Purely by coincidence, Kelly Sedinger and I both read Heart of Darkness. Sometime last year I saw it on Project Gutenberg’s Top 100 list and thought it might be interesting but it took me several months to get around to downloading and reading it.
I don’t have much to say about it. I didn’t dislike it but I didn’t like it a lot either. There’s one thing in the book that especially bothered me – the descriptions of the “silence” of the African jungle.
The current ran smooth and swift, but a dumb immobility sat on
the banks. The living trees, lashed together by the creepers and every
living bush of the undergrowth, might have been changed into stone,
even to the slenderest twig, to the lightest leaf. It was not sleep–it
seemed unnatural, like a state of trance. Not the faintest sound of any
kind could be heard.
I have never been to Africa and according to Wikipedia Joseph Conrad did travel up the Congo by steamboat, but I find this extremely hard to believe. When I step outside my back door on a summer night here in Oklahoma what I hear is far from silence. The chorus of frogs and crickets is actually loud. So, I find it hard to believe that the African jungle is ever silent. We know many different kinds of animals live there including insects and amphibians. Surely something is always making noise there at night. I’m sure it was just for dramatic effect but it’s unrealistic and that little detail got stuck in my mind and kept bugging me all through the book.
January 25th, 2012 - 11:51 am
Yeah, Florida back yards are pretty loud too, and they can be pretty jungly. Or maybe he was doing that 19th century thing of not counting nature sounds in the wilderness as real sounds — you know, as opposed to the sounds of “civilization” where people are talking, banging on things, carriage wheels are creaking, and so on. Or maybe he meant that the jungle was unnaturally silent — as if something scary was going on that made all the natural noises stop. (It’s a common trope in literature for a scene in a wood or forest to have that thing where the natural sounds stop when an intruding human speaks to loudly or moves suddenly or something. Then when the humans shut up the insects and whatever start up again. I must say the few times I’ve been in the woods I’ve never observed this to happen. Maybe nature isn’t afraid of me.)