Heart of Darkness
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Wikipedia-Article "Heart of Darkness"
- For other uses, see Heart of Darkness (disambiguation).
Heart of Darkness is a novella (published 1902) by Joseph Conrad. Before publication, it appeared in a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine (1899). This highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame tale, narrated by a man named Marlow to a group of men on a ship at dusk and on into the evening. It details an incident earlier in Marlow's life, a visit up the Congo River to investigate the work of Kurtz, a Belgian trader in ivory in the Congo Free State.
The story within a story device actually descends three levels: Conrad writes the story we read, which is the account of an unnamed narrator relating Marlow's yarn of his journey down the Congo river to meet and examine the central character Kurtz. (Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein used a similar device.)
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Background
To write Heart of Darkness, Conrad drew heavily from his own experience in the Congo. Eight years before he wrote the book, he served as a sea captain for a Congo steamer. On a single trip up the river, he had witnessed so many atrocities that he quit on the spot.
Conrad's experiences in the Congo and the historical background to the story, including possible models for Kurtz, are recounted in the historical work, King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild.
Themes
The theme of "darkness" from the title recurs throughout the book. It is used to reflect the unknown (as Africa at the time was often called the "Dark Continent" by Europeans), the concept of the "darkness of barbarism" contrasted with the "light of civilization" (see white man's burden), and 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 so forth.
To emphasize the theme of darkness within ourselves, Marlow's narration takes place on a yacht in the Thames tidal estuary. Early in the novella, the narrator recounts how London, the largest, most populous and wealthiest city in the world, where Conrad wrote and where a large part of his audience lived, was itself in Roman times a dark part of the world much like the Congo then was. Like Marlow himself, the astute reader emerges from the tale with an expanded comprehension of the darkness within his own mind.
Themes developed in the novella's more superficial levels include the naïveté of Europeans - particularly women - regarding the various forms of darkness in the Congo; the Belgian colonialists' abuse of the natives; and man's potential for two-facedness. The symbolic levels of the book expand on all of these in terms of a struggle between good and evil, not so much between people as within every major character's soul.
Controversy
Literary critics, most notably Chinua Achebe, have criticized Conrad for having a racist bias throughout the novella, despite the book's intentions to expose the atrocities in the Congo. In particular, critics have objected to the depiction of Africans as primitive, irrational people and of Africa itself as a savage, dark continent. Regardless, Heart of Darkness is considered to be a literary classic and is widely read in educational institutions around the world.
Films
- 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 mocks European colonialism and mimicks the trip in to the jungle with the madness and depravity of the characters increasing the deeper they go in to the wilderness.
- 1979 -- John Milius based his script for Apocalypse Now on the novel. It was filmed by Francis Ford Coppola.
- 1993 -- Nicholas Roeg filmed Heart of Darkness for television with Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz.
- 1993 -- Animaniacs parodied both Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness in a segment in episode 20 called Hearts of Twilight.
- 2005 -- King Kong has many references to "Heart of Darkness" and its themes are linked with the novella.
See also
- 1991 - Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a documentary about the making of the film Apocalypse Now
- 1993 - Headhunter, a novel by Timothy Findley which recasts Kurtz and Marlow as psychiatrists in an apocalyptic version of Toronto
- 2003 - Shatterpoint, a Star Wars book that was heavily influenced by Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now.
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