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By Andrew Francis,
University of Cambridge
Heart
of Darkness: A Graphic Novel, adapted by David Zane Mairowitz
and illustrated by Catherine Anyango (SelfMadeHero, 2010). £12.99.
Adaptations of works, even more than
translations, entail significant compromises in order to be realized
in the new form. This is all the more so when an adaptation is inter-media.
In the case of a graphic novel based on an original novel, the added
visual element forms a partnership with an abridged text, and this
new partnership’s success can be viewed as a weighing up of
the addition against the subtraction. If of some combinations it
can be said that 2+2=5 - the effect of the combination surpassing
the effects of the individual contributory elements – can
in this case 2 (the graphics) + 1 (the necessarily abridged text)
= perhaps 4?
“Heart of Darkness” as a text has,
more than any other work by Conrad, been subjected to reductive
readings and the extraction of “messages.” One aspect
of this treatment has been a conflation of Conrad with Marlow. Another
has been the condensing of a complex, subtle, and often ambivalent
text into a number of apparently simple truths. Thanks to a balanced
and thoughtful selection from the original text and from Conrad’s
“Congo Diary,” the graphic novel represents well the
texture of the original.
Nor does the selection exclude some of the more
complex writing of the original, for example: “He had kicked
himself loose of the earth. He had kicked the very earth to pieces...”
[p. 98],1 and, one of the central questions of the novel,
“What were we who had strayed in here?” [p. 39]. Nevertheless,
one misses so many passages from the novella, including some sharply
critical of European supposed civilization, as when Marlow says
of Kurtz’s memory: “I’ve done enough for it to
give me the indisputable right to lay it if I choose for an everlasting
rest in the dustbin of progress, amongst all the sweepings and,
figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of civilisation”
(96.6-9).
The black-and-white illustrations often powerfully
support the selections of text, helping us to “see the story”
[p. 41]. But that story, Marlow says, is “a dream –
that notion of being captured by ... the incredible” [p. 41].
The illustrations to an extent convey something of this unreality
through their gloomy, indistinct images; tusks of ivory appear impenetrable,
malign [pp. 76, 87], appearing as if engulfing bowels. The original
text’s problematizing of truth, vision, and comprehension
is well served in this respect. White faces are, appropriately,
frequently ghastly and distorted in this gloom.
The graphic novel commences with images of dominoes;
drawn huge, they obstruct the view and suggest the elements of play,
uncertainty, and arbitrariness that infuse Marlow’s tale,
one of his “inconclusive experiences” [p. 7]. The illustrations
also on occasion impress on the reader features which in the original
text may not necessarily register as strongly. This is the case
with broken equipment, which symbolizes the fractured impotence
of European “improvement”: while the locomotive boiler,
railway truck, and holed steamer may be familiar, the illustration
of the wantonly broken drainpipes [p. 22] arrests one’s attention
with the implications of a so-called civilizing mission that cannot,
or will not, convey away possibly even its own foulness. Equipment
and the oppressed are carcasses alike. The only functioning equipment
is iron collars and chains. (The brickmaker who cannot make bricks,
suggesting figuratively the impossibility of any literally “constructive”
European behaviour in the stations, is unfortunately absent from
the graphic novel.)
By contrast with the portrayal of the Europeans, it is the dignity
of the Africans that, in keeping with the original text, the illustrations
convey, people whose sounds are beyond the ability of the Europeans
to understand. Marlow ascribes to them possibly “as profound
a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country” (61.38-39),
and whose response to the “invasion” (104:15) is “grief”
(86.26) and “sorrow” (87.28).
Although the gloom of the images recalls the “darkness”
of the novella’s title, and is used to imaginative effect,
it comes to feel an overworked device. The original text emphasizes
not only gloom but also, from time to time, the brilliance and harshness
of the light, so that “the great cause” (57.20-21) portrayed
in the novella is also played out in an unforgiving brightness in
which the Europeans are, with fierce irony, cast as “pilgrims”
in what in fact is an invasion. The graphic novel does not allow
for the shock, and sense of unreality, provided by the “delayed
decoding” of the original (for example, the death of the helmsman),
even though its images convey shockingly the reality of death.
An important reservation about the illustrations
is that Marlow’s face is depicted as Conrad’s, a view
also expressed by Mairowitz in the prefatory note. The intertextual
use of Conrad’s “Congo Diary” in the graphic narrative
further complicates this issue. While this may not trouble the general
reader of the graphic novel, the implications of this unhelpful
conflation of author and narrator are a serious matter for critics
as well as, for readers in general, for an understanding of Conrad’s
art and for a just sense of what Conrad is writing in “Heart
of Darkness.”
The Swedish steamer captain remarks of “these
government chaps”: “It is funny what some people will
do for a few francs a month. I wonder what becomes of that kind
when it goes up country?” (56.1, 3-5). “Heart of Darkness”
attempts, among other things, to answer just that question, and
in doing so reveals as much about the colonial subject as about
his role as oppressor, his evil, and his baleful effect on those
he comes to dominate in the Belgian Congo as well as in his intrusions
elsewhere (“The French had one of their wars going on thereabouts”
[p. 16]).2 This graphic novel represents anew, with a certain appeal,
what Conrad writes, and should be an encouragement to its readers
then to turn to Conrad’s novella itself.
1 References to “Heart of
Darkness”: A Graphic Novel appear in square brackets.
References to ‘Heart of Darkness’ are by page/line
number to the critical text of the novella in Youth, Heart
of Darkness, The End of the Tether, ed. Owen Knowles (2010)
in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad.
2 For a valuable discussion of this
aspect, see David Trotter, "Colonial Subjects,"
Critical Quarterly 32.3 (1990): 3-20.
© 2011 Andrew Francis
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