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Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness
In Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness, James Reich discloses the contents of the papers that Kurtz entrusts to Marlow and the end of Joseph Conrad’s canonical novella. Drawing on clues left in Conrad’s account, the novel anticipates and dovetails with the arrival of Marlow at Kurtz’s ivory station in the Congo. Giving voice to one of the most enigmatic characters in the literary canon, Reich presents meticulous and controversial solutions to the origins, mystery and messianic deterioration of Mistah Kurtz: company man, elephant man, poet, feral god. Appalling rivalries, murder, fragile loyalties, doubt and desire shroud the pages of this book—part adventure, part desperate confession. Filtering the strangeness of Apocalypse Now! and historical accounts of the ivory trade, this irreverent, audacious endeavor lends meat and madness to the ghosts of the Congo, names that which had been nameless, and renders this Season in Hell in crystalline clarity.
- GenresEbooks
190 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 2016
3 people are currently reading
61 people want to read
About the author
James Reich
18 books62 followersJames Reich is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. He is the author of The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books, September 2023), The Song My Enemies Sing, Soft Invasions, Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness (Anti-Oedipus Press), Bombshell, and I, Judas (Counterpoint/Soft Skull). His psychoanalytic monograph Wilhelm Reich versus The Flying Saucers is forthcoming from Punctum Books. He is also the author of The Holly King, a limited-edition collection of poetry.
James is a contributor to SPIN Magazine, and his nonfiction has been published by Salon, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, International Times, Sensitive Skin Magazine, The Weeklings, Entropy, The Nervous Breakdown, Fiction Advocate, and others. His account of innovations in British science fiction is published by Bloomsbury in its ‘Decades’ series, The 1960s. His work has also appeared in the editions of Deep Ends: The J.G. Ballard Anthology, Akashic Books’ ‘Noir’ series, and various anthologies of fiction and criticism.
James was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire in the West of England, and has been a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 2009. He was greatly influenced by early exposure to the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and by a small book on dadaism, and later by Andy Warhol, the Beats, science fiction, psychoanalysis, punk rock, and the films of Ken Russell and Nic Roeg. Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, J.G. Ballard, Anne Sexton, Paul Bowles, D.H. Lawrence, and Lars von Trier are also vital constellations in his work.
James is a contributor to SPIN Magazine, and his nonfiction has been published by Salon, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, International Times, Sensitive Skin Magazine, The Weeklings, Entropy, The Nervous Breakdown, Fiction Advocate, and others. His account of innovations in British science fiction is published by Bloomsbury in its ‘Decades’ series, The 1960s. His work has also appeared in the editions of Deep Ends: The J.G. Ballard Anthology, Akashic Books’ ‘Noir’ series, and various anthologies of fiction and criticism.
James was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire in the West of England, and has been a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 2009. He was greatly influenced by early exposure to the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and by a small book on dadaism, and later by Andy Warhol, the Beats, science fiction, psychoanalysis, punk rock, and the films of Ken Russell and Nic Roeg. Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, J.G. Ballard, Anne Sexton, Paul Bowles, D.H. Lawrence, and Lars von Trier are also vital constellations in his work.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 5, 2016
The cover of this book is worth the price of the ticket, but I was also dead keen to read it, having become reasonably well acquainted with Conrad’s infamous character through many readings over a long time. It also helped that I was on holiday at home during a rather humid and mosquito-plagued midsummer, so the setting was right for reading this remarkably densely textured but, dare I say it, meticulously restrained novel.
The best way I can describe MISTAH KURTZ! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness is as a critical intervention, an appraisal and an amplification of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The ‘unspeakable’ is spoken in a manner that reminds us of the murderous European corruption and complicity that Conrad could not fully name.
You can read my full review here: http://pippatandy.com/reviews. For now, buy the book and read it!
The best way I can describe MISTAH KURTZ! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness is as a critical intervention, an appraisal and an amplification of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The ‘unspeakable’ is spoken in a manner that reminds us of the murderous European corruption and complicity that Conrad could not fully name.
You can read my full review here: http://pippatandy.com/reviews. For now, buy the book and read it!
March 2, 2016
Part adventure, part historical Mr. Reich pulls out thick and heavy prose. Telling a story of a man from his teenage days, his time spent in a sanitarium, and then a wild ride at sea.
This book moves a little slow for my top notch liking but I really enjoyed the author's vivid character description and poetic settings the adventure takes us readers.
Recommended!!
This book moves a little slow for my top notch liking but I really enjoyed the author's vivid character description and poetic settings the adventure takes us readers.
Recommended!!
April 26, 2021
COLONIALISM, THE GREATEST GENOCIDAL CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY EVER
The strangest novel you can imagine, trying to complete the beginning and the end of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. It has to be in phase with the horror of the original novel and it is, but it no longer is a testimony about what colonialism was in Africa at the end of the 19th century. It is a modern reconstruction of what colonialism could have been in such dark, very dark times when the worst ever crime against humanity from genocidal Europe – soon to be joined by America – engaged in this colonial adventure.
First, the main agents of this brutal colonization of Africa, here the Belgian Congo, are all systematically shown as monstrous delinquents from birth with parents just as bad as bad can be, just stopping short of killing their children. I guess they found more pleasure in torturing them, making them suffer, turning them into misfits, and misfits they are. Kurtz first of all but far from being the only one. They look for some kind of valorizing caper or adventure or mission on this earth to compensate for their failings and they find it in the service of the “Company” that provides them with a uniform, a worldwide organization that accompanies them to the very heart of wilderness with only one mission: to kill – ah the pleasure in this word – as many elephants they can to just extract their two tusks and send them back to Europe to become the fashionable jewels the rich there will be wearing when going to the opera.
No one can imagine the horror they discover.
In Gibraltar where they stop on their way to Kinshasa, the main character discovers “… the broken black men. Each of the n****** wore a noose around his throat that connected him to the slave before him and after him. Their shoulders were raw from whipping, and the reddening peninsula of Gibraltar now swelled blood all around me. The men grimaced, their white teeth large in their sunken faces, eyes barely open to the scene about them… The Arab pushed the leading man between the shoulders, choking him as he jerked away from the man shackled and roped behind him. There were nine of them, all painfully, adjusting their steps.” (page 79)
And it goes on with more remarks and descriptions: “What was it I witnessed in the bondage of all this negritude – resignation, patience, or absolute abjection?” (page 96) and again: “I saw a gang of N****** leaning on shovels at the lip of a small crater. There must have been six or seven of them conscripted there, chained together in iron collars that drew rings of blood from their throats when they walked or worked out of rhythm. As I took them in, another emerged from the broad shadow of a palm. This wone was not enchained but wore with European formality the uniform of the Company. It was in his hand that I first witnessed the chicotte – a six-foot whip wound from hippopotamus hide – in use. The diggers had not seen, nor heard him approaching their flank, and he lashed their ribs and shoulder with a savage disinterest, as though he were directing stubborn beasts. The whip splitting their skins became merely another of the dissonant percussions of the station. The diggers mouthed their agonies silently… I understood that it was a grave… These crater graves were meant for more than one man… Partly obscured with dirt was a wicked tangle of corpses… Their eyes fixed, dilated, the shocked sclera turned to a dull ivory. Some of them appeared to have fallen into an exhausted sleep, while others were mutilated into nightmarish deportment. Wrists without hands, projected from the pile. Palates without lower jaws gaped against the mud sliding into the pit. Either they had been executed or they had been blown up to smithereens by the dynamite detonating through the forest…” (page 99-100)
Kurtz was deranged by his infancy, childhood, and teenage but after that he no longer was deranged. He became completely berserk. It is beyond any kind of understanding that Kurtz could be only considered as a rotten apple in the basket along with many other white apples that were not rotten and would come back from Africa to produce a new generation of children and adults. Kurtz is living his PTcolonialSS through by becoming a being beyond repair, beyond reprieve, beyond salvation and he is taken away by the Company and all the crimes he committed will be buried in his file since he provided the company with so much more ivory than anyone else in the world, even if in his ranting and raving he imagined himself as a God or as an elephant. For him, there is only death at the end of his road but 100% of these colonists (minus one individual out of so many) will go back to England and Europe, insane but respected in their heroic dedication to the enrichment of the West.
Imagine the descendants of all these white colonists or all other white slave masters, how they inherited such trauma of white supremacy that they cannot even imagine – still today – sitting next to a black person in a restaurant, a bus, a train carriage, a plane, or even a church, etc. Then you can start understanding how difficult it has to be for them to accept the present turning point in our life, in our world, when white or western supremacy are both at the same time coming down the historical flush of a pandemic.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
The strangest novel you can imagine, trying to complete the beginning and the end of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. It has to be in phase with the horror of the original novel and it is, but it no longer is a testimony about what colonialism was in Africa at the end of the 19th century. It is a modern reconstruction of what colonialism could have been in such dark, very dark times when the worst ever crime against humanity from genocidal Europe – soon to be joined by America – engaged in this colonial adventure.
First, the main agents of this brutal colonization of Africa, here the Belgian Congo, are all systematically shown as monstrous delinquents from birth with parents just as bad as bad can be, just stopping short of killing their children. I guess they found more pleasure in torturing them, making them suffer, turning them into misfits, and misfits they are. Kurtz first of all but far from being the only one. They look for some kind of valorizing caper or adventure or mission on this earth to compensate for their failings and they find it in the service of the “Company” that provides them with a uniform, a worldwide organization that accompanies them to the very heart of wilderness with only one mission: to kill – ah the pleasure in this word – as many elephants they can to just extract their two tusks and send them back to Europe to become the fashionable jewels the rich there will be wearing when going to the opera.
No one can imagine the horror they discover.
In Gibraltar where they stop on their way to Kinshasa, the main character discovers “… the broken black men. Each of the n****** wore a noose around his throat that connected him to the slave before him and after him. Their shoulders were raw from whipping, and the reddening peninsula of Gibraltar now swelled blood all around me. The men grimaced, their white teeth large in their sunken faces, eyes barely open to the scene about them… The Arab pushed the leading man between the shoulders, choking him as he jerked away from the man shackled and roped behind him. There were nine of them, all painfully, adjusting their steps.” (page 79)
And it goes on with more remarks and descriptions: “What was it I witnessed in the bondage of all this negritude – resignation, patience, or absolute abjection?” (page 96) and again: “I saw a gang of N****** leaning on shovels at the lip of a small crater. There must have been six or seven of them conscripted there, chained together in iron collars that drew rings of blood from their throats when they walked or worked out of rhythm. As I took them in, another emerged from the broad shadow of a palm. This wone was not enchained but wore with European formality the uniform of the Company. It was in his hand that I first witnessed the chicotte – a six-foot whip wound from hippopotamus hide – in use. The diggers had not seen, nor heard him approaching their flank, and he lashed their ribs and shoulder with a savage disinterest, as though he were directing stubborn beasts. The whip splitting their skins became merely another of the dissonant percussions of the station. The diggers mouthed their agonies silently… I understood that it was a grave… These crater graves were meant for more than one man… Partly obscured with dirt was a wicked tangle of corpses… Their eyes fixed, dilated, the shocked sclera turned to a dull ivory. Some of them appeared to have fallen into an exhausted sleep, while others were mutilated into nightmarish deportment. Wrists without hands, projected from the pile. Palates without lower jaws gaped against the mud sliding into the pit. Either they had been executed or they had been blown up to smithereens by the dynamite detonating through the forest…” (page 99-100)
Kurtz was deranged by his infancy, childhood, and teenage but after that he no longer was deranged. He became completely berserk. It is beyond any kind of understanding that Kurtz could be only considered as a rotten apple in the basket along with many other white apples that were not rotten and would come back from Africa to produce a new generation of children and adults. Kurtz is living his PTcolonialSS through by becoming a being beyond repair, beyond reprieve, beyond salvation and he is taken away by the Company and all the crimes he committed will be buried in his file since he provided the company with so much more ivory than anyone else in the world, even if in his ranting and raving he imagined himself as a God or as an elephant. For him, there is only death at the end of his road but 100% of these colonists (minus one individual out of so many) will go back to England and Europe, insane but respected in their heroic dedication to the enrichment of the West.
Imagine the descendants of all these white colonists or all other white slave masters, how they inherited such trauma of white supremacy that they cannot even imagine – still today – sitting next to a black person in a restaurant, a bus, a train carriage, a plane, or even a church, etc. Then you can start understanding how difficult it has to be for them to accept the present turning point in our life, in our world, when white or western supremacy are both at the same time coming down the historical flush of a pandemic.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
January 14, 2016
Mistah Kurtz! is an intensely decadent study of one of the most mysterious characters in the Western canon. The prose is as dense and colorful as the Conoglian forests and tells a story as compelling as its predecessor. If you enjoyed Heart of Darkness, Reich's prelude is a must-read.
FULL REVIEW HERE
FULL REVIEW HERE
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews