I'll get back to you..: July 2022

Saturday 23 July 2022

The Specials - You're Wondering Now

"The Hollow Men"

What is the point of this scene of Kurtz reciting T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men?" It serves the same function as the Gardenia speech: reversal of expectations. Kurtz is reading poetry in the midst of this savage war. And the kind of poetry he reads is extremely important because it reveals his character.

Coppola adds another level of complexity in relationship to Heart of Darkness. Kurtz also reads poetry to the Russian who was mesmerized by Kurtz' eloquence. But the poetry Kurtz reads is very different from the poetry Colonel Kurtz reads. The distinction is crucial in understanding how fundamentally different the two Kurtzs turn out to be.

Conrad's Kurtz reads love poetry and his own poetry. We never hear any of it but we can imagine the kind that is consistent with his character: romantic poety full of high sounding but empty phrases. Remember Marlow points out that Kurtz is blind to the emptiness of his beautiful rhetoric about bringing enlightenment and civilization to the savage Africans. Kurtz is "hollow at the core." So imagine the kind of poetry he reads.

Colonel Kurtz reads a different kind of poetry. We know that he read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J.F. Prufrock" and Rudyard Kipling's "If" to the Photojournalist. And in this scene he reads the first stanza of "The Hollow Men." As the title and the first stanza indicate, the poem is a withering indictment of the moral emptiness of the modern world: the empty heads and the empty speech. So what kind of a man reads these kinds of poems? A man who has self-awareness and an acute sense of the ironies and contradictions of the world. Certainly not the Kurtz of Heart of Darkness.

The final bit of cleverness that Coppola adds to the scene is a nice in-joke for anyone who has read the Eliot poem. The poem is Eliot's meditation on Heart of Darkness. The epigraph to the poem is a line from the novella: "Mistah Kurtz he dead." The fundamental image of the poem--hollow men--is taken from Marlow's words: Kurtz was "hollow at the core." Coppola has his Kurtz reading the poem about Conrad's Kurtz.

http://hartzog.org/j/apocalypsenowkurtzwillard.html

Saturday 16 July 2022

Liverpool Packet

“For the scene of suffering is a scene of joy when the suffering is past; and the silent reminiscence of hardships departed is sweeter than the presence of delight.”
― Herman Melville, Redburn