Varied Interpretations

1
Varied Interpretations

• Many different interpretations have been put on
  this book
• Some see it as an attack on colonialism and a
  criticism of racial exploitation
• Some see Kurtz as the embodiment of all the evil
  and horror of the capitalist society.
• Others view it as a portrayal of one mans
  journey into the primitive unconscious where the
  only means of escaping the blandness of everyday
  life is by self degradation.

2
Heart of Darkness Themes Motifs

• Darkness
• Primitive Impulses (Kurtz, previous captain,
  etc.)
• Cruelty of Man (Kurtz and Company)
• Immorality/Amorality (Kurtz)
• Lies/Hypocrisy (Marlow chooses Kurtz evil versus
  Companys hypocritical evil)
• Imperialization/Colonization (Belgian Company)
• Cruelty of Man
• Greed
• Exploitation of People

3
Heart of Darkness Themes Motifs

• Role of Women
• Civilization exploitive of women
• Civilization as a binding and self-perpetuating
  force
• Physical connected to Psychological
• Barriers (fog, thick forest, etc.)
• Rivers (connection to past, parallels time and
  journey)

4
Review of Criticism

• Paul OPrey "It is an irony that the 'failures'
  of Marlow and Kurtz are paralleled by a
  corresponding failure of Conrad's
  technique--brilliant though it is--as the vast
  abstract darkness he imagines exceeds his
  capacity to analyze and dramatize it, and the
  very inability to portray the story's central
  subject, the 'unimaginable', the 'impenetratable'
  (evil, emptiness, mystery or whatever) becomes a
  central theme."
• James Guetti complains that Marlow "never gets
  below the surface," and is "denied the final
  self-knowledge that Kurtz had."

5
Review of Criticism

• Conrad, writing in 1922, responds to similar
  criticism "Explicitness, my dear fellow, is
  fatal to the glamour of all artistic work,
  robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all
  illusion. You seem to believe in literalness and
  explicitness, in facts and in expression. Yet
  nothing is more clear than the utter
  insignificance of explicit statement and also its
  power to call attention away from things that
  matter in the region of art."
• Marlowe, the narrator, describes how difficult
  conveying a story is "Do you see the story? Do
  you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to
  tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because
  no relation of a dream can convey the
  dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity,
  surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of
  struggling revolt, that notion of being captured
  by the incredible, which is the very essence of
  dream . . .No, it is impossible it is impossible
  to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch
  of one's existence--that which makes its truth,
  its meaning-- its subtle and penetrating essence.
  It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone . .
  ."

6
Review of Criticism

• Marxist You can see Heart of Darkness as a
  depiction of, and an attack upon, colonialism in
  general, and, more specifically, the particularly
  brutal form colonialism took in the Belgian
  Congo.
• the mistreatment of the Africans
• the greed of the so-called "pilgrims"
• the broken idealism of Kurtz
• the French man-of-war lobbing shells into the
  jungle
• the grove of death which Marlow stumbles upon
• the little note that Kurtz appends to his
  noble-minded essay on The Suppression of Savage
  Customs
• the importance of ivory to the economics of the
  system.

7
Review of Criticism

• Sociological/Cultural Conrad was also apparently
  interested in a more general sociological
  investigation of those who conquer and those who
  are conquered, and the complicated interplay
  between them.
• Marlow's invocation of the Roman conquest of
  Britain
• cultural ambiguity of those Africans who have
  taken on some of the ways of their Europeans
• the ways in which the wilderness tends to strip
  away the civility of the Europeans and brutalize
  them
• Conrad is not impartial and scientifically
  detached from these things, and he even has a bit
  of fun with such impartiality in his depiction
  the doctor who tells Marlow that people who go
  out to Africa become "scientifically
  interesting."

8
Review of Criticism

• Psychological/Psychoanalytical Conrad goes out
  of his way to suggest that in some sense Marlow's
  journey is like a dream or a return to our
  primitive past--an exploration of the dark
  recesses of the human mind.
• Apparent similarities to the psychological
  theories of Sigmund Freud in its suggestion that
  dreams are a clue to hidden areas of the mind
• we are all primitive brutes and savages, capable
  of the most appalling wishes and the most
  horrifying impulses (the Id)
• we can make sense of the urge Marlow feels to
  leave his boat and join the natives for a savage
  whoop and holler
• notice that Marlow keeps insisting that Kurtz is
  a voice--a voice who seems to speak to him out of
  the heart of the immense darkness

9
Review of Criticism

• Religious Heart of Darkness as an examination of
  various aspects of religion and religious
  practices.
• examine the way Conrad plays with the concept of
  pilgrims and pilgrimages
• the role of Christian missionary concepts in the
  justifications of the colonialists
• the dark way in which Kurtz fulfills his own
  messianic ambitions by setting himself up as one
  of the local gods

10
Review of Criticism

• Moral-Philosophical Heart of Darkness is
  preoccupied with general questions about the
  nature of good and evil, or civilization and
  savagery
• What saves Marlow from becoming evil?
• Is Kurtz more or less evil than the pilgrims?
• Why does Marlow associate lies with mortality?

11
Review of Criticism

• Formulist
• Threes There are three parts to the story, three
  breaks in the story (1 in pt. 1 and 2 in pt. 2),
  and three central characters the outside
  narrator, Marlow and Kurtz
• Contrasting images (dark and light, open and
  closed)
• Center to periphery Kurtz-gtMarlow-gtOutside
  Narrator-gtthe reader
• Are the answers to be found in the center or on
  the periphery?

12
Modernism

• Heart of Darkness was published in the Late
  Victorian-Early Modern Era but exhibits mostly
  modern traits
• a distrust of abstractions as a way of
  delineating truth
• an interest in an exploration of the
  psychological
• a belief in art as a separate and somewhat
  privileged kind of human experience
• a desire for transcendence mingled with a feeling
  that transcendence cannot be achieved
• an awareness of primitiveness and savagery as the
  condition upon which civilization is built, and
  therefore an interest in the experience and
  expressions of non-European peoples
• a skepticism that emerges from the notion that
  human ideas about the world seldom fit the
  complexity of the world itself, and thus a sense
  that multiplicity, ambiguity, and irony--in life
  and in art--are the necessary responses of the
  intelligent mind to the human condition.

13
Apocalypse Now

• Apocalypse Now is a film that was directed by
  Francis Ford Coppola starring Martin Sheen,
  Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando
• This film was based on Conrads Heart of
  Darkness.
• Coppola takes the story to Vietnam. Captain
  Willard (Marlow) is sent on a mission to kill
  Colonel Kurtz who has gone renegade