BY: Antonio Soriano Vidal.

Group: A.

Lecturer: Peter Blair.

Table of contents

1- Introduction page: 3

2- Critical approaches page: 3-7

3- Conclusion  page: 7
4- Bibliography page: 8

1- Introduction:

In this paper I am going to talk about “Heart of Darkness” (1899), by Joseph Conrad. The aim of the paper is to talk about imperialism and racism that appears in the book. For example we are going to talk about the racist idea that Joseph Conrad had in his novella through his principal narrator, Marlow, who reflects upon the evils of the human condition as he has experienced it in Africa and Europe. Seen from the perspective of Conrad's nameless, objective persona, the evils that Marlow encountered on the expedition to the "heart of darkness” about Africa and Europe as we says. Later on, we are going to explain why Conrad uses those differences about them (Africa and Europe). Furthermore, Conrad in his novel talks about the Imperialism, that he considers a good experience for the development of the people of his time. The European idealist, believing the lies of his Company and of the economic imperialism that supports it, is unprepared for the test of character that the Congo imposes, and succumbs to the potential for the diabolical latent within every human consciousness.

2- Critical approaches:

At this point I’m going to explain what I say in the introduction. First and foremost I’m going to talk about the imperialism.

In the world of Heart of Darkness, there are no clear answers. Ambiguity, perhaps the main form of the “darkness” in the story, prevails. Conrad overlays the political and moral content of his novella with symbolic and mythic patterns that divert attention from Kurtz and the Congo to “misty halos” and “moonshine”. The anonymous narrator uses these metaphors to describe the difference between Marlow’s stories and those of ordinary sailors:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical…. and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (pp. 19-20)

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The passage announces that locating the “meaning” of the story won’t be easy, and in fact may be impossible. It seems almost to be a confession of defeat, or at least of contradiction. Conrad here establishes as one of his themes the problem of rendering any judgment whatsoever –moral, political, metaphysical- about Marlow’s narrative. It is precisely this complexity –a theme he might be labelled the dislocation of meaning or the disorientation of values in the story- that many critics have treated as its finest feature.

By my point of view racism is bigotry, prejudice, violence, oppression, stereotyping, discrimination or any other socially divisive practice whose primary basis is the concept of race. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, racism is a belief or ideology that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially to distinguish it as being either superior or inferior to another race or races.

By the other side, imperialism is a movement developed in the early 19^th century after the Industrial Revolution when the western nations began to take control of other non-industrialized nations and colonies.

The massive evidence of wholesale torture and slaughter under the direction of Leopold’s white agents suggests not only that there were numerous Kurtzes in the “heart of darkness”, but also that, as Hannah Arendt contends in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, nineteenth-century imperialism prepared the ground in which fascism and Nazism took root after World War I. Arendt has Kurtz and other Conrad characters in mind when she describes the appeal of “the phantom world of colonial adventure” to certain types of Europeans:

Outside all social restraint and hypocrisy, against the backdrop of native life, the gentleman and the criminal left not only the closeness of men who share the same colour of skin, but the impact of a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the realization of their own phantom-like existence. Native life lent these ghostlike events a seeming guarantee against all consequences because anyhow it looked to these men like a “mere play of shadows. A play of shadows, the dominant race could walk trough unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its incomprehensible aims and needs”. The world of native savages was a perfect setting for men who had escaped the reality of civilisation.

When Marlow declares that “the conquest of the earth… is not a pretty thing”, he goes on to suggest that imperialism may be “redeemed” by the “idea” that lies behind it. But in the real world idealism is fragile, and in Heart of Darkness, except for the illusions maintained by a few womenfolk back in Brussels, it has almost died out. In “going native”, Kurtz betrays the “civilizing” ideals with which he supposedly set out from Europe. Among the “faithless pilgrims”, there are only false ideals and the false religion of self-seeking. “To tear treasure out the bowels of the land was their desire”, says Marlow, “with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe” (p.46). The true nature of European philanthropy in the Congo is revealed to Marlow by the chain gang and the “black shadows of disease and starvation”, left to die in the “greenish gloom”, which he sees at the Outer Station (p.32). These miserable “phantoms” are probably accurate depictions of what Conrad saw in 1890; they may also be taken to represent what he later learned about Leopold’s forced labour system. In any case, from the moment he sets foot in the Congo, Marlow is clear about the meaning of “the merry dance of death and trade” (p.29). It thus makes perfect sense to interpret Heart of Darkness as an attack on imperialism, at least as it was operative in the Congo.

But in the course of this attack, all “ideals” threaten to turn into “idols”-“something”, in Marlow’s words, that “you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to” (p.21). Conrad universalizes “darkness” partly by universalizing fetishism. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and other Marxist critics of empire described the era of “the scramble for Africa” –roughly 1880 to 1914- as one when the “commodity fetishism” of “late capitalism” was most intense, a notion that Edward Said touches upon in analyzing The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (142-43). If the “natives” in their darkness set Kurtz up as an idol, the Europeans worship ivory, money, power, reputation. Kurtz joins the “natives” in their “unspeakable rites”, worshipping his own unrestrained power and lust. Marlow himself assumes the pose of an idol, sitting on ship deck with folded legs and outward palms like a Buddha. And Kurtz’s Intended is perhaps the greatest fetishist of all, idolizing her image of her fiancé. Marlow’s lie leaves Kurtz’s Intended shrouded in the protective darkness of her illusions, her idol-worship.

But the difficulty with this ingenious inversion, through which “ideals” become “idols”, is that Conrad portrays the moral bankruptcy of imperialism by showing European motives and actions to be no better than African fetishism and savagery. He paints Kurtz and Africa with the same tarbush. His version of evil –the form taken by Kurtz’s satanic behaviour- is “going native”. In short, evil is Africa in Conrad’s story; if it is also European, that’s because some number of white men in the heart of darkness behave like Africans. Conrad’s stress of cannibalism, his identification of African customs with violence, lust, and madness, his metaphors of bestiality, death, and darkness, his suggestion that travelling in Africa is like travelling backward in time to primeval, infantile, but also hellish stages of existence –these features of the story are drawn from the repertoire of Victorian imperialism and racism that painted an entire continent dark.

Achebe is therefore right to call Conrad’s portrayal of Africa and Africans “racist”. It is possible to argue, as does Parry, that Conrad works with the white-and-black, light-and-darkness dichotomies of racist fantasy in order to subvert them, but she acknowledges that the subversion is incomplete: “Although the resonances of white are rendered discordant…black and dark do serve in the text as equivalences for the savage and undreamed, the corrupt and degraded…the cruel and the atrocious. Imperialism itself is perceived as the dark within Europe…Yet despite…momentous departures from traditional European usage…the fiction gravitates back to established practice, registering the view of two in compatibles orders within a Manichean universe” (23). The “imperialist imagination” itself, Parry suggest, works with the “Manichean,” irreconcilable polarities common to all artist ideology. Achebe states the issue more succinctly: “Conrad had a problem with niggers…Sometimes his fixation on blackness is… overwhelming” (789).

Identifying specific sources for Conrad’s later knowledge of the horrors of Leopold’s regime is less important than recognizing that there were numerous sources, swelling in number trough the 1980s. Conrad reshaped his first firsthand experience of the Congo in the light of these sources in several ways. As I have already suggested, the emphasis of cannibalism in Heart of Darkness probably derives in part from Conrad’s reading about the war between Leopold’s agents and the Arabs. At the same time, the war is not mentioned in the novella-conspicuous only by their absence. The omission has the important effect of sharpening the light-and-dark dichotomies, the staple of European racism; “evil” and “darkness” are parcelled out between only two antithetical sides, European and African, “white” and “black”. But while Conrad/Marlow treats the attribution of “evil” to the European invaders as a paradox, its attribution to Africans he treats as a given. Further, the omission of the Arabs means that Conrad does no treat cannibalism is also standard in racist accounts of Africa.

In simplifying his memories and sources, Conrad arrived at the dichotomous or “Manichean” pattern of the imperialist adventure romance, a pattern radically at odds with any realist, expose intention. Perhaps Heart of Darkness expresses two irreconcilable intentions. As Parry says, “to proffer an interpretation of Heart of Darkness as a militant denunciation and a reluctant affirmation of imperialist civilisation, as a fiction that (both) exposes and colludes in imperialism’s mystifications, is to recognise its immanent contradictions” (39). Moreover, the argument that Conrad was consciously anti-imperialist, but that he unconsciously or carelessly employed the racist terminology current in his day will not stand up, because he was acutely aware of what he was doing. Every white-black and light-dark contrast in the story, whether is corroborates racist assumptions or subverts them, is precisely calculated for its effects both as a unit in a scheme of imagery and as a focal point in a complex web of contradictory political and moral values.

3- Conclusion:

Conrad knew that his story was ambiguous (like I explain at the beginning of the paper): he stressed that ambiguity at every opportunity, so that labelling it “anti-imperialist” is as unsatisfactory as condemning it for being “racist”. The fault-line for all of the contradictions and ambiguities in the text lies between Marlow and Kurtz. Of course it also lies between Conrad and both of his ambivalent characters, not to mention the anonymous primary narrator. Is Marlow Kurt’s antagonist, critic and potential redeemer? Or is he Kurz’s pale shadow and admirer, his double, and finally one more idolator in a story full of examples of fetishism and evil worship?

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• Conrad, Joseph 1996. Heart of Darkness, ed. Penguin popular classics, 2^nd edition Jan.
• Arendt, Hannah.1968. Imperialism. New York: Harcourt.
• Parry, Benita.1983. Conrad and the Imperialism. London: Macmillan.
• Said, Edward W.1966.Joseph Conrad and the fiction of Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
• Arendt, Hannah.1968. Imperialism. New York: Harcourt.
• www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad.
• www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_darkness.