Heart of Darkness

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Heart of Darkness

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

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Joseph Conrads Life

• Born Josef Teodore Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, in
  Podolia, Ukraine, in 1857.
• Conrad's father had studied law and languages at
  St Petersburg University and wrote radical
  poems and plays.
• His father and mother, Apollo and Ewa, were
  political activists. They were imprisoned 7
  months and eventually deported to Vologda.

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Joseph Conrads Life

• Apollo tried to educate his son himself, he
  introduced him to the work of Dickens, Fenimore
  Cooper and Captain Marryat in either Polish or
  French translations.
• His father died of tuberculosis and his funeral
  was attended by a thousand admirers
• Conrad was raised by his uncle attended school
  (he was disobedient)
• In 1874, Conrad went to Marseilles France and
  joined the Merchant Navy
• Gun running for the Spanish and a love affair led
  to a suicide attempt.

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Joseph Conrads Life

• Conrad became a British merchant sailor and
  eventually a master mariner and citizen in 1886.
• He traveled widely in the east.
• He took on a stint as a steamer captain (1890) in
  the Congo, but became ill within three months and
  had to leave.
• Conrad retired from sailing and took up writing
  full time.
• Writing took a physical and emotional toll on
  Conrad. The experience was draining

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Joseph Conrads Other Works

• Almayers Folly (1895)
• The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897)
• Lord Jim (1900)
• Heart of Darkness (1902)
• Typhoon (1902)
• Nostromo (1904)
• The Secret Sharer (1907)
• 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
• He had to leave early for the job, as the
  previous captain was killed in a trivial quarrel

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Heart of Darkness Background

• 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 men from the chain gangs building the
  railroads.
• He found his ship was damaged.
• Dysentary 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 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 Youth A
  Narrative and Lord Jim
• Marlow recounts his tale while he is on a small
  vessel on the Thames with some drinking buddies
  who are ex-merchant seamen. As he recounts his
  story the group sits in an all-encompassing
  darkness.

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Varied Interpretations

• Some see novella as an attack on colonialism and
  a criticism of racial exploitation
• Some see Kurtz as the embodiment of all the evil
  and horror of the capitalist society.
• 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
• Primitive Impulses (Kurtz, previous captain,
  etc.)
• Cruelty of Man (Kurtz and Company)
• Immorality/Amorality (Kurtz)
• Lies/Hypocrisy (Marlow chooses Kurtzs evil
  versus Companys hypocritical evil)
• Imperialization/Colonization (Belgian Company)
• Greed / Exploitation of People
• Power Corrupts
• Savage vs. Civil

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Heart of Darkness Themes Motifs

• Role of Women
• Civilization exploitive of women
• Civilization as a binding and self-perpetuating
  force
• Physical connected to Psychological
• Barriers (fog, thick forest)
• Rivers (connection to past, parallels time and
  journey)

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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."

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Review of Criticism
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 upon which Marlow stumbles
• 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

• Formulist
• 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