Transcript Heart of Darkness - BentonEnglish.com

Heart of Darkness
Impressionism
Why the Blurriness?
• For modern novelists, the messiness,
confusion, and darkness of the human
experience is interesting.
• Rather than trying to simplify and abstract
a particular meaning from experience,
novelists tend to wallow in the multiplicity
of ideas and meanings and sensations
that experience can provide.
Why the Blurriness?
• Novelists are in the business of
recreating and communicating the
rich complexities of the experience
itself.
• Their purpose is to get the reader to
re-live an experience, with all its
complexity and messiness, all its
darkness and ambiguity
Conrad’s View
• For Conrad, the world as we
experience it is not a sort of
place that can be reduced
to a set of clear, explicit
truths.
• Its truths - the truths of the
psyche, of the human mind
and soul - are messy,
vague, irrational,
suggestive, and dark.
Conrad’s View
• Conrad’s intention? … to
lead his readers to an
experience of the “heart of
darkness,”not to shed the
light of reason on it…but to
recreate his experience of
darkness in our feelings,
our sensibilities, our own
dark and mysterious hearts
About the Novel
• Since its publication, Heart of Darkness
has fascinated readers and critics, almost
all of whom regard the novel as significant
because of its use of ambiguity and (in
Conrad's own words) "foggishness" to
dramatize Marlow's perceptions of the
horrors he encounters.
• Critics have regarded Heart of Darkness as
a work that in several important ways
broke many narrative conventions and
brought the English novel into the
twentieth century.
About the Novel
• Notable exceptions who didn't receive the
novel well were the British novelist E. M.
Forster, who disparaged the very
ambiguities that other critics found so
interesting, and the African novelist
Chinua Achebe, who criticized the novel
and Conrad as examples of European
racism.
Key Facts
• Full Title: Heart of Darkness
• Author: Joseph Conrad
• Type of Work: Novella (between a novel
and a short story in length and scope)
• Genre: Symbolism, colonial literature,
adventure tale, frame story, almost a
romance in its insistence on heroism and
the supernatural and its preference for the
symbolic over the realistic
Key Facts
• Time and Place Written: England, 1898–1899;
inspired by Conrad’s journey to the Congo in 1890
• Date of First Publication: Published in 1902 in the
volume Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories
• Narrator: There are two narrators: an anonymous
passenger on a pleasure ship, who listens to
Marlow’s story, and Marlow himself, a middleaged ship’s captain.
• Point of View: The first narrator speaks in the
first-person plural, on behalf of four other
passengers who listen to Marlow’s tale. Marlow
narrates his story in the first person, describing
only what he witnesses and experiences, and
provides his own commentary on the story.
Key Facts
• Tone: Ambivalent: Marlow is disgusted at the
brutality of the Company and horrified by Kurtz’s
degeneration, but he claims that any thinking man
would be tempted into similar behavior.
• Setting (time): Latter part of the nineteenth
century, probably sometime between 1876 and
1892
• Setting (place): Opens on the Thames River
outside London, where Marlow is telling the story
that makes up Heart of Darkness. Events of the
story take place in Brussels, at the Company’s
offices, on the Congo, and a Belgian territory.
• Protagonist: Charlie Marlow
Key Facts
• Major Conflict: Both Marlow and Kurtz confront a conflict
between their images of themselves as “civilized”
Europeans and the temptation to abandon morality
completely once they leave the context of European
society.
• Rising Action: The brutality Marlow witnesses in the
Company’s employees, the rumors he hears that Kurtz is
a remarkable man, and the numerous examples of
Europeans breaking down mentally or physically in the
environment of Africa.
• Climax: Marlow’s discovery, upon reaching the Inner
Station, that Kurtz has completely abandoned European
morals and norms of behavior.
• Falling Action: Marlow’s acceptance of responsibility for
Kurtz’s legacy, Marlow’s encounters with Company
officials and Kurtz’s family and friends, Marlow’s visit to
Kurtz’s “Intended.”
Key Facts
• Motifs: Darkness (very seldom opposed by light),
interiors vs. surfaces (kernel/shell, coast/inland,
station/forest, etc.), ironic understatement, hyperbolic
language, inability to find words to describe situation
adequately, images of ridiculous waste, upriver versus
downriver/toward and away from Kurtz/away from and
back toward civilization (quest or journey structure)
• Symbols: Rivers, fog, women (Kurtz’s Intended, his
African mistress), French warship shelling forested
coast, grove of death, severed heads on fence posts,
Kurtz’s “Report,” dead helmsman, maps, “whited
sepulchre” of Brussels, knitting women in Company
offices, man trying to fill bucket with hole in it
The “ Order” of HD’s Structure
• Three:
–
–
–
–
–
Chapters
Marlow breaks off the story 3 times
Stations
Women
Central Characters
• Frame Narrative
• Light and Dark
• Transformation
Heart of Darkness as a
Modernist Novel
• an interest in exploring the
psychological
• an awareness of primitiveness and
savagery as the condition upon
which civilization is built
• Multiplicity, ambiguity, irony
A Final Thought
• Multiplicity, ambiguity, and irony are not
the easiest forms of expression to cope
with when you are a student and asked to
express yourself clearly and directly. But
it is precisely because the world appears
to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and
ironic that we must strive to speak and
write clearly.
• Otherwise - there is only darkness, only
confusion.
Questions to Consider
as you Read:
• What does Marlow’s quest reveal
about one’s search for self?
• What is evil? How does the novel
seem to define evil?
• What is good? How does the novel
seem to define goodness?
• Consider the following definition of
darkness: “the absence of light”
Modernism
Genre Theory
• Genre: a type of literary
work with defining
conventions & audience
expectations
• Genres develop in
response to particular
cultural, communication,
& creative situations
• Literary genres evolve like
social institutions: their
conventions/codes
emerge, develop, &
change over time,
reflecting the (changing)
values, imagination, spirit
of an age, culture, artist
Genre History:
Dialogues with Tradition
“Once you start making...rules,
some writer will be sure to
happen along and break every
abstract rule you or anyone else ever thought up,
and take your breath away in the process. The
word should is … dangerous … It’s a kind of
challenge to the deviousness and inventive-ness
and audacity and perversity of the creative spirit”
-Margaret Atwood (1939-)
Modernism – General Definition
• broke up the logically developing plot typical of 19th
century novel and offered unexpected connections or
sudden changes in perspective
• an attempt to use language in a new way
– to reconstruct the world of art as much as the philosophers
and scientists had redefined the world of their own disciplines
• played with shifting and contradictory appearances to
suggest the shifting and uncertain nature of reality
• used interior monologues and free association to
express the rhythm of consciousness
Modernism – General Definition
• made greater use of image clusters, thematic
associations, and “musical” patterning to supply the
basic structures of both fiction and poetry
• drew attention to style instead of trying to make it
“transparent”
• blended fantasy with reality while representing real
historical or psychological dilemmas
• raised age-old questions of human identity in terms of
contemporary philosophy and psychology
Early Modernism &
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. Christianitychallenged as “convenient
fictions” created to impose
order, meaning on
random, senseless, violent
world
High Modernism
Early 20th century – Post -WW I
• Decline of West:
Catastrophe of WWI
shook faith in Western
civilization & its
cultural values
• Radical break from
traditional structures
of Western culture &
art
• Artists sought new
forms to render
contemporary disorder
& alienation
th
20
century versus
th
19
century
• 20th century vision implies a criticism of the
19th century as a period of comfortable
certainty and positive assurance that was
dangerously unreal.
• Note: this vision neglects the roots of modern
consciousness in 19th century science, sociology,
and art. Modernity was already as subject of
widespread anxiety and argument as the
Industrial Revolution transformed social,
economic, and political life.
Modernism
th
(20
century)
• Modernism claims to have –
– achieved a more accurate representation of
reality
– a better understanding of human
consciousness
• 20th century “vision” – emphasis on how we
know – on structures of perception themselves
Challenges for Readers
• Narrator/author
suggests/evokes, does not • Process/search/journey
meaningful in itself (even
explain; personal symbol
system
if goal never reached)
• new, previously forbidden • Reader must be active cosubjects
creator of meaning:
• unsettle readers’
“emplot” life
expectations; shock out of
complacency
• Open-ended, ironic, multilayered, “inconclusive”
Experimental Forms for Multiple
“Realities” of Uncertainty
• Flow of consciousness
& memory structures
narrative: associative
(vs. linear) “logic”
intertwines present
awareness & memory
• Interior monologue,
“stream of consciousness, flashforward/
flashback
• Narrative frame
• Marlow’s 1st-person
“limited” narration:
discontinuous /
fragmented,
suggestive / evocativerational connections,
introspective
The “Contract”
• Audience must agree to
“play” the imaginative
game (“suspend
disbelief”)
• Atwood: “...your life as
the writer of each
particular story is only as
long, and as good, as the
story itself.”
• The “speaking voice”
mediates reader-listener’s
access to the story, but it
is …
• “double-voiced” dialogue
(Bakhtin) between teller &
listener each with active
roles in making meaning.