Heart of Darkness
Aug. 22nd, 2010 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losSo I've started on the reading list for my (ahaha bitter irony) course syllabus! Yay!
It includes a lot of terrible or simply dull books, and I feel the masochistic need to read every one of them in preparation for my course, even the stuff I dislike and have read before. Boo.
But I've finished with one and a half of them this week despite VISA MAAAAAAADNESS!! Yay!
One of those I finished was the admittedly slender Heart of Darkness. It was--well. It was. If there had been one more repetition of the words 'light' and 'darkness' I would have fallen prey to the Horror.
It was an odd novel.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about plotting. I was reading something the other day on io9 about how Game of Thrones wasn't really plotted in a way that was consistent with the traditional Novel format. In Crime and Punishment so many things happen that 'plot' is lost in a haze of small events. What could be a tight murder-mystery (well--detective story, we know who murdered who, but tension could be found in the events of the pursuit and captures) spirals out of control, into the realm of literature. The events become difficult to track, and divorced from strict causality, they become irrelevant.
All Creatures Great and Small (TV), for a REALLY DIVERGENT example, is also great for reasons that have nothing to do with its plot. It's a romance of place. Being around for all the small steps of processes, with comparatively little impact on much outside themselves, without larger goals directing the flow of the action, distends time in the show. Even larger events like James marrying Helen seem a-temporal. He is courting and courting and suddenly they are married, but all along the central focus of the episodes is more on the days' veterinary tasks and their complications than it is on the potentially lives-altering events of their courtship. It takes an hour to watch an episode, but without being a burden or a chore to watch, each episode FEELS like it takes three or four hours to watch due to its unusual structure and filming. You don't really begrudge it the time--you like the Dales, and could happily be stuck there for a good long while.
Heart of Darkness is similarly not a novel (novella? awfully short) ABOUT plot. It's about Place, which is interesting because its project is not to make you understand or feel any part of the Africa it creates, but to bewilder you with it. If All Creatures is a romance of place, rendering a setting familiar, Heart of Darkness is a Horror Story or a Mystery of Place, rendering it unheimlich. It's a novel of colonialism, and comes off as a condemnation of it, but it's not ABOUT colonialism--and it has nothing to say about positive solutions to the problems it illustrates. Nor is the novel ABOUT Kurtz, the enigmatic central figure, the narrator, or any other character--characterization is more alluded to than focused on.
I suppose it could be a traditional quest narrative, with Kurtz as the prize, but the focus is off that, and the prize is so unrewarding. This doesn't quite fit. It's like the old 'what do you do when you get to Jerusalem' question--so many older novels have A Trip To Jerusalem as their mystical subject, but no real clear idea of what the characters will actually do when they get there. A novel that attempts to barge in and illustrate that, a la Disraeli's Tancred, comes to pieces under the burden of narrative expectation. What do you do when you find the Messiah/Kurtz? Not a lot, apparently.
It's a squirmy, difficult little thing, this slender novel. The prose is murky and weirdly beautiful and good, but not necessarily effective. The novel is frustrating and unlovable, but I acknowledge that it's well written. I'm rarely this unsure what I've come away from a novel with, which is perhaps in itself interesting, but again, not very useful.
It includes a lot of terrible or simply dull books, and I feel the masochistic need to read every one of them in preparation for my course, even the stuff I dislike and have read before. Boo.
But I've finished with one and a half of them this week despite VISA MAAAAAAADNESS!! Yay!
One of those I finished was the admittedly slender Heart of Darkness. It was--well. It was. If there had been one more repetition of the words 'light' and 'darkness' I would have fallen prey to the Horror.
It was an odd novel.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about plotting. I was reading something the other day on io9 about how Game of Thrones wasn't really plotted in a way that was consistent with the traditional Novel format. In Crime and Punishment so many things happen that 'plot' is lost in a haze of small events. What could be a tight murder-mystery (well--detective story, we know who murdered who, but tension could be found in the events of the pursuit and captures) spirals out of control, into the realm of literature. The events become difficult to track, and divorced from strict causality, they become irrelevant.
All Creatures Great and Small (TV), for a REALLY DIVERGENT example, is also great for reasons that have nothing to do with its plot. It's a romance of place. Being around for all the small steps of processes, with comparatively little impact on much outside themselves, without larger goals directing the flow of the action, distends time in the show. Even larger events like James marrying Helen seem a-temporal. He is courting and courting and suddenly they are married, but all along the central focus of the episodes is more on the days' veterinary tasks and their complications than it is on the potentially lives-altering events of their courtship. It takes an hour to watch an episode, but without being a burden or a chore to watch, each episode FEELS like it takes three or four hours to watch due to its unusual structure and filming. You don't really begrudge it the time--you like the Dales, and could happily be stuck there for a good long while.
Heart of Darkness is similarly not a novel (novella? awfully short) ABOUT plot. It's about Place, which is interesting because its project is not to make you understand or feel any part of the Africa it creates, but to bewilder you with it. If All Creatures is a romance of place, rendering a setting familiar, Heart of Darkness is a Horror Story or a Mystery of Place, rendering it unheimlich. It's a novel of colonialism, and comes off as a condemnation of it, but it's not ABOUT colonialism--and it has nothing to say about positive solutions to the problems it illustrates. Nor is the novel ABOUT Kurtz, the enigmatic central figure, the narrator, or any other character--characterization is more alluded to than focused on.
I suppose it could be a traditional quest narrative, with Kurtz as the prize, but the focus is off that, and the prize is so unrewarding. This doesn't quite fit. It's like the old 'what do you do when you get to Jerusalem' question--so many older novels have A Trip To Jerusalem as their mystical subject, but no real clear idea of what the characters will actually do when they get there. A novel that attempts to barge in and illustrate that, a la Disraeli's Tancred, comes to pieces under the burden of narrative expectation. What do you do when you find the Messiah/Kurtz? Not a lot, apparently.
It's a squirmy, difficult little thing, this slender novel. The prose is murky and weirdly beautiful and good, but not necessarily effective. The novel is frustrating and unlovable, but I acknowledge that it's well written. I'm rarely this unsure what I've come away from a novel with, which is perhaps in itself interesting, but again, not very useful.
