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==Background==
==Background==
<big>THIS BOOK IS POO</big>
Eight and a half years before writing the book, Conrad had gone to serve as the captain of a Congo [[Steamboat|steamer]]. On arriving in the Congo, he found his steamer damaged and under repair. He became sick and returned to Europe before serving as captain. 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]]''.<ref>Hochschild, Adam. ''King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa''. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. 144–145.</ref>


==Plot summary==
==Plot summary==

Revision as of 14:58, 12 March 2012

For other uses, see Heart of Darkness (disambiguation).
Heart of Darkness
AuthorJoseph Conrad
LanguageEnglish
GenreFrame story, Novella
PublisherBlackwood's Magazine
Publication date
1899
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint (serial)
Pages96 pp (1999 Modern Library Paperback Edition)
ISBNN/A Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character
OCLC16100396

Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series (1899) in Blackwood's Magazine. It was classified by the Modern Library website editors as one of the "100 best novels" [1] and part of the Western canon.

The story centres on Charles Marlow, who narrates most of the book. He is an Englishman who takes a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a river-boat captain in Africa. Heart of Darkness exposes the dark side of European colonization while exploring the three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters: the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the Europeans' cruel treatment of the African natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil.[2] Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. In the story, Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region.

This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts his Congolese adventure to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary from dusk through to late night. The passage of time and the darkening sky during Marlow's narrative parallels the atmosphere of the events he narrates.

Background

THIS BOOK IS POO

Plot summary

The story opens with an unnamed narrator on board the Nellie, a cruising yawl (boat) anchored in the Thames Estuary downstream from London and near Gravesend. He is with four friends, and dusk is falling as they wait for the turning of the tide. The narrator briefly describes the others, all of whom seem to be middle-aged men. One is called Charlie Marlow – the only one who "still followed the sea." Marlow makes a comment about London having been "one of the dark places on earth", and then begins a story of how he once took a job as captain of a river steamboat in Africa.

The Roi des Belges, the Belgian riverboat Conrad commanded on the upper Congo, 1889

Marlow describes his securing of the job and that when he arrives in Africa, he immediately dislikes the other white men he encounters, who work for the company, as they strike him as shallow and untrustworthy; one is like "papier-mâché". The company's main business seems to be buying ivory from the natives with beads, cloth and bits of brass. They speak often of the company's most remarkable agent, a man known only as Kurtz, stationed up-river, who has quite a reputation in many ways and who seems commonly regarded with a sense of mystery. Kurtz is apparently a completely ungovernable ivory collector, revealed much later to be also "essentially a great musician", journalist, skilled painter and "universal genius".

Marlow arrives up-river at the Central Trading Station run by a manager who is an unwholesome, conspiratorial character. Marlow discovers one day at the Station that his steamship has been sunk and secretly suspects the manager of causing the "accident." He spends three months repairing it, including a frustrating wait for spare parts. His first assignment is a voyage up-river to Kurtz's station to collect ivory and Kurtz himself, who seems to have gone rogue. There is a rumour regarding Kurtz's being ill; this makes the delays in repairing the ship all the more inconvenient. During the delay, Marlow overhears the manager expressing his fearful distrust of Kurtz, who appears to be a threat to the manager's powerful position, and how he wishes to execute a particular one of Kurtz's minions. Eventually Marlow, the manager, and three other white agents set out, with a crew of blacks from a cannibal tribe, on a long and difficult voyage up the river.

Old Belgian river station on the Congo River, 1889

As they near Kurtz's station they unexpectedly find a hut by the river with stacked firewood and a note saying that the wood is for them and that they should proceed up the river cautiously. Shortly after the steamer has taken on the firewood it is surrounded by a dense fog. When the fog clears, the ship is abruptly attacked by an unseen band of natives, who shoot arrows from the safety of the forest. They kill an African member of the crew who Marlow describes sentimentally and whose death he recounts with great sadness. Although Marlow suspects that Kurtz and his associates have already been massacred, the steamship surprisingly reaches Kurtz's unharmed station, which is eerily surrounded by a collection of natives' severed heads on poles. Marlow and his crew are first met by a guileless Russian traveler, who is reminiscent of a harlequin because of his motley-like clothing. The Russian assures them that everything is fine and informs them that he is the one who lived in the downstream hut and left the firewood. The Russian, a lone and aimless trader in the wilderness, came across Kurtz's station unexpectedly and has become something of a disciple of Kurtz, a man who seems to have the power to dominate anyone he meets. Marlow and his companions find that Kurtz has persuaded the natives to treat him as a god, and has led brutal raids in the surrounding territory in search of ivory. Marlow also recounts the brief appearance at the station of an awe-inspiring and enigmatic African woman, who may be Kurtz's mistress. The Russian, learning through Marlow of the manager's prior talk of executing him, quietly flees the station, though not before admitting that it was Kurtz, refusing to be taken away from his god-like throne in the wilderness, who ordered Marlow's boat to be attacked.

Due to Kurtz's ailing condition, however, Marlow and his crew take him aboard their ship themselves and depart. Kurtz is lodged in Marlow's pilot-house and Marlow begins to see that Kurtz, although skeletal due to his failing health, is every bit as grandiose as previously described, especially with regards to the enthralling tone of his speech. However, Marlow finds himself disappointed with Kurtz's childish schemes for fame and fortune. During this time, Kurtz gives Marlow a collection of papers and a photograph for safekeeping, as both witnessed the manager going through Kurtz's belongings. The photograph is of a beautiful young woman whom Marlow correctly assumes is Kurtz's fiancée, or as Marlow calls her, "his Intended."

One night Marlow happens upon Kurtz, obviously near death. As Marlow comes closer with a candle, Kurtz seems to experience a "supreme moment of complete knowledge" and speaks his last words: "The Horror! The Horror!" Marlow believes this to be Kurtz's reflection on the weight of the terrible actions he took in his life. Marlow does not tell the others immediately of Kurtz's death; the news is instead presented to the whole crew scornfully by the manager's child-servant who has peered inquisitively into the room with Kurtz's body.

Marlow later returns to Europe and is confronted by many people seeking objects and thoughts of Kurtz. Marlow visits Kurtz's fiancée about a year later; she is still in mourning and strongly maintains naïve notions of his virtue. When she asks him about Kurtz's death and his final words, Marlow is unable to tell her the truth, instead telling her that he died with her name upon his lips.

The story concludes back on the boat on the Thames, with a description of how the river seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

Motifs

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!"

— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

T. S. Eliot's use of a quotation from The Heart of Darkness—"Mistah Kurtz, he dead"—as an epigraph to the original manuscript of his poem The Hollow Men contrasted its dark horror with the presumed "light of civilization," and suggested the ambiguity of both the dark motives of civilization and the freedom of barbarism, as well as the "spiritual darkness" of several characters in Heart of Darkness. This sense of darkness also lends itself to a related theme of obscurity—again, in various senses, reflecting the ambiguities in the work. Morality is ambiguous, that which is traditionally placed on the side of "light" is in darkness and vice versa.

People gathered in the forest, at the passage of the steamboat “Roi des Belges” (“King of the Belgians”) in 1888.[3]

In the Victorian Era Africa was known as "The Dark Continent" and Europeans attributed many negative connotations to Africans. 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 supposedly infamous for his violence against his porters while in Africa, although records indicate this was perhaps an exaggeration[4] and he was later honoured with a knighthood. An agent Conrad met when travelling in the Congo, Georges-Antoine Klein, could also have served as a model for Kurtz (in German klein means "small" and kurz means "short"). Klein died aboard Conrad's steamer and was interred along the Congo, much like Kurtz in the novel.[5] Among the people Conrad may have encountered on his journey was a trader called Leon Rom, who was later named chief of the Stanley Falls Station. In 1895, a British traveller reported that Rom had decorated his flower-bed with the skulls of some twenty-one victims of his displeasure (including women and children) resembling the posts of Kurtz's Station.[6]

Duality of human nature

But theory is one thing, practice is another. Idealism, which has a Utopian quality, is inappropriate in a world where corrupt interests abound and where there are many who go on all fours. The last sentence in the report, an added footnote--"Exterminate all the brutes"--refers us to the dark other side of his personality, "the soul satiated with primitive emotions"; it shows a descent and that his "civilizer's" concern for the distressed savages has turned to hatred. Of particular relevance is the significance of the portrait he has painted, the blindfolded torchbearer against the black background which could suggest (among other things) the simplicity of the ideal and the complexity of reality, the illusion of light and the truth of darkness. The monstrous prevails and the human and artistic potential miscarries. There is a downward tug in Kurtz's involvement with the wilderness and he descends into a brute existence. He is reduced to madness and his aggressive impulses take control of him.

In conclusion, Kurtz, no less than other neo-primitives, is an evolutionary throwback, the "man-that-was" (Dracula 231). He is an exemplification of the duality of human nature, of how darkness is a component of light, and when it prevails, brings anarchy and corruption of others as well as self. Appropriately, he ends up ignominiously: "Suddenly the manager's boy probably burlesquing the manager~ put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt: 'Mistah Kurtz – he dead'" (71). Jung's definition of the "experience that furnishes the material for artistic expression" could well apply to Heart of Darkness and to each of the other novels: "It is something strange that derives its existence from the hinterland of man's mind, as if it had emerged from the abyss of prehuman ages, or from a superhuman world of contrasting light and darkness. It is a primordial experience which surpasses man's understanding and to which in his weakness he may easily succumb".

To emphasize the theme of darkness within mankind,[7] 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, was a dark place in Roman times. The idea that the Romans conquered the savage Britons parallels Conrad's tale of the Belgians conquering the savage Africans. The theme of darkness lurking beneath the surface of even "civilized" persons appears prominently and is explored in the character of Kurtz and through Marlow's passing sense of understanding with the Africans.

Kurtz embodies all forms of an urge to be more or less than human. His writings show in Marlow's view an "exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence" and they appeal to "every altruistic sentiment." His predisposition for benevolence is clear in the statement "We whites...must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings....By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded". The Central Station manager quotes Kurtz, the exemplar: "Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing". Kurtz's inexperienced, scientific self in the fiery report is alive with the possibility of the cultivation and conversion of the savages. He would have subscribed to Moreau's proposition that "a pig may be educated".[7]

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.[9] The symbolism in the book expands on these as a struggle between good and evil (light and darkness), not so much between people as in every major character's soul.

Reception

In a post-colonial reading, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, famously criticized Heart of Darkness in his 1975 lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", saying the novella de-humanized 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?"[10]—to support for Achebe's view—"I now realize that I had never really read Heart of Darkness although I have taught it for years,"[11] one professor told Achebe. Other critiques include Hugh Curtler's Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness (1997).[12]

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 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."[13]

Adaptations

A radio adaptation starring Orson Welles aired in the USA on November 6, 1938, as part of his Mercury Theatre on the Air program. The episode also adapted Clarence Day's Life with Father.[14]

The CBS television anthology Playhouse 90 aired a 90-minute loose adaptation in 1958. This version, written by Stewart Stern, uses the encounter between Marlow (Roddy McDowall) and Kurtz (Boris Karloff) as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. The cast includes Inga Swenson and Eartha Kitt.[15]

The most famous adaptation is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 motion picture Apocalypse Now, which moves the story from the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War.[16] In Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen plays Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a US Army officer charged with "terminating" the command of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. Marlon Brando played Kurtz, and it remains one of his most famous roles.

A production documentary of the film was titled, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, which exposed some of the major difficulties director Coppola faced in seeing the movie through to completion. The difficulties Coppola and his crew faced often mirrored some of the themes of the book.

On March 13, 1993, TNT aired a new version of the story directed by Nicolas Roeg, starring Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz.[17]

In 1991 Australian author and playwright Larry Buttrose wrote and staged a theatrical production based on Heart of Darkness called Kurtz with the Crossroads Theatre Company, Sydney.[18] The play is scheduled to be broadcast as a radio play to Australian audiences in August 2011 by the Vision Australia Radio Network [19] and the Radio Print Handicapped Network.

In 2011, an operatic adaptation by composer Tarik O'Regan and librettist Tom Phillips was premiered at the Royal Opera House in London.[20]

Notes

  1. ^ 100 Best, Modern Library's website. Retrieved 12 January 2010.
  2. ^ Naik, Srinivas. "Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Search, Read, Study, Discuss." The Literature Network: Online Classic Literature, Poems, and Quotes. Essays & Summaries. Web. 18 Aug. 2010. <http://www.online-literature.com/conrad/heart_of_darkness/>.
  3. ^ Delcommune, Alexandre (1922). Vingt Années de Vie africaine. 1874–1893; Récits de Voyages, d'Aventures et d'Exploration au Congo Belge (in French). Vol. 1. Brussels: Ferdinand Larciers. p. 258. Retrieved 2011-03-06. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)
  4. ^ Henry Morton Stanley
  5. ^ Sherry 1980
  6. ^ Conrad 1998
  7. ^ a b c 'Heart of Darkness' and late-Victorian fascination with the primitive and the double - novel by Joseph Conrad, p.4.
  8. ^ 'Heart of Darkness' and late-Victorian fascination with the primitive and the double - novel by Joseph Conrad, p.10.
  9. ^ Hayes, P. (1997), 'Conrad, Male Tyranny and The Idealization of Women', ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 28 (3): 97-117.
  10. ^ "Chinua Achebe: The Failure interview". Failure Magazine. Retrieved 2008-07-25. [dead link‍]
  11. ^ Achebe (1989), p. x.
  12. ^ Curtler, Hugh (March 1997). "Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness". Conradiana. 29 (1): 30–40.
  13. ^ Hochschild 1999, p. 143
  14. ^ The Mercury Theatre on the Air
  15. ^ Cast and credits are available at "The Internet Movie Database". Retrieved 2 December 2010. A full recording of the show can be viewed onsite by members of the public upon request at The Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television & Radio) in New York City and Los Angeles.
  16. ^ Scott, A. O. (2001-08-03). "Aching Heart Of Darkness". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-09-29.
  17. ^ Tucker, Ken. "Heart of Darkness". EW.com, March 11, 1994. Accessed April 4, 2010.
  18. ^ http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsB/buttrose-larry.html
  19. ^ http://www.visionaustralia.org/info.aspx?page=749
  20. ^ Royal Opera House Page for Heart of Darkness by Tarik O'Regan and Tom Phillips

References

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