(Trans)fusions of Conrad’s darkness: Selected adaptations of Heart of Darkness

Abstract

Heart of Darkness, due to its semantic complexity, interpretative openness and universal thematic interests, has been frequently intersemiotically adapted in a variety of media, encompassing radio broadcast, films, opera, graphic narratives and video games, as well as rewritten in the form of interlingual translations and refracted, with refractions including reviews and critical assessments, but also textual versions radically different from the source text. This article considers selected reinterpretations of Conrad’s text and comments briefly on how in each case the adaptation illustrates a fusion of Conrad’s vision with that of the adapter, hence (trans)fusion, and how this may give a new life to the source text via interpretative shifts. The article presents case studies: the film adaptation – Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Tarik O’Regan’s one-act chamber opera (both the United Kingdom in 2011 and the US staging in 2015), the graphic narrative by Catherine Anyango and David Zane Mairowitz (2010) and Jacek Dukaj’s Polish language version Serce ciemności (2017). This selection is governed by the variety of media and by the dissimilar approaches of the adapters to their source text. What is evident based on these variants is the role of the adapter as a creative participant in the process of transmitting the ideas of the original text, often updating them to make them relevant to new recipients of various cultural backgrounds. Additionally, reinterpretations and recontextualizations of the novella result directly from adaptive strategies specific to a given medium.