Joseph Conrad’s

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

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

Most famous novels:Almayer’s Folly (1889)Lord Jim (1900)Heart of Darkness (1902)Nostromo (1904)The Secret Agent (1907)Under Western Eyes (1911)

Marlow’s & Conrad’s1889-90 journey into

“Heart of Darkness”

Joseph Conrad(1857-1914)

Autobiography

• 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 (1889-1890)

• Like Marlow, he fell ill and nearly died

• Trauma & illness haunt him the rest of his life

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 anticolonialism: An exposition of the brutality of Belgian colonial rule.

3. As myth: An ( Arthurian) quest.4. As classical or Norse mythology.5. As psychology or psychoanalysis: A journey into the Self.

- and as a picture of the American involvement in the Vietnam War

Heart of Darkness

= Harrowing Critique of Western Colonialism

• 1899, 1902: Heart of Darkness exposes predatory European Colonialism & its atrocities

• Brussels = “whited sepulchre”; hypocrisy of hollow ideals: “civilizing mission” & “White Man’s Burden

• Public opinion turns against “jingoism” (e.g Rudyard Kipling)

• 1908: Leopold II loses Congo to Belgian government

• 1960: 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 furthe 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, 1865-1909) uses Stanley to explore, acquire, colonize “Congo Free State” as his personal possession

•1885: Berlin Conference European powers divide up Africa

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.”

• In an essay Conrad calls the colonial exploitation of the Congo, “the vilest scramble for loot that ever dis- figured the history of human conscience…”

Conrad about colonialism:

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. Christianity- challenged as “convenient fictions” created to impose order, meaning on random, senseless, violent world

“High” Modernism Early 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

Narrative Form• "Narrative frame" - like, but very different from, Wuthering Heights

• Marlow’s 1st-person narration = “limited” omniscient [not all-knowing]: introspective, discontinuous/fragmented, suggestive/evocative, a- rational connections

• Story/Plot is structured by flow of consciousness & memory: Interior monologue, “stream of consciousness," flashforward / flash-back; “logic” intertwines present awareness & memory

Congo in the 1890’s

Inner Station

Myth

•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 fibre or personal integrity.

•The trials do not necessarily lead to wealth and fame, but equally often to insight and humility.

Mythic Journey

• Unsettling global correspondences in world “myths” & rituals: e.g. Frazer’s Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890) & Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (Fisher king)

• Carl Jung (1875- 1961): all humans share common spiritual/ psychic heritage: collective unconscious, racial memories, archetypes emerge in dreams, myth/religion, art & literature

Mythology, classical 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 or NornesThe Sepuchral city => Descent into the underworld ( Odyssey and Aeneid)The river => Styx, Lethe (Rivers in the underworld)The dying Negroes => The lifeless shadows in the underworldThe journey itself => the journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas

The novel 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 = temptationThe dying Negroes = souls in limboThe Inner Station = the inner sanctum of Hell, Inferno

Christian Mythology

Dante (1265-1321)with his Divina Commedia

Psychology & Psychoanalysis

More than 20 years before Freud published his tripartite division of the mind into Superego, Ego and Id, Conrad seems to use similar ideas:

superego

ego

id

‘the policeman’ (p. 85)

‘your own innate strength’ (p.85) ‘..he was hollow at the core’ (97)

‘powers of darkness’ (p. 85)‘But the wilderness had found him out early… and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating’ (p. 97)

“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

Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now is only loosely based on Heart of Darkness.

However, the main plot and quite a few individual lines have been lifted directly

from the novel.

• Like the novel it is an delving into the darkness of man’s heart.

• Like the novel, the film wants to penetrate all the way to the reptile brain.

• Where the novel may be called anticolonialist, the film may be seen as anti-war.

• There is the same basic conflict of a technologically advanced culture attempting

to impose its will on a less developed people.

• If the novel questions ‘the white man’s burden’, the film questions the right of

one country to impose its political system on another.

‘The horror… the horror’

Other parallels between Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness

Same basic plot: An man goes up a river in order to get another man who, in the process, takes on an ominous significance

and e.g…..•The helmsman is killed by a spear•Kurtz’ camp is in both versions a vision of hell (in the novel some of the natives wear horns- in the film we see them.)

•Both Kurtzes are in opposition to their superiors.•Both Kurtzes are extremely gifted.•Kurtz’ voice plays a major role in both works. (Film: ”His voice really put the hook in me.” Novel: ”The man presented himself as a voice”.

Survey of various interpretations of Heart of Darkness

1. Realism the real journey the Congo River Brussels description of Stanleyville Marlow (Conrad) return toAutobiography expectation main office condition in the Inner Station close to dying civilisation

colony

2. Anticolonialism journey do absurd bureaucracy criticism of Europe’s so-called alienationPolitics alienation colonialism civilising influence inability to turned upside down communicate

3. Myth quest expectation delegation of task learning process culmination cleansing return, mission(Arthurian) departure temptation, trial purification accomplished

4. Mythology quest Styx, Lethe ? Nornes, Fates Hades, Hel dénouement danger of the for- homecomingClassical, Norse journey descent into Hades the underworld climax bidden, nemesis

5. Christian A Pilgrim’s Pro- Snake, tomb, descent lost souls inner Sanctum punishment forgivenessMythology gress, Everyman temptation memento mori limbo of Hell, Inferno purgatory salvation

6. Psychology analysis, method first scary learning process final step into the crisis curePsychiatry introspection revelations desperation Id

7. War movie mission ’circuit cable staff office, absurdity of the civilisation and Willard alive on mission accom-plugged into Kurtz’ bureaucracy war, ’arsehole of morality dissolved Kurtz’ terms plished, return

the world’

Snake skeleton