Heart of Darkness

1. Heart of Darkness By Joseph Conrad

2. Conrad, whose original name was JózefTeodorKonradKorzeniowski, 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.

3. Joseph Conrad (1857-1914) Marlow’s & Conrad’s 1889-90 journey into Heart of Darkness

5. Congo in the 1890s Inner Station

6. Semi-Autobiographical • 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 !! • Like Marlow, he fell ill and nearly died.

7. 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 anti-colonialism: An exposition of the brutality of Belgian colonial rule. 3. As myth: An (Arthurian) quest. 4. As Greek/ Roman or Norse mythology. 5. Christian: good vs evil 6. Psychologically: A journey into the self.

8. Heart of Darkness = Harrowing Critique of Western Colonialism 1899, 1902: Heart of Darkness exposes predatory European Colonialism & its atrocities Brussels = “whitedsepulchre” (9) (25),(70); hypocrisy of hollow ideals: “papier-mache Mephistopheles, (26),“civilizing mission” & “White Man’s Burden. Public opinion turns against “jingoism” (e.g Rudyard Kipling)1908: Leopold II loses Congo to Belgian government1960: Belgian Congo achieves independence

9. 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

10. • 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 further 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

11. Conrad about Colonialism: 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.” •“….but as I stood on this hillside I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak- eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”• 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…”

12. 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.

13. Arthurian Mythological Allusion •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 fiber or personal integrity. •The trials do not necessarily lead to wealth and fame, but equally often to insight and humility.

14. Mythology: Greek, Roman 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, Parcae, or Nornes (deciding the fate of man) The Sepulchral city => Descent into the underworld ( Odyssey and Aeneid) The river => Styx, Lethe (River/Stream in the underworld) The dying Negroes => The lifeless shadows in the underworld The journey itself => the journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas

15. In Greek mythology the Moirae were the goddesses of fate who personified the inescapable destiny of man. They assigned to every person his or her fate or share in the scheme of things. They are: CLOTHO who spins the Thread of Life, LACHESIS who allots the length of the yarn, and ATROPOS who cuts the thread of life (the final one). At the birth of a man, the Moirae spinned out the thread of his future life, followed his steps, and directed the consequences of his actions according to the counsel of the gods. It was not an inflexible fate; Zeus, if he chose, had the power of saving even those who were already on the point of being seized by their fate. The Fates did not abruptly interfere in human affairs but availed themselves of intermediate causes, and determined the lot of mortals not absolutely, but only conditionally, even man himself, In Roman mythology, the Parcae(singular, Parca) were the female personifications of destiny, often called The Fates in English. They also controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal and immortal from birth to death. Even the gods feared the Parcae. Jupiter also was subject to their power. The names of the three Parcae were: Nona (Greek - Clotho), who spun the thread of life. Decima(Greek -Lachesis), who measured the thread of life with her rod; Morta(Greek -Atropos), who cut the thread of life and chose the manner of a person's death.

16. Christian Allusions The novella 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 = temptation The dying Negroes = souls in limbo The Inner Station = the inner sanctum of Hell, Inferno

17. What principles of modernism are at work in Conrad’s novel? • Primitivism: • 1643/135: “‘Going up that river….” • 1645/137: “…we were traveling….” • 1655-56/147-78: “…how can you imagine….” • The unconscious mind: • 1645/137: The collective unconscious (Jung): “The mind of man is capable of anything….” • 1638/130, top par.: Reference to dreams: “It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream….” • Dramatization of the psyche (Freud): • Superego: Europe • Ego: Marlow • Id: Africa • Points: • Marlow has to mediate between competing extremes. • The trip enacts this psychomachia (n. conflict of the soul) as well as a descent into the unconscious mind. • Experiences become more dream-like as the voyage progresses.

18. Ways of Responding to the Unconscious • Ignore darkness of the unconscious mind: • 1630/122: Accountant (oblivious) • 1633/125: Manager (hollow) • Be overcome by the unconscious mind: • 1673/165: “True, he had made that last stride….” • Be aware of it but resist it with the help of work: • 1673/165: “Since I had peeped over the edge myself….” • Melville, Moby Dick: “Look not too long into the fire, O man!”—but do look! Conrad’s Inversion of Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory Here is what one assumes: Instead one gets: • Superego: Europe (self-restraint) Superego: Africa (self-restraint) • Ego: Marlow (attracted to both) Ego: Marlow (attracted to both) • Id: Africa (barbarity) Id: Europe (barbarity) The primitive people are more self-restrained than the Europeans. Conrad’s novel deconstructs Freud’s triad.

19. “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

20. Epistemological issues Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophythat studies the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge and belief. The term "epistemology" is based on the Greek words, "ἐπιστήμη or episteme" (knowledge or science) and "λόγος or logos" (account/explanation); it was introduced into English by the Scottish philosopher, James Frederick Ferrier. Heart of Darkness is centrally concerned with epistemological issues. Above all, it is a narrative engaged with the possibilities of knowledge about the self and the world. Many critics have pointed out that Marlow's journey into the center of Africa is a spiritual process of self-discovery, a metaphor for Marlow's spiritual odyssey to "the inconceivable mystery of [his] soul" (Conrad). Marlow himself acknowledges self-discovery to be the most important part of his journey and "the most [we] can hope from [the Droll thing life]" (Conrad).

21. Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was not the only late nineteenth-century writer seeking to make his contemporaries aware of man's primitive origins and drives: thinkers as various as Darwin, Freud, lung, and Frazer also explore what Conrad describes as "the duality of man's nature". The ceaseless competition of individuals is for Conrad a warfare larger than European and Roman conquest: it is inherent in that very nature. "The life history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of really very relentless warfare“ (12). But in contemplating that warfare as it is specified in modern capitalism and colonial exploitation, Conrad creates the mythic action and process of Heart of Darkness, a succession of images, a pulsation of energy and affirmation, an ebb and flow of voices that builds towards the final serenity Nietzsche found in the tragic myth of the Greeks. At the heart of the civilizing enterprise Conrad discovers the tragic paradoxes: the inevitability with which exploration becomes exploitative, the paradox of self-discovery at the moment when life itself is found to signify nothing. On Nietzsche: see Nietzche as seeing errors as potentially beneficial; that some doctrines are true , but deadly, that Nietzsche approved of Plato’s indispensable lie in the Republic, that freedom of will is ‘a necessary delusional concept’ and that moral freedom is also a ‘necessary illusion’. Such philosophical excursions may still hold credence 100 yrs later though in the last stages of post-modernism a contemporary audience is well tutored in the plurality of values and truths. InNietzscheanperspectivism ‘Lies’ it seems have always been untenable; they are sometimes ‘good’/productive, sometimes merely fiction; sometimes necessary, and they are definitely despicable. And yet there really is very little confusion when we call another person a ‘liar’ or when we tell a lie or when we seek legal recourse in the face of the lie. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

22. In the allegory of the cave, Plato asks us to imagine the following scenario: A group of people have lived in a deep cave since birth, never seeing any daylight at all. These people are bound in such a way that they cannot look to either side or behind them, but only straight ahead. Behind them is a fire, and behind the fire is a partial wall. On top of the wall are various statues, which are manipulated by another group of people, laying out of sight. Because of the fire, the statues cast shadows on the wall that the prisoners are facing. The prisoners watch the stories that these shadows play out, and because this is all they can ever see, they believe that these shadows are the most real things in the world. When they talk to one another about “men,” “women,” “trees,” “horses,” and so on, they refer only to these shadows. Now he asks us to imagine that one of these prisoners is freed from his bonds, and is able to look at the fire and at the statues themselves. After initial pain and disbelief, he eventually realizes that all these things are more real than the shadows he has always believed to be the most real things; he grasps how the fire and the statues together caused the shadows, which are copies of the real things. He now takes the statues and fire as the most real things in the world.

23. Next this prisoner is dragged out of the cave into the world above. At first, he is so dazzled by the light in the open that he can only look at shadows, then he is able to look at reflections, then finally at the real objects—real trees, flowers, houses, and other physical objects. He sees that these are even more real than the statues were, and that those objects were only copies of these. Finally, when the prisoner’s eyes have fully adjusted to the brightness, he lifts his sights toward the heavens and looks at the sun. He understands that the sun is the cause of everything he sees around him—of the light, of his capacity for sight, of the existence of flowers, trees, and all other objects. The stages the prisoner passes through in the allegory of the cave correspond to the various levels on the line. The line, first of all, is broken into two equal halves: the visible realm (which we can grasp with our senses) and the intelligible realm (which we can only grasp with the mind). When the prisoner is in the cave he is in the visible realm. When he ascends into the daylight, he enters the intelligible. The lowest rung on the cognitive line is imagination. In the cave, this is represented as the prisoner whose feet and head are bound, so that he can only see shadows. What he takes to be the most real things are not real at all; they are shadows, mere images. These shadows are meant to represent images from art. A man who is stuck in the imagination stage of development takes his truths from epic poetry and theater, or other fictions. He derives his conception of himself and his world from these art forms rather than from looking at the real world.

24. Plato’s Philosophies “He became very cool and collected all at once. ‘…I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples,’ he said sententiously, emptied his glass with great resolution, and we rose”(11). Plato on lying: Believes in 3 Realms (material realm, transcendental realm, and ultimate realm of god) the last of which included philosopher kings who were like guardians. They were the elite few who had come to grasp the idea of “the one, the true, and the good.” These kings have the right to lie, but citizens do not. Citizens must believe that the gods exists and the elites are descendents of them. “If anyone is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings with either their enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. Nobody else should meddle with this privilege.” Marlow emerges as a ‘supreme being’ (77) who perpetrates a lie as a means to protect society from the ‘reality.’

25. Various Interpretations of HOD