Heart of Darkness
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.
Factual/Historical Viewpoint
The Congo River was discovered by Europeans in 1482
• No one traveled more than
200 miles upstream until
1877
• Is 1,600 miles long and only
impassable to water traffic
between two places, creating
a two-hundred mile overland
trip
 Matadi (the Company
Station)
 Kinshasa (the Central
Station)
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.
Africa and Imperialism
CONGO FREE STATE
(1885)
1879-1885
Henry Morton Stanley
explores the region for
Leopold II of Belgium
1890
Conrad’s expedition to
the Congo (“Before the
Congo I was a mere
animal”)
Colonial Africa, circa 1892
Democratic Republic of the Congo
1908 Belgian Congo
1960 Independence
1964 People’s
Republic of the Congo
1971 Republic of
Zaire
1997 Democratic
Republic of the Congo
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.”
King Leopold II (reigned 1865 – 1909)
Belgian exploitation of the Congo
initially focused on the rubber
industry.
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.
12
Belgium’s Stranglehold on the Congo
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
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 Leopold’s activities in the Congo.
King Leopold’s Ghost
Novel by Adam Hochschild
written in 1998
Tells the horrific story of King
Leopold’s colonial rule over a
country and it’s 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
country…his ghost remains today
in memories of the Congolese.
16
The Explorer Stanley’s 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.
“The White Man’s Burden”*
“King Leopold found the Congo…cursed 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.
18
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 Man’s Burden.”
Take up the White Man’s 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.
19
The “White Man’s Burden”?
Pear’s 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.
Ivory and “the White Man’s 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 man’s burden”
and the fervor to bring
Christianity and commerce to
Africa grew.
In return for these “benefits,”
the Europeans extracted HUGE
amounts of ivory.
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
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 Conrad’s portrayal of the
system in Heart of Darkness, led to an international
protest movement against Belgium’s 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
Cecil Rhodes (18531902)
“The Colossus of Rhodes”
Uncle Sam: “The Colossus
of the Pacific” (A Parody)
Joseph Conrad’s Life
Born Josef Teodore Konrad
Nalecz Korzeniowski, in
Podolia, Ukraine, 3 December
1857.
Conrad’s father and mother,
Apollo and Ewa, were political
activists. 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.
Joseph Conrad’s 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.
Joseph Conrad’s 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.
Heart of Darkness
First published as a serial in
London’s 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
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
Heart of Darkness Background
Conrad saw some of the most shocking and depraved
examples of human corruption he’d 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
Heart of Darkness
Narrative Structure
Framed Narrative
Narrator begins
Marlow takes over
Narrator breaks in occasionally
Marlow is Conrad’s alter-ego, he shows up in some of
Conrad’s 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.
Narrative Structure of Heart of Darkness
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. Antiracism
Imperialism vs.
Insularity
Evil
What makes wellintentioned people do
bad things?
Heart of Darkness Motifs
Darkness
Primitive Impulses (Kurtz, previous captain, etc.)
Cruelty of Man (Kurtz and Company)
Immorality/Amorality (Kurtz)
Lies/Hypocrisy (Marlow chooses Kurtz’s evil versus
Company’s hypocritical evil)
Imperialization/Colonization (Belgian Company)
Greed / Exploitation of People
Power Corrupts
Savage vs. Civil
Heart of Darkness Motifs
Role of Women
Civilization exploitive of women
Civilization as a binding and selfperpetuating force
Physical connected to
Psychological
Barriers (fog, thick forest)
Rivers (connection to past,
parallels time and journey)
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 man’s journey
into the primitive unconscious where one must
confront one’s own inner darkness.
Still others see it as a modern journey quest,
perhaps with an anti-hero rather than a hero.
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 man’s 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
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 Darwin’s 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
Review of Criticism
Paul O’Prey: “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 selfknowledge that Kurtz had.?
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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
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
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?
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->Marlow->Outside
Narrator->the reader
Are the answers to be found in the center or on the
periphery?
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 irony—in life and in art—are the necessary
responses of the intelligent mind to the human
condition.
Movie Versions of the Book
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
Conrad’s 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
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 O’Neill
Graham Greene
Joseph Conrad’s Other Works
Almayer’s 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)