2. Heart of Darkness

3. GRAHAM GREENE, Journey without Maps (1936)
I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know. The unconscious mind is often sentimental; I have written ‘a shape’, and the shape, of course, is roughly that of the human heart.
Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.

4. Factual/Historical Viewpoint
The Congo River was discovered by Europeans in 1482
No one traveled more than 200 miles upstream until 1877
Is 1,600 miles long and only impassable to water traffic between two places, creating a two-hundred mile overland trip
Matadi (the Company Station)
Kinshasa (the Central Station)

5. History of the Congo
1878 – King Leopold II of Belgium asked explorer Henry Morton Stanley to set up a Belgian colony in the Congo
Wanted to “end slavery and civilize the natives”
Actually interested in more material benefits
1885 – Congress of Berlin forms Congo Free State
This was ruled by Leopold II alone
The Congress of Berlin is referred to in the book as “the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs.”
Leopold never even visited the Congo. He set up “the Company” to run it for him.

6. Africa and Imperialism

7. CONGO FREE STATE
(1885)
Henry Morton Stanley explores the region for Leopold II of Belgium
1890
Conrad’s expedition to the Congo (“Before the Congo I was a mere animal”)

8. Colonial Africa, circa 1892

9. Democratic Republic of the Congo
1908 Belgian Congo
1960 Independence
1964 People’s Republic of the Congo
1971 Republic of Zaire
1997 Democratic Republic of the Congo

10. Democratic Republic of the Congo (1997)
The name of this African nation derives from a people known as the BaKongo, first rendered as “Congo” in Portuguese chronicles of exploration in In their language, the 2,900-mile-long Congo River is called nzadi, “the river that swallows all rivers.”

11. King Leopold II (reigned 1865 – 1909)
Belgian exploitation of the Congo initially focused on the rubber industry.

12. King Leopold and the Congo
Belgium, as a small country, did not possess numerous overseas colonies, unlike its neighbours, Holland, France, Germany, and Great Britain, but shared their imperial ambitions. Leopold persuaded other European powers at the Berlin Conference of to give him personal possession of the Congo.
In 1876 he organized an international association as a front for his private plan to “develop” central Africa.
Leopold used the Congo as a huge money-making resource, committing human rights violations in the process, as he built public works projects in Belgium with the money he accrued.

13. Belgium’s Stranglehold on the Congo

14. 5-8 Million Victims (50% of Population)
“It is blood-curdling to see them (the soldiers) returning with the hands of the slain, and to find the hands of young children amongst the bigger ones evidencing their bravery...The rubber from this district has cost hundreds of lives, and the scenes I have witnessed, while unable to help the oppressed, have been almost enough to make me wish I were dead... This rubber traffic is steeped in blood, and if the natives were to rise and sweep every white person on the Upper Congo into eternity, there would still be left a fearful balance to their credit.” -- Belgian Official

15. White King, Red Rubber, Black Death
Countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain that acquired large empires exploited both land and people. However…
Some measures to protect the rights of overseas subjects were introduced.
Rights of women and men to vote.
Protection against industrial exploitation was making child labour illegal and improving employment conditions.
Some of these rights were followed in the African colonies…..but NOT BY LEOPOLD II
Leopold had to give up the Congo to Belgium in 1908 as a result of the international campaign exposing Leopold’s activities in the Congo.

16. King Leopold’s Ghost Novel by Adam Hochschild written in 1998
Tells the horrific story of King Leopold’s colonial rule over a country and it’s native peoples.
Based on the true story of the colonial activities.
King Leopold II, never set foot in the Congo, but managed to ruin a country…his ghost remains today in memories of the Congolese.

17. The Explorer Stanley’s Role
H. M. Stanley, a journalist who explored the Congo on an expedition financed by King Leopold of Belgium.
Stanley greatly aided his backer in gaining a firm foothold in what was to become the Belgian Congo (later Zaire), now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
King Leopold II never set foot in Africa.

18. “The White Man’s Burden”*
“King Leopold found the Congo…cursed by cannibalism, savagery, and despair; and he has been trying with patience, which I can never sufficiently admire, to relieve it of its horrors, rescue it from its oppressors, and save it from perdition.” --H.M. Stanley
*The idea that Europeans must carry the burden of civilizing Africa.

19. Different Motives of Imperialism
Some Westerners felt it was their duty to “civilize” the “savage” inhabitant of colonial lands in order to make them more “modern” and European. The English writer Rudyard Kipling displayed such an attitude in 1899 with a poem entitle “The White Man’s Burden.”
Take up the White Man’s burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

20. The “White Man’s Burden”?
The first step toward lightening the White Man’s Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness!
Pear’s Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances, while amongst the cultured of all nations, it holds the highest place-it is the ideal toilet soap.

21. Ivory and “the White Man’s Burden”
Most Europeans in the 1890s felt that the African peoples needed exposure to European culture and technology to become more evolved.
This responsibility was known as “the white man’s burden” and the fervor to bring Christianity and commerce to Africa grew.
In return for these “benefits,” the Europeans extracted HUGE amounts of ivory.

22. Ivory, cont. Uses of ivory in the 1890s
Jewelry and other decorative items
Piano keys
Billiard balls
From 1888 to 1892, the amount of ivory exported from the Congo rose from 13,000 pounds to more than a quarter million pounds.
1892 – Leopold declares all natural resources in the Congo are his sole property
This gave the Belgians free reign to take whatever they wanted however they wished.
Trade expands, new stations are established farther and farther away

23. The Results of Ivory Fever
Documented atrocities committed by the Belgian ivory traders include the severing of hands and heads.
Reports of this, combined with Conrad’s portrayal of the system in Heart of Darkness, led to an international protest movement against Belgium’s presence in Africa
Leopold outlawed these practices, but his decree had little effect
Belgian parliament finally took control away from the king
Belgium did not grant independence to the Congo until 1960

24. Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) “The Colossus of Rhodes”
Uncle Sam: “The Colossus of the Pacific” (A Parody)
“The Colossus of Rhodes”

25. Joseph Conrad’s Life
Born Josef Teodore Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, in Podolia, Ukraine, 3 December 1857.
Conrad’s father and mother, Apollo and Ewa, were political activists. They were imprisoned 7 months and eventually deported to Vologda.
Apollo introduced him son to the work of Dickens, Fenimore Cooper and Captain Marryat in Polish and French translations.

26. Joseph Conrad’s Life
His father died of tuberculosis and his funeral was attended by a thousand admirers
Conrad was raised by his uncle; attended school (he was disobedient)
In 1874, Conrad went to Marseilles, France, and joined the Merchant Navy.
Gun running for the Spanish and a love affair led to a suicide attempt.
Conrad became a British merchant sailor and eventually a master mariner and citizen in His ten years in the British Merchant Marine shaped most of his stories.

27. Joseph Conrad’s Life Conrad traveled widely in the east.
He took on a stint as a steamer captain (1890) in the Congo, but became ill within three months and had to leave.
Conrad retired from sailing and took up writing full time.
Died of a heart attack in 1924.
Buried in Canterbury Cathedral.

28. Heart of Darkness
First published as a serial in London’s Blackwood Magazine in 1899
First unified publication in1902
Considered by many to be the finest short novel ever written in English
Bridges the Victorian and Modern literary periods
Modern criticism sharply divided over merit due to racist/imperialist themes

29. Heart of Darkness Background
After a long stint in the east had come to an end, he was having trouble finding a new position.
With the help of a relative in Brussels he got the position as captain of a steamer for a Belgian trading company.
Conrad had always dreamed of sailing the Congo
He had to leave early for the job, as the previous captain was killed in a trivial quarrel

30. Heart of Darkness Background
Conrad saw some of the most shocking and depraved examples of human corruption he’d ever witnessed. He was disgusted by the ill treatment of the natives, the scrabble for loot, the terrible heat and the lack of water.
He saw human skeletons of bodies left to rot - many were men from the chain gangs building the railroads.
He found his ship was damaged.
Dysentary was rampant as was malaria; Conrad had to terminate his contract due to illness and never fully recovered

31. Heart of Darkness Narrative Structure
Framed Narrative
Narrator begins
Marlow takes over
Narrator breaks in occasionally
Marlow is Conrad’s alter-ego, he shows up in some of Conrad’s other works including “Youth: A Narrative” and Lord Jim
Marlow recounts his tale while he is on a small vessel on the Thames with some drinking buddies who are ex-merchant seamen. As he recounts his story the group sits in an all-encompassing darkness.

32. Narrative Structure of Heart of Darkness

33. Contrasts in Heart of Darkness
Light vs. Dark
Heavy vs. Light
Inferiority vs. Superiority
Civil vs. Savage
Interior vs. Exterior
Illusion vs. Truth
Misogyny vs. Misanthropy
Insanity vs. Sanity
Racism vs. Anti-racism
Imperialism vs. Insularity
Evil
What makes well-intentioned people do bad things?

34. Heart of Darkness Motifs
Primitive Impulses (Kurtz, previous captain, etc.)
Cruelty of Man (Kurtz and Company)
Immorality/Amorality (Kurtz)
Lies/Hypocrisy (Marlow chooses Kurtz’s evil versus Company’s hypocritical evil)
Imperialization/Colonization (Belgian Company)
Greed / Exploitation of People
Power Corrupts
Savage vs. Civil

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

37. Varied Interpretations
Some feel the novel offers a scathing attack on colonialist ideology, others feel the novel celebrates and defends colonialization and racism.
Some see Kurtz as the embodiment of all the evil and horror of capitalist society.
Others view it as a portrayal of one man’s journey into the primitive unconscious where one must confront one’s own inner darkness.
Still others see it as a modern journey quest, perhaps with an anti-hero rather than a hero.

38. Criticism – Early and Modern
Hailed as a portrayal of the demoralizing effect life in the African wilderness supposedly had on European men
Praised as a study of the collapse of the white man’s morality when he is released from the restraints of European law and order
Modern
Criticized for the blatantly racist attitudes it portrays
Some believe Conrad was simply reflecting the attitudes held common at the time
Others believe he may have been holding the ideas up for scorn and ridicule

39. Victorian and Modern Literature
Traditional subject matter, form, and style
Deals with issues of the day, including
Social, economic, religious, and intellectual issues
Industrial Revolution
Class tensions, early feminist movement, pressures for social and political reform
Impact of Darwin’s theories on evolution
Modern (post WWI – WWII)
Authors experiment with subject matter, form, and style
Deals with issues of the day, including
Horrors of WWI
Massive loss of life
Loss of faith
Expanding technology and science
Also encompassed/is related to Postmodernism

40. Review of Criticism
Paul O’Prey: “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.?

41. 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.”

42. Review of Criticism
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.”

43. 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 upon which Marlow stumbles
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.

44. 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.”

45. 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

46. 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

47. 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?

48. Review of Criticism
Formalist: Focus on the literary patterns and structures inherent in Heart of Darkness
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->Marlow->Outside Narrator->the reader
Are the answers to be found in the center or on the periphery?

49. Review of Criticism
Modernism: Heart of Darkness published in the Late Victorian Era 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 and interest in primitiveness and savagery as the condition upon which civilization is built
a skepticism and a sense that multiplicity, ambiguity, and irony—in life and in art—are the necessary responses of the intelligent mind to the human condition.

50. Movie Versions of the Book

51. Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now is a film directed by Francis Ford Coppola starring Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando
This film was based on Conrad’s 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

52. Circle of Influence Thomas Pynchon T.S. Eliot Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Luis Borges
Carlos Fuentes
George Orwell
Saul Bellow
Eugene O’Neill
Graham Greene

53. Joseph Conrad’s Other Works
Almayer’s Folly (1895)
The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897)
Lord Jim (1900)
Heart of Darkness (1902)
Typhoon (1902)
Nostromo (1904)
The Secret Sharer (1907)
Under Western Eyes (1910)
Chance (1914)