INTRODUCTION
"Heart of Darkness marvellously summarizes Conrad's bitter experiences in the Congo. (2)
"Youth" and "Heart of Darkness" had first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1897 and 1899.
"Heart of Darkness" is also interior, suggestively analytic, and highly psychological. Indeed, Conrad realized that in comparison to ""Heart of Darkness" is also interior, suggestively analytic, and higly psychological. Indeed, Conrad realized that in comparison to "Youth", "Heart of Darkness" is "written in another mood"; the "sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration" and the result "like another art altogether". (3)
Conrad's fiction is concerned with the various directions and forms this adventure may take, but although each novel may investigate a different alternative through which the self attempts to give itself solidity, the conditions which underlie the initial instability of all his characters remain constant throughout the body of his fiction. For Conrad, these conditions, conditions which measure the dimensions of his world, ultimately are neither political nor psychological. They flow instead from a more fundamental vision of the nature of all reality and of man's place in this reality, and it is with this unifying vision that we begin.
Like many nineteenth-century writers Conrad was fascinated by Theories of evolution and the picture they presented of a world of forms and men developing from undifferentiated matter. The ultimate reality in Conrad's world, the truth which underlies the "diaphanous" structures of all possible universes and all possible states of consciousness is just such inert matter. This "eternal something that waves" is dark like "the darkness before creation".
Conrad's primal darkness should not be associated in a simple and direct way with the everyday materiality things.
This "unearthly substance" not only transcends time and space; it also free of all characteristics of weight and mass which objects possess. Although this darkness is material, Conrad insists on the ephemeral nature of its materiality. It is, we recall, "a thing of inconceivable tenuity" which he describes in a letter to Cunninghame-Graham as "une ombre sinestre et fuyante dont it est impossible de fixer l'image".
Although it is itself without weight or dimension, this darkness lies behind all the distinct forms of creation. In his personal myth, the evolution of the cosmos seems to have been marked for Conrad by a series of stages in which this matter inexplicably took on more and more complex characteristics
It is clear, in this sense, that the greatest absurdity for Conrad is not the genesis of the world, but its continued existence. The presence of the darkness at the source of all things is a constant reminder for Conrad of the insubstantiality of creation, of the ephemeral nature of what we accept as reality.
Like the levels of creation in the physical world, moreover, each stage of consciousness is not only born from a more primitive stage; it must retain its relation to this stage in order to continue its existence. Neither emotional nor rational consciousness develops into an independent entity. Even man's apparently self-contained reason must maintain its roots in emotion and sensation in order to survive.
For Conrad, then, consciousness must always turn outside itself to find the source of its existence in some ground which does not share its won nature. On the most fundamental level the orphaned quality which stigmatizes his character flows from this position of consciousness in the world. The explanation of this lies in the very nature of what it means to be an orphan. When a child is born into a family, hi is presented immediately with a mane and an identity which this name symbolizes. Although this name and this identity do derive ultimately from something outside himself, from his family, they are made present to him in such a way that this derivative quality is minimized. Because they are presented to him continuously from the first moment o his awareness, the child assumes both to be innate elements of his existence. He assumes as a matter of course that he is continuous with the reality around him, and in this way, comes to possess a sense of solidity and self-contained being. To such children their manes and selves have, in the words of one critic, "the dignity of an essence".
Because his origins are not, by definition, present to him in such a way that he comes naturally to assume he shares in their reality, an orphan is denied this sense of solidity. On the contrary, his experience of these origins is an experience of something unknown, alien. Instead of assuring his identity, the orphan's relation to his source serves only to cast this identity in the form of a question. It is for this reason that the situation of the orphan has such a fundamental role in Conrad's thought, for it corresponds precisely to what is, for him, the initial standing place of consciousness.
The recognition what for Conrad is the inevitable position of consciousness in the world allows us to understand not only the most basic cause of his heroes' restlessness but also the real object of their adventures.
The destruction of the dream of reason by the irrational is not, however, the final revelation which comes to Conrad's characters. Emotional and sensory awareness are themselves intermediate stages of creation and, consequently, they themselves flow from sources which absurdly deny their nature. Sensation and emotion are, after all, modes of consciousness, however primitive, and the final truth at which Conrad's characters arrive is one which denies not only rational awareness but awareness itself. Al awareness flows from the vibrations in the "eternal something that waves" which are the source of "sensations-then emotion-then thought.". When these characters confront the darkness in its most primitive form, however, they find to their horror that these fundamental vibrations are not inherent in the basic nature of the "eternal something". Instead they discover "perfect silence joined to perfect immobility".
To see this "deadly stillness" lying behind the vibrations of the eternal something is, again, to see the forms of creation rooted in a source which denies them. Because the darkness in its ultimate form negates the ground of any awareness, Conrad's characters experience this darkness not as a sensation but as the absence of sensation, an absence which is like "a foretaste of annihilation" precisely because it deprives consciousness of its foundation in sensory experience. (4)
(2) ã Joseph Conrad by Oliver Warner
Published for THE BRITISH COUNCIL and the NATIONAL BOOK LEAGUE
By Longmans, Green and Co., London, New York, Toronto.
First published in 1950.
Page:27
(3) ã The World's Classics
Joseph Conrad. Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether.
Edited with an introduction by Robert Kimbrough.
Introduction, Notes, Glossary ã Robert Dimbrough- 1984
Pages:9 and 11.
(4) ã The Metaphysics of Darkness. Royal Roussel.
A study in the unity and development of Conrad's Fiction.
1971- The John's Hopkins Press by Baltimore and London.
Pages: 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14.