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Enjoying Conrad really requires a sense of history of the time he was writing, espe The Secret Agent and Nostromo, and most of all Heart of Darkness:
Heart of Darkness wasn't intended as a psychological novel. It really was based on his trip down the Congo river. The novel was essential a gazette, slightly fictionalized, of the horrors of the Belgian Congo. A protest novel, in a sense.
The mystery of Kurtz, his division between promising company man and fiancee and inner-jungle slave-king and demigod, reflects the activities of real white men hired by the Belgian government to control rubber plantation and mining operations in the interior.
A lot of promising, ambitious young British men left university and sought their fortune in the Congo, leaving behind family and girlfriends. They were sent to the interior to regulate slave production of rubber, etc. Most became tyrants, some truly became outright monsters, on par with Ivan Grozny or the WWII concentration camp Kommandants...but when they completed their tour, they went home, married their sweethearts, and lived as respectable men.
Reading Conrad for basic university lit, I ran up against endless unsatisfactory analytical positions about Heart of Darkness.
Then I read a history called "King Leopold's Ghost" written by Adam Hoschchild (spelling something like that) which is all about the Belgian occupation of the Congo and the hideous slave-state they created.
There is a specific chapter dealing with Conrad and the invention of the fictional character Kurtz.
After "King Leopold's Ghost," the entirety of Heart of Darkness opened up to me...not as a piece of inner psychological delving, but as a journalistic account of colonial horrors, in specific of the moral facade of colonial activities and the ignorance (or willing blindnees?) of the folks at home....
I wonder, how many books leave us cold because we fail to see their relevance to the now, particularly because we don't wholly get where the writer was coming from...what was common knowledge to Conrad's London audience--politics, celebrities, short-term history, slang and idiom--is obscure to us.
As I said with Heart of Darkness, the whole book suddenly made sense once I chewed on a bit of history relevant to the time it was written.
But Dickens still craps out giant honking fairy tales...with Victorian morals, no less 
The Archons opt for the "Left Behind" series, but I think that Salman Rushdie is one of the best prose writers In These Modern Times.
[ 26-01-2002: Message edited by: [infinite monkeys] ] |
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