>It's been over a half century since I read the book. (It's interesting
>that others have not read it in decades but can remember it. The number
>of books I have read once over half a century ago and still have some
>memory of is rather small.)
I read it twice, the second time about fifteen years ago, and didn't care for it either time. However:
>Sorting out my few remember fragments of the text, I tend to see it's
>'domain' as somehow to be found in the relations between Marlowe and
>that warship on one had, Kurtz's 'intended on the other hand.
<snip>
>So Conrad is playing with
>a rather offensive 19th-c cliche, the "dark continent," the "unknown"
>(to Europeans) continent. His very title is a cliche, a deliberate one I
>presume. Marlowe penetrates into the heart of Africa which in European
>myth is the heart of darkness. Darkness conceals. And the decision
>Marlowe has to make at the end (and no other character in the stoyr has
>any decisions to make) is what to tell the intended. He lies, but by
>this time there are so many unanswered questions that anything he might
>say is equally a truth and a lie.
The one memorable thing I gleaned from that second reading was that I read Conrad as equating Kurtz' intended (what a word!) with the African woman who grieves Kurtz as equally savage, and I took that as a commentary on imperialism.
Perhaps I read it wrongly, but that's how I read it.
>And the most ordinary form of it
>is to be found in the work to which the rest of English (even European)
>literature is a s eries of footnotes: Paradise Lost
I've never been able to appreciate that work, though I've enjoyed his shorter poems quite a bit. My great teacher, Jim Whitehead, told me that as I matured I would come to love Milton. Do you think fifty-two is old enough?
Thanks,
John A
http://www.arkansawyer.com/wordpress/