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Conrad in Africa and the Narrative Form of Heart of Darkness
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Conrad: Heart of Darkness
In this course, Dr Keith Carabine (University of Kent) explores Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness. The course begins by thinking about Conrad's own experiences in Africa, as recorded in his 'Personal Record' (1912) and 'Geography and Some Explorers' (1924), as well as the narrative form of the novel – an oral tale told by Marlow to a group of anonymous friends. In the second module, we look more closely at Marlow, focusing in particular on the scene in which he arrives at the Company Station, before moving on in the third and fourth modules to explore the character of Kurtz – looking first at his journal, which ends with the line 'Exterminate all the brutes!', and then at his famous final words in the novel, 'The horror! The horror!' In the fifth and final module, we turn to the ending of the novel, in which Marlow lies to the Intended about Kurtz's final words – 'The last word he pronounced was – your name.'
Conrad in Africa and the Narrative Form of Heart of Darkness
In this module, we think about Conrad's own experiences in Africa, as recorded in 'A Personal Record' (1912) and 'Geography and Some Explorers' (1924), before exploring the several functions of the narrative form of the poem: an oral tale told by Marlow to a group of friends, who is himself introduced to the reader by an anonymous first-person narrator.
Reading list:
– Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
– Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (1912)
– Joseph Conrad, Geography and Some Explorers (1924)
– Joseph Conrad, 'An Outpost of Progress' (1897)
– Joseph Conrad, Youth (1898)
in his autobiography, A Personal Record 1912 and a late,
00:00:02beautiful essay that I strongly recommend you
00:00:08read called Geography and some Explorers.
00:00:11Conrad retells and greatly amplifies Marlowe's story
00:00:15in heart of darkness of his child had a passion for maps
00:00:20and the glories of exploration
00:00:26and his determination to visit
00:00:28the remaining blank spaces on the earth.
00:00:31In his autobiography, Conrad recounts
00:00:36that his announcement as a 15 year old that he wanted to leave Poland
00:00:39to pursue his dream of the sea
00:00:45evoked a wave of scandalised astonishment,
00:00:47leading his tutor, who was taxed to dissuade him
00:00:53to exclaim, You are a regular donkey o. T.
00:00:57In fact, Conrad was accused of betrayal
00:01:02for leaving the country of his birth,
00:01:06consumed with the romance of travel and infatuated with the
00:01:11race to discover the source of the River Nile,
00:01:15which was to the West
00:01:18what the race to the moon became. A century later,
00:01:21Conrad
00:01:25exposed himself to the derision of his schoolboy chums.
00:01:26When, one day
00:01:31putting my finger on the various spot
00:01:33in the middle of the white heart of Africa, I declared,
00:01:37someday
00:01:42I would go there.
00:01:44Then, 18 years later, in the summer of 18 90.
00:01:46Standing on a little island in the upper Congo,
00:01:51I said to myself, with all
00:01:55this
00:01:58is the very spot
00:01:59of my boyish boast.
00:02:01He's all, however,
00:02:05soon yields
00:02:07to a great melancholy because he is overwhelmed by his participation
00:02:09and distasteful knowledge
00:02:16of the violence, scramble for loot
00:02:19that ever disfigured the history
00:02:22of human conscience
00:02:25and geographical
00:02:26exploration.
00:02:28What an end, he says,
00:02:30to the idealised realities of a boy's daydreams.
00:02:33From this perspective,
00:02:38heart of Darkness records
00:02:40the destruction
00:02:43of his boyhood daydreams
00:02:44of heroic action and exploration,
00:02:47and bears witness to the atrocious pillage of the Congo
00:02:50during the reign
00:02:55of King Leopold, the second
00:02:57comrade. Try to write about this disgust in a story which I recommend you read
00:03:02called The Outpost of Progress,
00:03:09where the irony of the Omnivision narrator
00:03:13is so withering
00:03:16his scorn, sauna baiting
00:03:18and unabashed
00:03:21that the two central figures, Collier
00:03:23and Chi, it's too
00:03:26insignificant. White men manning an outpost of progress
00:03:27in darkest Africa,
00:03:33sink under the weight of Conrad's commentary,
00:03:35and the reader
00:03:40is inclined to resist the generalisations.
00:03:42Conrad makes about their experiences as typical
00:03:45and representative of Europeans in Africa,
00:03:49Shaun of the ties with the everyday world,
00:03:54the policeman on the beat,
00:03:57the pub, etcetera,
00:04:00which ward off for these men to close to thinking
00:04:02either about their own demoralisation,
00:04:06all of the powers of darkness embodied in the jungle,
00:04:10which claimed the lives of the poultry pair
00:04:16who fight
00:04:20to the death
00:04:21over a piece of sugar.
00:04:23Conrad returned to his Congo experiences in
00:04:26December 1918 98 when William Blackwood,
00:04:30the owner of Blackwood's magazine,
00:04:34one of the most prestigious magazines of the late Victorian period,
00:04:37ask Conrad to follow up his success with a story called Youth,
00:04:41with another story
00:04:46to appear in the celebratory
00:04:481/1000 issue,
00:04:50due to be published in February 18 99.
00:04:53So this was an enormous coup for Conrad,
00:04:58writing in his third language fairly early in his career,
00:05:01True appear in this
00:05:07magazine
00:05:10now. The moment was ripe for Conrad to compose heart of Darkness at record speed
00:05:12because he discovered in youth
00:05:18the model for the narration of Heart of Darkness,
00:05:21namely an awful tale
00:05:24told by Marleau
00:05:26to a group of friends who
00:05:28we're fond of and and experienced the sea,
00:05:31and he's introduced to the reader as you know
00:05:36by anonymous first person. Narrator
00:05:39The phone and use of Marlowe
00:05:44serve several functions,
00:05:47and here I'm going to be brief. But I hope, um,
00:05:50this will prepare us for some of the later talks.
00:05:55It
00:06:01enabled Conrad,
00:06:02as Henry James observed, to take hold of and preserve his material.
00:06:03And, as Conrad himself said,
00:06:11it allowed him to write
00:06:14in a manner aimed essentially
00:06:17but the intimacy of a personal
00:06:20communication
00:06:23to
00:06:25the group of friends as the first hearers of the tail
00:06:26serve as surrogate readers.
00:06:30And they either interrupt Marlow or Marlowe halts his tail
00:06:33to address this sense of their scepticism and disbelief
00:06:39are simply to check that they're still awake.
00:06:43Three.
00:06:48The persona of Marlowe allows Conrad
00:06:50in ways the omniscient narration of Outpost of Progress couldn't
00:06:53to distance is discussed.
00:06:58As he told Blackwood,
00:07:01the criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness
00:07:03in tackling
00:07:08the civilising work in Africa
00:07:09was a justifiable idea.
00:07:13First story, indeed it was.
00:07:16He could now tackle this idea through the words and vision
00:07:19of Marlowe,
00:07:24who was created to share an express Conrad's own appalling memories of the Congo,
00:07:25and through Marlowe,
00:07:32he gains a distance
00:07:34on this very dark episode in his own life,
00:07:36he actually said Conrad to a friend, Edward Garnett.
00:07:41Before I went to the Congo,
00:07:46I was an animal
00:07:48four. Moreover, through Marlowe's analysis and commentary upon his experiences,
00:07:51Marlowe could ensure
00:07:59that the second and final attempt
00:08:01to treat the spoil I brought out from the centre of Africa,
00:08:03where really I had no sort of business
00:08:08will be of our time.
00:08:12Distinctly,
00:08:14though not
00:08:16topically treated.
00:08:17It is a story he went on to tell Blackwood as much as they out. Poster progress was
00:08:19but so to speak. It takes in more.
00:08:26It is a wider
00:08:30canvas,
00:08:32if less concentrated upon individuals.
00:08:34Five.
00:08:38The use of a framing the greater allowed Conrad to prepare the reader
00:08:40for the kind of tale Marlow is about to tell and to vouch for its authority. Six.
00:08:45The model of the frame tail
00:08:51whereby the unnamed narrator introduces Marlowe, who tells us of Kurtz,
00:08:54who is himself
00:08:59in. Finally introduced by his last disciple,
00:09:01the Russian Harlequin
00:09:05allows Conrad to rehearse a relay of voices to achieve
00:09:07a chain of narration which works for intimacy and communication.
00:09:12Despite the fact that the tail itself cast doubt
00:09:18upon the very possibility of communication
00:09:22and upon the very value
00:09:25of language itself
00:09:27and, of course, upon those
00:09:29inherent
00:09:31orders of meaning and belief, which underpin
00:09:32the organising features
00:09:36of narrative.
00:09:38Lastly,
00:09:41the use of Marlowe's voice at once flippant, disgusted, satirical, amused,
00:09:43horrified, ironic, self mocking
00:09:48enables Conrad
00:09:51to engage and hold his listeners
00:09:52remarkably. Also,
00:09:56it allows Conrad
00:09:58to create intricate patterns of imagery
00:10:00and highly wrought
00:10:03cost reference of detail in scene,
00:10:05enabling Conrad to give shape to what he called my complex way
00:10:08of thinking and feeling.
00:10:14Thus,
00:10:17Marlowe's voice suggests his story is discursive and
00:10:18true to a recollecting mind at play,
00:10:21whereas in fact we become increasingly aware
00:10:24that the narrative is complexly patterned
00:10:28through a series of motifs and images.
00:10:31Reading almost as a dramatic poem,
00:10:34Marlow is a performer,
00:10:37and heart of darkness like shape Spin needs to be read out loud
00:10:39as well as quietly
00:10:45to oneself. This will, I hope, become evident
00:10:47when I dwell on
00:10:52and read
00:10:54specific sequences
00:10:55
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Carabine, K. (2018, August 15). Conrad: Heart of Darkness - Conrad in Africa and the Narrative Form of Heart of Darkness [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/conrad-heart-of-darkness-fa149dc5-0a0f-4b79-aefc-ed797b79f278
MLA style
Carabine, K. "Conrad: Heart of Darkness – Conrad in Africa and the Narrative Form of Heart of Darkness." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/conrad-heart-of-darkness-fa149dc5-0a0f-4b79-aefc-ed797b79f278