Modernism and Heart of Darkness (1899/1902)

Notes by Cathelein Aaftink, March 1st 2005

Experiments with style

HoD: irony, paradox
        "And outside, the silent wilderness … struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion" (38)

Experiments with form

HoD: variations in tempo; unpredictable mixture of narration of former events, mediation on these events, and conversation with present companions on the Nellie; a-chronological technique of frequent anticipation and flashback

Rejection of realism, instead psychological realism:

Working of the human mind
        HoD: Marlow's journey as a quest into his inner self

Distrust of action and reality
        HoD: "I had to keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for the next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality -- the reality, I tell you -- fades. The inner truth is hidden -- luckily, luckily" (50); after the narrative, the men on the Nellie are surrounded by an "immense darkness," reality is inscrutable (95)

World is different for different observers
        HoD: "I don't like work -- no man does -- but I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself. Your own reality -- for yourself, not for others -- what no man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and can never tell what it really means" (44)

Incoherent characters
        HoD: Kurtz, heroic and damned at the same time

Psychoanalysis

Divided self
        HoD: Kurtz, heroic and damned at the same time; was the helmsman for Marlow just a well functioning "instrument" or did Marlow see him as an individual?

Dream
        HoD: "Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream -- making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment … "(42)

Ambiguity

HoD: Kurtz cry: "The horror! The horror!"; Marlow's lie to the Intended

Myth

HoD: quest-structure of the narrative; the Congo as universal snake

Sense of doom, apocalypse

HoD: "I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind" (90); " The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky -- seemed to lead into the heart of immense darkness (95)

Document prepared March 2nd 2005 / updated March 14th 2005