When I was about 14, my parents bought me, as a Chanukah gift, the Joseph Conrad novel, Heart of Darkness, which I soon proceeded to read -- after a fashion. What I mean by that last phrase is that although I certainly went through all of the pages of the book and took in all of the words, if you would have asked me what I came away with from the book, my response would have been: precious little.
Why I bothered to read an entire book that I really didn't understand at all escapes me. I have certainly been known to abandon books in the middle. For example, after adoring Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 900-page sprawl The Brothers Karamazov, I next attempted Crime and Punishment, and when I found that book inaccessible, I put it down, after a 150-page investment.
On the other hand, I do have a streak of stubborn tenacity. I went through a George Orwell period in high school, thoroughly enjoying Animal Farm, 1984, Keep The Aspidistra Flying and Burmese Days. When I then tackled his The Road To Wigan Pier, which, unlike the other works, was not a novel but rather a collection of essays on socialism, I bravely plodded through the entire tome, even though it largely went over my head.
And when I was in my Somerset Maugham phase, during which I happily devoured his four volumes of short stories, as well as his novels Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge and The Moon and Sixpence, I eventually found myself face to face with his memoir, The Summing Up, which I found inscrutable, but which, again, I nevertheless muddled through.
Back to Conrad. Flash-forward a year. English class. Our teacher announces that the next novel we will be studying will be Heart of Darkness, by the author Joseph Conrad.
A loud Ohhhh noooooooo! immediately rings through the classroom. All eyes turn to the source of said sad groan: moi. I relate to my curious classmates that I had already read the book and it was absolutely dreadful. (No doubt, a secondary reason for that groan was boastfulness, that I was such a well-read man-of-letters that my intake of literature included even obscure novels by authors that nobody else in my class had even heard of.)
Our teacher gave us a few days to read the novel, and then, before we began to study it, gave us a very brief quiz, consisting of a few very basic plot questions.
Receiving a failing grade on this quiz, which was designed simply to see whether we had read the book, on a book that I had by now read not once but twice, was certainly an interesting experience for me.
Meanwhile, a fellow classmate, who admittedly did not even crack the book open, aced the quiz. His secret? He told us that he had seen the film Apocalypse Now, which was based on the novel.
(This in turn reminds me of the occasion when our teacher gave us a similar quiz on a different novel, and the highest grade in the class had been attained by a different classmate, who had also eschewed the novel, but who had managed to get hold of the comic book version.)
At any rate, for the next few weeks, we studied the novel in class. And even though my own reading of the novel, twice!, had led to very few insights for me, when our teacher explained to us the various themes which the novel addressed, I gradually found myself increasingly fascinated by all of the profundities that it touched upon, such weighty matters as altruism, hypocrisy, man's inhumanity to man and the very nature of evil.
By the time we had concluded our unit on this book, I was positively enthralled with it. So much so that I resolved to myself with considerable enthusiasm:
This has been such a wonderfully illuminating experience! Now that, thanks to my perspicacious teacher, I completely understand all of the complex motifs of the novel, I am going to go back and read it again, so that the words will finally come alive to me, and I will be able to imbibe their profound wisdom!
Armed with my newfound erudition, I then eagerly proceeded to read the novel for the third time.
And did not understand one word.
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