The horror, the whore

When I was a Freshman in college, I took a class, as part of my English major, on literary theory. It was one of my favorite classes, taught by a short Eastern European woman named Michelle Tokarczyk, who spoke with a light accent and scurried around the room like a little hamster. The class covered the gambit of literary theory, from New Criticism to Reader-response criticism, from Post-Colonialism to Post-Structuralism and Deconstructism. It can rather overwhelm a young mind with the problem of how one can come to any sort of interpretation of a difficult text and was quite interesting.

In our class, we had a rather outspoken student, a woman probably in her junior year, with brown, tightly-curled hair and a certain sarcastic and sardonic way of speaking. At the time, we were reading the Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, a classic story that if you haven't read it, you should. If you're familiar with it, you probably know that it's the basis for Apocalypse Now, which, though only loosely based on the book, is entirely worth seeing on its own right.

The main plot is that the narrator, Charles Marlow, is on assignment to steam up the Congo into the interior of Africa to fetch a rogue ivory trader named Kurtz. In the end, hate to spoil it for you, Marlow finds Kurtz, but Kurtz dies on the way back, as he is dying, he says his famous final words, "The Horror! The Horror!" This is meant to be a reflection of the horror of life or the horror of the situation or something mysterious related to the darkness of the title of the book.

Sometime much later, Marlow goes and visits Kurtz's fiancee. She is unsurprisingly interested in knowing whatever Marlow knows about Kurtz, but Marlow is reluctant to tell her the whole truth, since it's rather unpleasant. Kurtz had really gone deeply into the dark and unpleasant side of life. She then asks Marlow, what Kurtz's last words were, and Marlow says he last words were her name. This being a literary theory class, our tiny professor asked us in her Eastern European accent why it was that Marlow told the fiancee that Kurtz's last words were about her. At this point, the brown-haired student pipes up and says, "Maybe his last words, 'the horror, the horror' were about her." The class laughed and then settled down and got back to the serious business of class. Of course, despite the overwhelming variety of methods of literary criticism one can be safe in saying that there are certain interpretations that one can dismiss as unlikely.

When I was a Freshman in college, I took a class, as part of my English major, on literary theory. It was one of my favorite classes, taught by a short Eastern European woman named Michelle Tokarczyk, who spoke with a light accent and scurried around the room like a little hamster. The class covered the gambit of literary theory, from New Criticism to Reader-response criticism, from Post-Colonialism to Post-Structuralism and Deconstructism. It can rather overwhelm a young mind with the problem of how one can come to any sort of interpretation of a difficult text and was quite interesting.

In our class, we had a rather outspoken student, a woman probably in her junior year, with brown, tightly-curled hair and a certain sarcastic and sardonic way of speaking. At the time, we were reading the Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, a classic story that if you haven't read it, you should. If you're familiar with it, you probably know that it's the basis for Apocalypse Now, which, though only loosely based on the book, is entirely worth seeing on its own right.

The main plot is that the narrator, Charles Marlow, is on assignment to steam up the Congo into the interior of Africa to fetch a rogue ivory trader named Kurtz. In the end, hate to spoil it for you, Marlow finds Kurtz, but Kurtz dies on the way back, as he is dying, he says his famous final words, "The Horror! The Horror!" This is meant to be a reflection of the horror of life or the horror of the situation or something mysterious related to the darkness of the title of the book.

Sometime much later, Marlow goes and visits Kurtz's fiancee. She is unsurprisingly interested in knowing whatever Marlow knows about Kurtz, but Marlow is reluctant to tell her the whole truth, since it's rather unpleasant. Kurtz had really gone deeply into the dark and unpleasant side of life. She then asks Marlow, what Kurtz's last words were, and Marlow says he last words were her name. This being a literary theory class, our tiny professor asked us in her Eastern European accent why it was that Marlow told the fiancee that Kurtz's last words were about her. At this point, the brown-haired student pipes up and says, "Maybe his last words, 'the horror, the horror' were about her." The class laughed and then settled down and got back to the serious business of class. Of course, despite the overwhelming variety of methods of literary criticism one can be safe in saying that there are certain interpretations that one can dismiss as unlikely.

The horror, the whore