Since I was thinking of watching Apocalypse Now again, I decided that I'd go back and re-read Conrad's classic. While I more or less enjoyed it, I can't say I thought it was truly amazing literature. This time it seemed to me over-written and a little repetitious. In a sense, there's not much left to the imagination here. Conrad hammers on the inscrutable and mysterious heart of darkness till everything becomes a symbol of ... "the horror, the horror". The plot of the novel does a better job of showing you this horror than Conrad does of describing it, and if I were his editor, I would have been tempted to cut out quite a lot of his flights of pseudo-philosophical narration. Perhaps, since it was published as a serial magazine story, Conrad didn't want to trust too much of its interpretation to the subtlety of the reader? Or perhaps he considered this overloaded style the only way to break through the thick shell of colonialism's moral hypocrisy -- by speaking to it in its own language?
Nevertheless, there are some memorable scenes. I particularly love the opening scene of sunset on the Thames that sets the story in its context. And Marlowe's reaction to the death of his helmsman is perfect. Save for the parallel mourning women though, the actual encounter with Kurtz is pretty forgettable. It's as if he exists only in Marlowe's fevered imagination, the symbol of something that has to remain forever hidden I suppose.
