Heart of Darkness

Impressionism

Why the Blurriness? •  For modern novelists, the messiness and

confusion and darkness of experience is interesting.

•  Rather than trying to simplify and abstract a particular meaning from experience, novelists tend to wallow in the multiplicity of ideas and meanings and sensations that experience can provide.

Why the Blurriness? •  Novelists are in the business of

recreating and communicating the rich complexities of the experience itself.

•  Their purpose is to get the reader to re-live an experience, with all its complexity and messiness, all its darkness and ambiguity

Conrad’s View •  For Conrad, the world as we

experience it is not a sort of place that can be reduced to a set of clear, explicit truths.

•  Its truths - the truths of the psyche, of the human mind and soul - are messy, vague, irrational, suggestive, and dark.

Conrad’s View •  Conrad’s intention? … to

lead his readers to an experience of the “heart of darkness,”not to shed the light of reason on it…but to recreate his experience of darkness in our feelings, our sensibilities, our own dark and mysterious hearts

About the Novel •  Since its publication, Heart of Darkness

has fascinated readers and critics, almost all of whom regard the novel as significant because of its use of ambiguity and (in Conrad's own words) "foggishness" to dramatize Marlow's perceptions of the horrors he encounters.

•  Critics have regarded Heart of Darkness as a work that in several important ways broke many narrative conventions and brought the English novel into the twentieth century.

About the Novel •  Notable exceptions who didn't receive the

novel well were the British novelist E. M. Forster, who disparaged the very ambiguities that other critics found so interesting, and the African novelist Chinua Achebe, who criticized the novel and Conrad as examples of European racism.

Key Facts •  Full Title: Heart of Darkness •  Author: Joseph Conrad •  Type of Work: Novella (between a novel

and a short story in length and scope) •  Genre: Symbolism, colonial literature,

adventure tale, frame story, almost a romance in its insistence on heroism and the supernatural and its preference for the symbolic over the realistic

Key Facts •  Time and Place Written: England, 1898–1899;

inspired by Conrad’s journey to the Congo in 1890

•  Date of First Publication: Published in 1902 in the volume Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories

•  Narrator: There are two narrators: an anonymous passenger on a pleasure ship, who listens to Marlow’s story, and Marlow himself, a middle-aged ship’s captain.

•  Point of View: The first narrator speaks in the first-person plural, on behalf of four other passengers who listen to Marlow’s tale. Marlow narrates his story in the first person, describing only what he witnesses and experiences, and provides his own commentary on the story.

Key Facts •  Tone: Ambivalent: Marlow is disgusted at the

brutality of the Company and horrified by Kurtz’s degeneration, but he claims that any thinking man would be tempted into similar behavior.

•  Setting (time): Latter part of the nineteenth century, probably sometime between 1876 and 1892

•  Setting (place): Opens on the Thames River outside London, where Marlow is telling the story that makes up Heart of Darkness. Events of the story take place in Brussels, at the Company’s offices, on the Congo, and a Belgian territory.

•  Protagonist: Charlie Marlow

Key Facts •  Major Conflict: Both Marlow and Kurtz confront a conflict

between their images of themselves as “civilized” Europeans and the temptation to abandon morality completely once they leave the context of European society.

•  Rising Action: The brutality Marlow witnesses in the Company’s employees, the rumors he hears that Kurtz is a remarkable man, and the numerous examples of Europeans breaking down mentally or physically in the environment of Africa.

•  Climax: Marlow’s discovery, upon reaching the Inner Station, that Kurtz has completely abandoned European morals and norms of behavior.

•  Falling Action: Marlow’s acceptance of responsibility for Kurtz’s legacy, Marlow’s encounters with Company officials and Kurtz’s family and friends, Marlow’s visit to Kurtz’s “Intended.”

Key Facts •  Motifs: Darkness (very seldom opposed by light),

interiors vs. surfaces (kernel/shell, coast/inland, station/forest, etc.), ironic understatement, hyperbolic language, inability to find words to describe situation adequately, images of ridiculous waste, upriver versus downriver/toward and away from Kurtz/away from and back toward civilization (quest or journey structure)

•  Symbols: Rivers, fog, women (Kurtz’s Intended, his African mistress), French warship shelling forested coast, grove of death, severed heads on fence posts, Kurtz’s “Report,” dead helmsman, maps, “whited sepulchre” of Brussels, knitting women in Company offices, man trying to fill bucket with hole in it

The “ Order” of HD’s Structure •  Three:

–  Chapters –  Marlow breaks off the story 3 times –  Stations –  Women –  Central Characters

•  Frame Narrative •  Light and Dark •  Transformation

Heart of Darkness as a Modernist Novel

•  an interest in exploring the psychological

•  an awareness of primitiveness and savagery as the condition upon which civilization is built

•  Multiplicity, ambiguity, irony

A Final Thought •  Multiplicity, ambiguity, and irony are not

the easiest forms of expression to cope with when you are a student and asked to express yourself clearly and directly. But it is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and ironic that we must strive to speak and write clearly.

•  Otherwise - there is only darkness, only confusion.

Questions to Consider as you Read:

•  What does Marlow’s quest reveal about one’s search for self?

•  What is evil? How does the novel seem to define evil?

•  What is good? How does the novel seem to define goodness?

•  Consider the following definition of darkness: “the absence of light”

Modernism

Genre Theory

•  Genre: a type of literary work with defining conventions & audience expectations

•  Genres develop in response to particular cultural, communication, & creative situations

•  Literary genres evolve like social institutions: their conventions/codes emerge, develop, & change over time, reflecting the (changing) values, imagination, spirit of an age, culture, artist

Genre History: Dialogues with Tradition

“Once you start making...rules, some writer will be sure to happen along and break every abstract rule you or anyone else ever thought

up, and take your breath away in the process. The word should is … dangerous … It’s a kind of challenge to the deviousness and inventive-

ness and audacity and perversity of the creative

spirit” -Margaret Atwood (1939-)

Modernism – General Definition

•  broke up the logically developing plot typical of 19th century novel and offered unexpected connections or sudden changes in perspective

•  an attempt to use language in a new way –  to reconstruct the world of art as much as the philosophers

and scientists had redefined the world of their own disciplines

•  played with shifting and contradictory appearances to suggest the shifting and uncertain nature of reality

•  used interior monologues and free association to

express the rhythm of consciousness

Modernism – General Definition •  made greater use of image clusters, thematic

associations, and “musical” patterning to supply the basic structures of both fiction and poetry

•  drew attention to style instead of trying to make it

“transparent” •  blended fantasy with reality while representing real

historical or psychological dilemmas •  raised age-old questions of human identity in terms of

contemporary philosophy and psychology

Early Modernism & Heart of Darkness

•  Social breakdown, fragmentation: lose faith in progress, science, religion, politics, bourgeois morality

•  Alienation from urban bureaucratic society, a sterile, materialistic “waste land”

•  Question, challenge structures of human life--e.g. Christianity-challenged as “convenient fictions” created to impose order, meaning on random, senseless, violent world

High ModernismEarly 20th century – Post -WW I

•  Decline of West: Catastrophe of WWI shook faith in Western civilization & its cultural values

•  Radical break from traditional structures of Western culture & art

•  Artists sought new forms to render contemporary disorder & alienation

20th century versus 19th century •  20th century vision implies a criticism of the

19th century as a period of comfortable certainty and positive assurance that was dangerously unreal.

•  Note: this vision neglects the roots of modern consciousness in 19th century science, sociology, and art. Modernity was already as subject of widespread anxiety and argument as the Industrial Revolution transformed social, economic, and political life.

Modernism (20th century)

•  Modernism claims to have – –  achieved a more accurate representation of

reality –  a better understanding of human

consciousness

•  20th century “vision” – emphasis on how we know – on structures of perception themselves

Challenges for Readers •  Narrator/author suggests/

evokes, does not explain; personal symbol system

•  new, previously forbidden subjects

•  unsettle readers’ expectations; shock out of complacency

•  Open-ended, ironic, multi-layered, “inconclusive”

•  Process/search/journey meaningful in itself (even if goal never reached)

•  Reader must be active co-creator of meaning: “emplot” life

Experimental Forms for Multiple “Realities” of Uncertainty

•  Flow of consciousness & memory structures narrative: associative (vs. linear) “logic” intertwines present awareness & memory

•  Interior monologue, “stream of conscious-ness, flashforward/ flashback

•  Narrative frame •  Marlow’s 1st-person

“limited” narration: discontinuous / fragmented, suggestive / evocative-rational connections, introspective

The “Contract” •  Audience must agree to

“play” the imaginative game (“suspend disbelief”)

•  Atwood: “...your life as the writer of each particular story is only as long, and as good, as the story itself.”

•  The “speaking voice” mediates reader-listener’s access to the story, but it is …

•  “double-voiced” dialogue (Bakhtin) between teller & listener each with active roles in making meaning.