ABSTRACT
Joseph Conrad’s orchestrated delay, holding off the first encounter for several thousand words and then revealing the severed heads only in a subordinate clause, comes after Marlow’s long eulogy of praise for Kurtz. European modernity is sometimes said to have been inaugurated by the elegant machine designed by the French revolutionary deputy, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, and first put into use in 1792. George Romero’s first three zombie films contained such uncompromising images of opened torsos and heads that they were unrated by the classification board of the Motion Picture Association of America, effectively declaring them to be outside the boundaries of acceptable taste. There is a long cultural tradition in Western culture of tales of uncanny “brazen heads” constructed by men of arcane, possibly devilish knowledge. These talking oracular heads, somewhere between biology and mechanism, life and death, utter unpalatable truths and prophecies when animated.
