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Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness
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Manufacturer: Filiquarian
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Filiquarian
Average Customer Rating: Average rating of 4.5/5Average rating of 4.5/5Average rating of 4.5/5Average rating of 4.5/5Average rating of 4.5/5
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Heart of Darkness Description

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781599869506
ISBN: 1599869500
Label: Filiquarian
Manufacturer: Filiquarian
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 102
Publication Date: 2007-11-07
Publisher: Filiquarian
Product Release Date: 2007-11-07
Studio: Filiquarian

Editorial Review of Heart of Darkness


Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his advanture to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who is employed by the government.


Customer Reviews of Heart of Darkness

Customer Rating: Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5
Review Summary: One of the first glimpses into of the horrors of European Colonialism
Review: I was forced to reread this book after purchasing the more recent "King Leopold's Ghost," which I have also reviewed.

Even though Conrad's book was a novel based loosely on events he, or other had witnessed, the events in "King Leopold's Ghost" were not fiction at all, but the "real modern day deal."

It was this novel that was the first to expose the true horrors of European colonialism on the African continent. It tells the story of a supremely successful collector of Elephant tusks, which were being taken from the Belgian Congo for the purpose of trading them on the world market for ivory. Kurz's business was successful only because of the brutality and immorality of his techniques: He swindled, stole and killed Africans in the hundreds if not the thousands to stay ahead of the competition. And just as happened a generation later, by the diminutive and brutal Belgian King, no one asked any questions about his brutal techniques.

The phrase" The Heart of Darkness," referring to the heart of the white colonists, came to replace the phrase "darkest Africa" as a result of this novel. Its beauty lies in Conrad's failed attempt to re-humanize Kurtz as a symbolic image of redemption in the name of all the white colonists that had heaped carnage upon Africa.

But the author's efforts fell short both in the novel and in reality because in Conrad's hands, Kurtz was turned into "a less than ideal moral man." He became a man who learned to come to grips with the evil he had spawn, by discovering that he was not an inherently wicked man, but one who was god-fearing and capable of the "natural moral superiority" that the white man was supposed to have over the more savage Africans. The question of which man was the more savage was left "hanging in the air" in the novel.

Unless you are white, turning to "the white man's religion" where moral superiority is still claimed by fiat is not much redemption. But at least it is something. Apparently the novel did not have the desired moral effect in reality either, as history can attest. It may in fact well have had just the opposite effect: as the Belgians repeated the same ghastly and brutal experiment a generation later, only this time with diamonds instead of ivory. Despite all this, and the goriness of the content, it is still a powerfully told story by a master of his craft.

Five Stars

Customer Rating: Average rating of 1/5Average rating of 1/5Average rating of 1/5Average rating of 1/5Average rating of 1/5
Review Summary: Great Book, Terrible Publisher
Review: Heart of Darkness is an incredible Novella. Everyone Should read it. This review is not critical of the story, but of the publisher.

I own this particular edition of the book. It is a joke. The publisher, Faliquarian, shouldnt have been given a license to print this book. It is rife with typos, and wierd symbold that don't make any sense.

For example, where in the origonal story Conrad uses the words "...etc. etc..." to end a sentence, this copy of HoD prints it as "...&c. &c..." Yes, those are "&" symbols. It doesn't make sense to me either.

And in other instances where Conrad uses italicyzed words to emphasize something, this copy of the book uses...an underscore? So when COnrad emphasizes the word "you" this publisher prints it as "you_".

I sware I can't belive I paid for this.

Customer Rating: Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5
Review Summary: "Mistah Kurtz--he dead." An influential work on five 20th century seminal works
Review: I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.



Customer Rating: Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5
Review Summary: Literature as Philosophical Anthropology
Review: Conrad's novella contains an almost endless fount of symbolic allusions. One of the most important occurs early in the story and ties the symbolism of darkness, finitude, the mystery of the labyrinth and death to the images of the lunar cycle, the tide, yarn and narrative. "The yarns of seaman have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical [...], and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine." Conrad appears to be indicating that the seaman is closer to the "State of Nature" because of his intimate relationship with this primal cycle of the tide (eternal recurrence). Melville certainly indicates as much in Moby-Dick. The natural rhythm of the sea forces the seaman into greater harmony with nature thus enabling him to see more clearly the natural state of man--helping him to see into the darkness. Religious rituals are very often tied to the cycle of the moon. For example, Easter is always on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The moon represents death and rebirth because it is born, grows, declines and dies, only to be reborn. Each day the moon is killed by the sun, the light. But the light of the sun only temporarily illuminates the darkness, i.e. darkness (ignorance) is the more natural state. Mythologically the animal associated with the sun is the lion, whose golden face resembles the sun; the animal associated with the moon is the bull, whose horns represent the horns of the moon. Thus we have the many references to the sacrifice of the bull in almost all primitive religions, imitating the death of the moon. The Minotaur is conspicuously brought to mind at the beginning of Plato's Phaedo 58a9-b3 in relation to Socrates, death and sacrifice. The lion's roar scatters the horned beasts of the prairie, imitating the power of the sun's light to scatter darkness. In this passage Conrad seems to be pointing out that some things are only visible at night, in the dark as it were. Furthermore these things can have a higher degree of reality than those made visible in the sunlight. The heart of things is shrouded in darkness. Might Conrad's account of light enveloped in darkness be a dramatic image of something like Socratic knowledge of ignorance? The entire tale can be read as a story of how nature is hidden in the deep recesses of the political community (civilization). But the story is told in Schopenhauerian/Nietzschean rather than Platonic language. We have an allegory of the recognition of the Mystery of Being as it manifests itself within the hierarchy of human souls or psyches. Of course in modernity there is not much of a hierarchy, and the souls of Conrad's Westerners all seem to be equally base. The closest thing we have in Conrad's tale to a philosopher is Marlow (we don't know enough about the frame narrator to say one way or the other, i.e. with him we are left in the dark), who is really more of a "neutral" observer. But Marlow clearly represents the harmonization of light and dark. We must look beyond Marlow--to his imitation of the Buddha--to see that knowledge of ignorance is the actualization of the cosmic State of Nature in the soul of man, which explains the soteric effects of philosophy and does so in way that also explains how these soteric effects transcend the "local" soteriology necessary to political community; i.e. it refers us to the necessity of religion to community politically and explains the tension between the soteric effects of philosophy in the elevated individual's soul in contrast with the soteriological needs of nonphilosophic souls. There are those unable to comprehend, unable to accept the truth into their soul without it destroying them. Thus Kurtz, even though he is exceptional (to borrow a Nietzschean term), is not a philosopher--he had "no restraint." The community must conceal the truth about darkness by shining a man-made light on it (the myth of cultural progress out of darkness into the light), you might say. Direct contact with the "light of truth" would destroy the community (philosophy is dangerous); for that light also contains within it the truth about cosmic darkness (staring directly into the light of the sun causes blindness or reabsorption into darkness). Plato's Good is not good for everyone, as Plato and especially Socrates knew all too well. Thus Marlow as the Buddha (the enlightened and definitely restrained one), having been to the East, removed from Western society and returned as the neutral observer. Or so Conrad seems to be saying. But what is clearly there to be discerned by the discerning reader is that the narrative structure of the story dramatically images a path to the State of Nature in the dark recesses of the psyche. The person with the capacity for such levels of discernment would likely experience this psychological journey as an ascent (i.e. a transcendence of the narrow and bodily concerns of the political community via asceticism=ascent), out of the cave, to the light of nature through philosophic thought; whereas the person who lacks the philosopher's intellectual capacities and inborn asceticism experiences the path to nature (knowledge of ignorance or light enveloped by darkness) as a descent or a return to savagery.

My interpretation may now be densely summarized in the following terms. The explanation of Conrad's quasi-religious imagery of the transformation of the civilized man to the uncivilized brute in the person of Kurtz fits like a mask of resignation and decline over the face of Western civilization. Resignation is personified by Marlow the neutral observer who is powerless to effect a reversal or even stop the decline of a single devolute in the person Kurtz. Thus Marlow's knowledge can save him but not his culture ("Solitude is the involution of the forces of nature, as these forces have fulfilled their purpose and returned to the void; it is the power of consciousness turning back upon itself" Patanjali, Yogasutra 4.34.); his civilization's cycle has run its course, like the cycle of the moon. (T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" is an explicit poetic imitation of Conrad's prose allegory.)

Customer Rating: Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5
Review Summary: A study of man
Review: It is well written. The idea of a storyteller in the story is not unique but very effective. We could ponder over the word darkness for quite some time. The best way to ponder is with Cliff's Notes. Personally I wanted him to get on with it. I guess I was a little impatient for the action and the conclusion. If it hadn't been for cliff notes I would have missed haft the things he was implying.

A merchant company is missing an agent Kurtz, and Marlowe must find him. Traveling though harsher environments than he imagined possible he may have found what he was seeking. As with many of this type of epic the physical distance or direction is not as important then the transformation it plays on ones soul.

I missed this book somehow in school. The reason I started to read this book before actually I actually became immersed in it, was to see how close it came to the movie. No not the movie you are thinking of. "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death" (1988) ASIN: 6305078599 . The film was shot primarily in the avocado groves maintained by the University of California at Riverside (UCR), which the university uses for horticultural experiments. Adrienne Barbeau is Dr. Kurtz.
The horror.....the horror.....

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death



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