I wish I had been guided into this deep way of perceiving literature - or music, or art, or life itself.īut most of us don’t have that opportunity. I’m envious of the students in the Columbia class that David Denby portrays in his 1995 article in the New Yorker, The Trouble with “Heart of Darkness”. That is the reason it has such an important place in the literary canon: it is very densely packed with philosophical questions that fundamentally can’t be answered.įrankly, I was trained as an engineer, and have to struggle even to attempt to peer through the veils of meaning. Once you get used to that, this is a very easy book to read - tremendously shorter than Moby-Dick, for instance.Įven though it is so much easier to read, this short novel shares with Moby-Dick the distressing (for many of us) fact that it is heavily symbolic. His second was French, and that lends a lyric quality which, once accomodated, can draw you into the mood of the story. The prose can feel turgid, but perhaps it may help to know that English was Conrad’s third language. Actually quite an intriguing and provocative question). involvement in Vietnam with the Belgian rule over the Congo. Having watched Apocalypse Now doesn’t count - if anything, it ups the ante, since that means you have to think about the similarities and differences (for example, contrast and compare the U.S.
He has been lauded as one of the most powerful, insightful, and disturbing novelists in the English canon despite coming to English later in life, which allowed him to combine it with the sensibilities of French, Russian, and Polish literature.įirst of all, get this straight: Heart of Darkness is one of those classics that you have to have read if you want to consider yourself a well-educated adult. This was useful when, because a need to come to terms with his experience, lead him to write Heart of Darkness, in 1899, which was followed by other fictionalized explorations of his life. He was deeply interested in a small number of writers both in French and English whose work he studied carefully. Joseph Conrad settled in England in 1894, the year before he published his first novel. He was hired to take a steamship into Africa, and according to Conrad, the experience of seeing firsthand the horrors of colonial rule left him a changed man. He was made a Master Mariner, and served more than sixteen years before an event inspired him to try his hand at writing.
He then began to work aboard British ships, learning English from his shipmates. He joined the French Merchant Marine and briefly employed himself as a wartime gunrunner. Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was a Polish-born English novelist who today is most famous for Heart of Darkness, his fictionalized account of Colonial Africa.Ĭonrad left his native Poland in his middle teens to avoid conscription into the Russian Army.
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