Heart of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad
Conrad, whose original name was Józef Teodor Konrad
Korzeniowski, was born near Berdichev, Poland (now in
Ukraine), the son of a Polish nobleman who was also a political
journalist and anarchist. From his father the boy acquired a love
of literature, including romantic tales of the sea. He was
orphaned at the age of 12, and when he was 16 years old he
left Russian-occupied Poland and made his way to Marseille,
France. For the next four years he worked on French ships, ran
guns for the Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, and
became involved in a love affair that ended in his attempted
suicide. He then entered the British merchant service, becoming
a master mariner and a naturalized British subject in 1886; a
few years later he changed his name to sound more English.
Joseph Conrad
(1857-1914)
Marlow’s & Conrad’s
1889-90 journey into
Heart of Darkness
Congo in the 1890s
Inner Station
• Conrad did, in fact, go up the Congo River in 1890.
• Like Marlow in the novel, he got the job to go to the Congo through his aunt.
• Like Marlow, he did not get along with the manager.
• Like Marlow, he was sent to pick up an agent Klein !!
• Like Marlow, he fell ill and nearly died.
Heart of Darkness is Conrad’s most widely read novel.
One reason is that it lends itself to wide range of interpretations.
It can be read as…..
1. As autobiography: The account of a journey up the Congo river that
Conrad undertook in the early 1890’s.
2. As anti-colonialism: An exposition of the brutality of Belgian colonial
rule.
3. As myth: An (Arthurian) quest.
4. As Greek/ Roman or Norse mythology.
5. Christian: good vs evil
6. Psychologically: A journey into the self.
Heart of Darkness = Harrowing
Critique of Western Colonialism
1899, 1902: Heart of Darkness
exposes predatory European
Colonialism & its atrocities
Brussels = “whited sepulchre”
(9) (25),(70); hypocrisy of
hollow ideals: “papier-mache
Mephistopheles, (26),“civilizing
mission” & “White Man’s
Burden.
Public opinion turns against
“jingoism” (e.g Rudyard
Kipling)1908: Leopold II loses
Congo to Belgian
government1960: Belgian
Congo achieves independence
A Brief History of Slavery & European
Development in Africa
• Atlantic Slave Trade (1650 - 1900): up to
28 million central & west Africans captured
& driven to coasts to be sold as slaves
• 450 and 1850: at least 12 million Africans
were shipped from Africa to New World-notorious "Middle Passage“ (20% mortality
rate)
•18th & 19th Centuries: European political,
economic, scientific interests fuel search
for new markets & "exploration" of Africa
• 1863: British explorers Speke & James
Augustus Grant, traveling downstream, & Sir
Samuel White Baker, working upstream, locate
sources of Nile…almost. David Livingstone takes
the exploration further and eventually discovers
source in 1872
•Christian missionaries & European merchants
come with European explorers
• View of Africans: "primitive, pre-literate,
undeveloped”
• 1870s: European “Scramble for Africa”
• 1876-1884: King Leopold II (r. Belgium, 18651909) uses Stanley to explore, acquire, colonize
“Congo Free State” as his personal possession
•1885: Berlin Conference European powers
divide up Africa
Conrad about Colonialism:
Anticolonialism
• “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the
taking it away from those who have a different
complexion or lightly flatter noses than ourselves, is
not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
• ”a taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all like
the whiff from some corpse.”
•“….but as I stood on this hillside I foresaw that in
the blinding sunshine of that land I would become
acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak- eyed
devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”
• In an essay Conrad calls the colonial exploitation of
the Congo, “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience…”
Early Modernism and 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. Christianitychallenged as “convenient fictions” created to impose order,
meaning on random, senseless, violent world.
Arthurian Mythological Allusion
•In the King Arthur myths a knight in shining amour goes on a quest. Typically a quest for
the holy grail.
•The quest usually involves a number of trials. Some of those are physical, but the
toughest tests are usually spiritual, a test of moral fiber or personal integrity.
•The trials do not necessarily lead to wealth and fame, but equally often to insight and
humility.
Mythology: Greek, Roman and Norse
There are a number of references to Greek and Norse Mythology and to the Iliad, the
Odyssey and the Aeneid :
The women in the Brussels office => Fates, Parcae, or Nornes (deciding the fate of man)
The Sepulchral city => Descent into the underworld ( Odyssey and Aeneid)
The river => Styx, Lethe (River/Stream in the underworld)
The dying Negroes => The lifeless shadows in the underworld
The journey itself => the journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas
In Greek mythology the Moirae were the goddesses of fate who
personified the inescapable destiny of man. They assigned to every
person his or her fate or share in the scheme of things.
They are: CLOTHO who spins the Thread of Life, LACHESIS who allots
the length of the yarn, and ATROPOS who cuts the thread of life (the
final one).
At the birth of a man, the Moirae spinned out the thread of his future life,
followed his steps, and directed the consequences of his actions
according to the counsel of the gods. It was not an inflexible fate; Zeus,
if he chose, had the power of saving even those who were already on
the point of being seized by their fate. The Fates did not abruptly
interfere in human affairs but availed themselves of intermediate
causes, and determined the lot of mortals not absolutely, but only
conditionally, even man himself,
In Roman mythology, the Parcae (singular, Parca) were the female
personifications of destiny, often called The Fates in English. They also
controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal and immortal
from birth to death. Even the gods feared the Parcae. Jupiter also was
subject to their power.
The names of the three Parcae were:
Nona (Greek - Clotho), who spun the thread of life.
Decima (Greek -Lachesis), who measured the thread of life with her
rod;
Morta (Greek -Atropos), who cut the thread of life and chose the
manner of a person's death.
Christian Allusions
The novella has repeatedly been compared to
Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Dante also undertakes a journey to the underworld,
to the Christian Hell.
Other parallels are:
The river = snake = temptation
The dying Negroes = souls in limbo
The Inner Station = the inner sanctum of Hell,
Inferno
What principles of modernism
are at work in Conrad’s novel?
•
Primitivism:
– 1643/135: “‘Going up that river….”
– 1645/137: “…we were traveling….”
– 1655-56/147-78: “…how can you imagine….”
•
The unconscious mind:
– 1645/137: The collective unconscious (Jung): “The mind of man is capable of anything….”
– 1638/130, top par.: Reference to dreams: “It seems to me I am trying to tell you a
dream….”
– Dramatization of the psyche (Freud):
• Superego: Europe
• Ego: Marlow
• Id: Africa
– Points:
• Marlow has to mediate between competing extremes.
• The trip enacts this psychomachia (n. conflict of the soul) as well as a descent into the
unconscious mind.
• Experiences become more dream-like as the voyage progresses.
Ways of Responding to the Unconscious
•
•
•
Ignore darkness of the unconscious mind:
– 1630/122: Accountant (oblivious)
– 1633/125: Manager (hollow)
Be overcome by the unconscious mind:
– 1673/165: “True, he had made that last stride….”
Be aware of it but resist it with the help of work:
– 1673/165: “Since I had peeped over the edge myself….”
– Melville, Moby Dick: “Look not too long into the fire, O man!”—but do look!
Conrad’s Inversion of Freud’s
Psychoanalytic Theory
Here is what one assumes:
•
Superego: Europe (self-restraint)
•
Ego: Marlow (attracted to both)
•
Id: Africa (barbarity)
Instead one gets:
Superego: Africa (self-restraint)
Ego: Marlow (attracted to both)
Id: Europe (barbarity)
The primitive people are more self-restrained than the Europeans. Conrad’s novel deconstructs
Freud’s triad.
“Psychological” Novel
•
•
•
Freud (1856-1939): feeling, unconscious, inward journey into self, back into past/
childhood keys to understanding human nature/behavior
•Psychoanalytical method: healing through storytelling •Focus: mental life,
perceptions of story teller and his search for meaning (vs. tale itself)
•inward journey into dream/nightmare world of irrational “uncontrollable” unconscious
Epistemological issues
Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy
that studies the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge and
belief. The term "epistemology" is based on the Greek words,
"ἐπιστήμη or episteme" (knowledge or science) and "λόγος or
logos" (account/explanation); it was introduced into English by
the Scottish philosopher, James Frederick Ferrier.
Heart of Darkness is centrally concerned with
epistemological issues. Above all, it is a narrative
engaged with the possibilities of knowledge about
the self and the world. Many critics have pointed out
that Marlow's journey into the center of Africa is a
spiritual process of self-discovery, a metaphor for
Marlow's spiritual odyssey to "the inconceivable
mystery of [his] soul" (Conrad). Marlow himself
acknowledges self-discovery to be the most
important part of his journey and "the most [we] can
hope from [the Droll thing life]" (Conrad).
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was not
the only late nineteenth-century writer seeking to make his
contemporaries aware of man's primitive origins and
drives: thinkers as various as Darwin, Freud, lung, and
Frazer also explore what Conrad describes as "the
duality of man's nature". The ceaseless competition of
individuals is for Conrad a warfare larger than European
and Roman conquest: it is inherent in that very nature.
"The life history of the earth must in the last instance be a
history of really very relentless warfare“ (12). But in
contemplating that warfare as it is specified in modern
capitalism and colonial exploitation, Conrad creates the
mythic action and process of Heart of Darkness, a
succession of images, a pulsation of energy and
affirmation, an ebb and flow of voices that builds towards
the final serenity Nietzsche found in the tragic myth of the
Greeks. At the heart of the civilizing enterprise Conrad
discovers the tragic paradoxes: the inevitability with
which exploration becomes exploitative, the paradox of
self-discovery at the moment when life itself is found to
signify nothing.
On Nietzsche: see Nietzche as
seeing errors as potentially beneficial;
that some doctrines are true , but
deadly, that Nietzsche approved of
Plato’s indispensable lie in the
Republic, that freedom of will is ‘a
necessary delusional concept’ and
that moral freedom is also a
‘necessary illusion’. Such
philosophical excursions may still hold
credence 100 yrs later though in the
last stages of post-modernism a
contemporary audience is well tutored
in the plurality of values and truths.
In Nietzschean perspectivism ‘Lies’ it
seems have always been untenable;
they are sometimes ‘good’/productive,
sometimes merely fiction; sometimes
necessary, and they are definitely
despicable. And yet there really is very
little confusion when we call another
person a ‘liar’ or when we tell a lie or
when we seek legal recourse in the
face of the lie.
In the allegory of the cave, Plato asks us to imagine the following scenario: A group of people
have lived in a deep cave since birth, never seeing any daylight at all. These people are bound in
such a way that they cannot look to either side or behind them, but only straight ahead. Behind
them is a fire, and behind the fire is a partial wall. On top of the wall are various statues, which
are manipulated by another group of people, laying out of sight. Because of the fire, the statues
cast shadows on the wall that the prisoners are facing. The prisoners watch the stories that these
shadows play out, and because this is all they can ever see, they believe that these shadows are
the most real things in the world. When they talk to one another about “men,” “women,” “trees,”
“horses,” and so on, they refer only to these shadows.
Now he asks us to imagine that one of these prisoners is freed from his bonds, and is able to look
at the fire and at the statues themselves. After initial pain and disbelief, he eventually realizes that
all these things are more real than the shadows he has always believed to be the most real
things; he grasps how the fire and the statues together caused the shadows, which are copies of
the real things. He now takes the statues and fire as the most real things in the world.
Next this prisoner is dragged out of the cave into the world above. At first, he is so dazzled by the
light in the open that he can only look at shadows, then he is able to look at reflections, then finally
at the real objects—real trees, flowers, houses, and other physical objects. He sees that these are
even more real than the statues were, and that those objects were only copies of these.
Finally, when the prisoner’s eyes have fully adjusted to the brightness, he lifts his sights toward the
heavens and looks at the sun. He understands that the sun is the cause of everything he sees
around him—of the light, of his capacity for sight, of the existence of flowers, trees, and all other
objects.
The stages the prisoner passes through in the allegory of the cave correspond to the various levels
on the line. The line, first of all, is broken into two equal halves: the visible realm (which we can
grasp with our senses) and the intelligible realm (which we can only grasp with the mind). When the
prisoner is in the cave he is in the visible realm. When he ascends into the daylight, he enters the
intelligible.
The lowest rung on the cognitive line is imagination. In the cave, this is represented as the prisoner
whose feet and head are bound, so that he can only see shadows. What he takes to be the most
real things are not real at all; they are shadows, mere images. These shadows are meant to
represent images from art. A man who is stuck in the imagination stage of development takes his
truths from epic poetry and theater, or other fictions. He derives his conception of himself and his
world from these art forms rather than from looking at the real world.
Plato’s Philosophies
“He became very cool and collected all at once. ‘…I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples,’ he said
sententiously, emptied his glass with great resolution, and we rose”(11).
Plato on lying:
Believes in 3 Realms (material realm, transcendental realm, and ultimate realm of god) the last of which included
philosopher kings who were like guardians. They were the elite few who had come to grasp the idea of “the one,
the true, and the good.” These kings have the right to lie, but citizens do not. Citizens must believe that the gods
exists and the elites are descendents of them. “If anyone is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State
should be the persons; and they, in their dealings with either their enemies or with their own citizens, may be
allowed to lie for the public good. Nobody else should meddle with this privilege.” Marlow emerges as a
‘supreme being’ (77) who perpetrates a lie as a means to protect society from the ‘reality.’
Various Interpretations of HOD
1.
Realism
Autobiography
Real
journey
The
Congo
River
expectati
on
Brussels
Main office
Description
of condition
in the colony
Stanleyville
Inner Station
Marlow
(Conrad)
close to
dying
Return to
civilization
2. Anti-colonialism
Politics
Journey
Do
Absurd
bureaucracy/
Alienation
Criticism of
colonialism
Europe’s so
called
civilizing
influence
turned upside
down.
Society
figuratively
“dead”
Alienation/
inability to
communicate.
Society
unable to
cope
3. Myth
(Arthurian)
Quest
Expectatio
n
Delegation of
task/ Departure
Learning
process
Culmination
temptation,
trial
Cleansing /
purification
Return,
mission
accomplished
4. Mythology –
Norse/Greek
/Roman
Quest
Styx,
Lethe,
Journey
Nornes, Fates,
Morea, descent
into Hades
Hades, Hell,
the
underworld
Denouement /
climax
Danger of
the
forbidden
,nemesis
Homecoming
5. Christian
A Pilgrims
progress,
Everyman
Snake,
temptation
Tomb, descent,
memento mori
(remember your
mortality).
Lost souls,
limbo
Inner
Sanctum of
Hell, Inferno
Punishment,
purgatory
Forgiveness,
salvation.
6. Psychology
Analysis,
introspection
Method
First scary
revelations
Learning
process
desperation
Final step into
the Id.
Crisis
Cure