Joseph Conrad

(Jósef Teodor Konrad 1857-1924)

 HOMO DUPLEX

*Polish nobleman & British citizen

*Mariner & writer
*Traditionalist & modernist
*Pessimistic & humane
*He called himself homo duplex ►he can be seen as one of the
most paradoxical of literary figures
*His works have been termed “janiform” ►Janus, the two-faced
god who looks in opposite directions at the same time
 Conrad as a writer

1. 1897-1911 ► major phase as a writer

2. More radical than any of his contemporaries.
3. Outstanding in his ability TO SEARCH, TEST AND
QUESTION ► political, cultural, psychological and linguistic
matters
4. Anticipated 20th-century preoccupations ► economic and
cultural imperialism; irrationality in the self and in the world;
the problem of moral affirmation in a skeptical era.
5. His characters face deep problems, ones with difficult or no
answers
 The narrative of the voyage

1. Partly a commemorative tribute to the great days of sail.

2. Partly a moral and political allegory of the ways in which a community
can be subverted from within by egotism and duplicity.
3. Partly a series of symbolic tableaux epitomizing the duties and hardships
of the sea in contrast to the demeaning pressures of the land.
4. Symbols and myth fill his fiction, and much of his story lies beneath the
surface narrative.
5. The adventure is merely a level of the story, the more intriguing one is
buried under the plot.
 Conrad as an intellectual

1. While crossing the oceans he accumulated an abundance of experience

► a diversity of characters of different nations.
2. His novella is a modern work than challenges the basic ethical question
of good and evil in mankind. It is more than an autobiographical account
of his journey to the Belgian Congo.
3. What were the basis of civilization?
4. What was the real nature of progress?
5. Were there any essential differences between the Europeans and those
they sought to colonize?
Heart of Darkness (April 1899)
 Themes

1. By the time Conrad visited the Congo, exploitation festered

everywhere. Brutality and degradation reigned, not progress
and enlightenement.
2. Problems of politics and psychology
3. Morality and religion
4. Social order and evolution
5. HoD goes beyond a critique of the mere fact of imperialism.
6. It questions the fundamental notion at the base of the
Empire: the IDEA OF CONTROL OF THE WORLD
 Cultural tradition(s)

*Generic and technical

*Political satire
*Protest literature
*Travellers’ tale
*Psychological odissey
*Symbolic novel
*Mediated autobiography
THE SOPHISTICATION AND OBLIQUITIES OF THE TEXT
ARE SUCH THAT IT NEEDS TO BE READ SEVERAL
TIMES TO BE PROPERLY UNDERSTOOD
 Light and darkness

*Satiric indictiment of colonialism

*Myopic arrogance of the Europeans
*Pessimistic and skeptic narrative
*Awareness that civilization finds its limits
*Light turns into darkness
*Virtue and courage are always at risk

BEHIND EVERY MAN THERE IS A DARKER

DOUBLE
 Marlow & Kurtz

* KURTZ ► has brought idealistic ambitions to the wilderness.

Marlow’s tragic double (“The wilderness had patted him on
the head”).
*MARLOW ► maintains a vigilant humanity, the authorial
indignation at man’s inhumanity to man and the despoliation
of the earth in the name of “progress”.
*Allegory of light falling into darkness, a descent through the
heart of Africa into human horror and the black places of the
soul.
 The river journey

*The story follows almost exactly C.’s experience in

Congo in 1890.
*It’s a night journey from London via a sinister
Brussels, to the grim Congo and the “Inner Station”.
*A journey that moves from civilization through futility
to EVIL, DARKNESS, EXPLOITATION
 The river journey II

*Kurtz, when dying, has to face a kind of desperate

self-knowledge.
*Marlow has been forced to call the whole purpose and
meaning of his existence into doubt.
*The real effect of the text seems to undermine our
hope that anything will (or can) be revevaled.
 Traditional critical readings

*Marlow’s quest for identity ► he becomes wiser as a result of

his experiences (“self-discovery”) VS the moral
disintegration of Kurtz.
*Africa occupies a purely supplementary role ► what is
important is the Western concept of self-knowledge.
*These critics re/construct a word with a white individual at the
centre of it.
*They view everything in the novel as significant only insofar it
relates to the western individual.

THE JOURNEY ITSELF IS A WHITE MALE SELF-

DICOVERY JOURNEY
 New Historicism

*How the text handles the issue of RACE.

*How Africans are presented in the text
*There is no sense on C.’s part that Africa might have a culture
of its own.
*Africa remains the subsidiary term in the pairing of Europe and
Africa.
*Africa must be read as a character and the critic must
concentrate on darkness itself.
Critical readings of traditional criticism

1. Edward Said – Orientalism (1978) & Culture and

Imperialism (1993) – www.edwardsaid.org
2. Chinua Achebe has noted that the European view of
the Other has never been innocent.
3. HoD posed no threat to imperial aims.
4. Terry Eagleton (Criticim and Ideology)►C.
questions merely the bourgeois materialism and
commercialism rather than Colonialism itself