Conrad's Heart of Darkness - Book Report/Review Example

Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Modernist Narrative Dis on Colonialism Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published at the close the nineteenth century (1899), is an important step in the development of the modern. It is an early important example of the Western intellectual elite in reaction against Western culture, in this case in denouncing colonialism, then an integral part of European and American civilization. Conrad does not merely decry the excesses of King Leopold II in the Congo, as a more traditional writer might have done (and as indeed many did), but singled out colonialism as subversive of Western identity, as incompatible with and destructive of the ideals upon the West was founded. Far from simply telling the reader his critique of colonialism in a straight-forward manner, Conrad leads the reader on a path of discovery so that he can reach similar conclusions on his own. One tool that Conrad uses to accomplish this is the use of various narrative devices. This has long been observed, and it ahs been suggested that the variation of Conrad's narrative technique from straight-forward discourse helps to destabilize the cultural assumptions that supported colonialism. "Edward Said, and before him Wilson Harris, has observed that Conrad's very style with its first-person narrators, framed narratives, time jumps, fractured sentences, and addiction to adjectives upsets the notion of absolute truths assumed by the 'Civilizing mission'" (Hawkins 370). In this paper, Conrad's techniques of narration, the rather unusually ordering the text, moving in a linear direction like a mystery, but also withholding or giving important pieces of information out of temporal sequence, and his practice of transforming seemingly simple narration of events experienced by his story-teller Marlow into complex images that strongly suggest the richly symbolic and evocative character of works of visual art, are used to support his critique of colonialism. The Heart of Darkness is not told by Marlow. It is told, rather, by a mysterious "I" who encounters Marlow, rides along with him on a ship briefly on some commercial errand, and hears Marlow give a long discourse, which the "I" purports to give word for word. The same is true of the other Conrad novels for whose stories we depend ultimately upon Marlow. In Heart of Darkness the "I" speaks for several pages, interacts briefly with Marlow, then lets his narrative take over. The "I" reappears only in the last paragraph when he informs the reader, "Marlow ceased" (77) and continues his own narrative of the ship voyage they are sharing. This complex element of the Heart of Darkness' narratology was keenly observed by Conrad's fellow novelist Henry James (James 1914). From a logical view point, this device ought to make the story seem highly implausible since it is obvious that no one could report exactly a speech of thousands of words that he heard only once, so a text produced in this way must be filled with error and conjecture. Yet, as James rightly argues, the device thickens the "atmosphere of authenticity" (313). The writer must work harder to handle the multiple levels of narration, but the result seems more effortless to the reader than a simple omniscient narrator. This is because it copies the circumstances of real life. Everyone has heard someone tell a story second hand so it seems natural to read a story constructed in that way. Conrad is suggesting a situation in which the reader will have found himself occupying the position of the narrator, listening to a story, rather than the more formal act of reading a story. The individual personalities of the narrators, their similitude to real persons, seems to testify to the truth of the narrative. By assigning the omniscience of the narrator to the highest level, the "I" of Heart of Darkness, the implausibility of a speaker who knows and controls everything is removed, leaving the sub-narrator Marlow free to seem a real person speaking in real terms, for all that he is as omniscient as the author needs him to be. Perhaps the second-hand nature of the text leaves the reader free to believe it or not, and he is happy to make the decision to believe. While this kind of narrative layering may be more common in modern authors than they were in nineteenth century authors like Dickens or Austen, it is hardly a modern invention. Precisely the same technique was used by the earliest Western literary author, Homer. In the Odyssey, the narrative voice of the text, the I who prays for the inspiration of the Muses at the outset, does not narrate the story of the Cyclops, of Circe's transformation of the crewmen into swine or any other of the most fantastic tales of the epic. Rather, he tells the story of Odysseus who finds himself a shipwrecked refugee at the court of king Alcinous of the Phaeacians, and it is Odysseus who tells all these stories to the king (Wilson 193). In the same way then as Odysseus', the fantastic narrative of Marlow is removed from the reader by higher levels of narration that vouch for its truth. The power of Conrad's narrative device supports the authenticity of the story in the mind of the reader and makes it seem more matter-of-fact, more closely related to the reader's own experience than something so foreign properly ought to be. As an author, Conrad employs this power widely and it is not uniquely focused on his main theme in the Heart of Darkness, the critique of the colonialist enterprise in the Congo. Nevertheless, he used its powers to persuade the reader to easily accept the facts of the atrocities being committed there, facts he might recoil from if he had read them in the supposedly more truthful newspapers. The reader is presented with facts at second hand so that he must decide for himself whether they are true or not, and in deciding that they are true, finds himself unconsciously but surely guided in the direction of Conrad's criticism of colonialism. A scene like, for example, the French warships using their naval rifles to shell the jungle (Conrad 14) is at one of the same time utterly fantastic in it uselessness, but all too familiar from newspaper reports. Whether the reader wishes to believe it or not, Marlow vouches for it and he is able to vouch for it because he is telling the story, not to the printed page, but to another person, the ultimate narrator. By agreeing with Marlow (which he has the illusion of freedom not to do), the reader comes to believe that colonialism is insane. The structure of Conrad's narrative is much like a detective story. As Marlow physically approaches his goal, the meeting with Kurtz, he gradually finds out more and more out about the man from information he is given and clues he finds. But Marlow does not play fair and sometimes withholds information form his audience. The "great man himself" (Conrad 10) who sends Marlow on his way must have told him something, but Marlow says nothing about it. Marlow also has a tendency to delay information until long after the point where he learns it. For instance he describes how Kurtz began to be corrupted by the petty sins of greed and pride, not when he must have learned them from Kurtz himself, but only when he is meeting the Intended (73). Nevertheless, the gradual discovery of bits and piece of information, led by Marlow's quest to understand, sympathetically disposes the reader to accept the conclusions offered, supporting acceptance of Conrad's critique of colonialism insofar as it might seem it is something the reader discovers for himself, rather than a bare fact he is told. One of the most striking features of Conrad's prose is his creation of scenes that inevitably evoke the dramatic compositions of paintings. His prose is used to shape a set-piece that suggests the drama and balanced compositions of visual art. A famous example is the 'Garden of Death' (Conrad 17) whose likeness to the horrific paintings of Bosch lead the reader to an equation of the colonial enterprise with hell. This narrative device has long been observed and has been commented on at length by the critic Ian Watt. He analyzed Conrad's prose in terms of its relationship to two schools of painting important in the 1890s: Impressionism and Symbolism. Conrad's colleague Ford Madox Ford in his memoir of Conrad describes him as an impressionist (318), but with somewhat less enthusiasm than Watt (353) implies. Ford says that the term was used by critics in order to associate Conrad and himself with an aesthetically and even politically radical avant gard. Conrad himself was not silent on the subject of Impressionist painters and Watt's account of his views may be better trusted since it presents evidence contrary to his own argument. On this account, Conrad was hostile to Impressionism precisely because it was avant gard (the common reaction until the generation following the war). Conrad dismissed it as an intellectually insubstantial form of visual representation. As unpromising, then, as this might suggest it would be to look for the imitation of Impressionist painting in Conrad's work, Watt does so, and finds evidence of it in Conrad's description of several scenes in which Marlow's boat falls under attack from Kurtz's warriors. In each case Marlow describes what he saw and experienced in the immediacy of the action, and only later, albeit a few seconds later, does Marlow figure out what the precise nature of the action had been. Watt gives this devise the jargonsitic name of delayed decoding. Conrad's technique seems like a very sensible way of describing the violent shocks of combat and one that elevates Conrad far above writers like Haggard who handled the same type of scene in a melodramatic fashion. While Conrad in these scenes certainly gives a vivid description of sense impressions and the confusion in understanding they can give rise to, that is true of any realistic prose, and it is hard to see how the use of the technique could have been linked in Conrad's mind to a style of painting he disliked or why it should be thought that he would consciously set out to imitate such a style. It is precisely because Watt does not address this that he is unable to make out a convincing case for Conrad's prose as impressionistic. Conrad deals with "the precarious nature of the process of interpretation" (Watt 358), but he cannot demonstrate that Conrad believed impressionist painters did so and still less that Conrad took them as his model. Watt is nevertheless correct that what he calls delayed decoding is another device that in general increases the verisimilitude of Conrad's narrative, thus heightening the impact of his critique of colonialism, however indirectly. Whatever the usefulness or correctness of Watt grouping Conrad with the impressionists, he is more forthright in asserting: "It is virtually certain, therefore, that whatever similarities may exist between Conrad and the French Symbolists are not the result of any direct literary influence on Conrad or of his doctrinal adhesion" (359). Watt (358-65) surveys Conrad's writings to demonstrate that his objection was not to the technique of the Symbolist poets (or Decadents as they were called in England), but in their failure to apply that technique to more serious matters than they did. While Watts argues that "the only real test must be that of [Heart of Darkness'] actual narrative practice," (363) and he finds many parallels of technique between Symbolist poets and Conrad, he does not, as he did in the case of the Impressionists, tackle any individual scenes that seem to be of symbolic importance, of which Conrad's work is full. Indeed, there is no shortage of passages from the novel which could pass as descriptions of Symbolist paintings. This is hardly surprising since Conrad's favorite painter was Jean Franois Millet (Watt 354), and while he is too early to be counted as a Symbolist, his quietly dramatic paintings use simple images of peasant life to evoke the most profound truths of human existence (Dali). Looking at a few such scenes will illustrate how Conrad used this narrative devise to further his critique of colonialism. Conrad creates a series of Symbolist images throughout Heart of Darkness that surprisingly combine to evoke the imagery of Jewish mysticism (the kind of religious esoterica that was beloved of the Symbolists), while leading to his general critique of colonialism once the meaning of the symbolisms is understood (Conrad's use of such material ought to exonerate Conrad further of Achebe's [345] absurd charge of anti-Semitism against him). Very early in the novel Marlow visits the headquarters of the Company across the English Channel (perhaps in the Symbolist centre of Bruges), and in the waiting room finds (Conrad 10) "Two women, one fat, the other slim, on straw-bottomed chairs knitting black wool." They present the demeanour of a "somnambulist;" indeed Marlow nearly collides with the thin one when she walks around the room at one point. After his initial interview with a Company executive he again finds, "In the outer room the two women knitted black wool feverishly." These women are generally interpreted as the ancient Greek Fates, the goddess who allotted destinies to humanity by spinning and finally cutting a wool string for each mortal (Hawthorn 405). Certainly the classically trained readers who made up the most influential part of Conrad's readership would see in them a reference to the Fates, and that would go a long way toward revealing their meaning. However, if they were the Fates, there would be three women, not two. Another interpretation which takes their number into account, could be that they are the personification of divine Mercy and Judgment, in Jewish mysticism the qualities of God that determine of the course of events in the world just as the fates doe in Greek myth (Scholem 36-37). Marlow's unfortunate future is foretold by his encounter with the thin woman who is Judgment (compare the lean cows symbolizing the years of divine punishment in Pharaoh's dream as interpreted by Joseph in Genesis). Once Marlow reaches the Central Station he sees a painting executed by Kurtz and Conrad gives a brief ekphrastic description of it: I noticed a small sketch in oils, on a panel, representing a woman draped and blindfolded carrying a lighted torch. The background was somber, almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister (Conrad 25). The figure is the Shekinah, the female component in God, that is, Israel in exile conceived of as the bride of God, mourning like a widow separated from her husband. She symbolizes the suffering of Israel separated from God by the destruction of the Jewish temple. In particular the Shekinah was often seen in visions in just this personified form by mystics praying by the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem (Scholem 225-27). Kurtz's artistic vision, however, is not hopeful since it has a sinister quality, and stern Judgment flows from God's left hand. It shows the Shekinah suffering God's wrath. The painting signifies that Kurtz's soul was already when he painted it being driven into exile, that he is going mad. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator characterizes Marlow's style of story telling: To him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty hallow that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine (Conrad 5) Kurtz's painting is precisely this kind of symbol, obscurely concealing meaning even as it reveals it, not approaching the true heart of the matter, but enveloping it a shell of misty light that nearly brings illumination to the reader. At the end of the novel, Marlow visits Kurtz' Intended bride. When he is admitted to her house, "She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk" (73). It is not difficult to compare her to the female apparition of Kurtz's painting, or to imagine that the black cloth the two women from the waiting room were knitting became her mourning dress. The bride of Kurtz, who had set himself up as God, she is a sort of Shekinah also. With Kurtz dead, she too is in the eternal exile of her grief. Marlow allows the Intended to keep her idea of Kurtz as a nearly godlike man, he does nothing to tell her of his fall. No doubt to tell her the story he has so far told the narrator of Heart of Darkness would have destroyed her too. It is not hard to see that this scene stands for the fact that the spirit of European civilization does not wish to hear the ugly truth of colonialism. But this symbol begins to address the meaning of the Heart of Darkness as a whole. Watt (363-65) is right to take Heart of Darkness as a whole as a larger symbolic image. He does not press the interpretation of such a large symbolic structure very far, but it undoubtedly tends to support the work's main purpose as a critique of colonialism. It is not hard to take Marlow's journey as a voyage of self-discovery. Granting that what he finds at the end is Kurtz, and, "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz: (Conrad 49), Kurtz can stand for Europe, or for the European impulse toward colonialism. By any European standard, though, Kurtz has gone completely insane. Entrusted with writing a report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, he offers the idea that Europeans stand in the position of gods over the primitive Africans, which leads him to conclude, "By the simple exercise of our will, we can exert a power for good that is practically unbounded" (50). An finally he scrawls at the end of the document: "Exterminate all the brutes!" Marlow goes on to find that Kurtz has indeed become a god to the natives he controls and participates with them in their 'savage customs' probably eating human flesh as a religious sacrament. Finally, unable to carry out his recommendation, Kurtz , "pronounced judgment upon the adventure of his soul upon this earth,' with the words, "The horror! The horror!' and died himself (69). Certainly these facts represent at some remove the historical case of the Belgian exploitation of the Congo, with Leopold's pious claim of working for the betterment of the natives while killing as many as ten million of them and maiming countless others, and the seeming inevitability that genocide (not yet a word) would become the ultimate result of colonialism (Hawkins 369-75). But as Hawkins (369) and Watts (205) both suggest without quite teasing out the thought fully, they also function on a far higher level. If we take Kurtz to stand for European civilization and European humanity, he foregoes the completion of his promise and his talents as a "universal genius" in music, art, politics, or anything else (71-72), and by the sin of believing himself to be superior to mortal nature slips down into a sub-human condition and finally death. The conclusion is, that while it is monstrous that African humanity is being destroyed by colonialism, Africa is not the only victim. European civilization is being destroyed just as thoroughly through colonization. It is becoming something "ugly" (36) as it betrays all of its own ideals and sinks down to a level of cruelty and savagery far worse than what it projects onto its victims. Marlow's aunt believes that the purpose of colonialism is to bring enlightenment to dark places and will not hear her nephew's objections that it is for profit. She makes a distinction between the perfect fantasy inhabited by women and the real world worked in by men: the concept of colonialism as an unalloyed good, and the real nature of colonialism as brutal oppression (12; cf. 48). At the end, Marlow cannot bring himself him to contradict a single one of the fantasies of Kurtz' Intended because there is no language that can communicate his real experiences into her fantastic notions; indeed Conrad seems to be looking forward to Orwell's conception of totalitarianism justifying itself by reshaping language. Conrad felt that colonialism was an enterprise whose brutality threatened the integrity of European civilization, that contorted the face of Europe into a new and horrible shape that could not even be named without the hearer being driven mad as Kurtz was. When Marlow tells the intended that Kurtz's last words were the name of the Intended (77), he was in no sense lying. By definition, the polite consensus of European civilization could not hear, the 'horror,' the truth of colonial atrocities, but at the same time civilization itself is rightly called the 'horror' as the author of those atrocities. Marlow expresses his surprise that the world is not destroyed by the Intended not knowing the truth. He must think it soon will be. One can hardly imagine a more strident critique of Colonialism. Yet, if Conrad had simply said in so many words, "Colonialism is forcing us to commit acts that destroy our very natures, we must cease it,' his plea would have fallen on deaf ears because the very hypocrisy of colonialism made it immune to that kind of criticism, it would respond that it was doint something else entirely. But by making the reader realize the meaning of his symbol, "It was though a veil had been rent" (69) and hypocrisy has no more force against his critique of colonialism. Bibliography Achebe, Chinua, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's heart of Darkness," The Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 78-94; rev. and ed. reprint. in Conrad 20064, 336-49. Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness: A Norton Critical Edition Paul B. Armstrong, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 20064). Dali, Salvador, The Tragic myth of Millet's Angelus Albert Reynolds Morse, trans.(St. Petersburg, Fla.: Salvador Dali Museum, 1986). Ford, Ford Madox, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), excerpt. Reprint. in Conrad 20064,316-22. Hawkins, Hunt, "Heart of Darkness and Racism," in Conrad 20064, 365-75. Hawthorn, Jeremy, Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment (London: Edward Arnold, 1990); excerpt. reprint. as "The Women of Heart of Darkness," in Conrad 20064, 405-15. James, Henry, "The New Novel," Notes on Novelists (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914), 347.48; reprint. Conrad 20064, 313-14. Scholem, Gershom G., Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken: Jerusalem, 1941). Wilson, Edmund, Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931). Watt, Ian, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); excerpt. reprint. as "Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness," in Conrad 20064, 349-65. Watts, Cedric, "'A Bloody Racist': About Achebe's View of Conrad," The Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 196-209. Read More