Heart of Darkness

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Heart of Darkness (disambiguation).

It has been suggested that Georges Antoine Klein be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

**Title** **Heart of Darkness**
Author	Joseph Conrad
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Frame story, Novella
Publisher
Released	1902
Media type	Print (Serial)

Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1902 publication, it appeared as a three-part series (1899) in Blackwood's Magazine.

This highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame narrative. It follows Charles Marlow as he recounts, at dusk and into the evening, 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. Though his job is transporting ivory downriver, Marlow quickly develops an intense interest in investigating Kurtz, an ivory-procurement agent in the employ of the government. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region.

1 Background
2 Motifs and themes
3 Controversy
4 In the arts
- 4.1 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Background

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 soon became ill and returned back to Europe soon after. 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.

[edit] Motifs and themes

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" 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 the Africans by Europeans. The lavishly praised, finest, most civilized and estimable flower of European civilization is represented by the character "Kurtz"; but Kurtz is actually the bloodiest, most evil, violent and monstrous—hence the "darkest"—character in the book. This contradiction is ultimately a criticism of the Victorian perception of Western Culture being the heart of "Civilization". One of the probable models for the Kurtz character was Henry Morton Stanley of "Dr. Livingston; 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 given a knighthood.

To emphasize the theme of darkness within all of mankind, Marlow's narration takes place on a yacht 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, not so much between people as within every major character's soul.

Through the novel, Conrad stresses the importance of restraint; in his view a person’s "primitive honour" against his or her basic impulses. From the perspective of existentialism, people without restraint will be trapped in the destructive cycle and their lives will be absurd and inane.

[edit] Controversy

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-humanised 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?"^[1] to Cedric Watts' A Bloody Racist: About Achebe's View of Conrad (1983),^[2] 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).^[3]

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.

[edit] In the arts

1927 - T. S. Eliot quoted the line, "Mistah Kurtz, he dead," along with the folk saying, "A penny for the old Guy," at the beginning of his poem, "The Hollow Men."
1940 - Orson Welles attempted to make his first film based on Heart of Darkness but abandoned the project.
1958 - Playhouse 90 episode# 3.7, aired November 6 - American television version of Heart of Darkness starring Roddy McDowall, Eartha Kitt, Richard Haydn, Inga Swenson, and Boris Karloff as Kurtz.
1972 - Aguirre, The Wrath of God, a German film directed by Werner Herzog, is remarkably similar to Conrad's novella — like Conrad's book, it mocks European colonialism and mimics the trip in to the jungle with the madness and depravity of the characters increasing the deeper they go in to the wilderness.
1975 - Song titled "Heart of Darkness" by band Pere Ubu
1979 - John Milius based his script for Apocalypse Now on the novel and moved the plot to Vietnam. It was filmed by Francis Ford Coppola.
1980 - In A Confederacy of Dunces, the theme of "modern slavery" in America during the Jim Crow period is explored. There are two divisions in Levy Pants, a business that makes and markets pants: white collar (office work) and blue collar (factory work). Most (perhaps all) of the underpaid factory workers in Levy Pants are American Blacks. When Ignatius J. Reilly enters the factory, he is reminded of Heart of Darkness: "Perhaps I likened myself to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness when, far from the trading company offices in Europe, he was faced with the ultimate horror. I do remember imagining myself in a pith helmet and white linen jodhpurs, my face enigmatic behind of a veil of mosquito netting." In addition, the terms Outer Station, Central Station, and Inner Station are used in association with Levy Pants.
1993 - Nicolas Roeg filmed Heart of Darkness for television with Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz.
1993 - In the novel Headhunter by Canadian author Timothy Findley, a schizophrenic spiritualist accidentally sets Kurtz free from page 92 of Heart of Darkness, and is forced to find a Marlow to defeat him. The novel recasts Kurtz and Marlow as psychiatrists in an apocalyptic version of Toronto.
1998 - Star Trek: Insurrection took plot inspiration from Heart of Darkness.
1998 - the video game Heart of Darkness borrowed the title from the novel and was loosely based on the story.
2005 - Peter Jackson's King Kong has many references to Heart of Darkness, such as a scene where Jimmy holds a copy of the book and says “It’s not an adventure story, is it?” As King Kong itself is a story of the cruelties of men, the film suggests that Conrad meant to explore human cruelty towards others as much as he meant to explore the Belgian Congo—and thus also the film is more than an adventure story but also explores the human will to exploit others. [1]
2006 - Lost. The novel is one of many to be mentioned in the popular television series Lost. It has been hinted that the literary works that are featured in this series are clues to its mysterious plot.

[edit] See also

1904 - The Congo Reform Association was formed to expose labor abuses in the Congo Free State, eventually leading to the Belgian state taking responsibility for the colony.
1905 – Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy describes the barbaric, exploitative treatment of Congo's populace by the Belgians.
1912 - H. M. Tomlinson's The Sea and the Jungle, a non-fiction travel-narrative classic, recounts the voyage of the first English "tramp steamer" to traverse the Amazon River (1905). It includes many of the same themes as Heart of Darkness.
1922 - An extract from 'Heart of Darkness' was initially used as an epigraph to the poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. However it was replaced by an extract from the Satyricon on the advice of Ezra Pound.
1991 - Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a documentary about the making of the film Apocalypse Now
1998 -"The Poisonwood Bible", by Barbara Kingsolver explores many of the themes of Heart of Darkness, largely in the same place.
2005 - The First Casualty, a novel by Ben Elton, follows the same storyline where a British police detective investigates a crime in the midst of the First World War, and gradually becomes painfully acquainted with the horrors of war. He is given the false name of Christopher Marlowe (cf Charlie Marlow), and he makes references to the Belgian colonisation of the Congo.

[edit] References

^ "Chinua Achebe: The Failure interview"
^ Watts, Cedric. "A Bloody Racist: About Achebe's View of Conrad." The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 13 (January 1983), 196-209.
^ Curtler, Hugh. "Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness." Conradiana, vol. 29 issue 1 (March 1997), 30-40.