I can totally relate to this. We had to read it in school (American system school) and there was no mention of the historical context. When I had to read it again in college, it broke my brain and made me want to revisit so many books I'd read in the past in search of whatever deeper context I might have missed or wasn't made aware of back in school. Same thing happened to me with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake after I reread them with added guides. Those rereads made me fall in love with James Joyce. Literature never ceases to amaze me with its ability to short-circuit our brains.
Well wow, your book experience here is incredibly profound! Mine doesn't quite compare in intensity, but did rewire my brain a bit.
I am doing a re-read of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for a book club. I read this book years ago in college in a Gothic Lit class, reading it in the context of gothic genre traits: self vs other, familiar vs strange, civilization vs savage- and the inevitable dread accompanying the dissolution of the 'vs' and realization that civiliity is mere patina on monstrosity etc.
I still had my old college copy, but sadly it was filled with underlines and highlights (I can't believe I was so terrible!) so I got a clean copy, a Norton Critical edition. Omg. The amount of extra material included was vast. Essays on the history of the Congo, on Imperialism, letters to Belgium's King Leopold, notes from Conrad's own journey as a Congo steamboat captain, critical essays on the book itself.
As ridiculous as it sounds, I had NO IDEA this book was a critique of Imperialism. None. Zero. Reading this in college I thought it was purely a fictional dark gothic fantasy. I didn't know about the actual atrocities in the Congo and that Conrad had witnessed them first hand. I didn't know public sentiment turned against King Leopold after this was published, because they too didn't really understand what was happening there. I even read in one of the essays that American kids were being taught this book as a 'journey to the center of self' and devoid of any mention of imperialism. Yes, yes we were! That spoke directly to my experience.
All of this suddenly coming into focus felt both enlightening and awful. How was this taught without context?? And how am I only realizing this now? I'm still reading through the essays, grateful I found them before reading the novella again.
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