On Style and First Impressions

Reading J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is quite the different experience from reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The fact that the novel is written in the present voice is very interesting. The reader witnesses the action as it happens -- quite unlike the memories being retold in Heart of Darkness. As discussed in class, this prevents most foreshadowing and gives the reader an eerie uncertainty of what might happen later on in the novel.

Waiting for the Barbarians reads very quickly. Most of the sentences are short and to the point -- which is a far cry from the lengthy, flowery sentences of Conrad’s, who seems to delight in listing adjective after adjective.

This is, indeed, another detail which differentiates the two works of literature: Coetzee’s lack of long descriptive passages. Sure, there are small portions of description, however, the action is always moving forward. Each sentence and phrase seems to hold something of significance to either setting, character, plot, or theme. These full sentences make it extremely unbeneficial to become distracted while reading the novel, or to merely skim over lines. Missing a sentence could cause the reader to miss crucial bits of information and leave him or her lost within the plot. (Wait…. What just happened? When did he leave the granary? And where did those people come from?)

The text is also broken up frequently into portions of a few pages by pairs of asterisks, which allow the reader frequent breaks and gives the illusion of an even faster progression through the novel.

Overall, though, I seem to be enjoying Waiting for the Barbarians quite a bit. I am very much a fan of the asterisk breaks as mentioned in the previous paragraph. (I was never one for long chapters. They make my progress seem much slower.) I look forward to the completion of the text and its discussion in class. (319)

Happy Thanksgiving (Break)!

On "To Boldly Go" and Heart of Darkness

Notes on Linda J. Dryden's "To Boldly Go": Heart of Darkness and Popular Culture

-Heart of Darkness is a novella that has not yet been "closed" because the story is still relevant in the 21st Century.

-The story continues to be re birthed over and over again through parodies and references in popular culture.

-There is "a broader interdependence between popular culture and some of our most valued literary products."

-Without Heart of Darkness, either Apocalypse Now would never have been made, or it would have been a completely different film. Less powerful. Less enduring.

-Did Conrad's work continue to be popular because of its lasting literary merit? Or was it Coppola's Apocalypse Now that renewed interest in the novella?

-"In a sense, a kind of two-way process is enacted here whereby literature is influencing the more populist media of the cinema, which itself is reflecting that literature back at an audience who subsequently find a new relevance in a 'old masterpiece' "

-"High" culture, as it is called, seems to be seeping into popular culture which blurs the dividing line between the two.

-Star Trek uses the same themes and plot points that Heart of Darkness uses. Africans are replaced with alien species, however, both raise the same questions regarding race relations and colonialism.

-Popular culture cannot exist without "high" culture to draw upon.

-"The point is that without the elite products of our culture, such as literature, popular culture itself would be impoverished, lacking in cultural reference points on which to base its narratives."

-Heart of Darkness is apparently "one of the most frequently quoted texts within popular culture and media."

"It has become part of our cultural heritage."

On Closure and Stability

While the last section of The Sound and the Fury does not close the novel definitely -- many ends are left open and possibility for the future still remains -- one aspect of the section does help give the novel a base and some form of closure. This device is, of course, the use of a third-person narrative. By leaving behind the stream-of-consciousness method used in the first three sections, William Faulkner creates a foundation which offers the reader a small portion of -- if one can say this in regard to the Compson family. -- stability. Abandoning the chaos and disorder of the minds of the Compson men, the reader is finally able to see the Compson family in a third-person panorama. By disengaging the reader with the characters, Faulkner allows the reader to look back over the novel as a whole and put together -- within his/her own mind -- the entire tragedy of the Compson family. The reader sees each event in chronological order, piecing together the story bit by bit and finally is able to see the entire arch of the novel. In this way, the last sections offers closure -- closure that the novel would indeed lack were the story to end with yet more twisted memories. (212)