Heart of Darkness

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

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Joseph Conrads Life

• Josef Teodore Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski was born
  in Podolia, Ukraine, in1857.
• 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 seven
  months and eventually deported to Vologda
• Conrads mother died of pneumonia in 1865.

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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.
• In 1896, he married Jessie George a typist from
  Peckham.
• 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 Works

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

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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 quickly for the job the previous
  captain had recently been killed in a trivial
  quarrel.

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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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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 and passes around a bottle.

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Varied Interpretations

• There are many different interpretations of 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 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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Themes Motifs

• Darkness
• Primitive Impulses (Kurtz, previous captain)
• Cruelty of Man (Kurtz, the Company)
• Immorality/Amorality (General Manager/Kurtz)
• Lies/Hypocrisy (Marlow chooses Kurtz evil vs.
  Companys hypocritical evil)
• Imperialism/Colonialism
  (The Company)
• Cruelty
• Greed
• Exploitation

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Themes Motifs

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

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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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Response to 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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Interpretations Marxist

• A depiction of, and an
  attack upon, colonialism in general
  and, in particular, the
  brutality
  demonstrated 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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Sociological/Cultural

• Conrad pursues a sociological investigation into
  those who conquer, 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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Psychological / Psychoanalytical

• Conrad suggests that Marlow's
  journey is like a dream or a
  return to the
  primitive past - an exploration
  of the dark recesses of the
  human mind.
• Similarities to the psychological theories of
  Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung Dreams offer clues
  to hidden areas of the individual and collective
  unconsciousness.
• Humans are primitive savages, capable of
  appalling and horrifying impulses. (the Id)
• Note that Marlow refers to Kurtz as a voice which
  seems to speak to him from the heart of the
  immense darkness.

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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 as a
  justification for the violent and irresponsible
  actions of the colonialists.
• The dark way in which Kurtz fulfills his own
  messianic ambitions by accepting the role of God.

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Moral-Philosophical

• Heart of Darkness is preoccupied with general
  questions about the nature of good and evil,
  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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Formulism

• 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 (light and dark, open and
  closed, civilized and savage)
• Center to Periphery Kurtz Marlow Narrator
  Reader
• Are the answers to be found in the center or the
  periphery?

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Modernism

• Heart of Darkness was published in the Late
  Victorian-Early Modern Era but exhibits mostly
  modern traits, which include
• 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 privileged
  human experience,
• A desire for transcendence mingled with a feeling
  that transcendence cannot be achieved,
• An awareness of primitivism and savagery as the
  condition upon which civilization is built, and a
  corresponding interest in 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 a film directed by Francis Ford
  Coppola, starring Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall,
  and Marlon Brando.
• Based on Conrads Heart of Darkness.
• Set in Vietnam. Captain Willard (Marlow) is sent
  on a mission to kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz.
• Parallels physical setting, colonialism, savage
  vs. civilized, irony, insanity, darkness

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