Heart of Darkness

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Heart of Darkness
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GRAHAM GREENE, Journey without Maps (1936)

• I thought for some reason even then of Africa,
  not a particular place, but a shape, a
  strangeness, a wanting to know. The unconscious
  mind is often sentimental I have written a
  shape, and the shape, of course, is roughly that
  of the human heart.
• Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian
  atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape
  of the human heart.

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Factual/Historical Viewpoint

• The Congo River was discovered by Europeans in
  1482
• No one traveled more than 200 miles upstream
  until1877
• Is 1,600 miles long and only impassable to water
  traffic between two places, creating a
  two-hundred mile overland trip
• Matadi (the CompanyStation)
• Kinshasa (the Central Station)

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History of the Congo

• 1878 King Leopold II of Belgium asked explorer
  Henry Morton Stanley to set up a Belgian colony
  in the Congo
• Wanted to end slavery and civilize the natives
• Actually interested in more material benefits
• 1885 Congress of Berlin forms Congo Free State
• This was ruled by Leopold II alone
• The Congress of Berlin is referred to in the book
  as the International Society for the Suppression
  of Savage Customs.
• Leopold never even visited the Congo. He set up
  the Company to run it for him.

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Africa and Imperialism
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CONGO FREE STATE (1885)
1879-1885 Henry Morton Stanley explores the
region for Leopold II of Belgium 1890 Conrads
expedition to the Congo (Before the Congo I was
a mere animal)
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Colonial Africa, circa 1892
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Democratic Republic of the Congo
1908 Belgian Congo 1960 Independence 1964
Peoples Republic of the Congo 1971 Republic of
Zaire 1997 Democratic Republic of the Congo
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Democratic Republic of the Congo (1997)
The name of this African nation derives from a
people known as the BaKongo, first rendered as
Congo in Portuguese chronicles of exploration
in 1482. In their language, the 2,900-mile-long
Congo River is called nzadi, the river that
swallows all rivers.
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King Leopold II (reigned 1865 1909)
Belgian exploitation of the Congo initially
focused on the rubber industry.
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King Leopold and the Congo

• Belgium, as a small country, did not possess
  numerous overseas colonies, unlike its
  neighbours, Holland, France, Germany, and Great
  Britain, but shared their imperial ambitions.
  Leopold persuaded other European powers at the
  Berlin Conference of 1884-85 to give him personal
  possession of the Congo.
• In 1876 he organized an international association
  as a front for his private plan to develop
  central Africa.
• Leopold used the Congo as a huge money-making
  resource, committing human rights violations in
  the process, as he built public works projects in
  Belgium with the money he accrued.

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Belgiums Stranglehold on the Congo
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5-8 Million Victims (50 of Population)
It is blood-curdling to see them (the soldiers)
returning with the hands of the slain, and to
find the hands of young children amongst the
bigger ones evidencing their bravery...The rubber
from this district has cost hundreds of lives,
and the scenes I have witnessed, while unable to
help the oppressed, have been almost enough to
make me wish I were dead... This rubber traffic
is steeped in blood, and if the natives were to
rise and sweep every white person on the Upper
Congo into eternity, there would still be left a
fearful balance to their credit. -- Belgian
Official
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White King, Red Rubber, Black Death

• Countries such as France, the Netherlands, and
  Great Britain that acquired large empires
  exploited both land and people. However
• Some measures to protect the rights of overseas
  subjects were introduced.
• Rights of women and men to vote.
• Protection against industrial exploitation was
  making child labour illegal and improving
  employment conditions.
• Some of these rights were followed in the African
  colonies..but NOT BY LEOPOLD II
• Leopold had to give up the Congo to Belgium in
  1908 as a result of the international campaign
  exposing Leopolds activities in the Congo.

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King Leopolds Ghost

• Novel by Adam Hochschild written in 1998
• Tells the horrific story of King Leopolds
  colonial rule over a country and its native
  peoples.
• Based on the true story of the colonial
  activities.
• King Leopold II, never set foot in the Congo, but
  managed to ruin a countryhis ghost remains today
  in memories of the Congolese.

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The Explorer Stanleys Role

• H. M. Stanley, a journalist who explored the
  Congo on an expedition financed by King Leopold
  of Belgium.
• Stanley greatly aided his backer in gaining a
  firm foothold in what was to become the Belgian
  Congo (later Zaire), now the Democratic Republic
  of Congo.
• King Leopold II never set foot in Africa.

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The White Mans Burden

• King Leopold found the Congocursed by
  cannibalism, savagery, and despair and he has
  been trying with patience, which I can never
  sufficiently admire, to relieve it of its
  horrors, rescue it from its oppressors, and save
  it from perdition. --H.M. Stanley

The idea that Europeans must carry the burden of
civilizing Africa.
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Different Motives of Imperialism

• Some Westerners felt it was their duty to
  civilize the savage inhabitant of colonial
  lands in order to make them more modern and
  European. The English writer Rudyard Kipling
  displayed such an attitude in 1899 with a poem
  entitle The White Mans Burden.

Take up the White Mans burden-- Send forth the
best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile To
serve your captives need To wait in heavy
harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your
new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and
half-child.
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The White Mans Burden?
The first step toward lightening the White Mans
Burden is through teaching the virtues of
cleanliness!
Pears Soap is a potent factor in brightening the
dark corners of the earth as civilization
advances, while amongst the cultured of all
nations, it holds the highest place-it is the
ideal toilet soap.
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Ivory and the White Mans Burden

• Most Europeans in the 1890s felt that the African
  peoples needed exposure to European culture and
  technology to become more evolved.
• This responsibility was known as the white mans
  burden and the fervor to bring Christianity and
  commerce to Africa grew.
• In return for these benefits, the Europeans
  extracted HUGE amounts of ivory.

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Ivory, cont.

• Uses of ivory in the 1890s
• Jewelry and other decorative items
• Piano keys
• Billiard balls
• From 1888 to 1892, the amount of ivory exported
  from the Congo rose from 13,000 pounds to more
  than a quarter million pounds.
• 1892 Leopold declares all natural resources in
  the Congo are his sole property
• This gave the Belgians free reign to take
  whatever they wanted however they wished.
• Trade expands, new stations are established
  farther and farther away

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The Results of Ivory Fever

• Documented atrocities committed by the Belgian
  ivory traders include the severing of hands and
  heads.
• Reports of this, combined with Conrads portrayal
  of the system in Heart of Darkness, led to an
  international protest movement against Belgiums
  presence in Africa
• Leopold outlawed these practices, but his decree
  had little effect
• Belgian parliament finally took control away from
  the king
• Belgium did not grant independence to the Congo
  until 1960

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Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902)
Uncle Sam The Colossus of the Pacific (A
Parody)
The Colossus of Rhodes
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Joseph Conrads Life

• Born Josef Teodore Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski,
  inPodolia, Ukraine, 3 December1857.
• Conrads father and mother,Apollo and Ewa, were
  politicalactivists. They were imprisoned 7
  months and eventually deported to Vologda.
• Apollo introduced him son to the work of Dickens,
  Fenimore Cooper and Captain Marryat in Polish and
  French translations.

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Joseph Conrads Life

• 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.
• Conrad became a British merchant sailor and
  eventually a master mariner and citizen in 1886.
  His ten years in the British Merchant Marine
  shaped most of his stories.

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Joseph Conrads Life

• Conrad 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.
• Died of a heart attack in 1924.
• Buried in Canterbury Cathedral.

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Heart of Darkness

• First published as a serial in Londons Blackwood
  Magazine in 1899
• First unified publication in1902
• Considered by many to be the finest short novel
  ever written in English
• Bridges the Victorian and Modern literary periods
• Modern criticism sharply divided over merit due
  to racist/imperialist themes

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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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Narrative Structure of Heart of Darkness
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Contrasts in Heart of Darkness

• Light vs. Dark
• Heavy vs. Light
• Inferiority vs. Superiority
• Civil vs. Savage
• Interior vs. Exterior
• Illusion vs. Truth
• Misogyny vs. Misanthropy

• Insanity vs. Sanity
• Racism vs. Anti-racism
• Imperialism vs. Insularity
• Evil
• What makes well-intentioned people do bad things?

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Heart of Darkness 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 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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Varied Interpretations

• Some feel the novel offers a scathing attack on
  colonialist ideology, others feel the novel
  celebrates and defends colonialization and
  racism.
• Some see Kurtz as the embodiment of all the evil
  and horror of capitalist society.
• Others view it as a portrayal of one mans
  journey into the primitive unconscious where one
  must confront ones own inner darkness.
• Still others see it as a modern journey quest,
  perhaps with an anti-hero rather than a hero.

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Criticism Early and Modern

• Early
• Hailed as a portrayal of the demoralizing effect
  life in the African wilderness supposedly had on
  European men
• Praised as a study of the collapse of the white
  mans morality when he is released from the
  restraints of European law and order

• Modern
• Criticized for the blatantly racist attitudes it
  portrays
• Some believe Conrad was simply reflecting the
  attitudes held common at the time
• Others believe he may have been holding the ideas
  up for scorn and ridicule

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Victorian and Modern Literature

• Victorian (1837 1901)
• Traditional subject matter, form, and style
• Deals with issues of the day, including
• Social, economic, religious, and intellectual
  issues
• Industrial Revolution
• Class tensions, early feminist movement,
  pressures for social and political reform
• Impact of Darwins theories on evolution

• Modern (post WWI WWII)
• Authors experiment with subject matter, form, and
  style
• Deals with issues of the day, including
• Horrors of WWI
• Massive loss of life
• Loss of faith
• Expanding technology and science
• Also encompassed/is related to Postmodernism

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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 Conrads
  techniquebrilliant though it isas the vast
  abstract darkness he imagines exceeds his
  capacity to analyze and dramatize it, and the
  very inability to portray the storys 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 dreammaking 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 ones existencethat which makes its truth,
its meaningits subtle and penetrating essence.
It is impossible. We live, as we dreamalone.
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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.
• Marlows 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 Marlows
  journey is like a dream or a return to our
  primitive pastan 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 voicea 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 Focus on the literary patterns and
  structures inherent in Heart of Darkness
• 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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Review of Criticism

• Modernism Heart of Darkness published in the
  Late Victorian Era 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 and interest in primitiveness and
  savagery as the condition upon which civilization
  is built
• a skepticism and a sense that multiplicity,
  ambiguity, and ironyin life and in artare the
  necessary responses of the intelligent mind to
  the human condition.

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Movie Versions of the Book
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Apocalypse Now

• Apocalypse Now is a film 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

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Circle of Influence

• Thomas Pynchon
• T.S. Eliot
• Ernest Hemingway
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• William Faulkner
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• Mario Vargas Llosa
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Carlos Fuentes
• George Orwell
• Saul Bellow
• Eugene ONeill
• Graham Greene

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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)