User talk:Purnenduchatterjee

HEART OF DARKNESS

'Heart of  Darkness'  is  one  of  Conrad’s  most  ambiguous  stories  and  the  author  had  a  foreknowledge  of  its  ambiguity,  as  he  makes  clear  in  a  letter  written  to  Cunninghame  Graham: “There  are  two  more  installments  in  which  the  idea  is  so  wrapped  up  in  secondary  notions  that  you — even  you — may  miss  it.” In  keeping  with  the  ambiguity  that  the  story  presents,  the  title  lends  itself  to  various  interpretations: a  journey  into  the  heart  of  the  dark  continent,  Africa,  a  voyage  into  the  darkness  of  the  sub-conscious  mind  as  well  as  a  journey  into  the  unknown.

The story  of  Heart  of  Darkness  is  told  by  Marlow  who  once  had  the  job  of  taking  a  steam-boat  up  the  Congo  to  bring  back  from  a  distant  trading-post  an  ivory-trader  named  Kurtz. This voyage  takes  the  narrator  to  the  heart  of  Africa. Africa, Europe’s  anti-type,  is  a  place  at  once  horrific  and  vital,  evolving  complex  responses  in  the  European. Its landscape  is  hostile  and  un-Wordsworthian,  with  dense  vegetation  “like  a  rioting  invasion  of  soundless  life,  a  rolling  wave  of  plants ……. ready to ……. sweep every  little  man  of  us  out  of  his  little  existence.”  Marlow  refers  to  the  great  silence  of  the  impenetrable  forests  where  the  air  was  warm,  thick,  heavy  and  sluggish. The long  stretches  of  the  water-way  ran  on  into  the  gloom  of  overshadowed  and  the  broadening  waters  flowed  through  a  mob  of  wooded  islands.

The barbarism  of  the  natives  reinforces  the  effect  of  the  descriptive  passages  and  intensifies  the  atmosphere  of  mystery  and  fear  that  underlies  much  of  the  narration. The natives  attack  Marlow’s  steamer  in  all  their  ignorance,  in  all  their  darkness  of  mind,  for  they  were  obeying  Kurtz’s  order. Kurtz has  begun  to  identify  himself  with  the  savages,  participating  in  their  customs  and  ceremonies  and  presiding  over  their  midnight  dances  which  always  end  with  “unspeakable  rites”. He has  been  experiencing  “abominable  satisfactions”  and  has  become  a  part  of  the  darkness  of  the  dark  continent. His utterance,  “The  horror! The horror!”  just  before  his  death,  is  not  a  renunciation  of  evil  as  the  narrator  believes,  but  an  exultant  rejection  of  the  obsolete  values  of  a  dying  civilization. Thus, the  novella  may  be  regarded  as  an  implicit  attack  on  the  values  of  western  society,  as  K.K. Ruthven  suggests,  and  “an  annunciation  of  the  Savage  God”.

Pulsating with  “hidden  evil”,  the  jungle  is  also  a  present  reminder  of  our  own  prehistory  for,  sailing  up  the  Congo  is  like  traveling  back  to  the  earliest  beginnings  of  the  world”  with  the  result  that  Marlow  and  his  crew  feel  like  “wanderers  on  prehistoric  earth”. This Frazerian-anthropological  element  is  developed  in  a  manner  that  curiously  anticipates  Jung  when  Conrad  treats  the  experience  as  an  act  of  penetration  to  the  most  ancient  core  of  the  European  mind,  a  stirring  of  racial  memories:  hearing  the  incomprehensive  yells  of  the  savages  Marlow  remarks  that  “if  you  were  man  enough  you  would  admit  to  yourself …… a  dim  suspicion  of  there  being  a  meaning  in  it  which  you — you  so  remote  from  the  night  of  first  ages — could  comprehend.”

The journey  up  the  Congo  is  a  psychic  voyage  into  the  innermost  recesses  of  the  mind,  to  a  point  at  which  European  morality  has  not  even  begun  to  operate. Marlow is  solidly  and  naively  Victorian  in  his  moral  outlook  and  feels  that  in  order  to  endure  stark  realities  of  human  life,  a  man  should  possess  strength  of  character. There are  passages  scattered  throughout  Marlow’s  narration  that  give  readers  glimpses  of  his  own  mind. He reveals  the  effect  on  his  own  psyche  of  Kurtz’s  arguments  defending  his  action  in  slipping  away  from  the  ship’s  cabin  into  the  jungle.

Heart of  Darkness  is  a  travelogue,  but  the  revelations  of  travel  are  never  simply  geographical. For critics  like  F.R. Leavis  and  E.M. Foster  the  darkness  of  Africa  remains  inconceivable. The “darkness”  of  the  novel  lends  itself  to  different  interpretations:  it  is  the  unknown;  it  is  the  subconscious;  it  is  a  moral  darkness;  it  is  the  evil  which  swallows  Kurtz  and  it  is  the  spiritual  emptiness  which  he  sees  at  the  centre  of  existence;  but  above  all  it  is  the  mystery  itself,  the  mysteriousness  of  man’s  spiritual  life. The phrase  “heart  of  darkness”  compels  attention  but  resists  analysis,  as  symbols  should,  and  in  this  way  Conrad  is  able  to  penetrate  our  bias  against  the  primitive,  enabling  us  to  experience  the  African  darkness  without  feeling  that  we  are  simply  reverting  to  barbarism.