Heart of Darkness

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Heart of Darkness

• An Brief Look at Conrads Life and Works, Themes
  and Motifs in Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse
  Now

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Joseph Conrad
Born 1857 in Russian-occupied Poland Patriot
father family exiled in Russia 1862 Both
parents dead of illness by 1869 Conservative
uncle took him in
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• Joined French Merchant Marine at the age of 16
• Kicked out due to his nationality a suicide
  attempt
• Joined British Merchant Marine 1878
• Left the sea began writing 1894
• Died 1924 buried in Canterbury

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Joseph Conrads Other Works

• Amayers Folly (1895)
• Lord Jim (1900)
• Heart of Darkness (1902)
• Nostromo (1904)
• Under Western Eyes (1910)
• Chance (1914)

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Heart of Darkness Background

• After a long stint in the east had come to an
  end, he was having trouble finding a new
  position.
• With the help of a relative in Brussels he got
  the position as captain of a steamer for a
  Belgian trading company.
• Conrad had always dreamed of sailing the Congo
• Had to leave early for the job because the
  previous captain was killed in a trivial quarrel

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One interpretation of the title A literal
journey into the Dark Continent, (the Heart of
Darkness) as Africa was viewed by Conrads
contemporaries
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Africa and Imperialism
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Congo in the 1890s
Inner Station
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Heart of Darkness Background

• While traveling from Boma (at the mouth) to the
  company station at Matadi he met Roger Casement
  who told Conrad stories of the harsh treatment of
  Africans
• Conrad saw some of the most shocking and depraved
  examples of human corruption hed ever witnessed.
  He was disgusted by the ill treatment of the
  natives, the scrabble for loot, the terrible heat
  and the lack of water.
• He saw human skeletons of bodies left to
  rot--many were bodies of men from the chain gangs
  building the railroads.
• He found his ship was damaged.
• Dysentery was rampant as was malaria Conrad had
  to terminate his contract due to illness and
  never fully recovered

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Heart of Darkness Conrads most widely read
novel It can be read. . .

• As Autobiography The account of a journey up the
  Congo river that Conrad undertook in the early
  1890s.
• As Anti-colonialist/imperialist An exposition of
  the brutality of Belgian colonial rule. (See King
  Leopolds Ghost)
• As an Arthurian Quest.
• As Classical or Norse Mythology.
• As Christian Mythology (Dante)
• As Psychoanalysis A Journey into the Self

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Autobiography

• Conrad did, in fact, go up the Congo River in
  1890
• Like Marlow in the novel, he got the job to go
  to the Congo through his aunt.
• Like Marlow, he did not get along with the
  manager
• Like Marlow, he was sent to pick up an agent
  (named Klein)
• Like Marlow, he fell ill and nearly died

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Anti-colonialist/Imperialist
Conrads own words about colonialism

• The conquest of the earth, which mostly means
  the taking it away from those who have a
  different complexion or slightly flatter noses
  than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you
  look into it too much.
• A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all
  like the whiff from some corpse.
• In an essay Conrad calls the colonial
  exploitation of the Congo the vilest scramble
  for loot that ever disfigured the history of
  human conscience

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• In the King Arthur myths a knight in shining
  amour goeson a quest, typically a quest for the
  holy grail.
• The quest usually involves a number of trials.
  Some of those are physical, but the toughest
  tests are usually spiritual, a test of moral
  fibre or personal integrity.
• The trials do not necessarily lead to wealth and
  fame, but equally often to insight and humility.

Arthurian Quest
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Classical and Norse Mythology
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References to Greek and Norse Mythologyand to
the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid The women
in the Brussels office the three Fates The
Sepulchral City Descent into the underworld of
Odysseus and Aeneas The river Styx and Lethe
(Rivers in the underworld) The dying negroes The
lifeless shadows in the underworld The journey
itself the journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas
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Christian Mythology
The novel has repeatedly been compared to
DantesDivine Comedy. Dante also undertakes a
journey to the underworld, to the Christian
Hell. Other parallels The river snake
temptation The dying negroes souls in limbo The
Inner Station the inner sanctum of Hell and
Inferno
Dante (1265-1321) with his Divinia Commedia
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Psychoanalytical
More than 20 years before Freud published his
tripartite division of the mind into Superego,
Ego and Id, Conrad seems to use similar ideas.
superego
The part of the mind that represses and controls
impulses (Governance/Policing A civilizing
effect) The part of the mind that controls but
focuses impulses (Self-Expression/ Striving A
pioneering spirit) The instinctual,
pleasure-seeking part of the mind (Can be
degenerate, amoral, disturbing) But the
wilderness had found him out early and the
whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating
ego
id
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Narrative Structure

• Framed Narrative
• Narrator begins, Marlow takes over, Narrator
  breaks in occasionally
• Marlow is Conrads alter-ego, he shows up in some
  of Conrads other works including Lord Jim
• Three main characters
• The unnamed narrator
• Marlow
• Kurtz
• Also three stations, three interruptions to the
  narrative, etc.
• Marlow recounts his tale while he is on a small
  vessel on the Thames in London with some drinking
  buddies who are ex-merchant seamen.

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A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to
sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above
Gravesend, and farther back still seemed
condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding
motionless over the biggest, and the greatest,
town on earth.
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Varied Interpretations

• Many different interpretations have been seen in
  this book
• Some see it as an attack on colonialism and a
  criticism of racial exploitation
• Some see Kurtz as the embodiment of all the evil
  and horror of which humans are capable.
• Others view it as a portrayal of one mans
  journey into the primitive unconscious where the
  only means of escaping the blandness of everyday
  life is by self degradation.

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Heart of Darkness Themes Motifs

• Darkness and Light
• Primitive vs. Civilized
• Good vs. Evil (but look also for reversals of
  this!)
• Lies/Hypocrisy (Marlow chooses Kurtzs evil
  versus the companys hypocrisy)
• Imperialism/Colonization Cruelty, greed,
  exploitation in the guise of civilizing the
  natives (nb. Eliots The Hollow Men)

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Heart of Darkness Themes Motifs

• Role of Women
• Three female figures (Marlowes aunt, Kurtzs
  African mistress, the Intended)
• Each embodies a distinct role
• Physical connected to Psychological Barriers
  (fog, thick forest, darkness, obscurity)
• Rivers (connection to the past, parallels time
  and the journey)

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(No Transcript)
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Review of Criticism

• Paul OPrey "It is an irony that the 'failures'
  of Marlow and Kurtz are paralleled by a
  corresponding failure of Conrad's
  technique--brilliant though it is--as the vast
  abstract darkness he imagines exceeds his
  capacity to analyze and dramatize it, and the
  very inability to portray the story's central
  subject, the 'unimaginable', the 'impenetratable'
  (evil, emptiness, mystery or whatever) becomes a
  central theme."
• James Guetti complains that Marlow "never gets
  below the surface," and is "denied the final
  self-knowledge that Kurtz had."

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Review of Criticism

• Conrad, writing in 1922, responds to similar
  criticism "Explicitness, my dear fellow, is
  fatal to the glamour of all artistic work,
  robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all
  illusion. You seem to believe in literalness and
  explicitness, in facts and in expression. Yet
  nothing is more clear than the utter
  insignificance of explicit statement and also its
  power to call attention away from things that
  matter in the region of art."
• Marlowe, the narrator, describes how difficult
  conveying a story is "Do you see the story? Do
  you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to
  tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because
  no relation of a dream can convey the
  dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity,
  surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of
  struggling revolt, that notion of being captured
  by the incredible, which is the very essence of
  dream . . .No, it is impossible it is impossible
  to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch
  of one's existence--that which makes its truth,
  its meaning-- its subtle and penetrating essence.
  It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone . .
  ."

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Review of Criticism

• Marxist You can see Heart of Darkness as a
  depiction of, and an attack upon, colonialism in
  general, and, more specifically, the particularly
  brutal form colonialism took in the Belgian
  Congo.
• the mistreatment of the Africans
• the greed of the so-called "pilgrims"
• the broken idealism of Kurtz
• the French man-of-war lobbing shells into the
  jungle
• the grove of death which Marlow stumbles upon
• the little note that Kurtz appends to his
  noble-minded essay on The Suppression of Savage
  Customs
• the importance of ivory to the economics of the
  system.

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Review of Criticism

• Sociological/Cultural Conrad was also apparently
  interested in a more general sociological
  investigation of those who conquer and those who
  are conquered, and the complicated interplay
  between them.
• Marlow's invocation of the Roman conquest of
  Britain
• cultural ambiguity of those Africans who have
  taken on some of the ways of their Europeans
• the ways in which the wilderness tends to strip
  away the civility of the Europeans and brutalize
  them
• Conrad is not impartial and scientifically
  detached from these things, and he even has a bit
  of fun with such impartiality in his depiction
  the doctor who tells Marlow that people who go
  out to Africa become "scientifically
  interesting."

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Review of Criticism

• Psychological/Psychoanalytical Conrad goes out
  of his way to suggest that in some sense Marlow's
  journey is like a dream or a return to our
  primitive past--an exploration of the dark
  recesses of the human mind.
• Apparent similarities to the psychological
  theories of Sigmund Freud in its suggestion that
  dreams are a clue to hidden areas of the mind
• we are all primitive brutes and savages, capable
  of the most appalling wishes and the most
  horrifying impulses (the Id)
• we can make sense of the urge Marlow feels to
  leave his boat and join the natives for a savage
  whoop and holler
• notice that Marlow keeps insisting that Kurtz is
  a voice--a voice who seems to speak to him out of
  the heart of the immense darkness

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Review of Criticism

• Religious Heart of Darkness as an examination of
  various aspects of religion and religious
  practices.
• examine the way Conrad plays with the concept of
  pilgrims and pilgrimages
• the role of Christian missionary concepts in the
  justifications of the colonialists
• the dark way in which Kurtz fulfills his own
  messianic ambitions by setting himself up as one
  of the local gods

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Review of Criticism

• Moral-Philosophical Heart of Darkness is
  preoccupied with general questions about the
  nature of good and evil, or civilization and
  savagery
• What saves Marlow from becoming evil?
• Is Kurtz more or less evil than the pilgrims?
• Why does Marlow associate lies with mortality?

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Review of Criticism

• Formalist
• Threes There are three parts to the story, three
  breaks in the story (1 in pt. 1 and 2 in pt. 2),
  and three central characters the outside
  narrator, Marlow and Kurtz
• Contrasting images (dark and light, open and
  closed)
• Center to periphery Kurtz-gtMarlow-gtOutside
  Narrator-gtthe reader
• Are the answers to be found in the center or on
  the periphery?

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Modernism

• Heart of Darkness was published in the Late
  Victorian-Early Modern Era but exhibits mostly
  modern traits
• a distrust of abstractions as a way of
  delineating truth
• an interest in an exploration of the
  psychological
• a belief in art as a separate and somewhat
  privileged kind of human experience
• a desire for transcendence mingled with a feeling
  that transcendence cannot be achieved
• an awareness of primitiveness and savagery as the
  condition upon which civilization is built, and
  therefore an interest in the experience and
  expressions of non-European peoples
• a skepticism that emerges from the notion that
  human ideas about the world seldom fit the
  complexity of the world itself, and thus a sense
  that multiplicity, ambiguity, and irony--in life
  and in art--are the necessary responses of the
  intelligent mind to the human condition.

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Apocalypse Now

• Apocalypse Now is a film that was directed by
  Francis Ford Coppola starring Martin Sheen,
  Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando
• This film was based on Conrads Heart of
  Darkness.
• Coppola takes the story to Vietnam. Captain
  Willard (Marlow) is sent on a mission to kill
  Colonel Kurtz who has gone renegade