HEART OF DARKNESS

by Josef Conrad (1899) notes

Joseph Conrad was born as Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3rd, 1857 in the Ukraine, at that time under Russian dominion. He came from a well-to-do Polish Catholic family of the landed gentry, ardent patriots, especially his father, a patriotic idealist and a revolutionary, who bitterly resented the division of his native country between Germany, Austria and in particular Russia. For his conspiratorial activities he was exiled together with his sick wife and son to Russia, where his wife died when his son was only seven. Out of bondage, father and son shared the fathers gloomy world of forlorn hopes, and Jozefs early childhood was a lonely one. In 1869 also his father died and he was taken under the protection of an uncle. In 1874 he left Poland for France to join the French Merchant Navy at Marseilles. Four years later he came into contact with England, and soon he decided to become an English seaman. In 1886 he became a British subject, and in 1888 he was given his first command. He sailed until 1894, then married and settled down in Kent in 1896, the year when he published his first novel, Almayers Folly. He had worked on this book in 1889, when he had also applied for a command on a river-steamer on the Congo, following an old boyhood dream of going to see the enormous blank space of the African interior. On his African expedition he came up against the real face of colonialism, with its greed and corruption, and the suffering it caused native populations. The expedition had a disastrous effect on his health, making him suffer for the rest of his life from gout and fever. He returned to England and started to write: the experience had matured his essentially adventurous spirit, and his career as a novelist had begun. Structure and plot First published as a three-part serial in Blackwoods Magazine. In the first pages an anonymous first-person narrator introduces us to Marlow (another first-person narrator and the protagonist of the story: an example of frame-narrative), whose account of his experiences in the Belgian Congo, apparently dealing with the rescue of mysterious Mr Kurtz, takes up most of the book. There are frequent shifts between the outer and the inner narrative. The inner narrative is further complicated because events and information are anticipated or postponed, breaking the chronological sequence and deferring the climax (Marlows meeting with Kurtz has been anticipated through the points of view of various characters: the chief accountant, the manager etc.). Literary influences Flaubert, Maupassant (French realistic literature); H.James (psychological realism), E.A.Poe, Rider Haggard - King Solomons Mines(1885), Allan Quatermain(1887): a warning against the white mans greed for money, admiration for African tribes. Conrad knew and loved Shakespeare and Dickens (sense of drama). Style Tendency towards the disappearance of the narrator: - in the Marlow novels (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Chance), Marlow is a sort of speaker for the author himself (perhaps too talkative and rhetorical; yet a guide who interprets events and characters, and is aware of his own changes - but, how reliable?). - shifting point of view: the consciousness of different characters reflects the action in a variety of interpretations which deny the possibility of a single truth. In both ways Conrad anticipates the modern novel. Speech styles are adapted to the personalities of the characters, time shifts from present to past and future, the language borrows from the tradition of romance, the gothic, and psychological realism. It introduces a wealth of symbols: light and darkness, the jungle, Inferno, black and white, ivory, the quest, the snake, the round knobs, the book An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship, the Inner Station, etc.). In the narrative the dialectical relationship between Good and Evil, which is typical of romance, implies that their roles can be reversed, or, at least, confused. So we keep wondering about the real significance of light and darkness, white and black, surface and depth, civilization and (untamed) nature, truth and lie, enemy and ally. Conrad seems to have loved language generally, and in particular verbal ambiguity: I wish to put before you a general proposition: that a work of art is seldom limited to an exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. Imagery and symbolism Oblique style, retrospective narrative. Oppositions: black and white, light and darkness, nature and civilization, MarlowKurtz (the double), the Thames and the Congo (apparently civilization versus nature, actually both dark places of the earth). Symbols: the wilderness, the jungle, the ivory, the women knitting black wool, the episode of the French ship of war, the Accountant's starched white shirt, the bit of white worsted tied round the native boy's neck, the drainage-pipes, the round knobs, the Belgian city is "a whited sepulchre", both Marlow and Kurtz are compared to "Buddha", Kurtz is often referred

to as "a voice". The adjectives are redundant, vague, gothic, "infernal", oneiric, smoky, unmodifiable, elusive, evasive, impressionistic. Latinate words, excessive repetition. Themes He started writing in an age which followed the decline of the Victorian novel. He worked in relative isolation, since his was a difficult art, of a psychological, literary and technical complexity to which late nineteenth-century literary taste was not accustomed. The nineteenth-century novel reflected a safe and steady world, in which there was room for moral edification, and for the omniscient narrator to discuss his characters with the reader, and decide on their applicability to human nature in general. But with new philosophies, and a new way of seeing the world, the rambling Victorian novel had had to change to a more urgent fictional style: the authorial voice gave way to more direct and dramatic depiction of character and reality, all reality, not just the realism of the 19th century. Most important in this respect was the work of French Naturalists, especially Zola. Flaubert was also important, with his insistence on the novel being not just entertainment, but a highly-refined literary artefact. (Other influences: Henry James, Stevenson, Ford Madox Ford). Conrad broke violently with the novel tradition in his themes. The 19th-century novel up to then had dealt mainly with man in society, living, even if often critically, in an intricate network of births, loves, marriages and deaths, gain or loss of wealth, reputation, but always in society, in the public world, as the ground on which individual moral and psychological problems were to be worked out. The minor novelists of the end of the century had described adventure and exotic places. With Hardy a new vision of the world had appeared, dominated by the shadow of Darwinism. Suddenly, man was conscious of another, huge dimension, which dwarfed him in all his small individual, social desires and expectancies. Conrads novels were in some respects similar to Hardys, in the lonely hero working out his salvation in an inscrutable world. It is in loneliness, in the wilderness, in the microcosm of the ship, away from the crowd and organized society, that true morality, true choice, is to be found, and individual responsibility and self-control are learnt. Society may afford shelter and give confidence, but it is artificial, illusory, a comforting deception. At the same time mans deep instincts and desires threaten to destroy his control over himself. One of Conrads main themes is mans struggle to keep hold of his integrity and decency, and his failure to do so both in the social world and in the wilderness. His vision of the problems of guilt, pride, selfdeception, mans inevitable isolation, and moral ambiguity, is pessimistic; for the late 19th-century literary world it was certainly too dark. Conrads view of human nature was complex, and reflected ideas which were in the air at the end of the century concerning mans inner psychological realities, the conscious and subconscious mind, the two souls of man, and so on (beginnings of psychoanalysis, Dostoevskys novels, Stevensons moral fables of the evil and primitive sides of man). Conrad delved deep into the human soul, and to describe the complex pattern of life he saw there he broke narrative, continually shifting points of view, creating an oblique style which would reflect the endless interweaving of cause and effect, for the sake of a new kind of realism, psychological realism. The readers attitudes and reactions were conditioned psychologically as they had never been before. The indirect narration, the supreme example of which was Marlow, and the authorial voice, were mingled in a new impressionistic and symbolic method. Where writers had previously created their worlds in their novels and left them for their readers to observe and understand, Conrad suggests metaphorical applications for his worlds - they become hubs of irradiating meaning. As the narrator says of Marlow: The meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze. To the end of his days, Conrad experimented with the novel as no other novelist had done before. As for his pessimistic vision of man, there is evidence that his depressive nature feared it and tried to keep it at bay; but it is the vision that was to become the early twentieth-century vision of the hollowness of modern civilization which T. S .Eliot portrayed so potently, and the central Conradian stance of man calling into a darkness which was both deaf and dumb was to be the powerful central image of Existentialism. Levels of interpretation 1. psychological, psychoanalytical, journey within the self, the double 2. anthropological, Darwinian, primitive ages, primeval nature 3. mythical, archetypal journey, romance, search for the Holy Grail, fight between Good and Evil, Inferno 4. moral, Victorian values, materialistic, work ethics, restraint, efficiency, duty, hypocrisy, conventionality of the idea of civilization, "the horror" 5. historical, western colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, cruelty A modernist novel: in the way/style it is written, in depicting the modern idea of materialism and absence of values, in not giving a clear answer to the questions it poses (Marlow's "inconclusive" tales, that is, open ended), in the new approach of psychological introspection, in the idea of time, consciousness and of man's existential loneliness: "we live as we dream -alone" (James, Stevenson, Dostoevsky). The relationship Marlow-Kurtz is ambiguous, as is ambiguous the final meaning which seems to condemn colonialism but not the values and beliefs that caused it.