A reedited version of the film, Apocalypse Now Redux, was released in theaters in 2001. Clocking in at over three hours, Redux adds and expands scenes, working to underscore the thematic thrust of the original without significantly altering it.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this writer’s enduring work.
Comments
JOSEPH CONRAD
My task is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.
—from The New Review (December 1897)
EDWARD GARNETT
“Heart of Darkness,” to present its theme bluntly, is an impression, taken from life, of the conquest by the European whites of a certain portion of Africa, an impression in particular of the civilizing methods of a certain great European Trading Company face to face with the “nigger.” We say this much because the English reader likes to know where he is going before he takes his art seriously, and we add that he will find the human life, black and white, in “Heart of Darkness” an uncommonly and uncannily serious affair. If the ordinary reader, however, insists on taking the subject of a tale very seriously, the artist takes his method of presentation more seriously still, and rightly so. For the art of “Heart of Darkness”—as in every psychological masterpiece—lies in the relation of the things of the spirit to the things of the flesh, of the invisible life to the visible, of the sub-conscious life within us, our obscure motives and instincts, to our conscious actions, feelings and outlook. Just as landscape art implies the artist catching the exact relation of a tree to the earth from which it springs, of the earth to the sky, so the art of “Heart of Darkness” implies the catching of infinite shades of the white man’s uneasy, disconcerted, and fantastic relation with the exploited barbarism of Africa; it implies the acutest analysis of the deterioration of the white man’s morale, when he is let loose from European restraint, and planted down in the tropics as an “emissary of light” armed to the teeth, to make trade profits out of the “subject races.” The weirdness, the brilliance, the psychological truth of this masterly analysis of two Continents in conflict, of the abysmal gulf between the white man’s system and the black man’s comprehension of its results, is conveyed in a rapidly rushing narrative which calls for close attention on the reader’s part. But the attention once surrendered, the pages of the narrative are as enthralling as the pages of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The stillness of the sombre African forests, the glare of sunshine, the feeling of dawn, of noon, of night on the tropical rivers, the isolation of the unnerved, degenerating whites staring all day and every day at the Heart of Darkness which is alike meaningless and threatening to their own creed and conceptions of life, the helpless bewilderment of the unhappy savages in the grasp of their flabby and rapacious conquerors—all this is a page torn from the life of the Dark Continent—a page which has been hitherto carefully blurred and kept away from European eyes. There is no “intention” in the story, no parti pris, no prejudice one way or the other; it is simply a piece of art, fascinating and remorseless, and the artist is but intent on presenting his sensations in that sequence and arrangement whereby the meaning or the meaninglessness of the white man in uncivilized Africa can be felt in its really significant aspects.
—from an unsigned review in Academy and Literature (December 6,
1902)
THE ATHENAEUM 5. UNSIGNED REVIEW
The art of Mr. Conrad is exquisite and very subtle. He uses the tools of his craft with the fine, thoughtful delicacy of a mediaeval clock-maker. With regard to his mastery of the conte opinions are divided, and many critics will probably continue to hold that his short stories are not short stories at all, but rather concentrated novels. And the contention is not unreasonable. In more ways than one Mr. Conrad is something of a law unto himself, and creates his own forms, as he certainly has created his own methods. Putting aside all considerations of mere taste, one may say at once Mr. Conrad’s methods command and deserve the highest respect, if only by reason of their scholarly thoroughness. One feels that nothing is too minute, no process too laborious for this author. He does not count the hours of labour or the weight of weariness involved in the production of a flawless page or an adequately presented conception; but he has the true worker’s eye, the true artist’s pitilessness, in the detection and elimination of the redundant word, the idle thought, the insincere idiom, or even for the mark of punctuation misplaced. The busy, boastful times we live in are not rich in such sterling literary merits as these; and for that reason we may be the more thankful to an author like Mr. Conrad for the loyalty which prevents his sending a scamped page to press.
A critical writer has said that all fiction may roughly be divided into two classes; that dealing with movement and adventure, and the other dealing with characterization, the analysis of the human mind. In the present, as in every one of his previous books, Mr. Conrad has stepped outside these boundaries, and made his own class of work as he has made his own methods. All his stories have movement and incident, most of them have adventure, and the motive in all has apparently been the careful analysis, the philosophic presentation, of phases of human character. His studious and minute drawing of the action of men’s minds, passions, and principles forms fascinating reading. But he has another gift of which he himself may be less conscious, by means of which his other more incisive and purely intellectual message is translated for the proper understanding of simpler minds and plainer men. That gift is the power of conveying atmosphere, and in the exercise of this talent Mr. Conrad has few equals among our living writers of fiction. He presents the atmosphere in which his characters move and act with singular fidelity, by means of watchful and careful building in which the craftsman’s methods are never obtrusive, and after turning the last page of one of his books we rise saturated by the very air they breathe. This is a great power, but, more or less, it is possessed by other talented writers of fiction. The rarity of it in Mr. Conrad lies in this, that he can surround both his characters and his readers with the distinctive atmosphere of a particular story within the limits of a few pages. This is an exceptional gift, and the more to be prized in Mr. Conrad for the reason that he shows some signs of growing over-subtle in his analysis of moods, temperaments, and mental idiosyncrasies. It is an extreme into which all artists whose methods are delicate, minute, and searching are apt to be led. We have at least one other analyst of temperament and mood in fiction whose minute subtlety, scrupulous restaint, and allusive economy of words resemble Mr. Conrad’s. And, becoming and obsession, these characteristics tend to weary the most appreciative reader. With Mr. Conrad, however, these rather dangerous intellectual refinements are illumined always by a vivid wealth of atmosphere, and translated simply by action, incident, strong light and shade and distinctive colouring....
—December 20, 1902
H. L. MENCKEN
Conrad’s predilection for barbarous scenes and the more bald and shocking sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His own road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved among men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of sentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he saw it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among the carnivora of the jungle. Some of his stories, and among them his very best, are plain
ly little more than transcripts of his own experience. He himself is the enchanted boy of “Youth”; he is the ship-master of “Heart of Darkness”; he hovers in the background of all the island books and is visibly present in most of the tales of the sea.
—from A Book of Prefaces (1917)
CHINUA ACHEBE
Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.
—from The Massachusetts Review (Winter 1977)
Questions
1. What (or where) is the heart of darkness?
2. We are told that “all Europe went into the making of Kurtz,” that he is a writer, a journalist, a painter, and a musician, as well as an explorer and colonialist. What does Conrad want to convey by making Kurtz a universal genius on the cutting edge of European civilization?
3. There are numerous doubles in Heart of Darkness: Marlow and Kurtz, the Congo and the Thames are obvious ones. Can you name others? What do these doubles—what does the very process of all this doubling—do? How does the doubling affect the reader and create meaning?
4. The cannibals, the “savages,” we are told, have incomprehensible “restraint” in the face of inconceivable temptation, whereas it is precisely “restraint” that the “civilized” Europeans lack. Can you explain this paradox?
FOR FURTHER READING
Other Selected Works of Fiction by Joseph Conrad
Almayer’s Folly (1895)
An Outcast of the Islands (1896)
The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897)
Tales of Unrest (1898)
Lord Jim (1900)
The Inheritors, with Ford Madox Ford (1901)
Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (1902)
Romance, with Ford Madox Ford (1903)
Typhoon and Other Stories (1903)
Nostromo (1904)
The Secret Agent (1907)
Under Westem Eyes (1911)
‘Twixt Land and Sea (1912)
Chance (1914)
Victory (1915)
The Shadow-Line (1917)
The Rescue (1920)
Biographies
Baines, Jocelyn. Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960. Although largely superseded by Karl’s and Najder’s biographies, this was the standard account of Conrad’s life for many years and is still useful.
Conrad, Joseph. The Mirror of the Sea (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1906) and A Personal Record (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1912). Memoirs of Conrad’s that are unreliable yet full of fascinating material, the latter volume especially.
Karl, Frederick R. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives-A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979. An extraordinarily (and sometimes overwhelmingly) detailed account of Conrad’s life.
Najder, Zdzislaw. Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. Translated from the Polish by Halina Carroll-Najder. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983. The best of the Conrad biographies, especially on his Polish background.
Sherry, Norman. Conrad and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. A good introduction to the life and literary career of Conrad for the general reader.
Critical Studies
Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Contains “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” the most influential essay ever published on Conrad’s novella.
Berthoud, Jacques. Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. An account of Conrad’s fiction from The Nigger of the “Narcissus” to Under Western Eyes.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. The chapter on Heart of Darkness intelligently contextualizes Conrad’s novella in the history of imperialism.
Fleishman, Avrom. Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Analyzes Conrad’s political ideas and their expression in his fiction.
GoGwilt, Christopher. The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Heavily informed by critical and postcolonial theory, this is a fine study although a difficult go for the general reader.
Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. An important study of Conrad’s fiction; the orientation is primarily psychoanalytic.
Hay, Eloise Knapp. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963; revised ed., 1981. An astute assessment of the political aspects of Conrad’s fiction.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. A highly readable account of King Leopold II’s Congo and a fine rendering of the historical background of Heart of Darkness.
Kimbrough, Robert, ed. Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism. Third edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988. Contains a wide assortment of background materials and critical works on the novella.
Knowles, Owen, and Gene M. Moore. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. A very useful encyclopedia.
Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto and Windus, 1948. An influential work of criticism that helped to solidify Conrad’s place in the history of British literature.
Moser, Thomas C. Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. An account of the arc of Conrad’s career as a whole.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Of Said’s several books that discuss Conrad and imperialism, this one deals most extensively with Heart of Darkness.
Sherry, Norman. Conrad’s Eastern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. This and the next title are painstakingly documented accounts of the sources of Conrad’s fiction.
—. Conrad’s Westem World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
—, ed. Conrad: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Contains a generous selection of contemporary reviews of Conrad’s fiction.
Stape, J. H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. A useful collection of essays on various aspects of Conrad’s career and writings.
Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. The single most important study of Conrad’s early fiction, including Heart of Darkness. Although it was planned as the first of two volumes on Conrad, Watt never completed the second volume. His posthumously published Essays on Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), however, contains some material that would have been included in it.
Watts, Cedric. A Preface to Conrad. Second edition. London and New York: Longman, 1993. A smart introduction to Conrad for the general reader.
Letters
Karl, Frederick R., Laurence Davies, and Owen Knowles, eds. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983-. Of the projected eight volumes, six have been published to date: vol. 1,1983; vol. 2,1986; vol. 3,1988; vol. 4, 1990; vol. 5, 1996; vol. 6, 2002.
Memoirs and Reminiscences
Conrad, Jessie. Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him. London: Heinemann, 1926. This and the following title are two fanciful and sometimes mutually contradictory accounts of Conrad by his widow.
—. Joseph Conrad and His Circle. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1935.
Ford, Ford Madox. Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. London: Duck-worth, 1924. Memories of Conrad by his friend and collaborator.
Ray, Martin, ed. Joseph Conrad: Interviews and Recollections. London: Macmil lan, 1
990. A compendium of memories of Conrad by his family, friends, and acquaintances.
Other Works Cited in the Introduction
Conrad, Joseph. “The Congo Diary” and “Geography and Some Explorers.” In Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays. London: J. M. Dent, 1955.
—. The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Reviews and Criticism. Edited by Robert Kimbrough. New York: W.W.Norton, 1979.
—. The Works of Joseph Conrad: Tales of Unrest; A Personal Record; Notes on Life and Letters (“Autocracy and War,” “The Censor of Plays,” “The Crime of Partition,” “A Note on the Polish Problem”). New York: Doubleday, 1920-1921.
Jean-Aubry, G. Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday, 1927.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. New York: Penguin, 1991.
Russell, Bertrand. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1872-1914. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
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