Heart of Darkness

What's your analysis of Heart of Darkness? What did you like and dislike? What's to be learned here?

colonialism is bad
it's hot at the equator
fever is dangerous

it was racist so I didn't like it

this. where does this white cis-male get off degrading blacks and talking about africa

mankind sucks

The narrative structure stood out to me the most. As a high schooler, I disliked the idea of starting off every paragraph with quotation marks because Conrad could have just made it third-person at that point. Reading through it again a couple of years ago, it was a neat concept.

Yeah the structure threw me off originally. Having two intersecting narrations really makes it confusing.

I still don't get what exactly could Kurtz have been engaging in with those blacks, that was so horrible? "The horror!" -- is it ever explained? It's only alluded to as far as I remember and I've always been too ashamed to ask: what was going on up in those woods?

>I still don't get what exactly could Kurtz have been engaging in with those blacks, that was so horrible?
sex
he clearly had sex with one of them

Only Lovecraft knows.

Every highschool English teacher will tell you that this book has a lesson, and that lesson is 'colonialism is bad'. I felt that it was more a critique of the colonial methods of the time, had Conrad seen a more humane, efficient version I believe he would have been perfectly fine with it. I thought it was a pretty good book familiae

It was written in a way where it's not very interesting or engaging, but you can still tell the man had some kind of talent for writing, just in a general language way, but not in a something I would want to read way. This is all I've even attempted to read by him, and I didn't finish it, but from what I can tell Nabokov was right.

>Nabokov was right

>>Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad "writers of books for boys"?

>>That's exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story, "The Killers." And the description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb.

welp... conrad didn't write about rhythmic urination and so nabokov disliked him

Nabokov was cool, he didn't give a fuck.
Just wrote whatever he wanted and caught butterflies.

The Horror, at least in my opinion, was PTSD induced Nihilism.
His being in the jungle under life or death circumstances for so long with only one objective (Money) collapsed his mind when he found it rather pointless.

Kek

Maybe not originally intended to be written as a critique of imperialism but worked as such. A tad too pretentious. Overall just a period piece.

I've only seen Apocalypse Now.

The horror was what he found in the jungle. Namely, himself and what he was capable of.

the horror was the judge in the outhouse you fuckimg pleb

Kurtz was injecting people with the HIV virus. "Heart of Darkness" is a story about the origin of the AIDS epidemic.

Does anyone know the passage where Marlow describes a nude tribeswoman appearing out of the foliage like some kind of primordial goddess? I remember the imagery being very striking.

This was easily my favorite book in a 20th century British literature class. The class was taught by a lesbian woman and it was basically 101 ways to say colonialism is bad

That is kind of what I was thinking and I guess you've got the gist of it pretty nicely. I remember allusion after allusion to this great, dreadful, dark...thing that is not really shown. I get it, it's Conrad's shtick, he's being subtle and poetic or something. It's just that I find it a fun exercise to pull out into the light just whatever the fuck he was doing with his darkies in there.

So, there's the allusion to raw, primal lovemaking with his animal-like negress, that this user remembers . There was also something about human heads on pikes around the compound or is my memory making shit up? Then, the fact that Kurtz was unprecedently prodigious at gathering the white gold for the company by, I assume, working the natives hard. That's what I remember.

Was he playing some sort of petty god-king to those poor creatures, working them to death, murdering them and having wild monkey sex with his ebony queen? Is that it? Ok, how? He was alone and not very physically impresive, right? Did the primitive blacks just submit to his higher, white man's intelligence and burgeois manners or what? What was his magic? How was he able to perform those unspeakably dreadful acts that he, himself gets horrified by and repentant of in the end (was he repentant?)? I understand that the darkness he uncovered in the depths of his own soul was what broke him, but what did he do, mang? I want to know.

I wish Conrad had got a tad more pulpy and showed us the good stuff.

That Conrad is a really cool sounding name.

I think I'll name my next Death Note OC after him.

>Was he playing some sort of petty god-king to those poor creatures, working them to death, murdering them and having wild monkey sex with his ebony queen?

Basically, yes. Plus I'm pretty sure the insane Russian guy who worships him talks about how the pagan Africans offer up rituals and ceremonies to Kurtz, and it's implied that immoral (i.e., sexual) stuff goes on at them.

Honestly, the point you're making is pretty valid (at least in my reading). I didn't really understand that Lovecraftian "horror" Conrad's nudging us toward.

But the idea that Kurtz came to realize the base, primal urges at the heart of every human, and came to understand that he was, beneath all the psychic and social conditioning and civilized manners, an animal (just like everyone else) seemed to be the real "horror."

At the time of writing it was just taken for granted that if some white guy is hanging out in the jungle with negroes all day, he is going to be involved in some primitive, fucked-up shit.

I read it from a non-attached racial perspective. It felt more like instead of "evil white man" what we see there is a descent into barbarism which even the most virtuous of men can descend into, same as blacks prove to have some sense of nobility anf honor. Kinda felt horrifying how Kurtz changes from a great man into a monster, almost like a vampire.

Was it also taken for granted that said negroes were inevitably going to be enraptured by the white man and automatically submit to him and deify him despite him being weak and practically alone?

>Maybe not originally intended to be written as a critique of imperialism but worked as such.

wrong

>Overall just a period piece.

wrong

Literally Chinua Achebe's essay. "The racism is absolutely central to the novel's literary significance. Also it shouldn't be taught anymore"

Which isn't to say it isn't, but it's unhelpful within the context of the novel to describe these literary devices as "racist" or harms to society (unless your teacher is poststructuralist)
Largely For me it dialectically explores the intellectual heritage of colonialism. The various contradictions between material conditions, philanthropic ideas and cultural supremacy - lazy savages (white man's burden) vs violent savages (and how they may be treated by the "civilized",) all facing down a monolithic, hostile, unassimilateable foreign race and culture. It's easy to read it as an allegory of the neoconservative tenure and even more so now we're a while into these mass """"""""syrian"""""""" migrations.

I saw the horror as the natural response to the resolution of these contradictions. It has extreme nihilistic character which I took in the Nietzschean sense - the god of colonialism is dead. Kurz, while positively godlike in his superficial accomplishments, cannot transcend his outmoded master-slave morality paradigm and the result is his utter irrelevance. And his utter spiritual death when involuntarily removed from it. This last contradiction is what makes him such a tragic character.

>Literally Chinua Achebe's essay. "The racism is absolutely central to the novel's literary significance. Also it shouldn't be taught anymore"

Actually, Achebe argues that critical study has neglected the novella's racism. Also, he does not argue that Heart of Darkness should not be taught. Achebe has taught it himself.

Write your own damn novel then

Fsaggot asshole

>expecting "literally" to actually mean literally
pure refined autism

>Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as "among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language." And why it is today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American universities.

He doesn't say it should never be taught, but it's disingenuous to ignore the essay's implicit attempt to reduce the novel's prominence in English departments.