Heart of Darkness
I know I'm going to catch a lot of grief for this, since so far my other reviews here involving classics have received much the same, but ultimately I prefer those discussions because it really helps question what literature can do for various people and their separate perspectives. In the case of Heart of Darkness, I'd rather live in a world with it than without it, because without it we wouldn't have Apocalypse Now, or Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, or even the popularized use of the term "heart of darkness" as a sort of tragic Odyssey into inhuman and exotic mindsets and locales.
However, is it possible for a book to not be superficial enough? By that I mean, depth in literature is always appreciated, certainly, but with Heart of Darkness I almost beg for some amount of surface area in order to penetrate it. I've read this book four times. The first was on my own, but the other three were all for teachers, two for in-class discussion and one because a professor of mine really wanted to talk to me about it so I read it separately for him. It's true that any discussion I've gotten into can go to the infinite ends of minutia for any one image in this book--the hippo, the white city, the starving natives, the boat itself, Kurtz = Christ, and the meaning of "the horror, the horror." Fine, Joseph had some major things to say about Imperialism. However, this book stands, for me, as one of the most anticlimactic experiences in literature, and it's because of the surface of it. On the surface, this book is about a man who eagerly anticipates meeting a man--only for the famous man himself to just up and die the moment they meet, and then the main character to wax awe for pages afterward about how amazing the experience was. It's a man, in a boat, describing being in a boat to meet a man, and only getting out if it Deep Thoughts and a boat ride.
One time I got myself in trouble with a friend I was discussing this book with because I said, "Apocalypse Now at least had some social commentary importance with its setting in Vietnam," at which point my friend correctly reamed me and said, "What, the African ivory trade, which killed more people than the Holocaust, isn't an important background for social commentary?" Win for him, but in a way my point still stands because Joseph Conrad never let me care. I meet authors halfway on this, if I go into a book its with the assumption that I should care what the book is about, but Conrad was too busy writing about boredom for eighty pages for me to really continue to appreciate the darkness he was moving into the heart of. Certainly the meaning and importance of the book is there, but Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes has power plays, gold, conquistadors, monkeys! Apocalypse Now has "Ride of the Valkyries", "I love the smell of napalm in the morning", drugs, a sacrificed pig! Shit happens. I believe it is a ten page sequence of Heart of Darkness where Conrad describes the need and importance to be productive, to work mindlessly, to offset the cabin fever and fight the madness, and it's certainly true, and it's certainly a good point, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a ten page description about how nothing happened.
Do not get me wrong. I already feel your hands twitching to click on the comment section and say, "Just because YOU find this book boring!" Actually, I don't. I don't find Heart of Darkness boring at all. I find it prosaic and didactic. I think it could have been shorter, I think it could have been more succinct, I think it made its point fine with a few sentences and then proceeded to beat the point to death with multiple-page long paragraphs emphasizing the original sentences. I believe that the reason Heart of Darkness has worked to create so much good art afterward (and I cite Coppola and Herzog as obvious and mainstream examples, but Conrad's writing twists itself through much modern art) is the same reason Andre Bazin is credited for the French New Wave despite the fact that he was a critic and not a filmmaker. The ideas and the significance of those ideas are compelling--the work itself is not a piece of art, it just points to a means of art.
Joseph Conrad is a great writer. Heart of Darkness is not a great book. My issue with it is not that I don't understand it, but that Conrad never lets me care about the significance of it. I much prefer tracing its ideas in the imagery of others to reading it again, and if someone ever tells me to read it again, the answer is, No, thank you, I've finished it already.
--PolarisDiB