Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness

An Introduction

Heart of Darkness was first published in 1899 as a series in the British Blackwood’s Magazine.

The novel is loosely based on Conrad’s own experience traveling with a steamboat crew up the Congo in 1890.

Since its publication, Heart of Darkness has been the center of both controversy and praise for its stunning, and sometimes biased description of the state of Africa in the Colonial era.

• 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 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.

Conrad’s View

Heart of Darkness

An Introduction

•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.

Genre: Modernism

Heart of Darkness

An Introduction

•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.

Genre: Modernism

Heart of Darkness

An Introduction

•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.

Genre: Modernism and Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness

An Introduction

Heart of Darkness is an example of a “frame-tale”.

A “frame-tale” is basically a story within another story.

Instead of listening directly to the narrators account of Africa, Conrad gives us a middle-man(Marlow) to listen to.

This technique effectively protects Conrad from all accountability. We cannot blame him for any of the negative portrayals of Africa because it is Marlow who is speaking and not the author.

Style and Structure

Heart of Darkness

An Introduction

The book's structure is cyclical, both in geography and chronology. It begins in the 1890s, goes back several years, and returns to the present. The voyage describes almost a perfect circle, beginning in Europe, traveling into the heart of the African continent, coming out again, and returning almost to the exact spot at which it began.

Style and Structure

• 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.

• Since its publication, Heart of Darkness has been the center of both controversy and praise for its stunning, and sometimes biased description of the state of Africa in the Colonial era.

• 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.

Controversy: Questioning Conrad’s Tale

Heart of Darkness

An Introduction

Controversy: Questioning Conrad’s Tale

Although Conrad’s has remained a very popular novel today, much criticism surrounds his tale.

His novel has been called racist because of its depiction of Africa and its people.

Many people feel that Conrad’s novel offers a very biased and imperialistic view of Africa in the early 20th century.

• 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 derided the novel and Conrad as examples of European racism.

• Authors including Chinua Achebe have wrote entire novels in response to this piece. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart shows the deep culture and civility that existed in Africa at the time.

Controversy: Questioning Conrad’s Tale

Marlow’s & Conrad’s1889-90 journey into

“Heart of Darkness”

Joseph Conrad(1857-1914)

The Journey

Heart of Darkness

An Introduction

The End