light to scatter darkness.
In this passage Conrad is metaphorically indicating by means of symbolic images and conceptual allusion that some things are only visible at night, in the dark as it were. Furthermore, these things can have a higher degree of reality than those made visible in the sunlight. The heart of things is shrouded in darkness. Might Conrad's account of light enveloped in darkness be a dramatic image of something like Socratic knowledge of ignorance? The entire tale can be read as a story of how nature is hidden in the deep recesses of the political community (civilization). But the story is told in Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean rather than Platonic language. We have an allegory of the recognition of the mystery of existence as it manifests itself within the hierarchy of human souls or psyches. Of course in modernity there is not much of a hierarchy, and the souls of Conrad's Westerners all seem to be equally base. The closest thing we have in Conrad's tale to a philosopher is Marlow (we don't know enough about the frame narrator to say one way or the other, i.e. with him we are left in the dark), who is really more of a "neutral" observer. Marlow's soul lacks eros or the "love of victory" necessary to pursue the never-ending quest for self-knowledge; however, Marlow clearly represents the harmonization of light and dark. Even so, we must look beyond Marlow--to his imitation of the Buddha--to see that knowledge of ignorance is the actualization of the cosmic state of nature in the soul of man, which explains the soteric effects of self-knowledge and does so in way that also explains how these soteric effects transcend the "local" soteriology necessary to political community; i.e. it refers us to the necessity of religion to community politically and explains the tension between the soteric effects of self-knowledge in the elevated individual's soul in contrast with the soteriological needs of nonphilosophic souls. There are those unable to comprehend, unable to accept the truth into their soul without it destroying them. Thus Kurtz, even though he is exceptional (to borrow a Nietzschean term), is not a philosopher--he had "no restraint" (63). The community must conceal the truth about darkness by shining a man-made light on it (the myth of cultural progress out of darkness into the light), you might say. Direct contact with the "light of truth" would destroy the community (knowledge is dangerous); for that light also contains within it the truth about cosmic darkness (staring directly into the light of the sun causes blindness or reabsorption into darkness). Plato's Good is not good for everyone, as Plato and especially Socrates knew all too well. Thus Conrad has Marlow appear at the beginning and the end as the Buddha (the enlightened and definitely restrained one), having been to the East, removed from Western society and returned as the neutral observer (7, 96). When considered as a whole by the discerning reader the form of the story dramatically images a path to the state of nature in the dark recesses of the psyche. The person with the capacity for such levels of discernment is likely to experience this psychological journey as an ascent (i.e. a transcendence of the narrow and bodily concerns of the political community via asceticism), out of the cave, to the light of nature through contemplation; whereas the person who lacks intellectual capacities in combination with inborn asceticism experiences the path to nature (knowledge of ignorance or light enveloped by darkness) as a descent or a return to savagery.
This interpretation may now be densely summarized in the following terms. The explanation of Conrad's quasi-religious imagery of the transformation of the civilized man to the uncivilized brute in the person of Kurtz fits like a mask of resignation and decline over the face of Western civilization. Resignation is personified by Marlow the neutral observer who is powerless to effect a reversal or even stop the decline of a single individual in the person of Kurtz. Thus Marlow's knowledge can save him but not his culture. "Solitude is the involution of the forces of nature, as these forces have fulfilled their purpose and returned to the void; it is the power of consciousness turning back upon itself" (Yogasutra 4.34). This is why Conrad repeatedly invokes the image of a "whited sepulcher" as a reflection of the modern West.
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