Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
is considered by many to be the ultimate 'modernist'
novel, a work of great complexity designed to reflect the complexity of experience we find
in the real world. The thread running through the topic, Africa's Congo River, helps to lend
both direction and form to its uncertainties. The story is a simple quest, an adventurous
journey upriver by one man, Marlow, in search of another, Kurtz. This is a physical journey,
into a continent along a river, but also a moral and political journey, confronting the harsh
realities of colonialism (Kurtz is a lost agent who works for a Belgian company involved
in the ivory trade). The journey also works on another level still, becoming a psychological
trip, undertaken by Marlow and the reader, in which we descend into ourselves to confront
our basic drives and impulses, weaknesses and needs, a descent into the underworld that is
the 'Heart of Darkness'.
The topic is constructed as a tale within a tale, the narrative beginning on the estuary of the
River Thames, where four men sit on the deck of a ship listening to Marlow tell his story
of a trip to Africa in his youth. The setting allows the implications of what happens in the
'dark places' of a far-away continent to reverberate through the seemingly safe and com-
fortable world of the audience.
During Marlow's voyage upriver, an image of Kurtz gradually emerges. A man who started
out as a force for good has been corrupted by the exercise of power. Kurtz has acquired a
status in the local African community that is almost divine, a position consolidated by his
use of force: he has plundered the countryside for its ivory, shooting people at will and dis-
playing their skulls on his picket fence as a symbol of his authority. Marlow's journey into
the heart of Africa is an exploration of the shadowy underbelly of the European Enlighten-
ment, the language of reason, and the rhetoric of imperialism.
Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
was first published in serial form in
Blackwood's Magazine
right at the end of the 19th century, and as a topic in 1902. Towards the end of the 20th
century, Marlow's river trip was re-enacted in another classic of fiction, this time on cellu-
loid, in Francis Ford Coppola's spectacular film about the Vietnam War,
Apocalypse Now
(1979). The movie, although of course ostensibly set on another continent, showed that
Conrad's story still had numerous contemporary echoes almost a century after its creation.
Colonel Kurtz, a special forces commander driven insane by power, played by Marlon
Brando, still represents the corrupted voice of Enlightenment, humanism, and supposed
progress. The film, like the topic, develops imagery and characters that can be interpreted
as a searing criticism of war, racism, and colonialism. However, both topic and film have
also been viewed as expressions of the hypocritical values they are trying to expose.
