Heart of Darkness Agenda and Notes; Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski (1857-1924)

"by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel... before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask." (1897)

Themes

            -- Darkness

            -- The Horror

            -- Truth/Lies

            -- Restraint, rivets vs. freedom: id vs. superego

            -- Civilization vs. Savagery; which is which and who is which?

            -- Heroism (expanding human experience into deepest depths, as well as heights, truth, honesty vs. lies)

            -- Man’s “true” nature, man stripped of social-construction, social constraints (See Freud: Psyche and Dreams)

            -- The limits, nature and basis of traditional morality

To unlock H of D’s theme/meaning, you need to understand

1) Victorian Era: tensions between intellectual and cultural attitudes; colonialism, Leopold in Congo; “civilization”

2) Style: impressionism, symbolism, realism

3) The disjoint between European attitudes toward colonialism and the actual colonial experience

4) The broader, non-historically contextualized themes concerning the human experience (Apoc. Now etc.)

1) Victorian Era; Queen Victoria’s Reign 1839-1901 Beginnings of the Modern Era

-- Queen Victoria (1819-1901)

-- Rise of British Empire and Colonialism

-- Protestant work ethic, family values, religious observation and institutional faith, hard work, respectability, social deference and religious conformity.

-- Brit. Faith in culture and political form, exported to world thru colonialism

-- The birth and spread of political movements, most notably socialism, liberalism and organized feminism

-- Social Responsibility; responsibility to family, social class, nation/empire; society trumps individual

-- Rise of modern medicine, sanitation

          -- Irish Famine: at least one million people died between 1845 and 1851

          -- Corsets: Restraint

-- Conflict between capitalism and socialism (1848 Communist Manifesto, 1867 Das Kapital)

-- Conflict between Empiricism and Faith (Darwin Origin of the Species 1859)

-- Comparisons to Candide, Frankenstein, Narration of a Slave; share to a degree many common perspectives on the human political/social experience; roots in similar egalitarian/democratic/liberal values; repulsion at the hypocritical abuse of those values

2) Style: Modernism, Realism and Impressionism, Symbolism

Modernism From 1860s to present (or Post-Modernism rise in 1970s)

            -- Inner individual perceptions: from objective reality to subjective impressions

            -- Solipsism, alienation, nihilism, existentialism

            -- Rise of psychology: Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams 1900

            -- Literary emphasis on the individual, the mind

Impressionist Movement in Literature

            -- Roots in painting: Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir. See: Impressionism

-- Psychology: Attempts to capture/represent psychological perception of experience; experience as perceived by the mind, not just the eye or an objective observer. See: Freud: Psyche and Dreams

-- Modernism: disjunction of understanding of reality based on:

-- Combination of:

a)  narrator’s impressions (sense-perceptions) of

b) objective reality/experience, filtered thru:

c) perspective, understanding, psychology (emotion, bias, past experience etc.)

Realism

-- Art focusing on concrete experience; attempts to capture reality realistically; realistic characters doing realistic things in realistic situations (compare to fantastic Candide, gothic Frankenstein, Classical, Neo-Classical, Romantic Gods, Christian-Dantean-Miltonian descents into hell etc.)

Symbolism (see quotes)

-- Abstract, enigmatic,  relationship between the signified (idea) and signifier (symbol) (no one to one relationship between the symbol and what it signifies)

            -- Realism and symbolism: symbols drawn from actual experience and situation, setting, characters

            -- French Symbolist poets: Verlaine, Rimbaud, Malarmé (Conrad has little respect for them but seem to have adopted their methods in H of D; this is, however, his only work considered "Symbolist"))

                        -- "All the great creations of literature have been symbolic. ... A work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive conclusion. And this is for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character." (Quoted from Watt, Conrad in the 19th Century. 189.)

Victorian Lit:

The Victorian era ushered in great literary and poetic works from writers such as George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, William Butler Yeats, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry James in England. At the same time, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, and Mark Twain published their masterpieces in the Americas. Aestheticism, a movement emphasizing artistic values over social or moral themes and popularized by Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire, became a notable force in literature of the time. Baudelaire's work also exemplified the Decadence Movement in France, which focused on the autonomy of art, the rejection of middle-class values, and unconventional and morbid experiences.

http://www.erasofelegance.com/arthistory.html#8

3) Disjoint: Brussels, Belgium. Seat of Leopold II Empire and business etc. vs. reality of Colonial Experience

 Matthew 23:27 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead [men's] bones, and of all uncleanness. (KJV)