Taking Sides: Heart of Darkness vs Apocalypse Now

"she carried her head high... she must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something onimous and stately in her deliverate progress. And the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the collosal body of the decnd and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul."

generally his reflections upon the 'savages' are gentler than those of the other white men against the 'enemies' as shown by conrads letters which disagreed with what was happening in the Congo and the rest of africa.

kurtz black mistress, as i described above, gets the best treatment of any of the charactes in the book

and, i guess my point is, this is 1899... and marlowe is the most liberal character in regards to the blacks in the whole book (apart from maybe kurtz, but his motives seem to be more sinister)

i'm sorta struggling, however, with the black ppl being blamed comment as i don't remember that in the book. unless its a 'damn blacks coming and taking our jobs, downfall of society blah blah blah' thing

I'd have to reread to book to pinpoint exactly where this stood out for me, but your mention of Kurtz's mistress is striking a dull chord in my memory.

It was this status, this power and fortune and influence that bought him to disrepute. It was not the savages who bought it out of him... he chose to explore this part of his heart, the 'heart of darkness'. He debased his soul and he paid the price.

Marlowe sees and understands this, but decides not to get too close as he is afraid of the consequences.

The racism isn't the active hate of the 20th cent but more along the lines of viewing a place's inhabitants as part of the "untamed natural" environment (from which current racism extends). "Noble" enough, sure, but not worth any more consideration than so many scrubby trees to be cleared for tilling --> cf European/Americans vs Native Americans, European Jews vs Levant Arabs and on and on.

Surely Conrad would be baffled at all this kind of attention when I think (also been years and years since I've read it) HoD was a dramatization of non-existence of any inner moral compass...ehh but then W. society that keeps us in line is also the kernel of evil in Conrad's formulation; notice no "savages" crowning themselves godkings.

I also took that HoD was also about the non-existance of any underlying anything, i.e. 'Marlowe was not typical, and to him the meaning was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which bought it out only as a glow brings out a haze...'

when i read it, i read it as "we brought THIS — ie what kurtz does — with us" (hence the title) (that wz more than 20 years ago, mind you)

historical context: date of belgian colonial genocide in the congo vs date of HoD

Apocalypse Now was pretty alright. Hate the redux version though.

(same goes for Last Tango In Paris and his riff to his dead wife)

young Larry Fishburne dancing to Satisfaction is good also.

The book is a masterpiece, I firmly feel. And so is the movie. But they each represent such a different genre that I cannot compare them and therefore I cannot voice an opinion as to which is better. Despite the similarity of the story lines, so much of HOD was visual for me, internally visual, where I was creating the world based on the words Conrad had composed. And in AN I was being shown one person's interpretation of those visualizations, and therefore being denied the pleasure of creating them for myself. But at the same time, what I was being shown helped me to create new mental images when I re-read HOD.

So, well, that's my contribution - I was going to say something more and quite witty, but I'm experiencing a temporary (hopefully) brain cloud.

But ALSO I think that AN shares all those traits with HoD, and HoD at least isn't an incoherent mess.

Remember that up until the 1920s essentially ALL critiques of colonialism had racist aspects to them (Orwell's "Burmese Days" ESPECIALLY included).

I liked the tiger in the movie, I think.

I know it's fun to laugh at Coppola the dumb auteur with his "My movie is not about Vietnam, it IS Vietnam" crap, but much of what's good about his film is that he didn't entirely understand his source material (which is itself deeply confused), so he distorted it into something (possibly) better. (No one's yet touched on the obvious extention of HoD being possibly racist: is AN racist in its depiction of the Vietnamese?)

"Look at my Redux version! More chicks! More French people! More drugs! More boat! More Doors!" "Ehh but what about, you know..."

Ok Ok someone has to know: urban legend or not: Marlon Brando refusing to be shot from waist down on [movie] and so showing up on set sans pants?

Just re-read the book for the nth time, and I still found it immense: dark, disturbing, at the same time feverish and icily detached and quite possibly the most insightful premonition of what Europe would become in the 20th Century.

Guess Hannah Arendt was right when she defined it, for better or worse, one of the most illuminating works on the Western experience in Africa: but it is also a scarily precise prophecy of the post-WW1 European totalitarian frenzy (Kurtz described as the possible "splendid leader of an extreme party" etc).

For what's worth, I read Dan's point about Conrad's unability/unwillingness to portray Africans as three-dimensional characters, but it seems to me that he did very much the same with the Belgian colonizers or the other European expats too (the inspiration for TS Eliot's hollow men).
In the frightening, decaying Heart of Darkness world (the world of colonialism, "the happy dance of trade") no one can be depicted as a "person", simply because there's no room for any kind of understanding or intelligence: there are just pain, violence, greed and the only slightly sympathetic character is the mad Russian Harlequin bound to lose himself in the jungle.
In this world, Africans can exist only as soulless objects (suspected of not being totally inhuman!) or fierce, inscrutable "savages" (and surely here there's at work a bit of Golden Bough-like cheap fascination).
Also, I cannot find a more fitting and concise description of a certain Western ambivalence towards the rest of the world than the humanitarian pamphlet about the civilization of the natives ending with the "Exterminate the brutes" scribble.

Uh, sorry for the longish post but this book always strikes me as one the most subtle, terrifying descriptions of the then-upcoming European horrors ever.

I should reread this book sometime but, as I said before, I was so offended by it the first time around that I really don't want to.

there is a really good essay by J Hillis Miller about the racism in the novel, it's included in the norton critical edition. It was immensely useful for me when i was teaching it. I had the students read the famous Achebe essay and then I sorta summarized and presented the Miller (he's a deconstructionist and they were freshman)--it was one of the better classroom discussions I ever had--more a discussion about how racism works and what it is rather than "is X a racist" type stuff.

weirdly i also think of this novel as of a piece with Gravity's Rainbow as "death drives of Western Civilization" novels.

Conrad can be unsettling and unpleasant in his pessimism over mankind and culture, he surely had race issues and he was very much Western-centric, but I think no other book describes the mechanics of the colonial system and the imminent collapse of (continental?) Europe with this ferocious, bare intensity.

A Bend in the River is a good companion piece.

When I was here I wanted to be there
When I was there all I could think of was getting back Into the jungle

Basically, believing in the civilised/savage binary is racist, but the act of stating 'white man = savage' is an excellent piece of negative work.

And the narrative setup in Heart of Darkness is precision engineered to make this statement effectively - the idea of a journey into the heart, getting worse all along, rumours of this Kurtz person, then finally, here he is.