Information about Heart Of Darkness

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 Joseph Conrad. 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 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.

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 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.

Motifs and themes

"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 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 Europeans. This contradiction is ultimately a criticism of the Victorian perception of Western Culture being the heart of "Civilization". 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 honored by a knighthood. However, an agent Conrad himself encountered when traveling 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. ^[1]

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.

Historical context

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." ^[2]

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."<ref name="HistoricalContext" />

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. <ref name="HistoricalContext" /> This caused a rise in atrocities perpetrated by the Belgian traders similar if not identical to those perpetrated by the fictional Kurtz.

The Belgian Congo received its independence from Belgium in 1960, becoming the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo. The country changed names to Zaire in 1971, and then returned to its original name after a near-bloodless civil war in 1997.

Controversy

In a post-colonial reading, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe famously criticized the Heart of Darkness in his 1975 lecture , 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?"^[3] to Cedric Watts' A Bloody Racist: About Achebe's View of Conrad (1983),^[4] 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).^[5]

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." ^[6]

In the arts

• 1910 - John Buchan, in Prester John, his adventure novel concerning a Zulu uprising, has his main character David Crawfurd say "Last night I had looked into the heart of darkness, and the sight had terrified me".
• 1925 - 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 an adaption of Heart of Darkness as his first film, but abandoned the project.
• 1940s - Lux Radio Theater, with Brian Aherne as Marlow.
• 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.
• 1966 - , a novel by Hunter S. Thompson, closes with an account of the gang's savagery visited on him and quotes of Kurtz: "The horror! The horror! ... Exterminate all the brutes!"
• 1970 - Downward to the Earth is a science fiction novel by Robert Silverberg. It is a tale of the quest for transcendence (a frequent Silverberg theme) set on another planet, and includes themes and references to Heart of Darkness including the name of 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 addresses colonialism and mimics the trip into 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 directed 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.
• 1987 - Title of a song performed by The Hoodoo Gurus.
• 1991 - Orson Welles' attempt to base a film on this story is a centre piece of the novel Flicker by Theodore Roszak.
• 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.
• 1995 - Iron Maiden's 1995 album " The X Factor" contains a song titled The Edge of Darkness which is based on the novel and the film "Apocalypse Now".
• 1998 - 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.
• 2000 - "His last step. My hesitating. Excerpt from Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness" ('Sein letzter Schritt. Mein Zögern'), Art of Thomas Offhaus inspired by Heart of Darkness.
• 2002 - video game featured a reference to Heart of Darkness in the final mission called "Heart of Plastic".
• 2003 - "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" made a reference to this book calling it a very good book even though it was quite short.
• 2003 - "The Rundown" indirectly referenced this novel when Christopher Walken's character Hatcher, the slave-driving operator of a mining town in the Amazon, says, “I’m the heart in the darkness!?
• 2004 - 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.
• 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. http://www.bookslut.com/features/2006_01_007452.php
• The 2005 video game, , features a level entititled Heart of Darkness. The 501st Legion (Clone Troopers) is called in to find a lost legion on Felucia, and battle the Confederacy of Independent Systems (CIS) with the help of Aayla Secura, their hero. An introduction to the level includes narration from the novella.
• 2006 - Flags of Our Fathers. On page 137 of the book, James Bradley describes the Marines who flew the flag at Iwo Jima as "boys back from their Pacific Heart of Darkness."^[7]
• 2007 - Heart of Darkness is a chamber opera version of the novella by the British composer Tarik O'Regan in collaboration with the artist Tom Phillips RA,^[8] which is jointly in development in London with Royal Opera House OperaGenesis and in New York with American Opera Projects.

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 - , a documentary about the making of the film Apocalypse Now.
• 1992 - Sven Lindqvist's 'Exterminate All the Brutes', an odyssey into the Heart of Darkness, European colonialism and the following genocide.
• 1996 - Seinfeld - Season 8 Episode 8, makes references to Apocalypse Now, with Peterman quoting Kurtz. The film of course transposed the novel to the Vietnam War.
• 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.

References

External links

• Heart of Darkness With Study Guide.
• Heart of Darkness, available at Project Gutenberg.
• Heart of Darkness, available as a printer-ready PDF from Ria Press.
• Heart of Darkness Study Notes from SparkNotes.
• Heart of Darkness from CliffsNotes.
• Heart of Darkness, full text and audio.
• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad at Page By Page Books.
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: A searchable online version at The Literature Network.
• Literary Critiques (from both sides) of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
• Discussion of Heart of Darkness on BBC Radio 4 In Our Time series, 15th February 2007.
• Audio book recording with accompanying text of Heart of Darkness from LoudLit.org.
• Heart of Darkness, a free audiobook version from LibriVox.
• Heart of Darkness at American Literature.