Heart of Darkness

Hello, Veeky Forums.
I recently discovered Conrad and he's seemed to be an interesting writer to me. Yet I've seen some really negative opinions on him here.
Could you explain why?
Especially this book.

Reading it feels like trudging through molasses.

Could you elaborate?

An intriguing build up to a disappointing ending the novel.

This somehow was shocking to people at the time and I have no idea why.

A lot of people get forced to read it in school, which inevitably leaves to a backlash of contrarianism against it.

It's not the most amazing book in the world, but people give it too much stick. Conrad was ahead of his time in the themes he explored in it, and the character of Kurtz is one of the most compelling and unique every written.

Wow, it's really surprising to know that people read it in school, given that it's written by a non-English writer.

It was written in English.

Also, Nabokov.

Great book for building vocab. Kind of embarrassing a dude writing in his 3rd language has better English than me

It sucks.

I meant that he wasn't a native spearker.
That's quite motivating for though. He started communicating with British only in his twenties and was able to become a classical writer.

>it's boring
these are the kind of people who find moby dick boring
>it's racist :(
it's not about niggers or colonialism
>it's poorly written
It's not

It actually is poorly written.

explain why

It's a really polarising book from my experience. I like it a lot though. Honestly, just read it for yourself and find out which side of the argument you're on.

The reason it is so dense and hard to read is because Conrad was bridging the gap between Victorianism and Modernism. Whereas Victorian novels almost always featured clear plots with obvious morals and characters, Conrad gives us a plot obscured by the psyche of the narrator, and the narrator often trails off into increasingly abstract musings, such that when you finish a sentence you don't even remember what the beginning of it was about. Location and time are indistinct, the characters are indistinct, and there doesn't seem to be a strong sense of direction or morality. The modernists would take these elements and push them to the extreme, but Conrad was just writing in the 1890s.

A lot of "readers" here have really short attention spans and can't appreciate florid prose.

I hadn't noticed.

DUDE ITS AN EPIC BUT LIKE NOT EPIC BECAUSE NOTHING HAPPENS LMAO

Conrad writes some damn good prose, i was very surprised and (as english is not my first challenge) challenged by it. Especially his short story 'Karain' has left a deep impression on me. Haven't read Heart of Darkness though...

Don't know about that one, but I read Nostromo and though it was quite good.

mawkish and bombastic tripe

Nabokov?

This. It just felt overwritten, like Conrad Should've lost or shortened a good deal of sentences, and like the things being described could've had the same effect with less words.
That and it could've just been shorter. Events could've been rewritten to take substantially less time without losing much value.
At 30 pages in it feels like you've read 60, but those 30 pages felt like they should've been 15.

This exactly. It's a novella but when I finished reading it I felt like I had just read a 400 page book, not to say that I got way more out of it. I enjoyed the book but holy shit it dragged on and on and it added very little to the story in doing so.

spotted the high schoolers

I agree, but I think that it elevates the atmosphere of the novel, hot, sticky, and slow. he wasn't just trying to show off, but he used his prose for a useful effect.

It could have been shorter, but it would have lost a lot of value. I have read it three times and each time I got something new out of it, and I know people who have read it 10 times and still find it a worthwhile experience even if it isn't their favourite novel.
The ending disappointing? I don't get this idea. It was so perfect for the characters and the themes. Or did it not have enough drama for you?
I agree wholeheartedly
True, it's not boring, it's extremely well written, and it is a bit racist but not racist enough to outweigh its literary merit.

Bump

I started it and after what felt like having read 50 pages really all that had happened was some dudes were sitting on a boat in a harbor

I read it in a day when i had a very intense headache. The prose didn´t help and it made me afraid of reading it again.

REMINDER FOR YOU CRETINS TO READ AMBROSE BIERCE

the whole book is like 100 pages, it is slow but not that slow

get over it and read it, its worth it

there are two types of people lmao

A quality comment

Hah, that's my exact thought whenever some shit thinks they're in a position to call a literary great highfalutin using only 4 letter words.

>like Conrad Should've
>and like the things
solid bait

Do you also dislike Moby Dick, you small-minded brainlet?

To this day still makes for a decent pleb/patrician litmus test

What does it mean if I just thought it ok? The idea had a lot of potential but Conrad falls short of what I'd call greatness.

apocalypse now did it better.

I don't know, I thought it was great.

I read it for the first time last week, and was very impressed. The prose was dense, but beautifully written, and I didn't feel like it was needlessly florid.

Question for user: I'm going to watch Apocalypse Now for the first time tomorrow. Should I watch the original 1979 cut or the 2001 extended version? Of course, I expect the answer to be the extended version, but sometimes scenes are cut for a reason...

Scenes are cut for a reason. Watch the original version, and only go for the extended cut if you love it and want to rewatch it.

>you will never read Nigger of the Narcissus or Ten Little Niggers on public transit raising your eyebrows obnoxiously at every black person you see

Typhoon is godly and you're not a man if you disagree

>finish reading Heart of Darkness
>loved it, beautifully written, universal themes, thick atmosphere, amazing and vivid descriptions
>go check out what other people thought about it
>find some British slag's review of it on Youtube
>first sentence is "It's safe to say there is not much to say about this book if you're not talking about it with Achebe's essay in mind"
Are people seriously this stupid? I couldn't imagine a book written about a journey into Africa in the 19th century that would be less racist than Heart of Darkness, it basically spells out for you that the Europeans aren't all that different from the African savages when the chips are down, no? Jesus Christ.
With that being said, meeting Kurtz was kinda disappointing and I don't know if that's what Conrad was going for.

One of the most useless and overrated novels I have ever read. Thank goodness it is short, otherwise I would have been very upset for the waste of time.

yes

Achebe's essay is really important and deserves to be engaged with if you're taking Heart of Darkness seriously. but saying you should engage with the essay is not at all the same as saying the essay is correct or that Heart of Darkness is bad (even saying that the essay is correct doesn't mean that Heart of Darkness is bad). in general terms, engaging with Achebe's essay means engaging with the context of the novel through the lens of our modern understanding of African colonialism.

also, you clearly haven't engaged with the essay, as you are missing the basic point the essay makes. Achebe doesn't really argue that Heart of Darkness is racist in the sense that it posits Europeans being basically better than African savages. his argument is that the novel doesn't really engage with Africans on the level of human beings, instead treating them as a passive background against which to define and criticize Europeans. which is quite a different critique.

>the novel doesn't really engage with Africans on the level of human beings, instead treating them as a passive background against which to define and criticize Europeans. which is quite a different critique.

Yet he concludes that the novel is still racist, doesn't he? It's been some time since I last read it, though, so I might be misremembering.

Anyway, the novel doesn't really set out to portray the Africans in the narrative as "human beings", precisely because it is seen through the lens of the European colonizers. I'm sure Conrad was aware of this when he wrote it, since we even have at least two layers of narration blurring what happened (Marlowe's and the unnamed narrator's). And even if he wasn't, my point still remains. Not only that, but I think Achebe wanted Conrad to write through the eyes of the African slaves (which is what Achebe would later do) instead of through the eyes of the European colonizers, which is what the novel actually does.

And Achebe critique is ustified, since he himself is African and his experience is not portrayed as he may wanted it to be in the novel. But that is not what the text wants to do at all, nor what it could have done during his time. Isn't his critique, then, anachronic?

he does argue that the novel is racist on those grounds, yeah, although I don't think the points the essay makes need to be limited to that question

>Anyway, the novel doesn't really set out to portray the Africans in the narrative as "human beings", precisely because it is seen through the lens of the European colonizers. I'm sure Conrad was aware of this when he wrote it, since we even have at least two layers of narration blurring what happened (Marlowe's and the unnamed narrator's). And even if he wasn't, my point still remains.

I mean, Conrad's intent seems secondary here - I think Achebe's point about the way that the novel works is still basically correct regardless of whether or not Conrad intended to do it that way or was aware of it. I don't think that invalidates the novel - I really like Heart of Darkness, it's one of my favorite things ever - but like I say, I think Achebe makes cogent points that deserve to be engaged with. That Africans are presented as a kind of blank, primal background is one facet of the novel that deserves to be drawn out in all its implications.

>And Achebe critique is ustified, since he himself is African and his experience is not portrayed as he may wanted it to be in the novel. But that is not what the text wants to do at all, nor what it could have done during his time. Isn't his critique, then, anachronic?

I'm not sure I agree with this, because African slaves of the time did - in fact - have human narratives and experiences that could have been depicted and imagined and written about.

It would be anachronistic to expect Conrad to have actually written those narratives, but I'm not sure that matters to Achebe, and I'm not sure it should matter when you're considering the novel as a novel. It does matter if you're conducting some sort of imaginary tribunal on whether Conrad is Good or Bad but I'm not really very interested in doing that, it's quite boring and pointless in this instance.

You really don't see the absurdity of the claim that a book should require an essay by another author on an irrelevant topic (a topic that doesn't relate to what the author meant to accomplish) to be discussed?

>It does matter if you're conducting some sort of imaginary tribunal on whether Conrad is Good or Bad but I'm not really very interested in doing that, it's quite boring and pointless in this instance.

That is exactly what Achebe does, funnily enough.

>That Africans are presented as a kind of blank, primal background is one facet of the novel that deserves to be drawn out in all its implications.

I completely agree, and I think it is a pertinent criticism of the novel. But Achebe cares more about ranting over how Conrad was a racist and the novel is racist and the Western Canon is racist, instead of actually doing that. Well, evidently all of that about which Achebe complains will prioritize the European perspective over any other. We cannot expect it to do otherwise, at least not until very recently when all of that has started to be critized. Should we take out Heart of Darkness out of that construct we call "the Canon" just because it is politically incorrect by today's standards? No. On the contrary, if anything, we should read it with its background in mind, to see how things have changed or haven't changed. To make us think. I'm sure Achebe would like the Canon to be filled with novels about victimization of the natives and criminalization of the colonizers, but that defeats his own point.

>I'm not sure I agree with this, because African slaves of the time did - in fact - have human narratives and experiences that could have been depicted and imagined and written about.

Yes, yes, that much is obvious. But what I meant is that you can't expect the novel to do that, deliberately or unkowingly. And that is Achebe's main point. Of course it matters to him. It doesn't matter to the novel as novel, since novels usually care little about other's opinions on them, but after Achebe's essay it now matters.

I'm not going to get into the weeds of specific verbal formulations of what is 'required' or what some random youtube person specifically said. I think the Achebe essay deserves to be engaged with and engaging with it is good and improves understanding of Heart of Darkness.

>an irrelevant topic (a topic that doesn't relate to what the author meant to accomplish)

I also don't agree even a little with this line of argument, as an interpretive approach or whatever.

>That is exactly what Achebe does, funnily enough.

Sure.

I think part of my point is, basically, you can engage with the Achebe essay without caring about that particular part of the argument, and without reducing the Conrad novel to it. I'm not saying the Achebe essay is perfect, or that I agree with every jot and tittle, any more than I'm saying the novel itself is perfect. I do think the essay makes a number of cogent points about the novel forcefully and well and forms a really central part of the context of the novel.

I'm not sure we even really disagree. I'm just saying that engaging with Achebe's essay doesn't require agreeing with its framework.

>I'm just saying that engaging with Achebe's essay doesn't require agreeing with its framework.

I agree.

I loved it through and through
I especially loved the ending back in Europe, made me feel a bit uneasy about people in daylight
Any suggestions on other books that remind us of the essential animalness of humans? Other one I love is Lord of the Flies

that was nice to read guys thanks

You could try A Clockwork Orange.

Achebe is a dumb ape and the Africans were quite literally savage animals

It's sad that it took 57 replies for someone to say this, Achebe was a fucking abysmal writer compared to JC and he seemed like a pompous wanker in the interviews.

think that might having something to do with intellectual level and not motivation

>it's not well written

If HOD isn't well written then what is to you people? Lee Child?

It's literally one of the most influential and widely discussed books of it's time.

The Secret Agent is the one you want mate, not Heart of Darkness