Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

I don’t envy Peter Kuper taking on the challenge of adapting Heart of Darkness. It’s one of those classic works that every well-read person knows forward and back. Not only are there a half-dozen famous scenes and dramatic lines that readers will already have their own imaginative reconstruction of, but there’s also Coppola’s Apocalypse Now playing somewhere in the background. Even if Marlon Brando’s plus-sized Colonel Kurtz doesn’t correspond to the emaciated figure in Conrad, I think it likely that most people see Brando when Marlow finally gets to the Inner Station, the end of the line.

Put another way, everyone has their own Heart of Darkness and all you can really ask is that an illustrator not colour outside the lines too much. For example, Kuper takes a couple of what I think are minor items from the text and leans on them pretty heavily. First there’s Marlow’s pipe, which he’s seen handling throughout. There is I think only one reference to Marlow smoking a pipe in the Conrad’s book, and that comes in one of the moments that takes us back outside of the main narrative. At the beginning of the story he doesn’t have a pipe because both his hands are described as placed palms outward like an idol. The other image is that of crocodiles in the jungle. I believe Conrad mentions alligators (which must be wrong) only once. In any event, I didn’t think of them as having as big a presence as they do here.

There was only one point though that I strongly disagreed with. This is Kuper’s rendering of the ship shelling the coast. I think Conrad makes it clear that the shelling, like the fusillade of gunfire that the pilgrims launch into the riverside jungle later, is totally useless. The jungle is like a giant green sponge that absorbs cannon- and gunfire without being affected in any visible way. But Kuper includes a panel from the native point of view that has Africans in the jungle running away from the cannon shells. This made no sense at all to me.

The visual motif that stood out the most was that of the spiral. This is the way the sun is presented throughout, and it’s also used for people’s eyes to show madness (as with the doctor who examines Marlow before his setting out, and for Kurtz at the end). It’s also the spiral snake that is the Congo River, and so gives the impression of a vortex that’s swallowing Marlow just as it’s already consumed Kurtz. My favourite motif though was the way the jungle is presented as a tapestry of foliage of faces and figures. This wallpaper effect works especially well because there’s no sharp distinction between blacks and whites but only shades of grey, giving the forest an urban-camouflage effect.

But overall I have to say I felt a lack of punch to the proceedings. Giving “The horror! The horror!” two double-page spreads seemed like Kuper was trying too hard to make up for something he really wasn’t feeling. But then, as Marlow insists, Kurtz is a voice, and how can any narrator, or artist, render that?

So it’s a responsible adaptation, but I came away thinking Kuper wasn’t a great fit for this material, as he was for his Kafka adaptations. It seems to me that Heart of Darkness needs something like that fantastic, psychedelic note of expressionism that Coppola and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro brought to it. Conrad’s prose can be maddeningly vague and ambiguous, but (and at the same time) it can also be precise, emotionally fraught, lurid, and bombastic. I wouldn’t call Kuper’s approach conservative here, but there’s something in Conrad he wasn’t reaching.

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