Images of light and dark in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness and James Joyces Araby - Essay Example

?Client’s Images of Light and Dark in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and James Joyce’s Araby Imagery of light anddark play important roles in both the writing of Joseph Conrad’s in Heart of Darkness and James Joyce’s in Araby. The primary flow between light and dark is defined by both the flow from civilized ideals to more primitive thoughts, as well as innocence into knowledge. The concept of the primitive in Conrad is seen through the descent into the jungles of Africa where life was more ‘primitive’, where in Joyce the concept of the primitive is understood by the base instincts of sexuality. The narrators of both story begin without the knowledge of how dark the world can be, but are soon immersed in the ‘truth’, revelations that shatter their innocence and replace it with a more corrupted truth in which the world is ‘revealed’. The imagery of light and darkness provide both Conrad and Joyce a metaphor for explaining the past and present as they are changed through revelations that darken the nature of the human experience. The influences of light and dark are rooted in the primitive, the recollections of having had no source other than fire to hold back the terrors of the night. During the day was the hunt, the search for sustenance found in blood and violence, with the night holding back those who would hunt the hunter. The shadows could be demons, monsters, or fear manifested into dangers that kept primitive man huddled against the night. These are the images that are evoked in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The story begins in the light, but as it progresses, darkness is all that is left. The travel along the river is symbolic of traveling to a primitive past, the flow into the jungle representing a departure from the light of civilization and a regression to a time when savagery was the rule (Carroll 265). Conrad wrote “And the stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention” (91). The dark begins to represent a force through which an intention was implied. The light was passing from the experiences of Marlow as he traveled. Fear was engulfing him in such a way that he could not trust anything within the experiences. The darkness was a thing that was alive and acted upon the story as if it were a character. The stillness acted as an agent of the darkness, creating an atmosphere that was thick and oppressive. Marlowe was within an oppressive state that was imposed on him by the nature of the darkening world through which he was traveling and would soon be fully immersed. By the end of the book, the light has abandoned the characters and nothing but darkness existed within the space of their existence. Conrad wrote of Marlow that “I could not tell her. It would have been too dark…too dark altogether” (216). This appears at the end of the second to last paragraph, with the final paragraph reading “the uttermost tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (216). In this case, the personification of the darkness has moved from characterization to a metaphor of the psychology of being in the place. These two concepts, both the personification and the metaphor of the psychology of the environment are steeped within the novel, giving power to the darkness to take from the characters their civilization and swallow them in the dark roots of the primitive. The representation that Conrad creates is that of the differences between innocence and corruption, civilization and the primitive, and the difference that comes from knowing how horror impacts the overall understanding of the world. Light represented a time before knowledge of those horrors existed, with the dark representing what happens to the mind as those horrors are realized. Joyce uses the imagery of darkness through a number of different devices in order to evoke a state of being. Foster writes that the use of the word blind appears repeatedly in order to suggest a sense of not seeing, a darkness that is implied about the way in which the events are being interpreted by the characters. He states that “as the young boy watches, hides, peeks, and gazes his way through a story that is alternately bathed in light and lost in shadow”, the boy, on the cusp of sexual awareness is both aware of it and unaware of the meaning of what he sees (Foster 204). Through the repetition of the word blind, Joyce creates a setting in which the boy does not understand the truth of his environment where the romanticized vision that he believes will be corrupted by the ‘darkness’ of the truth. Even as the children play, the light and dark takes shape around them, the light representing the innocence with the dark representing the corruption of that innocence. This is placed into context as Joyce writes “The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which I found the late tenant’s rusty bicycle pump” (Bloom 26). The apple tree can be seen to represent knowledge, the aged pump the corruption of steel as nature is overrun by the darkness of sexuality. This is furthered when the boy goes into the room of the deceased priest and the weather becomes a deluge through which darkness descends upon the experience. As the boy, who is the narrator of the story, discusses being in the priest’s room, he reveals that he is grateful he can see so little, a reference once again to blindness, suggesting that he has yet to fully understand the implications of sexuality. Although knowledge is often represented as light, in the case of this short story, knowledge was a descending darkness that was taking the boys innocence As the boy envisions his love for Mangan’s sister, he romanticizes that version of her that he believes is the truth. She is seen in light through romanticized visions in which she is the sexual perfection that the innocence of the boy believes her to be. As he goes to the bazaar at Araby, he believes that this will be the beginning of her love for him. The descending darkness as he arrives a bit too late provides the darkening psychological environment through which truth envelopes his romanticized innocent perspective on his feelings for the girl. The balance of light and darkness, just as in Conrad’s story, come together to take the character from his civilization and innocence into the darkness of truth in which knowledge has taken something from the protagonist and been shrouded so that moving back from that knowledge is no longer possible. Joyce takes from the boy his belief in a romanticized world and replaces it with the knowledge of how sexual relations between men and women are really experienced, which is not shown to be in the blush of love. In both stories the use of light and dark frame both the emotions of the experiences of the characters as much as the transition that they experience as they move from innocence into knowledge. In the light, the characters have the peace of their innocence which is taken from them in a world that is darkening around them. Weather plays an important part in the metaphor in both stories as the overcast world is shadowed by the knowledge that will soon take from the narrators of both works their delusions about the nature of the world. For Joyce, light and dark play back and forth as sexual awakening is experienced by the children, their worlds on the edge between childhood innocence and the knowledge that comes as they grow into adulthood. For Conrad, the use of light provides context for his narrator who is experiencing the darker truths of what it means to get in touch with the more primitive nature of being human. In both stories, light and dark is used to represent states of existence between innocence and knowledge. Works Cited Bloom, Harold. James Joyce. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999. Print. Carroll, Joseph. Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Print. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Print. Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading between the Lines. New York, NY: Quill, 2007. Print. Read More