Symbolism In Heart Of Darkness By Joseph Conrad - Essay Example

Symbolism In Heart Of Darkness By Joseph Conrad

Hundred-paged station novel “Heart of Darkness” on a superficial glance may seem like a purely adventurous work. In fact, unlike James, who replaced the external plot with the character’s psychological experiences, Conrad’s prose is replete with events, and the tale embodies his aesthetic principle of extracting the maximum dramatic effect from an event: “The novel should represent the Event, a single chain of difficult circumstances, one spiral of the hero’s actions, one psychological progression.

The novel should exhaust all aspects of the situation, develop towards a climax, and in the last or penultimate sentence reveal the psychological meaning of the whole” in the images of Kurtz and Marlow. The plot of the jungle story is based on the writer’s impressions of serving in the Belgian colonial company as captain of a steamboat, which in 1890 made voyages along the great African river Congo. Conrad solves the same problem as James in The Turn of the Screw: how, through the point of view of the storyteller, who is directly involved in the station events and therefore biased, allows the reader to feel the point of view of the heart of the author, who is open to the fullness of what is happening?

To solve this jungle problem, Conrad resorts to the same method as James: he uses the “story-in-story” technique, first conducting the narrative on behalf of an anonymous narrator who introduces the reader to the main narrator recalling a story from his past. This narrator is one of Conrad’s protagonists - Charlie Marlow, a charming retired Congo river sailor, insightful and skeptical. Marlow recalls his journey up the heart of Congo, in the heart of the African continent, with the goal of saving the best agent of the company named Kurtz. Marlow hears enthusiastic reviews about Kurtz from all jungle sides, and from these reviews he composes the image of a wonderful, great man, the best representative of European civilization, the engine of progress. And now Agent Kurtz, whose station supplies the company with the largest amount of ivory, is rumored to be ill and lies dying. The hypocritical head of the company’s branch, who is in his heart afraid of Kurtz, seeing him as a competitor, leads a station expedition on a ship to a remote station by Conrad The jungle expedition is faced with all sorts of obstacles: in the fog from the Congo river shore, the natives attack the ship, their arrow kills the black helmsman. When the ship approached the inner station, the severed heads of the natives on the surrounding picket fence became visible from the deck. It becomes clear what methods Kurtz works: he declared himself a god for the surrounding tribes and brutal violence achieved their complete obedience. The by Conrad station expedition is ready to pick up the body of Kurtz, but, against expectations, they catch him alive. Marlow becomes aware that Kurtz organized an attack on the Congo river ship in the hope that the expedition would turn back and be left alone. On the way back, Kurtz’s health is rapidly deteriorating, in the delirium of tropical fever, he trusts Marlow with his terrible secrets and a bunch of papers, among which is his pamphlet “Eradicating the customs of savages,” ending with the words: “Exterminate all the cattle!” The last Congo river station words of Kurtz dying in the arms of Marlow: “Horror! Horror!” A year later, barely surviving after his own illness, Marlow returns to Europe and meets Kurtz’s bride, who is still mourning for him and considers her fiance to be a perfection of virtue. She asks Marlow about the last words by Kurtz. And unable to tell the truth - because it would hurt her - he replies that Kurtz died with her name on his lips. The by Conrad work is so tightly written, it has so many meanings that, upon first reading, as the Congo river experience shows, a lot of things elude the reader’s attention. For example, in the first scene aboard a station yacht, which expects low tide in the evening, bored passengers get dominoes, “erecting structures from bone tiles”, but not starting the game.

So the leitmotif of the bone is introduced - ivory as an object of profit, bones protruding from the emaciated bodies of Africans, bones as human bones. Marlow story begins with the image of “a young Roman from a good family, dressed in toga. You know, he was too keen on playing dice ... ”, and to improve his affairs, he goes to a distant Congo river colony - Albion, that is, to the very places that the yacht passengers are looking at.

The Albion is so unlike modern civilized England - Marlow draws swamps and swamps, savages and the “jungle”, and the eerie sensation of a young man from the center of ancient civilization that “the wilderness is closing around him.” Much later, it becomes apparent that this Roman is the first sketch of the image of Kurtz, an introduction to the theme of the feelings of the river jungle colonialist.

As for the symbolism in heart of darkness by Joseph Conrad, further, in the story of Marlow, there appear symbolic images of the “coffin of the drowned” - a boring and gloomy European capital, where the company’s headquarters is located on a deserted street. Two women are sitting in the hallway of the office and knitting something from black wool - the image refers both to Parks, the Greek goddesses who determine the duration of human life and to the gloomy “knitters” of the French Revolution - women from the common people who were knitted at the foot of the guillotine.

“There was something terrible, fatal in them. Subsequently, I often recalled these two women who guard the gates of darkness and seem to knit a warm shroud of black wool; one all the time escorts people to the unknown, the other with indifferent senile eyes peers into cheerful silly faces. “ The old doctor during a physical examination measures the skull of Marlow, at the same time making it clear that from where he goes, few people return. He sets sail to a duty station on a French ship, and in sailing along the shores burned by the sun, he fixes a striking general indifference to human life in the jungle. No one counts blacks dying in the surf during unloading; some phantasmagoric shelling of a deserted coast by a gunboat takes place, they say, there is the pacification of the natives-rebels. One of the first impressions of Marlow after the landing - six shackled blacks, criminals, carry on their heads a basket of earth. “And standing on a hillside, I realized that in this country, flooded with dazzling rays of the sun, I have to get acquainted with the languid, blind-eyed demon of predation and cold madness.” These diverse scenes of violence, disease, death, white perfidy, black savagery serve as a preface to a journey inland, to a meeting with Kurtz. Between the images of Marlow and Kurtz from the very beginning, there is a certain attraction. Everyone around Marlow speaks with enthusiasm as an outstanding person, “a messenger of mercy, science, progress,” his amazing eloquence ignites people, he is lucky. And only gradually did Marlow discover that “in his name, there was as much truth as in his jungle life”: his name in German means “short”, and in Kurtz was seven feet tall, that is, more than two meters. All his best qualities turn into lies, demagogy, extremism. Torn away from civilization, this model European refused all its norms and prohibitions. He takes part in the dark rituals of the natives, they pray to him like a god. As Marlow metaphorically puts it, “He held a high position among the demons of that country. ... The wilderness caressed him, and - oh, a miracle! - he is tired. She accepted him, fell in love, penetrated into his veins, into his flesh, put her stamp on his soul, did some kind of devilish initiation ceremony on him. He was her spoiled favorite. Ivory? Of course! Ivory piles, ”Kurtz supplies the firm with fossil ivory, the one that the Negroes buried as treasures dedicated to their deities. And although honest Marlow hates lies and death, he still feels inextricably linked with Kurtz, whose voice sounds in his ears, and the figure fascinates him even more than the others, because he is also a highly developed European and faces the same dangers as Kurtz, and because he is looking for an answer to the question of what evil is. This is one of the central issues of literature in general, especially significant for 20th-century literature. The story “Heart of Darkness” depicts evil spread in nature itself - it is hostile and destructive to the man in the story: the merciless sun of the black continent mows the Europeans who came here for profit and impose their orders on the natives. But the main evil is masked inside the human soul, as the example of Kurtz shows.

There is neither truth nor justice in the world of the story, there is only the stupidity of idealism, and more often - the insidiousness of cold egoism, money-grubbing, fanatical extremism, always turning into violence. Repeatedly, the narrator speaks of the unknowability of the world: “The hidden truth remains hidden - fortunately. But still, I felt it - silent and mysterious... It is impossible to convey what is the truth, meaning and purpose of this life. We live and dream alone. ” Loneliness and darkness are the leitmotifs of the work, where evil is incurable and incomprehensible. It wears clothes of goodness, plays out fierce farces, takes on the arsenal of enthusiasm and energy of madness. From total pessimism, the deal is saved only by Marlow humanity and the author’s indignation from human cruelty in the name of “progress.” Marlow values these. If in “Turn of the Screw” the governess writes her manuscript spontaneously, without reflecting on her literary form, then in “Heart of Darkness” Marlow is preoccupied with the form of her narrative. He comments on his own plot, interrupts it more than once with appeals to his listeners, for example: “Do you see this fiction? Do you see anything? It seems to me that I am trying to tell you a dream - I am making a vain attempt because it is impossible to convey in words the feeling of sleep. “So in the story, where there are elements of literary reflection in a modernist spirit - a feeling of inadequacy of words to the truth of life. Doubts haunt Marlo.

The first readers, which appears from the reviews, perceived the tale as a hybrid of an adventure novel for teens and the travel genre. Both genres are characterized by complete certainty and clarity of the author’s position. Description of adventures in an exotic country was a long tradition of popular English literature, and, just as in the case of Turn of the Screw, it was far from immediately seen in the tale its symbolic plan, its philosophical depth and ambiguity.

Symbolic images create a philosophical subtext of the work. From the first to the last scene, the work is dominated by darkness. It is the giant London at sunset, the gloom of an unnamed European capital, the darkness of the jungle, the darkness in the heart of Kurtz. Much less often, the author notes the light, and the light is not given the traditional meaning of the positive opposition of darkness.

The light in the fiction is ruthless, blinding, dim, i.e. emotionally, it is painted as negatively as darkness. Darkness is the impossibility to see, in the darkness, it is easy to pass by another person, darkness excludes full communication. So the image of darkness symbolizes in the tale of human blindness in the face of life, the tragic darkness of human existence.

The equally clearly visible surface of things prevails in the work over the meaning usually attributed to them. An unnamed narrator at the very beginning says about Marlow that “for him, the meaning of the episode was not inside, like a nut kernel, but under the conditions that were opened thanks to this episode.”

Accordingly, Marlow reproduces in detail his visual impressions and minimizes the moral commentary on events, and this is a completely new turn in relation to the European tradition of looking for the very essence of things. The essence, supposedly hidden in things, is always the fruit of someone’s interpretation, it depends on the meaning that the observer gives the thing, and the observer is mistaken.

Conscious of this, Conrad emphasizes the description of the appearance of objects and scenes that fall into Marlow field of vision. It is clear that this manner contributes to the growth of the value of each individual subject, and therefore, increases the possibility of creating a symbolic subtext, as in the image of Marlow.

Symbolically, Europe and the African forest wilderness are not as far apart as we could imagine: the suburb of London is described by the same words that will later describe the wilderness of the Congo, and European civilization penetrates the heart of Africa.

On the other hand, Europeans sail deep into Africa on a steamboat, a winding, treacherous zone is the only way available to them, and rapids, shoals, fogs, blockages on the fairway and other dangers of swimming suggest the hostility of the river to Europeans, that nature itself prevents them moving deeper into the continent.