Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness

Historical + Political
1. Colonialism
  1. Not just a histoical phenomenon! An ideology: A way of seeing the world. Here - There. Civilzation - Savage
  2. Misrepresentation of the Middle east
    1. Edward Said: 'Orientalism'. Historians/ literary and cultural studies scholars for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Middle Eastern.
      1. The West dominates and restricts
      2. The world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident)
    2. The Subaltern: Kurtz mistress. Vicariously viewed through Conrad/Marlow, don't know her perception
    3. Fanon says typical for the settler to present the native as utterly evil
  3. Shift in identifying with the colonized, when he effectively becomes British he now becomes "colonizer"
    1. Almayers Folly
      1. Conrad may have been doing something quite radical here
      2. Character of Nina (a half-caste) in a white community
2. Racism
  1. Achebe says that it is (perceived) as necessary for Western psychology to set up Africa as a foil to Europe
    1. 'The other world'
      1. An antithesis of Europe + civilization
    2. 'Prehistoric earth'
    3. Denounced a 'bloody racist'
    4. Was he racist?
      1. Najder: could feel 'solidarity' with Marlowe while 'maintaining distance'
        The character is in fact a distancing device.
3. During the century people were recognizing the difference between the (often religious or idealistic ) propaganda of imperialism and the extents of its exploitation
4. Can a texts be read as timeless autonomous entities.. OR serve political interest
  1. To reconstruct Eurocentric and patriarchal binarisms
Narrative
1. 'My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word is to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see'
  1. 'See' = implies readers visualization. To create understanding.
  2. 'Life did not narrate, but mode impressions on our brains.' - Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Rememberance
2. Delayed decoding
  1. The writer confronts us with effect while with holding knowledge of its course. Eventual explanation may not erase strong impression of events strangeness (partic. HOD = Heads on stakes)
    1. 'These round knobs were not oramental... those heads on stakes... I was not so shocked as you may think'
      1. Trying to cling to the familiar. But seems the strange has become familiar/ familiar strange.
      2. Casual, nonchalant acknowledge
  2. Is at the novels core.
    1. 'Maintain general atmosphere of pointless activity; while the plot, when we eventually percieve it, makes a bitter comment on the evolutionary doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest + politcal doctrine that the white man has a moral right to rule Africa' A Preface to Conrad - Cedric Watts
3. Impressionism
  1. Conrad contrast to Victorian Lit, realism
  2. To be realistic is to represent actual impression (including every sensation)
  3. To be realistic is to represent actual impression (including every sensation)
4. Nested Narrative - 'Story within a story'
  1. A meandering narrative, deffering from what we most want to know/see, Conrad's evasiveness in full play.
Modernism
1. Quoted himself as 'modern'
  1. In it's essence [my work] is action... action of human beings that will bleed to a prick, and are moving in a visible word' Letters II, P.418
    1. Stape in The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad argues: 'realism' made his modernism. Letter associates with realism, while Kurtz' perception of 'horror' like that of T.S Eliot's 'The Hollow Men', still clings to the nineteenth century image of the hero. Lord Jim = Tales of heroic self-justification
2. The intrinsic factors: Satiric verse Multiple narrations and p.o.v its paradoxicality
3. Anticipates postm.
  1. Weakens sense of the world
    1. Narrative, time and geography dominated by Europe
Conflicts and Paradoxes
1. Civilization can be barbaric
2. Awareness is better than unawareness, but soon becomes more beneficial to remain ignorant
3. Association with white and black is exploited
  1. The city being 'sepulchral'
  2. London 'brooding gloom'
  3. Ivory trade
    1. Back in London is hints of it 'grand piano stood massively in the corner, dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus
      1. Paradox from oxymoron 'dark gleams'
      2. Symbol of death
4. Dichotomies: a contrast between things
  1. Light/dark, good/evil, fear/fascination

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