Heart of Darkness: Titan Illustrated Classics, by Joseph Conrad
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Heart of Darkness: Titan Illustrated Classics, by Joseph Conrad
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Heart of Darkness is a novella by Anglo-Polish writer Joseph Conrad about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, in the heart of Africa. Central to the work is the idea that there is little difference between so-called civilized people and those described as savages.
Heart of Darkness: Titan Illustrated Classics, by Joseph Conrad- Amazon Sales Rank: #927155 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-11-18
- Released on: 2015-11-18
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review "The brilliant mind behind Moby Dick in Pictures is back to illustrate Joseph Conrad’s classic."—Flavorwire"Darkness never looked so good: Matt Kish's illustrated edition of Joseph Conrad's classic follows the template he created with Moby-Dick In Pictures ."— The National Post "For your friend who slept through English class, an illustrated version of a classic: Heart of Darkness, written by Joseph Conrad and illustrated by Matt Kish."— The Airship (picked Matt Kish's Heart of Darkness as one of the best books of 2013!)"Two years after his infinitely wonderful illustrations for every page of Moby-Dick, which ranked among the best art and design books of 2011, self-taught Ohio-based artist Matt Kish returns with an equally exquisite edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (public library). With one haunting acrylic-paint-and-ink illustration for every page, Kish — whose artwork was included in the excellent compendium The Graphic Canon, Vol. 3 — reinvigorates the Conrad classic and its timeless themes of race, gender, power, privilege, and the dualities of the human soul."—Brainpickings
About the Author Joseph Conrad (1857 - 1924) Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 11-12 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist, who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTIONEvery illustrator, no matter what the project, is confronted with choices. In considering how to approach Heart of Darkness, I had to make a lot of choices, and they were never simple. What struck me while illustrating Moby-Dick in Pictures was just how vast Melville’s novel seemed. It is an enormous book that, to paraphrase Whitman, contains multitudes. It contradicts itself in style and tone in gloriously messy ways and it’s strong enough to carry the weight of the visions of dozens of artists, from Rockwell Kent to Frank Stella to Benton Spruance to Leonard Baskin to, well, me. What I’m saying here is that with Melville, there is room.Conrad is something entirely different, particularly when it comes to Heart of Darkness. There is a terrifying feeling of claustrophobia and a crushing singularity of purpose to the story. It’s almost as if the deeper one reads, the farther down a tunnel one is dragged, all other options and paths dwindling and disappearing, until nothing is left but that awful and brutal encounter with Kurtz and the numbing horror of his ideas. Where Moby-Dick roams far and wide across both land and sea, Heart of Darkness moves in one direction only, and that is downward.While it could never have been an easy task to take a well known piece of classic literature and breathe some different kind of life into it with pictures, the inexorable downward pull of this black hole of a story—this bullet to the head—made demands that I couldn’t have imagined. Poe wrote that “a short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it,” and I knew that in order to let Conrad’s ideas knife their way inside, every one of my illustrations had to carry this mood and build toward that ending. But what to exclude? What to leave out? Which path to go down? How to take this story of white men and black men and Africa, this filthy horrible business of ivory and slavery and greed and murder, and show it, really show it, in such a way that this mood would be visible?Begin with the title: Heart of Darkness. One would think, initially at least, that here is the first visual clue. Darkness. Blackness. Inky swirls of ebony on murky pages. That seemed too easy to me, entirely too obvious. But there was another reason why I knew immediately that this was not the right choice to make. In college, as an undergraduate, I took an introduction to poetry class. A very basic thing, really, just an overview of Western poetry hitting all the proper and expected notes. The professor, though, was not at all proper or expected, and her almost embarrassing passion for poetry put us all on edge and made our minds scuffed and raw enough for the poetry we studied to leave a few scars. At some point, while discussing Requiem by Christina Georgina Rossetti, the professor devolved into another of her oddly personal narrations exploring the poem and its significance to her. It involved her brother, his murder, and her as a young woman in college attending his funeral on what she called the warmest and sunniest day she could remember. At first she was outraged but gradually she broke down—apparently at that funeral then again in front of the stunned class—when she realized that murder could and did take place under the bright and shining sun, where everyone could see. It was folly to think that terrible things happen only in the dark. That experience stayed with me and informed the first choice I made. Conrad’s Africa, the scene of so much death, so much killing, so much horror, would not be a dark place in the literal sense. The sun would shine there, in my images, as brightly and hotly as it does on the happiest of days and that would be the right way, the best way, to look unflinchingly at what Conrad is putting in front of us. Immediately, the world of the novel began to take shape, a place filled with bright acid greens, the patterns of leaves and the shadows of trees, a sickly diseased yellow sky rotten with the kind of sunlight that casts everything into a sharp and lacerating clarity. The first choice had been made.While Heart of Darkness is set in Africa during the rape of a continent and at the height of what amounted to a racially and economically driven genocide, what disturbed me the most is that these things are hardly confined to that part of the globe or even that period of time. All our history is stained with what Conrad so aptly described as “just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind.” I knew that in order illustrate this book truthfully, I had to find a way to show that what happens in Heart of Darkness is horrifyingly universal. That it doesn’t end there and will probably never end. That this wasn’t just the story of Europeans in Africa, it is the story of humanity, wherever we may go. I needed to find a way to show that at the bottom of it all, we are all complicit in this. We have all profited from it. To do that I had to take these pictures and pull them away from reality, away from what the viewer might be able to connect to a specific time or place or thing and make them something so odd that they could literally be anything. Only then would the names “Africa” and “Europe” and the concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” fall away so that the reader could see it for what it is—“robbery with violence” and “aggravated murder on a great scale.” Conrad’s Europeans became grotesqueries. Pale, bloated, fleshy monstrosities with gaping slavering mouths, huge brutal hands, and intentionally symbolic heads. Their victims, while perhaps marginally less monstrous, are gaunt and spectrally black. Shades of death, no strangers to superstition, hatred, and violence themselves, lurk furtively in the hidden spaces of a nightmare-green landscape overrun with conquerors, fanatics, and opportunists quick with the gun and the lash. The second choice had been made.But pictures do not move, they lie on the page frozen in time, static and dead. This is not a choice; it is a simple fact. And yet it was something I felt I could use to my advantage. Heart of Darkness, in spite of being a story about a journey up a river, is rife with a sense of paralysis, stasis, stillness, and futility. In his narration, Marlow relays image after image after image, all of which emphasize this dance of death taking place before him. On his way to Africa aboard a French steamer, he describes how “[w]e pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers—to take care of the custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved.” There is the awful feeling that no matter what is done, what effort is expended, it won’t matter at all. The sun will keep hammering down, the killing will continue, and the awful charade will go on and on. And the relentless dance of death continues, unceasingly and unmercifully. Again, Conrad puts it best when he writes of a warship incomprehensibly firing its cannon into the jungle “and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding.” This “touch of insanity” hangs over the book, the journey, and the final meeting with Kurtz like a cloud of flies on a corpse.It all eventually comes down to Kurtz. He is the dark polestar at the center of the novel, the rotting heart around which everything circles in the slow maelstrom. Kurtz almost proved to be my undoing. In Moby-Dick, Ahab is at least a kind of antihero whose insane pride and unwillingness to accept divine providence drive him on and on to lash out continually against an uncaring and unyielding universe. Kurtz gives nothing; he only takes. Kurtz is a disease for the reader, a rot that starts almost innocently but ever so slowly sinks deeper and deeper, cell by cell, into the brain like a cancer until what was there before is no longer known and all is Kurtz. Marlow’s curious synthesis of hatred for and terror and worship of Kurtz mirror the reader’s, I think, and definitely my own. It is said many times that Kurtz is “a remarkable man,” but it is not until the climax, the inevitable meeting, that this is made quite clear. Kurtz, a product of all of Europe and now safely nestled in the bosom of the wilderness, astride both worlds, had a vision that “was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. 'The horror!'” Initially we may react to this with disbelief and denial. But we can’t help eventually giving in until the surrender is near total. Having to live with this, having to think about Kurtz and his ideas every day for months, having to become complicit in bringing the man to some kind of life through these illustrations took a savage toll on me. Like Marlow, I became infected with his ideas. Like Marlow, I began to see Kurtz as a “remarkable man.” Like Marlow, who admits, “That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal,” I found in Kurtz a dark and welcoming mirror. It seems that Conrad has, in this tale, provided the key for all of us to unlock our own heart of darkness.And this can be seen, quite literally seen, in the illustrations. Kurtz begins as an icon, a severed head floating on a golden background crowned with a blood-red jewel embedded with ivory, the bleached-white skull-like face of a minor god. The adoration grew as his ideas took root and more and more of Kurtz is revealed—a gaunt and stricken colossus of a man, by no means unintentionally resembling Christ, hanging transcendentally in a green hell no longer brightened by the sun but instead stained with the blackness of his judgment. Kurtz, having retreated deeper and deeper into the wilderness, closer and closer toward that ultimate personal confrontation with reality, has not quietly faded into the solitude of his hard-won knowledge but instead, like a magnet, draws those in his orbit nearer and nearer. This is what it means to read Conrad. That is what it means to illustrate Conrad, and to bring his words into a different kind of life.Books always end. The reader can delay this in any number of ways, but the final page is always reached unless the story is abandoned. While I had read Heart of Darkness several times in the past, never before had I followed so closely, so uncomfortably, in the footsteps of Marlow. And never before had I felt the death grip of Kurtz so profoundly on both my waking thoughts and my troubled dreams. But, thankfully, it ended. Looking back on this body of work, this step-by-step journey to the heart of darkness and, hopefully, back again, I can see its shape better. I can see how each image was designed with one singular mood, and how that murderous intent was carried through and delivered upon. This book is for me, personally and artistically, a long and slow
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful. Short and Sweet with Tons of Meat By Jenna Rasmussen Reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a lot like running a 5K (3.2 miles) race. You start out slow and steady trying to get your pace and make your way through the convoluted mess of other racers, but by mile two you’re huffing and puffing and ready to quit because it’s a lot harder than you thought it would be. By the time you hit mile three you think you can’t possibly keep going until finally the endorphins kick in and you realize, hey, you’re actually having fun! Then before you know it the race is over, and you’re left with a sense of wonder and accomplishment at having run the whole thing. Most importantly you take away a new identity of yourself; you, my friend, are now a Runner.Just as a 5K is 3 miles, Heart of Darkness is divided into 3 parts. For me, the first part of the story was initially hard to get into because I found it difficult to adjust to Conrad’s dense writing style, and I found myself confused by Conrad's use of one narrator to begin the story and then the shift in point of view to the character of Marlow telling his own story. I read something about an interview and something about a river boat captain, but few things made sense. By the second part, I thought I was beginning to understand. Marlow’s predicament with his broken down boat and the puzzle pieces began to come together. To grasp the meaning, I looked at reviews and others’ critiques of the story, and I realized I might not be understanding what was going on. I moved into part 3 with a tentative understanding. The plot, muddy and dark, became tinted grey. Marlow finally meets the man I'd read about in pages before -- Mr. Kurtz, a man spoken of with a weird sense of awe. Marlow, this idealist, comes to understand that some really bad things are happening in his world. He wakens to the realities of duplicity and greed and how a wild land can corrupt a man. Emotion seeps into part 3 as Marlow comes to understand. He says, “I was, so to speak, numbered with the dead. It is strange how I accepted this unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms.” Heart of Darkness is about a man, broken by his experience and what he sees and learns in the Congo.To experience Heart of Darkness is to come away asking yourself who you are and what has your life shaped you to be? And just as running a 5K gives you a new identity of Runner, reading Heart of Darkness gives you a new identity of Self.
28 of 33 people found the following review helpful. Read it! By Jeremy Kingsbury This is an excellent book. I had no idea what I was getting into when I bought this on kindle, but after I started reading it I didn't want to stop. Sure it's written back in the 1800's and their writing style was different and this makes it more challeninging to read, but the story is amazing and you can learn a lot from this book and you can even relate it to things that are happening in our world today.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful. Imagery at it's best! By Lacy A first person narrative of a struggling steamboat sailor, struggling with his soul, struggling with his morals, struggling with his heart. A beautiful audible book performance. I highly recommend!
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