Sinopsis
By now, more than a century after its first publication in 1899, Heart of Darkness is indisputably a “classic” text. This is both good and bad. The advantages are clear: a “classic” continues to be read, if only because it has already been read again and again and has thereby become part of the cultural air we breathe. If authors generally intend anything, it is that their works survive beyond their passing. Demonstrating a capacity to be interpreted in many different ways (some of these perhaps not imaginable at the time of writing) is how a text lives on. Heart of Darkness is a “classic” not because it has an immutable meaning that has endured for several generations but because readers have been able to attribute so many different meanings to it. The disadvantages of “classic” status may be less obvious but are nevertheless real and demonstrable, and Heart of Darkness has suffered from them as well. A text that has been read and analyzed and discussed as thoroughly as has Conrad’s short novel runs the risk of becoming so familiar that it grows tired, losing its ability to surprise, please, or give rise to thought. A classic text also sets itself up as a target to be shot down—to be demystified for its complicity with prevailing ideologies whose interests are served by its preservation (and may, in the view of suspicious-minded critics, be the reason for its veneration). Especially after Marlon Brando’s performance as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the once resounding words “the horror, the horror” have become a cliché. For that very reason (and perhaps ironically), some of the scathing attacks that have recently been directed at Heart of Darkness—exposing it as a racist, sexist, or imperialist text—have made it more interesting by showing new and unexpected ways of reading it and by revivifying the critical debates through which it is preserved. Attacking and demystifying a classic text can, paradoxically, give it a new lease on life.
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