Opinion on “Youth” (1898) and related work
- Spin-off: The Heart of Darkness (1899)
- Adaptation: Apocalypse Now (1979)
- Spin-off: Lord Jim (1900)
“Youth” (1898
)
Joseph Conrad (writer).
‣ The Heart of Darkness (1899)
Joseph Conrad (writer).
More on Charles Marlow.
Thomas Thornycroft’s statue of Boudica and her bare-breasted daughters did not yet exist when Conrad wrote The Heart of Darkness. One inscription on the statue’s plinth, made by Thomas Graham Jackson, is from “Boadicea: An Ode” (1782). It refers unironically to the fact that the Celtic Iceni terrorist was slain by the Romans before her British descendants built an empire even bigger than Rome.
The statue was erected in 1902. This book, which came out in Blackwood’s Magazine three years earlier, opens with a scene from Roman Britain that undercuts the plinth. It’s not about Boudica at all, but the name of that queen of the Iceni is a lot like the name “Victoria”. Both refer to victory. The Iceni rose against the Roman Empire when the untested teenager Nero became emperor, and did so well against them that the Romans seriously considered abandoning its foggy British conquests. If Boudica had achieved a lasting peace, Victoria’s more horrifying empire would probably not have happened.
The darkness of the book’s title is colonialism, as a psychological force that brings out a cruel atavism in the colonizer. However, the heart of darkness is not the anonymized setting of the Congo Free State. In 1902, the same year that the novel came out in hardback, Thornycroft’s ridiculous statue was erected at the site of the heart, near an old Roman wall of what was once Londinium.
References here: “The Hollow Men” (1925), Lord of the Flies (1954), Exterminate All the Brutes (1992), Time Team (1994), King Kong (2005).
‣‣ Apocalypse Now (1979
)
As good as this is, even on its own terms, it says very little that wasn’t said in MASH (1970).
References here: Full Metal Panic: Fumoffu (2003).
fiction moving picture adaptation
‣ Lord Jim (1900)
Joseph Conrad (writer).
The scene of the near-destruction of the Patna is so extremely well written that the narrative can only lose steam from there.
References here: Force Majeure (2014).