Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 1899

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Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

• The Sacred River

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Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

• To what does heart of darkness refer?

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Construction of HD Narratology

• The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
  the
• whole meaning of which lies within the shell of
  a
• cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his
• propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to
  him
• the meaning of an episode was not inside like a
• kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which
• brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze,
  in
• the likeness of one of these misty halos that
• sometimes are made visible by the spectral
• illumination of moonshine (18).

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Construction of HD NarratologyNarrators N1, N2

• FrameN1 MarlowN2 Frame
• Shell Kernel Shell
• Meaning Tale Meaning
• Misty Halo Moonshine Misty Halo
• Haze Glow Haze
• meaning envelopes ( inclusio) episode

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Construction of HD River, Heart

• FrameN1 N2 Frame
• Thames Congo Thames
• England Belgian Congo England
• Romans Europeans Romans
• Thames Father Thames, Tamesis River god.

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Construction of HD River, Heart

• Marlow The Unreliable Narrator
• Its queer how out of touch with truth
• women are (28).
• You know I hate, detest, and cant bear a
• lie, not because I am straighter than the
• rest of us, but simply because it appals
• me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of
• mortality in lies,which is exactly what I
• hate and detest in the worldwhat I want
• to forget (49-51).

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The River Metaphor in HD

• Essay (on website)
• Main Ideas
• Buddha Marlows tale Buddha
• River Samsara
• Buddha enlightened one

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LIFE IS A RIVER Analysis of Parallelism

• A
• 1aThe brown current ran swiftly
• 2aout of the heart of darkness,
• bearing us
• 3adown towards the sea
• with twice the speed of our
• upward progress
• B
• 1band Kurtzs life was running swiftly too,
• ebbing, ebbing
• 2bout of his heart
• 3binto the sea
• of inexorable time.
• (Penguin, 109).

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Construction of HD River, Heart

• FrameN1 N2 Frame
• The offing was barred by a black bank of
  clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the
  uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under
  an overcast skyseemed to lead into the heart of
  an immense darkness.
• What is the place in the text for this citation?
  What is its meaning?

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Rudolph Ottos numinous experience and HD

• In a very few hours I arrived in a city that
  always make me
• think of a white sepulchre (24)
• She seemed uncanny and fateful (26).
• The sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir
  under
• my cap (68).
• But there was the fact facing methe fact
  dazzling, to be
• seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea,
  like a ripple
• on an unfathomable enigma, a mystery greaterwhen
  I
• thought of itthan the curious, inexplicable note
  of
• desperate grief in this savage clamour that had
  swept by us
• on the river-bank, behind the blind whiteness of
  the fog
• (71-72).
• The horror! The horror! (112).

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Disease

• We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that
  lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of
  three a-day) and went on. We called at some more
  places with farcical names, where the merry dance
  of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy
  atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb all
  along the formless coast bordered by the
  dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to
  ward off intruders in and out of rivers, streams
  of death in life, whose banks were rotting into
  mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invated
  the contorted mangroves, that seemed to write at
  us in the extremity of an impotent despair.
  Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a
  particularised impression, but the general sense
  of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It
  was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for
  nightmares (31).

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Centre/Depth

• The best way I can explain it you is by saying
  that, for a second or two, I felt as though,
  instead of going to the centre of a continent, I
  were about to set off for the centre of the
  earth (29, and note 47 Jules Verne).
• My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a
  moment but no sooner within than it seemed to me
  I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some
  Inferno (35 note 58).
• Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the
  trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to
  the earth itself, half coming out, half effaced
  within the dim light, in all the attitudes of
  pain, abandonment, and despair (34-35). Dante,
  Commedia, LInferno, Canto 3, line 9.
• His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at
  him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the
  bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines
  (111).

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Filmography

• Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola.
  Parmount, 1979.
• Blood Diamond. Dir. Edwar Zwick. Warner Bros.,
  2007.
• The Good Shepherd. Dir. Robert DeNiro. Universal
  Studios, 2006.

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Further Reading

• Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Rpt. London
  Everymans Library, 1992. William Heinemann,
  1958.
• Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa Racism in
  Conrads Heart of Darkness. The Massachusetts
  Review 18 (1977) 782-94. Rpt. in Heart of
  Darkness. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. A Norton Critical
  Edition. 3rd ed. NY, London Norton, 1988.
• Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. Rpt.
  NY Harper Perenial Modern Classics, 2005. NY
  HarperCollins, 1998.
• Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. NY Pocket
  Books, 1982.

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Work Cited

• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Robert
  Hampson. Penguin 1995, 2000.