Like Dickens before him, Eliot tries to induce his audience, each person there, to acknowledge in his secret self a capacity for violence, in the same way that Kurtz faces up to the horror of savagery in himself and all men beneath a veneer of civility. Kurtz has this insight as he confronts mortality. The report, ‘Mistah Kurtz–he dead’, is the epigraph to ‘The Hollow Men’ (one of the last touches to this poem, which Eliot completed and published in November 1925).
It was Eliot’s second use of an epigraph from Heart of Darkness. The first, the original epigraph to The Waste Land, had been ‘The horror! the horror!’ The reader is persuaded to bear witness, like Conrad’s fictional counterpart returned to Europe and moving through a sepulchral city, maddened by his encounter with what lurks in men’s hearts: ‘I daresay,’ he mutters, ‘I was not very well at that time.’ To see brings on mental breakdown.
No comments:
Post a Comment