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For other uses, see Heart of Darkness (disambiguation).
| Heart of Darkness | |
| Author | Joseph Conrad |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Frame story, Novella |
| Publisher | Blackwood\'s Magazine |
| Publication date | 1902 |
| Media type | Print (Serial) |
| OCLC | 16100396 |
Heart of Darkness is a novella by Polish-born writer Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski). Before its 1902 publication, it appeared as a three-part series (1899) in Blackwood\'s Magazine. It is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon.
This highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts, from dusk through to late night, his adventure into the Congo to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary.
The story details an incident when Marlow, an Englishman, took a foreign assignment as a ferry-boat captain, employed by a Belgian trading company, on what readers may assume is the Congo River, in the Congo Free State, a private colony of King Leopold II; the country is never specifically named. Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver; however, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz to civilization in a cover up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region.
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In writing the novella, Conrad drew inspiration from his own experience in the Congo: eight and a half years before writing the book, he had served as the captain of a Congo steamer. However he became ill and returned to Europe. Some of Conrad\'s experiences in the Congo, and the story\'s historic background, including possible models for Kurtz, are recounted in Adam Hochschild\'s King Leopold\'s Ghost.
The story-within-a-story device that Conrad chose for Heart of Darkness — one in which an unnamed narrator recounts Marlow\'s recounting of his journey — has many literary precedents. Emily Brontë\'s Wuthering Heights and Mary Shelley\'s Frankenstein used a similar device, but the best examples of the framed narrative include Geoffrey Chaucer\'s The Canterbury Tales, The Arabian Nights and Samuel Taylor Coleridge\'s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
"He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—\'The horror! The horror!\'"
T. S. Eliot\'s use of this famous quotation from The Heart of Darkness as an epigraph to the original manuscript of The Waste Land contrasted with the "light of civilization" and the ambiguity of both - the dark motives of civilization and the freedom of barbarism, as well as the "spiritual darkness" of several characters. This sense of darkness also lends itself to a related theme of obscurity — again, in various senses, reflecting the ambiguities in the work. Moral issues are not clear-cut; that which ought to be (in various senses) on the side of "light" is in fact mired in darkness, and vice versa.
Africa was known as "The Dark Continent" in the Victorian Era with all the negative attributes of darkness attributed to Africans by the English. One of the possible influences for the Kurtz character was Henry Morton Stanley of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" fame, as he was a principal explorer of "The Dark Heart Of Africa", particularly the Congo. Stanley was infamous in Africa for horrific violence and yet he was honoured by a knighthood. However, an agent Conrad himself encountered when travelling in the Congo, named Georges-Antoine Klein (Klein means \'small\' in German, as Kurtz is \'short\') could have possibly served as an actual model for the Kurtz that appears in Heart of Darkness. Klein died aboard Conrad\'s steamer and was interred along the Congo, much like Kurtz in the novel. Sherry, Norman. "Conrad\'s Western World". Cambridge University Press. 1971.
The motif of "darkness" from the title recurs throughout the book. It is used to reflect the unknown, the concept of the "darkness of barbarism" places Mr. Kurtz, the ambiguous anti-hero of the story, at the dark heart of the twentieth century.
To emphasize the theme of darkness within all of mankind, Marlow\'s narration takes place on a yawl in the Thames tidal estuary. Early in the novella, Marlow recounts how London, the largest, most populous and wealthiest city in the world at the time (where Conrad wrote and where a large part of his audience lived), was itself a "dark" place in Roman times. The theme of darkness lurking beneath the surface of even "civilized" persons is further explored through the character of Kurtz and through Marlow\'s passing sense of understanding with the Africans.
Themes developed in the novella\'s later scenes include the naïveté of Europeans — particularly women — regarding the various forms of darkness in the Congo; the British traders and Belgian colonialists\' abuse of the natives; and man\'s potential for duplicity. The symbolic levels of the book expand on all of these in terms of a struggle between good and evil (light and darkness), not so much between people as within every major character\'s soul.
Throughout the novel Conrad dramatizes a tension in Marlow between the restraint of civilization and the savagery of barbarism. The darkness and amorality which Kurtz exemplifies is argued to be the reality of the human condition, upon which illusory moral structures are draped by civilization. Marlow\'s confrontation with Kurtz presents him with a \'choice of nightmares\' - to commit himself to the savagery of the human condition, or to the lie and veneer of civilized restraint. Though Marlow \'cannot abide a lie\' and subsequently cannot perceive civilization as anything but a veneer hiding the savage reality of the human condition, he is also horrified by the darkness of Kurtz he sees in his own heart. After emerging from this experience, his Buddha-like pose aboard the Nellie symbolizes a suspension between this choice of nightmares.
The novel is largely autobiographical, based upon Joseph Conrad\'s six-month journey up the Congo River where he took command of a steamboat in 1890 after the death of its captain. At the time, the river was called the Congo, and the country was the Belgian Congo. The area Conrad refers to as the Company Station was an actual location called Matadi, a location two-hundred miles up river from the mouth of the Congo. The Central Station was a location called Kinshasa, and both these locations marked a stretch of river impassable by steamboat, upon which Marlow takes a "two-hundred mile tramp." "Historical Context: Heart of Darkness." EXPLORING Novels, Online Edition. Gale, 2003. Discovering Collection. Subscription required
The Company was in reality a company formed by King Leopold II of Belgium charged with running the country of the Congo Free State in 1885. The Congo Free State was voted into existence by the Congress of Berlin, which Conrad refers to sarcastically in his novella as "the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs."
Leopold II declared the Congo Free State his personal property in 1892, legally permitting the Belgians to take what ivory they wished from the area without having to trade with the African natives. This caused a rise in atrocities perpetrated by the Belgian traders similar if not identical to those perpetrated by the fictional Kurtz.[citation needed]
The Congo Free State was taken out of the personal property of the king and made a regular colony of Belgium, called Belgian Congo, in 1908, after the extent of atrocities committed there became generally known in the West, partially through Conrad\'s novel. Belgian Congo received its independence from Belgium in 1960, becoming the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo.The country then was called Zairium.
In a post-colonial reading, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe famously criticized the Heart of Darkness in his 1975 lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad\'s "Heart of Darkness", saying the novel de-humanized Africans, denied them language and culture, and reduced them to a metaphorical extension of the dark and dangerous jungle into which the Europeans venture. Achebe\'s lecture prompted a lively debate, reactions at the time ranged from dismay and outrage - Achebe recounted a Professor Emeritus from the University of Massachusetts saying to Achebe after the lecture, "How dare you upset everything we have taught, everything we teach? Heart of Darkness is the most widely taught text in the university in this country. So how dare you say it’s different?""Chinua Achebe: The Failure interview" to Cedric Watts\' A Bloody Racist: About Achebe\'s View of Conrad (1983),Watts, Cedric. "A Bloody Racist: About Achebe\'s View of Conrad." The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 13 (January 1983), 196-209. which sets out to refute Achebe\'s critique. Other critiques include Hugh Curtler\'s Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness (1997).Curtler, Hugh. "Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness." Conradiana, vol. 29 issue 1 (March 1997), 30-40.
In King Leopold\'s Ghost (1998), Adam Hochschild argues that literary scholars have made too much of the psychological aspects of Heart of Darkness while scanting the moral horror of Conrad\'s accurate recounting of the methods and effects of colonialism. He quotes Conrad as saying, "Heart of Darkness is experience...pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case." King Leopold\'s Ghost. Hochschild, Adam. Mariner Books. New York, 1999. Page 143.
Heart of Darkness is also criticized for its characterization of women. In the novel, Marlow says that "It\'s queer how out of touch with truth women are." Marlow also suggests that women have to be sheltered from the truth in order to keep their own fantasy world from "shattering before the first sunset."
The most famous reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, which translates the context of the narrative from the Congo into Vietnam.
Some read this through the eyes and works of Nietzsche and ‘Will to Power’ theories, where society no longer works for its own good but for the good of one man. Kurtz could be read as being the embodiment of Übermensch or super man, an almost antichrist figure whom society has built itself around. In the novel, Kurtz refuses to leave the station; he is ‘king’ to the people, although he is not from those people. There is a stark contrast from the middle station where Marlow has a long trek over land and laments on the slavery of the blacks to the almost godlike figure Kurtz has become for the same people at the inland station.
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