Historical Context
- Joseph Conrad captained a steamboat up the Congo in 1890. He wrote Heart of Darkness
in 1899. At the time Conrad went up the Congo, the region he travelled
in was The Congo Free State, a million square miles in central Africa
that was the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. It was established in 1884 and remained his personal kingdom until 1908.
- Two figures were especially important in the exploration
and annexation of Africa by the European powers: David Livingstone and
Henry Morton Stanley.
- Livingstone
was a famous missionary/explorer. He put lots of Africa on the map in
the 1840's-70's. He disappeared for many years in the heart of Africa
in 1865. A journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, in 1871, went on a mission
to find him. When he found him he uttered the famous greeting: "Dr.
Livingstone, I presume."
- Stanley became a famous explorer. He crossed Africa in 1877, east to west, 7000 miles. Wrote lots of books about Africa.
- In 1878, at the height of Stanley's fame, King Leopold II
hired Stanley to create his African kingdom. For five years, Stanley
was in the Congo making "treaties with the natives,"--that is, creating a
slave-state of forced labor based on the gun and the whip.
- In 1884, the U.S. was the first country to recognize
Leopold's claim to the million miles, which was called the International
Association of the Congo.
- In 1884-5, the European powers held a conference to
divide up Africa--the so called "Scramble for Africa." The Conference
ended by recognizing Leopold's claim. He changed the name to "The Congo
Free State" (nice irony).
- The Europeans justified their exploitation of Africa with
the rhetoric of bringing European Civilization to the Dark
Continent--the Light of Christianity and the value of work, with a
Capital W. The dominant views were nicely summed up and expressed in
Rudyard Kipling's The White Man's Burden which was written the same year as Heart of Darkness.
Europeans and Americans had a sacred duty to bring enlightnment and
progress, civilization and economic development to the Land of Darkness.
- In this historical moment, Conrad writes Heart of Darkness.
As you read the novel, you'll see how Conrad appropriates for his own
ends a lot of the language and understanding of Africa which was
dominant in Europe at the time. Notice Marlow's aunts view of Marlow's
misssion in the Congo and especially Kurtz's words, which are indirectly
quoted at various moments in the story.
The Art of Narration in Heart of Darkness
- The Method of telling the story: the story within a story.
-
Conrad uses a frame-story, which is a narrative device that enhances
the complexity of the story-telling. By using a frame-story one can
have stories within stories commenting on each other in a variety of
ways. For example, Rashomon. The central story is the story
that goes on between the Priest, the Woodcutter and the Commoner at
Rashomon gate. The stories told by the bandit, the wife, the husband
and the woodcutter about what happened in the woods all function to
illuminate the frame-story--the 3-way debate at Rashomon.
- HD is a first-person narration within a first-person
narration. The narrator of the frame-story is a nameless character who
tells about Marlow's telling of the main story. The central narrator is
Marlow. In the standard first person narration the readers are the
direct audience. For example , in A Clockwork Orange, Alex
addresses the readers: "Oh, my brothers." In HD, the audience for
Marlow's tale is the guys on the boat on the Thames. Marlow is speaking
to the characters in the story, not directly to the audience outside
the story.
- What are the advantages of this narrative technique? It creates an oral storyteller--A
voice. It simulates the qualities of oral story-telling. Marlow, the
oral story-teller, moves easily back and forward in time, creates
suspense by mentioning things that have already happened, but which
he's not telling everything about them just yet. He can make abrupt
statements like: "This too has been one of the dark places of the
earth.." What? He drops hints, stops the flow of action for
digressions into reflection and commentary. At the moment of attack,
when the steerman is dying at his feet, Marlow stops the story for a
long reflection on Kurtz. Just as the boat is about to reach Kurtz,
Marlow stops the narrative to attack his audience for their inability to
understand the meaning of his story.
- So this narrative technique of the oral story-teller is a
very flexible technique. Lesiurely, loose, digressive, meandering,
which allows for Marlow's critical commentary and reflection on what he
encounters, and for the creation of anticipation and suspense as we
slowly journey upriver to meet, at last, the "remarkable" Mr. Kurtz.
- Story Structure--The Journey.
- The journey is a classic type of story. Take a trip, go through a series of adventures on the road. The Odyssey, Don Quixote, On the Road.
-
This is an archypical narrative form for exploring the movement from
innocence to experience, ignorance to knowledge. Basic initiation story
form in which characters are initiated into a complex reality that they
didn't understand before making the journey.
- The
journey is a nice loose structure in which one can add or subtract
incidents. The events can have a certain completness in and of
themselves. Witness the events in Apocalypse Now.
- Symbols.
- HD is a difficult story to read partly because of the digressive
oral style, but mostly because the story is dense with symbolic meaning.
Characters, events, details of description reverberate with symbolic
suggestiveness. A Clockwork Orange is much easier reading, even
with the Nadsat of Alex , for two reasons. The writing style is simple
and direct and there are only a few symbols use in the story, such as
the title.
- What is a symbol? A symbol is a specific detail or
details which has a specific meaning in the context, but suggests much
more. Symbols are condensed, short-hand means of communicating rich
meaning by suggestion instead of direct statement. For example, the
title, Heart of Darkness, drips with multi-meanings. Or the
French gunboat firing into the jungle. The Central Station; the Innner
Station. The blasting going on at the Central Station. "The grove of
death." The heads. Kurtz's painting and Report. Or the characters as
symbols of moral types--ways of facing the Heart of Darkness.
-
Part of the pleasure of reading such a symbolically dense text is the
pleasure of sleuthing, puzzling out the meaning of the symbols.
- Characters.
- The Major Characters.
- Marlow. Marlow is the central character who is
changed by his journey into the heart of darkness and his encounter with
Mr. Kurtz. How does he change? Notice that he does not tell a neutral
story about his experiences. He casts a critical ironic eye upon
his encounters. He makes moral judgments by the way he describes what
he sees and hears. Pay attention to the comments he makes about his
experience.
- Kurtz. A voice. A remarkable man--an idealist, a
painter and poet and orator. A writer of the "Report on the Suppression
of Savage Customs." "All of Europe went into the making of Kurtz."
Yet Mr. Kurtz was "hollow at the core." "The Horror! The Horror! What
happened to Mr. Kurtz in the heart of darkness?
- The Accountant. Keeps immaculate accounting records, while living a few hundred feet from "the grove of death."
- The Russian Harlequin. A young adventurer in Africa,
who was "thoughtlessly alive." A great admirer of Kurtz: "He enlarged
my mind." What is his function in the novel?
- Relationship among characters: What do they have in common?
- Citizen in a toga; Fresleven; Kurtz; Marlow
- Chief Accountant; Russian
- Station Manager; Assistant Manager-bricklayer; El Dorado Exploring Expedition; the Pilgrims.
- Natives on shore; Cannibals on the boat.
- Marlow's Aunt; Warrior Woman; the Intended.
- Definitions: "Those who have the power to define are the Masters." (The links are to the paragraphs in Heart of Darkness in which the definitions appear.)
Key scenes for analysis and discussion.
[The links are to the paragraphs in HD.]
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