Heart of Darkness
#19thcentury #unitedkingdom #novel #primary
Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness. (1899, United Kingdom)
A controversial text. British Colonialism. Race. A journey through Africa.
Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness. (1899, United Kingdom)
A controversial text. British Colonialism. Race. A journey through Africa.
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
2.
How does a novel represent the individual's internal struggle?
Joseph
Conrad. Heart
of Darkness.
(1899, United Kingdom)
Supporting References:
- NPR program “Chinua Achebe: 'Heart Of Darkness' Is Inappropriate” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113835207
- Course study guide: http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/99/heart-of-darkness/
- Morley, Jonathan. "Heart of Darkness." The Oxford Companion to Black British History. : Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference. 2007. Date Accessed 26 Aug. 2013
“Heart of Darkness. Novel by Joseph Conrad, first serialized in
Blackwood's Magazine in 1899 and published in book form in
1902. It indicts Belgian colonialism in the Congo, where a quest
upriver into the steamy ‘horror’ of Africa reveals the descent
into savagery of civilized man. The novel is modelled on Conrad's own
experience of captaining a sternwheeler, the Roi des Belges,
up the Congo in 1890. Before departing for the interior, he stayed
for three weeks at Matadi Station with Roger Casement, the British
consular official who exposed the savage behaviour of the Belgian
colonizers, and who was later to be executed for treason during the
First World War. Casement had the soul, Conrad wrote, of Bartholomé
de las Casas, the Spanish emancipator of Amerindians: ‘I would help
him but it is not in me. I am only a wretched novelist inventing
wretched stories.’
“For Chinua
Achebe, spearheading the decolonization of literature in the 1970s,
Conrad was notoriously a ‘bloody racist’ (‘bloody’ was
amended to ‘thoroughgoing’ in subsequent reprints of his essay
‘An Image of Africa’). Achebe drew attention to Conrad's
depictions of Africans in the novel, where they appear only as
corpses, savages, and whirling shadows on the riverbank, arguing
that, despite condemning imperialism, Conrad was unable to free his
mind of the racist world‐view on which empire ‘sharpened its iron
tooth’. The novel's central concern was the degeneration of Kurtz
into savagery, and Africa was merely the place where this could
happen. This Eurocentrism was inverted by the early generation of
post‐colonial African novelists: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi
wa Thiong'o, Tayeb Salih, Ama Ata Aidoo, and others have variously
satirized the bigotry of the Marlow character, refashioned him as a
Europeanized African returning to the continent, or sent black
explorers into Europe. Conrad has also been Caribbeanized, most
notably in the work of the Guyanese novelists Wilson Harris and David
Dabydeen, where river voyages into Amerindian territory result in the
commingling of protagonists' identities, suggesting the possibility
of moving beyond the grand narratives of imperialism.”
- Birch, Dinah. "‘Heart of Darkness’." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 26 Aug. 2013
“‘Heart of Darkness’. A tale by Joseph
*Conrad, serialized in 1899 in Blackwood's
Magazine, and published, with other narratives,
in book form in 1902. On board a boat anchored peacefully in the
Thames the narrator, Marlow, tells the story of his journey on
another river. Travelling in Africa to join a cargo boat, Marlow
grows disgusted by what he sees of the greed of the ivory traders and
their brutal exploitation of the natives. At a company station he
hears of the remarkable Mr Kurtz who is stationed in the very heart
of the ivory country and is the company's most successful agent.
Leaving the river, Marlow makes an arduous cross‐country trek to
join the steamboat which he will command on an ivory‐collecting
journey into the interior, but at the Central Station he finds that
his boat has been mysteriously wrecked. He learns that Kurtz has
dismissed his assistant and is seriously ill. The other agents,
jealous of Kurtz's success, hope that he will not recover, and it
becomes clear that Marlow's arrival at the Inner Station is being
deliberately delayed. With repairs finally completed Marlow sets off
on the two‐month journey towards Kurtz. The river passage through
the heavy motionless forest fills Marlow with a growing sense of
dread. The journey is ‘like travelling back to the earliest
beginnings of the world’. Ominous drumming is heard and dark forms
glimpsed among the trees. Nearing its destination the boat is
attacked by tribesmen and a helmsman is killed. At the Inner Station
Marlow is met by a naive young Russian sailor who tells Marlow of
Kurtz's brilliance and the semi‐divine power he exercises over the
natives. A row of severed heads on stakes round the hut give an
intimation of the barbaric rites by which Kurtz has achieved his
ascendancy. Ritual dancing has been followed with human sacrifice
and, without the restraints imposed by his society, Kurtz, an
educated and civilized man, has used his knowledge and his gun to
reign over this dark kingdom. While Marlow attempts to get Kurtz back
down the river Kurtz tries to justify his actions and his motives: he
has seen into the very heart of things. But dying his last words are:
‘The horror! The horror!’ Marlow is left with two packages to
deliver, Kurtz's report for the Society for Suppression of Savage
Customs, and some letters for his Intended. Faced with the girl's
grief Marlow tells her simply that Kurtz died with her name on his
lips. This short novel has become one of the most discussed texts in
postcolonial
literary studies: it also inspired Coppola's
post‐Vietnam film Apocalypse Now (1979).”
- "Conrad, Joseph." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Eds. Drabble, Margaret, Jenny Stringer, and Daniel Hahn. : Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference. 2007. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Conrad and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Conrad, Joseph (Józef Teodor
Konrad Korzeniowski) (1857–1924), novelist and short
story writer, born of Polish parents in the Russian‐dominated
Ukraine. From an early age he longed to go to sea and in 1874 he went
to Marseilles, embarked on a French vessel, and began the career as a
sailor which was to supply so much material for his writing. In 1886
he became a British subject and a master mariner and in 1894 he
settled in England and devoted himself to writing. He published his
first novel at the age of 38, writing in English, his third language.
“Almayer's Folly
(1895) was followed by An Outcast of the Islands (1896), The
Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897),
and Lord
Jim (1900). The sea continued to supply the
setting for most of his novels and short stories. His narrative
technique is characterized by a skilful use of breaks in
time‐sequence and he uses a narrator, Marlow, who provides a
commentary on the action not unlike that of a Greek chorus. Conrad
has been called an Impressionist, and the movement of the stories, of
the images and emotions, is portrayed through each character's
private vision of reality. He collaborated with F. M. Ford
on The Inheritors (1900) and Romance (1903).
Typhoon
(1902) was followed by a major work, Nostromo
(1904), a novel which explores one of Conrad's chief
preoccupations—man's vulnerability and corruptibility. In his short
story ‘Heart
of Darkness’ (1902) Conrad had carried this
issue to a terrifying conclusion. The
Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes
(1911) are both novels with political themes, the latter set in
Switzerland and Russia and centred on the tragedy of the student
Razumov, caught up in the treachery and violence of revolution.
Conrad's work was at first ill‐received by critics and public
alike, and it was the novel Chance (1913) that brought him
his first popular and financial success; it is the story of Flora de
Barral, lonely daughter of a crooked financier, and combines the
attractions of a sea background with the theme of romantic love and
more female interest than is usual with Conrad. His other major works
include Youth (1902), The Mirror of the Sea (1906),
Victory (1915), The Shadow‐Line (1917), The
Rescue (1920), and The Rover (1923). Conrad's
autobiography, A Personal Record, appeared in book form in
1912 and his unfinished novel Suspense was published in
1925.
“By the time of his death, Conrad was
well established in the literary world as one of the leading
Modernists;
a decline of interest in the 1930s was followed by increasing
scholarly and critical attention, pioneered in part by a study in
1941 by M. C. Bradbrook, and by an essay in the same year by Leavis
in Scrutiny
(later reprinted in The Great Tradition) in which Conrad is
placed ‘among the very great novelists in the language’. The
Collected Letters, ed. F. Karl and L. Davis, were published
in five volumes (1983–96).”
Comments