English 2307E
Tuesday March 11
Lecture 14
Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’
Some Hallmarks of Modernism:
• The legacy of WWI (1914-1918)
o Pessimism and disillusionment
o An end to the Victorian age and its values
o People lost faith and belief (not just religious, but faith in authorities),
feelings of nationalism…
• The problem of representation
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o They turned away from 19 century realism - novels tried to depict the
world as it really was, but it was hard to portray or capture the devastation
of war
o There was a move away from realism because people no longer had faith
in the objective world
o Writers could begin to invent and discover new ways of showing the
experience of life (although there were losses, there were gains as well)
eg. T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf
• Narrative and verse forms that represent fracture and non-closure
o Writers to learned to make art out of things that were broken
o Modernist writers still have that pessimism that doesn’t really go away, but
they discover new artistic possibilities
• An interest in inwardness, states of subjectivity
o Writers turned away from the objective world (which could never be
assuredly known)
o This is how we truly experience life – as a series of fragments (we don’t
really follow a continuous narrative)
eg. we may face a problem while thinking about what we’ve done in
the past
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
• There is a drive toward exploring inward states of mind
• Joseph Conrad was born in the Ukraine, but was ethnically Polish
• His parents died when he was young, and was raised by his uncle
• At the age of 17, he went to sea (didn’t have a formal education), going on
voyages with different armies on merchant ships (a way to see the world)
• When he was 21, he arrived in England and took another position on a boat that
went from London to the northern parts of England
• Conrad didn’t learn English until he was in his early 20’s (but is a “master stylist
of the English language”)
o He uses rich description, particular symbolism, and elaborate sentences
o Though he is a stranger to the language, he can see its linguistic potential
as an outsider • The story is in part inspired by Conrad’s own experience in the Congo (after he
was England and was in his 30’s)
o He was a steamboat captain, navigating the Congo river for four months
• Heart of Darkness first came out in a literary magazine called Blackwoods
• It was a novella, but Conrad also wrote some longer novels
o A lot of his novels were also set at sea, or were adventure tales
(Europeans going out into an “exotic land”)
Basic Summary:
• Part I
o The initial setting is in England, and the narrator is Marlow
o Marlow talks about what he did before coming to Africa (visiting the doctor
to get his medical exam)
o Marlow goes from the outer station (initial launching off point) to the
central station, and meets the manager and then the brick layer
o Marlow f
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