Critical Review of “The Heart of Darkness”

MRS. RITU BAJAJ

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

HANS RAJ MAHILA MAHA VIDYALAYA, JALANDHAR

A Great Masterpiece : Its Publication

• One of the most gripping and powerful of Conrad’s stories is the Heart of Darkness in the volume of short novels or novelle entitled Youth and Other stories, 1902. The story has been made famous by T.S. Eliot’s use of a line from it. “Mistah Kurtz, he dead”- as the motto of his poem, the Hollow Men. The novella received considerable attention from the very beginning and has now come to be regarded as a great masterpiece.

• The story has a universal element in as much as its basis is the curiosity and lust for the adventure as well as greed which send men prying into all sorts of remote, unknown, far off places. It vividly brings out the corruption and degradation which results from isolation in the dark, secluded wildernesses of the earth. None can read it without being impressed by the horror of it all. It is one of the “universal classics”, great world-book, despite the fact that it covers hardly a hundred pages.

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The Autobiographical Note�

• The novella had its origins in personal experience, though that experience has been much heightened and coloured, so that its essence may be more fully conveyed to the readers. It is the transmutation of the personal and the autobiographical into a great work of art.

• In 1890 Conrad went to the Belgian Congo to command a river steamer. It was the realization of a wish expressed as a child when he put his finger on a map of Central Africa and said he would go there one day. From the experience in the Congo, Conard was physically weakened but psychologically awakened and his writing career dates from this period, for he was then writing his first book,, Almayer’s Folly. Years later he gave his Congo story in one of his finest books, The Heart of Darkness, “As a child, Conrad had noted the black spot in the centre of a map of Africa with a snake-like river forming the entrance to this heart of darkness.” This is exactly how Marlow notices the black sport of the map.

• The story of “The Heart of Darkness” fully brings out the maddening horrors and sensations which Marlow experiences and which Conrad, too, must have experienced during his stay in the heart of darkness. It also brings out the disgust of Conrad at the cruel and ruthless methods used by the whites to exploit the natives and rob their native land of its wealth.

• They went there under the pretence of civilizing the natives, to carry to them the light of religion and knowledge, but their real motive was greed and lust for gold, in the present case ivory. During his voyage Conrad was appalled by the inhuman cruelty of the whites and the appalling suffering and misery of the simple natives and this personal horror heightened and transmuted into a work of art, makes “The Heart of Darkness” one of the most forceful and outspoken indictments of white imperialism and conlonial exploitation.

• His voyage of exploration into the heart of darkness where he was often very close to death, resulted in inner illumination, a better and fuller understanding of life and its mystery, and the result was a great world-book which The Heart of Darkness certainly is.

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• Marlow is a close self-portrait. He has Conrad’s passion for the sea, his love of travel and adventure and his romantic fascination for the remote and the far of, He voices Conrad’s humanism, his admiration for fidelity and self-restraint and his abhorrence of greedy self seeking. He may be a persona a clever literary device, but much that is autobiographical has also gone into his making.

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• Emotional reality is a higher reality, than the factual one, and The Heart of Darkness has this emotional reality. It may deviate from biography in minute details here and there, but there is no deviation as far as emotional truth is concerned.

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The Heart of Darkness : Aptness of the Title�

• The title of a work of art should be apt and suggestive. It should indicate its theme as a signboard indicates the contents of a shop.
• The title “The Heart of Darkness” is quite appropriate and suggestive, for it indicates and theme of the novella. Says Walter Alten, “The Heart of Darkness of the title is at once the heart of Africa, ,the heart of evil-everything that is nihilistic, corrupt and malign and perhaps the heart of man”. The title is indicative of the theme of the novella both on the literal and the allegorical plane.

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• On the literal plane the novella gives an account of a voyage of discovery into Cango, Central Africa. This part of the globe is the very “heart of darkness, for it is a spot unknown, unfamiliar, and mysterious. As Marlow tells us in the very beginning it is one of the dark spots of the world, such as England herself must have been long, long ago, when the Romans first invaded the country.

• It is a land grown all over with primeval forests, dark and dense, which act upon those who dare enter these vast wildernesses, kill them and swallow them up. Very few dare enter these dark, wild places, and those who enter seldom return. Not only do these limitless wilds of central Africa act upon explorers and adventurers physically, they also act upon them psychologically.

• They awaken in them all the evil latent in the human heart. Cheeks of public opinion and security provided by society and the state are no longer operative and hence man tends to act irrationally and emotionally. In those wild secluded spots, evil latent within the heart of man comes to the surface and he is more and more dehumanized.

• The veneer of culture and civilization Is removed, degradation sets in and the ‘civilised man becomes more like his remote ancestors, the primitive savages of the heart of darkness. The light of knowledge, wisdom and religion has not been able to penetrate the thick darkness of this darkest spot on the map. Those who go there on civilizing missions themselves become brutalized by the solitude of the primeval forests acting on them.

• A thick fog envelops the moral and spiritual vision of man, so that he becomes more skin to a brute than to a human being. Marlow’s voyage into the heart of darkness is also a voyage of exploration into the heart of evil, the evil that lurks deep down in the soul of man. Kurtz is the symbol of this evil. He symbolizes all that is irrational, impulsive and evil in the heart of man.

• He symbolizes the greed, the cruelty, the ruthlessness and the heartless selfishness, brutality and savagery of the white colonizers. He is what Marlow himself would have become had he stayed longer in the heart of darkness, or if he had been without his devotion to duty. The voyage helps Marlow to understand the nature of evil and the cruel, inhuman and brutal ways of the white colonizers.

• The whites over-work the natives, starve them and beat them and torture them mercilessly for the least fault. They kill them merely for sport. Kurtz’s post-script to his report, “exterminate the brutes” is a measure both of the brutality of the white colonizers and of the degrading impact of the heart of darkness.

• “Marlow’s passage though successive stations of the company to the inner station represents the various stages in his exploration and understanding of the nature of evil, greed and lust which lies beep in the dark depths of the human heart.

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• THANKS