.Above is a picture of the Thames River at dusk. Because Heart of Darkness begins and ends on the Thames, I thought that this image would work quite nicely.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism is actually almost twenty years old, but it's a useful introduction to the book and to ways of reading it.
Twenty years ago (the late 1980s) literary studies was undergoing a great change as ways of reading and writing about literature became more systematic and self-conscious. This resulted from the (relative) popularization of literary theory. Literary theory predates the 1980s, of course, but during this decade theory became more and more important to literary studies.
Before I go further, I want to emphasize that I am reviewing this book because Heart of Darkness is complicated. There is no one way to read it. Moreover, Conrad's style can be difficult because he is evoking the atmosphere of the Congo and its psychological impact on Marlow (the original narrator). Also, Conrad wrote at the end of the 19th century, a time before film and the internet. His work truly is "betwixt and between"...between older, more elaborate novels by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens & others like Thomas Hardy *and* later, more direct novels by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald or impressionistic novels by Virginia Woolf. When I first read Heart of Darkness (in a course on the 19th century British novel), I remember being shocked at how short this novella was. It looked very different a few years later when I read it in a course on Conrad and then again when I read it at the beginning of a course on the modern British novel.
Heart of Darkness: A Case Study focuses on five different theories that were popular at the time (1989). These theories are psychoanalytic (focusing on psychology), reader-response (focusing on the reader's response to literature), feminist, deconstructionist (attempting to take apart the text and discover its structure & contradictions), and new historicist (placing the text in its historical and cultural context). If this book were to be revised today, I suspect that deconstructionism and reader-response theory might be replaced with queer studies and post-colonial studies. Here is a link to an essay that takes a more post-colonial approach: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/conrad/pva52.html This situation reminds me that there is no one way to read a piece of literature.
The book actually begins with a short biography of Joseph Conrad and an introduction to his work. I'm going to save time here by linking to a general biography:
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jconrad.htm
What's most important to know about Conrad is this. He was Polish at a time when Poland did not officially exist because it was ruled by Russia and Germany. (He grew up in the Russian Empire.) English was his third or fourth language, and he traveled the world as a sailor before becoming a writer. At first, his writings were not popular, but they became popular and even influential. Many later writers admired his work and the view of the world expressed in it.
By the way, like many 19th century novels, Heart of Darkness was first published in a magazine over three issues. Here's a link to a college's web site that has this version:
http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/darkmenu.htm
To finish, I'd like to mention what each section focused on in Heart of Darkness.
The psychoanalytic reading interprets the novel as Kurtz and Marlow's inner journey. Kurtz falls victim to his desire for power, but Marlow comes away with greater self-knowledge. This section was written by Frederick R. Karl who also wrote a biography of Conrad, but he does *not* talk about the connections between Marlow and Conrad. Yes, there are connections!
Adena Rosmarin's section on reader response in turn faces the reasons why Heart of Darkness is difficult for many readers. Specifically, there are gaps in the narrative and therefore places where the reader has to decide for him/herself what is going on and why it is important. Conrad's refusal to tell the reader what to think appealed to readers who lived through World Wars One and Two. WWI, in particular, disillusioned many who fought in it and lived through it.
For more information about WWI, see this site from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/
The presence of a feminist reading of Heart of Darkness may surprise you. Or does it? In this section, Johanna M. Smith (one of my husband's professors at Indiana University) uses feminist theory to examine Marlow's narrative and his self-justifications about the Company, the Congo, and the women he encounters along the way. These women include his aunt (who convinces the Company to hire him), Kurtz' African lover, and his European fiancee (his Intended whom Marlow visits at the end of the story). Interestingly, in the 19th century, a popular type of book was the collected biographies of women. A number of these women went to Africa, India, and elsewhere in the British Empire as missionaries, and the collected biographies encouraged young female readers to see missionary work as an ideal career. In practice, most young women could not become missionaries, but these biographies ultimately encouraged them to go on to other careers in the US and the UK. For more information on these collective biographies and their impact on women, see my review of Prof. Alison Booth's How to Make It As A Woman:
http://ncgsjournal.com/szlyk.htm
Now you know the other side of the story...as Paul Harvey says!
In a deconstructionist reading, J.Hillis Miller argues that Heart of Darkness is something of a parable, a story that appears to be about realistic, everyday events but reveals a hidden, cosmic truth. He also examines the ways in which Conrad's novel is apocalyptic, that is, about the end of time. (Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now had come out about ten years earlier. I know that I first thought of Heart of Darkness as the novel that Apocalypse Now was based on.)
Brook Thomas' New Historicist reading places Heart of Darkness in its historical and cultural context. Thomas also notes Conrad's thoughts on history and the extent to which a novelist is also a historian. Conrad, the literary scholar argues, "felt that 'the reality of forms and observation of social phenomenon' in his fiction [produced] more truthful histories than those of most historians" (Thomas 239).
In your opinion, what are the most important elements of Heart of Darkness? Why? Which of the five perspectives outlined above seem most useful to you?
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