Heart of Darkness  

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Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1902 publication, it appeared as a three-part series (1899) in Blackwood's Magazine. It is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon.

This highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame narrative. It follows Charles Marlow as he recounts, at dusk and into the evening, his adventure into the Congo to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary.

The story details an incident when Marlow, an Englishman, took a foreign assignment as a ferry-boat captain, employed by a Belgian trading company, on what readers may assume is the Congo River, in the Congo Free State, a private colony of King Leopold II; the country is never specifically named. Though his job is transporting ivory downriver, Marlow quickly develops an intense interest in investigating Kurtz, an ivory-procurement agent in the employ of the government. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region.

In the arts

• 1910 - John Buchan, in Prester John, his adventure novel concerning a Zulu uprising, has his main character David Crawfurd say "Last night I had looked into the heart of darkness, and the sight had terrified me".
• 1925 - T. S. Eliot quoted the line, "Mistah Kurtz, he dead," along with the folk saying, "A penny for the old Guy," at the beginning of his poem, "The Hollow Men."
• 1938 - Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air adapted Heart of Darkness for radio.
• 1940 - Orson Welles attempted to make an adaption of Heart of Darkness as his first feature film, but abandoned the project.
• 1940s - Lux Radio Theater, with Brian Aherne as Marlow.
• 1943 - Orson Welles did a half-hour adaptation for the radio show This is My Best.
• 1954 - Lord of the Flies by William Golding has Ralph weep "for the darkness of man's heart" at the novel's culmination. Golding's novel also depicts displaced 'Westerners' in a mysterious, Other realm, which he uses to outline breakdown of civilised consciousness, revealing the monstrosity that lies beneath.
• 1958 - Playhouse 90 episode# 3.7, aired November 6 - American television version of Heart of Darkness starring Roddy McDowall, Eartha Kitt, Richard Haydn, Inga Swenson, and Boris Karloff as Kurtz.
• 1966 - Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, a novel by Hunter S. Thompson, closes with an account of the gang's savagery visited on him and quotes of Kurtz: "The horror! The horror! ... Exterminate all the brutes!" Thompson also wrote a pocketbook obituary for Dr. Timothy Leary upon his death, named Mistah Leary - He Dead, after the epitaph given for Kurtz in the novel, "Mistah Kurtz, he dead".
• 1979 - John Milius based his script for Apocalypse Now on the novel and moved the plot to Vietnam. The film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
• 1980 - In A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, the theme of 'modern slavery' in America during the Jim Crow period is explored. There are two divisions in Levy Pants, a business that makes and markets pants: white collar (office work) and blue collar (factory work). Most (perhaps all) of the underpaid factory workers in Levy Pants are American Blacks. When Ignatius J. Reilly enters the factory, he is reminded of Heart of Darkness: "Perhaps I likened myself to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness when, far from the trading company offices in Europe, he was faced with the ultimate horror. I do remember imagining myself in a pith helmet and white linen jodhpurs, my face enigmatic behind of a veil of mosquito netting." In addition, the terms Outer Station, Central Station, and Inner Station are used in association with Levy Pants.
• 1987 - U2's The Joshua Tree features the song "One Tree Hill" containing the phrase "And in the world, a heart of darkness, a fire-zone/Where poets speak their heart then bleed for it."
• 1987 - Title of a song performed by The Hoodoo Gurus.
• 1989 - J.F. Lawton based his film Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (also known as Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death) on Conrad's book. Kurtz, now a feminist played by Adrienne Barbeau, has taken to the jungle's amazonian inhabitants, rather than continuing to write books that nobody reads and promoting them on TV talk shows. Mimicking the original, her dying words are "The horror! The horror... of Letterman!"
• 1991 - Orson Welles' attempt to base a film on this story is a centre piece of the novel Flicker by Theodore Roszak.
• 1993 - Nicolas Roeg filmed Heart of Darkness for television with Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz.
• 1993 - In the novel Headhunter by Canadian author Timothy Findley, a schizophrenic spiritualist accidentally sets Kurtz free from page 92 of Heart of Darkness, and is forced to find a Marlow to defeat him. The novel recasts Kurtz and Marlow as psychiatrists in an apocalyptic version of Toronto.
• 1995 - Iron Maiden's 1995 album " The X Factor" contains a song titled The Edge of Darkness which is based on the novel and the film Apocalypse Now.
• 1995 - German metal band Grave Digger in 1995 released an album Heart of Darkness containing track also titled "Heart of Darkness" lyircs of which are based on the novel and the film "Apocalypse Now".
• 1996 - Alex Garland's book The Beach heavily references the Heart Of Darkness
• 1998 - Star Trek: Insurrection took plot inspiration from Heart of Darkness.
• 1998 - the video game Heart of Darkness borrowed the title from the novel and was loosely based on the story.
• 2000 - "His last step. My hesitating. Excerpt from Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness" ('Sein letzter Schritt. Mein Zögern'), Art of Thomas Offhaus inspired by Heart of Darkness.
• 2002 - Army Men: RTS video game featured a reference to Heart of Darkness in the final mission called "Heart of Plastic".
• 2003 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon made a reference to Heart of Darkness calling it a very good book even though it was quite short.
• 2003 - The Rundown indirectly referenced this novel when Christopher Walken's character Hatcher, the slave-driving operator of a mining town in the Amazon, says, "I’m the heart in the darkness!"
• 2003 - A reference to Heart of Darkness was inserted into HIM's lyrics for the song "Love's Requiem" on the album "Love Metal". "The heart of darkness is hope of finding you there, and that hope will be our love's requiem."
• 2004 - Lost. The novel is one of many to be mentioned in the popular television series Lost. It has been hinted that the literary works that are featured in this series are clues to its mysterious plot.
• 2005 - Peter Jackson's King Kong has many references to Heart of Darkness, such as a scene where Jimmy holds a copy of the book and says "It’s not an adventure story, is it?" As King Kong itself is a story of the cruelties of men, the film suggests that Conrad meant to explore human cruelty towards others as much as he meant to explore the Belgian Congo—and thus also the film is more than an adventure story but also explores the human will to exploit others. [1]

See also

• 1904 - The Congo Reform Association was formed to expose labor abuses in the Congo Free State, eventually leading to the Belgian state taking responsibility for the colony.
• 1905 – Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy describes the barbaric, exploitative treatment of Congo's populace by the King of the Belgians.
• 1912 - H. M. Tomlinson's The Sea and the Jungle, a non-fiction travel-narrative classic, recounts the voyage of the first English "tramp steamer" to traverse the Amazon River (1905). It includes many of the same themes as Heart of Darkness.
• 1922 - An extract from 'Heart of Darkness' was initially used as an epigraph to the poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. However it was replaced by an extract from the Satyricon on the advice of Ezra Pound.
• 1959 - Things Fall Apart - A novel by Chinua Achebe that is often seen as a response to Heart of Darkness. The novel attempts to give readers a sense of African culture from Achebe's point of view, rather than the one that Conrad gives in Heart of Darkness.
• 1991 - Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a documentary about the making of the film Apocalypse Now.
• 1992 - Sven Lindqvist's 'Exterminate All the Brutes', an odyssey into the Heart of Darkness, European colonialism and the following genocide.
• 1996 - Seinfeld - Season 8 Episode 8, makes references to Apocalypse Now, with Peterman quoting Kurtz. The film of course transposed the novel to the Vietnam War.
• 1998 - The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver explores many of the themes of Heart of Darkness, largely in the same place.
• 2005 - The First Casualty, a novel by Ben Elton, follows the same storyline where a British police detective investigates a crime in the midst of the First World War, and gradually becomes painfully acquainted with the horrors of war. He is given the false name of Christopher Marlowe (cf Charlie Marlow), and he makes references to the Belgian colonisation of the Congo.