HEART OF DARKNESS   by Josef Conrad (1899)

Joseph Conrad was born as Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3rd, 1857 in Ukraine, from a well-to-do           Polish Catholic family of the landed gentry, ardent patriots, especially his father, a patriotic idealist and a revolutionary, who bitterly resented the division of his native country between Germany, Austria and in particular Russia. Exiled to Russia, where his wife died when his son was only seven, shared his gloomy world of forlorn hopes with Jozef, whose early child-hood was a lonely one. In 1869 also his father died and he was taken under the protection of an uncle. In 1874 he  left for France to join the French Merchant Navy at Marseilles. In 1886 he became a British subject, and sailed until 1894, then married and settled down in Kent in 1896.
He had worked on this book in 1889, when he had also applied for a command on a river-steamer on the Congo, following an old boyhood dream of going to see the enormous blank space of the African interior.                                                           

On his African  expedition he came up against the real face of colonialism, with its greed and corruption, and the suffering it caused native populations. The expedition had a disastrous effect on his health, making him suffer for the rest of his life from gout and fever. He returned to England and started to write: the experience had matured his essentially adventurous spirit, and his career as a novelist had begun.
Structure and plot
First published as a three-part serial in a magazine, in the first pages an anonymous first-person narrator introduces us      to Marlow (another first-person narrator and the protagonist of the story: an example of frame-narrative), whose account          of his experiences in the Belgian Congo, apparently dealing with the rescue of mysterious Mr Kurtz, takes up most of the book. There are frequent shifts between the outer and the inner narrative. The inner narrative is further complicated because events and information are anticipated or postponed, breaking the chronological sequence and deferring the climax (Marlow’s meeting with Kurtz has been anticipated through the points of view of various characters: the chief accountant, the manager etc.).                                                                                                                                               

Style  Tendency towards the disappearance of the narrator:

• Marlow is a sort of speaker for the author himself (perhaps too talkative and rhetorical; yet a guide who interprets events and characters, and is aware of his own changes - but, how reliable?)
• Thanks to shifting point of view consciousness of different characters reflects the action in a variety of interpretations which deny the possibility of a single truth, creating an oblique style in an endless interweaving of cause and effect, for the sake of a new kind of realism, psychological realism.

Speech styles are adapted to the personalities of the characters;  time shifts from present to past and future.
Symbols: light and darkness, the jungle, Inferno, black and white, ivory, the quest, the snake, etc.).                                                               In the narrative the dialectical relationship between Good and Evil implies that their roles can be reversed, or, at least, confused. We therefore keep wondering about the real significance of light and darkness, white and black, surface and depth, civilization and (untamed) nature, truth and lie, enemy and ally.

Themes

He started writing in an age which followed the decline of the Victorian novel.                                                                                      

The nineteenth-century novel reflected a safe and steady world, in which there was room for moral edification, and for the omniscient narrator to discuss his characters with the reader, and decide on their applicability to human nature in general.     But with new philosophies, and a new way of seeing the world, the rambling Victorian novel had had to change to a more urgent fictional style: the authorial voice gave way to more direct and dramatic depiction of character and reality, all reality, not just the realism of the 19th century.

Conrad broke violently with the novel tradition in his themes. The 19th-century novel up to then had dealt mainly with man in society, living, even if often critically, in an intricate network of births, loves, marriages and deaths, gain or loss         of wealth, reputation, but always in society, in the public world, as the ground on which individual moral and psychological problems were to be worked out.                                                                                                                                           

Suddenly, man was conscious of another, huge dimension, which dwarfed him in all his small individual, social desires and expectancies.
It is in loneliness, in the wilderness, in the microcosm of the ship, away from the  crowd and organized society, that true morality, true choice, is to be found, and individual responsibility and self-control are learnt.  Society may afford shelter and give confidence, but it is artificial, illusory, a comforting deception. At the same time man’s deep instincts and desires threaten to destroy his control over himself. One of Conrad’s main themes is man’s struggle to keep hold of his integrity and decency, and his failure to do so both in the social world and in the wilderness. His vision of the problems of guilt, pride, self-deception, man’s inevitable isolation, and moral ambiguity, is pessimistic; for the late 19th-century literary world it was certainly “too dark”.

Conrad’s view of human nature was complex, and reflected ideas which were “in the air” at the end of the century concerning man’s inner psychological realities, the conscious and subconscious mind, the two souls of man, and so on (beginnings of psychoanalysis, Dostoevsky’s novels, Stevenson’s moral fables of the evil and primitive sides of man).

The indirect narration, the supreme example of which was Marlow, and the authorial voice, were mingled in a new impressionistic and symbolic method. Where writers had previously created their worlds in their novels and left them for their readers to observe and understand, Conrad suggests metaphorical applications for his worlds - they become hubs of irradiating meaning. As the narrator says of Marlow: “The meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze”.

To the end of his days, Conrad experimented with the novel as no other novelist had done before. His pessimistic vision of man was to become the early twentieth-century vision of the hollowness of modern civilization, and the central Conradian stance of man calling into a darkness which was both deaf and dumb was to be the powerful central image of Existentialism.

Levels of interpretation

• psychological, psychoanalytical, journey within the self, the double
• anthropological, Darwinian, primitive ages, primeval nature
• mythical, archetypal journey, romance, search for the Holy Grail, fight between Good and Evil, Inferno
• moral, Victorian values, materialistic ethics, restraint, efficiency, duty, hypocrisy, conventional idea of civilization, "the horror"
• historical, western colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, cruelty

A modernist novel: in the way/style it is written, in depicting the modern idea of materialism and absence of values, in not giving a clear answer to the questions it poses, in the new approach of psychological introspection, in the idea of time, consciousness and of man's existential loneliness: "we live as we dream -- alone" (James, Stevenson, Dostoevsky). The relationship Marlow-Kurtz is ambiguous, as is ambiguous the final meaning which seems to condemn colonialism but not the values and beliefs that caused it.