Altered Reality in Heart of Darkness
The world of darkness that Marlow finds himself in is directly comparable to what Leary describes of the bardos (stages) that occur during a drug-induced trip or psychedelic experience. ‘The underlying problem of the Second Bardo is that any and every shape—human, divine, diabolical, heroic, evil, animal, thing—which the human brain conjures up or the past life recalls, can present itself to consciousness: shapes and forms and sounds whirling by endlessly’ (48). An example of such presentation is Marlow’s perception of the jungle as a palpable force that has the power of human gestures. It calls, beckons, lures, etc. Leary writes that accompanying the moment of ego-loss is the perception of ‘wave-energy flow’: ‘the individual becomes aware that he is part of and surrounded by a charged field of energy, which seems almost electrical...the attempt to control or to rationalize this energy flow... is indicative of ego-activity and the First Bardo transcendence is lost’ (41). Marlow never loses ego-activity so he never reaches transcendence, but his ego-activity rationalizes his feeling of the physical awareness of the jungle. He colors the Congo dark instead of light and chooses to reject, not embrace, the force of the jungle so his rationalizations are negative and he thinks the force is evil.
The negative, wrathful counterparts to this vision occur if the voyager reacts with fear to the powerful flow of life forms. Such a reaction is attributable to the cumulated result of game playing (karma) dominated by anger or stupidity. A nightmarish hell-world may ensue. The visual forms appear like a confusing chaos of cheap, ugly dime-store objects, brassy, vulgar and useless. The ...
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... all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible’ (Conrad, 113).
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Editor Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1988.
Cox, C. B. Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes. London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1987.
Guetti, James. ‘Heart of Darkness and the Failure of the Imagination’, Sewanee Review LXXIII, No. 3 (Summer 1965), pp. 488-502. Ed. C. B. Cox.
Leary, Timothy , Metzner, Ralph, Alpert, Richard The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
Ruthven, K. K. ‘The Savage God: Conrad and Lawrence,’ Critical Quarterly, x, nos 1& 2 (Spring and Summer 1968), pp. 41-6. Ed. C. B. Cox.
Watts, Cedric. A Preface to Conrad. Essex: Longman Group UK Limited, 1993.
One of the main causes of the increase in Earth’s temperature is greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases are gases that are trapped in the atmosphere. The gases consist of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. They trapped heat from the sun from returning back into the atmosphere. Over the last 100 hundred years we have increased the earth’s average temperature by 1.4 degree fahrenheit (Carey). This is mainly due to the fact we are producing ten times more greenhouse gas than before. It is exp...
Heart of Darkness is a kind of little world unto itself. The reader of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness should take the time to consider this work from a psychological point of view. There are, after all, an awful lot of heads and skulls in the book, and Conrad goes out of his way to suggest that in some sense Marlow's journey is like a dream or a return to our primitive past--an exploration of the dark recesses of the human mind.
Cox, C. B. Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes. London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1987.
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Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Ed. David Damrosch, New York: Pearson. Copyright 2004.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of darkness and other tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
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Smith, Johanna M. Smith. "'Too Beautiful Altogether': Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness ." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism , ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. Pp. 179-198.
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