Someone asked the question of how Conrad might have
influenced noir.
1. With his heads mounted in the garden, Kurtz was a serial
killer. There's the connection to our favorite American
tendency.
2. OK, if you object he didn't necessarily kill them himself,
then Kurtz was a sort of Godfather, a mafioso of the Belgian
Congo. [Recent estimates put deaths of natives in that region
somewhere in the millions by WW I.]
3. Conrad helps transfuse hapless killer psychology, perhaps
germinated by Dostoevski, into modern fiction. Thinking here
of The Secret Agent, Victory, as well as HoD. [Secret Agent
made into Hitchcock's Sabotage.]
4. Graham Greene was haunted by Conrad (his own admission)
and, it seems to me, was espec. haunted by HoD when he helped
create one of the classic noir films, The Third Man. The city
as the jungle with eyes; Harry Lime as Kurtz.
5. Marlow's attraction to Kurtz, his characterizing Western
ideals as like idols we worship, possibly a Big Lie, just
like the "idea" of Western Civilization...I mean how noir do
you want to be? [Too bad this side of Heart of Darkness is
not aggressively taught in high schools.]
6. Marlow's characterizing his listeners as only straight
because their neighbors and the local policeman are watching
vie with some of the darkest things Twain used to say about
the human race (though I'll give Twain the award in this
department).
7. If Hemingway influenced HB fiction, there's at least the
possibility that Conrad influenced Hemingway. Think of
Hemingway's worst moments, when he has a character
philosophizing, like the infamous "they'll get you in the
end" (loose memory here) speech in Farewell to Arms or the
hokey symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea... Let's blame
Conrad. Or EH, trying for profoundity in a style that resists
the vagueness necessary to carry it off.
8. And, if you look for them, there are actually little noir
gems in Conrad: a murdered porter as an improvement in the
trail; Kurtz' collection of heads as showing a "certain lack
of restraint"; guns that squirt lead into a hippo who seems
to live on; the burial of Kurtz as [they] "buried something
in a muddy hole."
Bill Hagen
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