You’ve studied the three short stories, two novellas, and you’ve looked at several outside sources [literary criticisms] for use in developing ideas about each story/novella. write a paper on “Heart of Darkness”. what intrigued you. 

You should quote passages from the story you write about and use the criticisms that are below this!!!!!

Read the criticism in this module [below], entitled, “Heart of Darkness as Contradiction”

• Heart of Darkness as a Story

Heart of Darkness is a story by Joseph Conrad about a man (Marlow) who goes upriver in search of another man (Kurtz).

In this search, Marlow finds nothing but the decay of imperialism and the stench of racism gangrenous in White Man (represented by Kurtz). And when Marlow goes upriver looking for the voice of Kurtz all he can find is the husk of a man who probably went insane when he could not handle the reality he faced — Europe, what he knew as civilised, was barbaric and uncouth — the jungle, the wilderness is the anthropomorphic personification of Life.

The jungle was natural and real, unpretentious and unassuming. The jungle doesn’t care what your skin colour is; it will consume you just the same.

The horror Kurtz experienced was the horror of civilisation’s barbarism exposed by the wilderness. Kurtz experiences this through the jungle’s stripping away of everything he assumed he knew about reality; only then did Kurtz realise his mistake.

Not that he acted on it. He should have seen the pure joyful unadulterated horror of nature which man cannot fathom. Certain groups of humans missed the point, and so built concrete walls and dressed up reality in funny words to feel superior to nature — nature which is older than humans and unencumbered by man-made hang-ups.

Heart of Darkness isn’t Racist

In “What Does Heart of Darkness do with RacismLinks to an external site.”, I briefly touched on the idea: the story isn’t racist how you read it determines whether you read it as racist or not.

That is — each reader can’t but avoid judging the book based on their own cultural/social/political context. Some readers see the word nigger in the story and that’s it: the story must be racist.

Which, of course, ignores language usage in the early 1900s. Does that excuse the language? No, but damning it as racist isn’t the right approach either.

This argument is circular — but the point is: the story is and isn’t racist. It is, and is not, offensive. I am not saying Heart of Darkness is neutral either. This story works so well and has endured so long because it is a contradiction. It is as offensive as it is inoffensive — as racist as it is an attack against racism. It is pro-imperialism just as it is anti-imperialism.

The Success of the Story

Heart of Darkness succeeds in its failure. And it’s failure is in its inability to adequately (or convincingly) damn imperialism and colonialism.

As Edward Said wrote, “As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them.” (pg 428)

The story tries to point out everything wrong with what Marlow sees, however, Marlow’s narration has this odd sort of doubling. Rather than two characters with opposing ideas setting each other off, we have only Marlow and his inability to make up his mind.

He both believes in imperialism as well as colonialism and sees the barbarism in all of it — and so wants to condemn it. For example: Marlow, before he launches into his tale, tells of the Romans:

“They were conquerors, and for that you only want brute force — nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder of a great scale, and men going at it blind — as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.” (pg 7)

The doubling occurs when he damns the methods of the Romans, and then at the very last moment justifies it with “as is very proper…” almost as though he doesn’t want his audience to see what he really thinks (or he doesn’t quite know what to think).

To condemn, or not to condemn — that’s Marlow’s question

Part of Marlow wants to damn the invaders for their barbarism. For their blind approach to their conquest of the earth, “which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves…[this is] not a pretty thing when you look too much into it too.”, but then he goes and says, “what redeems [conquest] is the idea only…an unselfish belief in the idea — something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice too…” (pg 7)

Which is rather a thin thing to say. Bow down before what? Sacrifice what to what? Marlow doesn’t have an answer, “sacrifice too…” (ellipsis Conrad’s) is the last thing he says before he starts to tell of his adventure to the Congo.

This doubling of Marlow’s speech, of his opinions, and of his narration is what the reader is offered throughout the book. And it’s never more obvious than when he talks about the wilderness:

“the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.” (pg 23)

Fantastic can refer to size as well as to something being good. This sentence seems to be referring to the size of the invasion. Or, perhaps, fantastic is meant in terms of it being strange or exotic: more appropriate to the imagination than to reality.

This latter definition also lends itself to the style of narration Marlow offers. And his inability to settle on any one perspective of his experience. Marlow is too hung-up in his love of Europe, and specifically his love of Great Britain to ever really let the wilderness, and the jungle win.

At the end of the story, he can hear the cries of the jungle (“dusk was repeating” Kurtz’s last words “in a persistent whisper” a whisper which “seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind” (pg76)), but still elects to tell Kurtz’s Intended what she wants to hear (pg 77).

In the end, Marlow “bows down before” and offers a sacrifice to Kurtz. Because in the end, Marlow’s “unselfish belief in the idea” of Kurtz is the only idea he survives the jungle with (pg 7).

The Only European Character Who Got IT Right

Speaking of Europeans who enter the Congo and survive: there’s a Russian (pgs 52–63) Marlow meets on his way to see Kurtz.

This Russian is the only European who got it right in Heart of Darkness. He is Conrad’s Dostoyevskian character…although a Dostoyevsky character without the suicidal hang-ups.

This Russian (who is referred to as the Russian but also “the admirer of Mr Kurtz” and “Kurtz’s last disciple” (pg 58)) for Marlow is “the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure.” (pg 55)

Marlow envies him because he “wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through.” (page 55)

When the Russian’s life is in danger from the colonists, he leaves in a canoe with “three black fellows.” With a pair of Marlow’s old shoes, a pouch of tobacco and some ammunition as well as his only book, the Russian thought “himself excellently well equipped for a renewed encounter with the wilderness.”(pg 63)

The Russian doesn’t try to impose his will on the wilderness. He simply experiences what is around him, and survives with what’s around him. This allows him to live in a place which drives others mad.

Marlow looks at the Russian and sees the only way a European can survive in the wilderness. But for the Russian, he has spent time with Kurtz, and Kurtz knows Time and It. The Russian cannot articulate Time or It, but he leaves Marlow saying, “Oh, he enlarged my mind.” (pg 63)

As a critique of imperialism/racism/colonialism Heart of Darkness fails

As Paul Armstrong said: “Heart of Darkness is a calculated failure to depict achieved cross-cultural understanding.” (pg 431)

Heart of Darkness is a good story. It’s thought-provoking and provides the reader with some wonderful imagery.

As a critique of all the above mentioned -isms, it never quite achieves its goals. His doubling speech, the persistent need to both condemn the colonists and relegate the natives to mere scenery often in the same breath, makes it easy for readers to dismiss Heart of Darkness as racist.

Those readers choose to see only the negative aspect of the doubling without any regard for what comes before or after it. Chinua Achebe’s excellent article “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (italics Achebe’s) is an example of this ignoring of the doubling. Achebe partially ignores the text in favour of going after Conrad.

Achebe dismisses the arguments distinguishing the narrator from Conrad, on the basis that Conrad “neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his character.” (pg 342)

Achebe feels that it is up to the author to fill in every possible point of view into the story. He says “It would not have been beyond Conrad’s power to make that provision if had thought it necessary.” (pg 342)

True, Conrad could have made the provision to hint at an alternative frame of reference, but then:

1] Would Heart of Darkness been as powerful a story if it showed half a dozen points of view?
2] Would it have made such an impact?
3] Would we even still be reading it?

Yes, Heart of Darkness fails as a critique of imperialism and slavery and racism. And in its failure as a critique, it succeeds as a contradiction of opinions and ideas that force the active participation of the reader.

Thank you for reading.

**All quotes are taken from the Norton Critical Edition (fourth edition) of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.**

The Trouble with “Heart of Darkness”

“Who here comes from a savage race?” Professor James Shapiro shouted at his students.

“We all come from Africa,” said the one African-American in the class, whom I’ll call Henry, calmly referring to the supposition among most anthropologists that human life originated in sub-Saharan Africa. What Henry was saying was that there are no racial hierarchies among peoples—that we’re all “savages.”

Shapiro smiled. It was not, I thought, exactly the answer he had been looking for, but it was a good answer. Then he was off again. “Are you natural?” he roared at a girl sitting near his end of the seminar table. “What are the constraints for you? What are the rivets? Why are you here getting civilized, reading Lit Hum?”

It was the end of the academic year, and the mood had grown agitated, burdened, portentous. In short, we were reading Joseph Conrad, the final author in Columbia’s Literature Humanities (or Lit Hum) course, one of the two famous “great books” courses that have long been required of all Columbia College undergraduates. Both Lit Hum and the other course, Contemporary Civilization, are devoted to the much ridiculed “narrative” of Western culture, the list of classics, which, in the case of Lit Hum, begins with Homer and ends, chronologically speaking, with Virginia Woolf. I was spending the year reading the same books and sitting in on the Lit Hum classes, which were taught entirely in sections; there were no lectures. At the end of the year, the individual instructors were allotted a week for a free choice. Some teachers chose works by Dostoyevski or Mann or Gide or Borges. Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar from the Department of English and Comparative Literature (his book “Shakespeare and the Jews” will be published by Columbia University Press in January), chose Conrad.

The terms of Shapiro’s rhetorical questions—savagery, civilization, constraints, rivets—were drawn from Conrad’s great novella of colonial depredation, “Heart of Darkness,” and the students, almost all of them freshmen, were electrified. Almost a hundred years old, and familiar to generations of readers, Conrad’s little book has lost none of its power to amaze and appall: it remains, in many places, an essential starting point for discussions of modernism, imperialism, the hypocrisies and glories of the West, and the ambiguities of “civilization.” Critics by the dozen have subjected it to symbolic, mythological, and psychoanalytic interpretation; T. S. Eliot used a line from it as an epigraph for “The Hollow Men,” and Hemingway and Faulkner were much impressed by it, as were Orson Welles and Francis Ford Coppola, who employed it as the ground plan for his despairing epic of Americans in Vietnam, “Apocalypse Now.”

In recent years, however, Conrad—and particularly “Heart of Darkness”—has fallen under a cloud of suspicion in the academy. In the curious language of the tribe, the book has become “a site of contestation.” After all, Conrad offered a nineteenth-century European’s view of Africans as primitive. He attacked Belgian imperialism and in the same breath seemed to praise the British variety. In 1975, the distinguished Nigerian novelist and essayist Chinua Achebe assailed “Heart of Darkness” as racist and called for its elimination from the canon of Western classics. And recently Edward W. Said, one of the most famous critics and scholars at Columbia today, has been raising hostile and undermining questions about it. Certainly Said is no breaker of canons. But if Conrad were somehow discredited, one could hardly imagine a more successful challenge to what the academic left has repeatedly deplored as the “hegemonic discourse” of the classic Western texts. There is also the inescapable question of justice to Conrad himself.

Written in a little more than two months, the last of 1898 and the first of 1899, “Heart of Darkness” is both the story of a journey and a kind of morbid fairy tale. Marlow, Conrad’s narrator and familiar alter ego, a British merchant seaman of the eighteen-nineties, travels up the Congo in the service of a rapacious Belgian trading company, hoping to retrieve the company’s brilliant representative and ivory trader, Mr. Kurtz, who has mysteriously grown silent. The great Mr. Kurtz! In Africa, everyone gossips about him, envies him, and, with rare exception, loathes him. The flower of European civilization (“all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”), exemplar of light and compassion, journalist, artist, humanist, Kurtz has gone way upriver and at times well into the jungle, abandoning himself to certain . . . practices. Rifle in hand, he has set himself up as god or devil in ascendancy over the Africans. Conrad is notoriously vague about what Kurtz actually does, but if you said “kills some people, has sex with others, steals all the ivory,” you would not, I believe, be far wrong. In Kurtz, the alleged benevolence of colonialism has flowered into criminality. Marlow’s voyage from Europe to Africa and then upriver to Kurtz’s Inner Station is a revelation of the squalors and disasters of the colonial “mission”; it is also, in Marlow’s mind, a journey back to the beginning of creation, when nature reigned exuberant and unrestrained, and a trip figuratively down as well, through the levels of the self to repressed and unlawful desires. At death’s door, Marlow and Kurtz find each other.

Rereading a work of literature is often a shock, an encounter with an earlier self that has been revised, and I found that I was initially discomforted, as I had not been in the past, by the famous manner—the magnificent, alarmed, and (there is no other word) throbbing excitement of Conrad’s laboriously mastered English. Conrad was born in czarist-occupied Poland; though he heard English spoken as a boy (and his father translated Shakespeare), it was his third language, and his prose, now and then, betrays the propensity for high intellectual melodrama and rhymed abstraction (“the fascination of the abomination”) characteristic of his second language, French. Oh, inexorable, unutterable, unspeakable! The great British critic F. R. Leavis, who loved Conrad, ridiculed such sentences as “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” The sound, Leavis thought, was an overwrought, thrilled embrace of strangeness. (In Max Beerbohm’s parody: “Silence, the silence murmurous and unquiet of a tropical night, brooded over the hut that, baked through by the sun, sweated a vapour beneath the cynical light of the stars. . . . Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and pale, was covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory like everything else, only more so.”)

Read in isolation, some of Conrad’s sentences are certainly a howl, but one reads them in isolation only in criticism like Leavis’s or Achebe’s. Reading the tale straight through, I lost my discomfort after twenty pages or so and fell hopelessly under Conrad’s spell; thereafter, even his most heavily freighted constructions dropped into place, summing up the many specific matters that had come before. Marlow speaks:

“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands. You lost your way on that river as you would in a desert and butted all day long against shoals trying to find the challenge till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants and water and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”In one sense, the writing now seemed close to the movies: it revelled in sensation and atmosphere, in extreme acts and grotesque violence (however indirectly presented), in shivering enigmas and richly phrased premonitions and frights. In other ways, though, “Heart of Darkness” was modernism at its most intellectually bracing, with tonalities, entirely contemporary and distanced, that I had failed to notice when I was younger—immense pride and immense contempt; a mood of barely contained revolt; and sardonic humor that verged on malevolence:

“I don’t pretend to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing. We had enlisted some of these crew. Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face: they had brought along a provision of chaps on the way for a hippo-meat which went rotten and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the Manager on board and three or four pilgrims [white traders] with their staves—all complete. Sometimes we came upon a station close by the bank clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel with great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome seemed very strange, had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ‘ivory’ would ring in the air for a while—and on we went again into the silence, along empty reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of our winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the stern-wheel.”

Out of sight of their countrymen back home, who continue to cloak the colonial mission in the language of Christian charity and improvement, the “pilgrims” have become rapacious and cruel. The cannibals eating hippo meat practice restraint; the Europeans do not. That was the point of Shapiro’s taunting initial sally: “savagery” is inherent in all of us, including the most “civilized,” for we live, according to Conrad, in a brief interlude between innumerable centuries of darkness and the darkness yet to come. Only the rivets, desperately needed to repair Marlow’s pathetic steamboat, offer stability—the rivets and the ship itself and the codes of seamanship and duty are all that hold life together in a time of moral anarchy. Marlow, meeting Kurtz at last, despises him for letting go—and at the same time, with breathtaking ambivalence, admires him for going all the way to the bottom of his soul and discovering there, at the point of death, a judgment of his own life. It is perhaps the most famous death scene written since Shakespeare:

“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

“ ‘The horror! The horror!’ ”

Much dispute and occasional merriment have long attended the question of what, exactly, Kurtz means by the melodramatic exclamation “The horror!” But surely one of the things he means is his long revelling in “abominations”—is own internal collapse. Shapiro’s opening questions set up a reading of the novella that interrogated the Western civilization of which Kurtz is the supreme representative and of which the students, in their youthful way, were representatives as well.

When Shapiro asked the class why they thought he had chosen “Heart of Darkness,” hands were going up before he had finished his question.

“You chose it because the whole core curriculum is embodied in Kurtz,” said Henry, who had answered Shapiro’s earlier question. “We embody this knowledge, and the book asks, Do we fall into the void—do we drown or come out with a stronger sense of self?”

Henry had turned the book into a test of the course and of himself. Conrad had great personal significance for him, which didn’t surprise me. An African-American from Baltimore, Henry, in his sophomore year at Columbia, had evolved into a fervent Nietzschean, and, though Conrad claimed to dislike Nietzsche, this was a Nietzschean text. The meaning of Henry’s life—his personal myth—required (he had said it in class many times) challenge, struggle, and self-transcendence. He was tall and strong, with a flattop “wedge” haircut and a loud, excited voice. Some months after this class, he got himself not tattooed but branded with the insignia of his black Columbia fraternity—an act of excruciating irony unavailable to members of the master race. Kurtz, however horrifying, was an exemplar for him as for Conrad’s hero, Marlow.

A freshman of Chinese descent from Singapore, who was largely reared on British and Continental literature, also saw the book as a test for Western civilization. But, unlike Henry, she hated the abyss. Kurtz was a seduced man, a portent of disintegration. “Can we deal with the knowledge we are seeking?” she asked. “Or will we say, with Kurtz, ‘The horror’?” For her, Kurtz’s outburst was an admission of the failure of knowledge.

And many others made similar remarks, All of a sudden, at the end of the course, the students were quite willing to see their year of education in Western classics as problematic. Their reading of “the great books” could be affirmed only if it was simultaneously questioned. No doubt Shapiro’s rhetorical questions had shaped their responses, but still their intensity surprised me.

“The book is a kind of test,” said a student from the Washington, D.C., area, who was normally a polite, bland schoolboy type. “Does its existence redeem the male hegemonic line of culture? Does it redeem education in this tradition?” By which I believe that he also meant to ask, “Could the existence of such a book redeem the crimes of imperialism?” That, at any rate, was my question.

The students were in good form, bold and free, and as the class went on they expounded certain points in the text, some of them holding the little paperback in their hands like preachers before the faithful. All year long, Shapiro had struggled to get them to read aloud, and with some emotional commitment to the words. And all too often they had droned, as if they were reading from a computer manual. But now they read aloud spontaneously, and their voices were alive, even ringing.

Cite your sources. 

You will write a 3-4 page paper on one of the stories You should use sources that help you in your analysis of the story/stories. This assignment allows you to demonstrate the variety of skills you have learned throughout this unit [and the first three modules], especially your understanding of literary criticism, Jungian archetypes, and the story elements [plot, character, theme, symbol, etc.] and your understanding of a fairly broad range of cultural and intellectual experiences and voices [see course objectives]. Your paper will also be grammatically sound and contain few to no punctuation errors. You should treat this like any other kind of paper. MLA rules apply. 

Follow the steps below:

Open a document (e.g., Google Doc, Word). 

MLA requires your name, my name, the course title, and the date [upper left], hit return key once, begin the paper. Do not allow for extra spacing.

You should find relevant, quality sources [literary criticisms] that help this paper.

Use our textbook if you have it and/or the criticisms that I’ve found for you. Remember to use your fact-checking skills when selecting database sources!

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