Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [140]
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.
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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