The Limits of Language in Heart of Darkness
From the very beginning of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad traps us in a complex play of language, where eloquence is little more than a tool to obscure horrific moral shortcomings. Hazy, absurd descriptions, frame narratives, and a surreal sense of Saussurean structural linguistics create distance from an ever-elusive center, to show that language is incapable of adequately or directly revealing truth. Understanding instead occurs in the margins and along the edges of the narrative; the meaning of a story “is not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze” (105).
The title of the novel is itself misleading, because Conrad purposely leads us around understanding rather than directly to its heart, always hinting at something that, it seems, cannot be expressed. En route to “the biggest...most blank” space on the map of his youth, Marlow muses: “My isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion” (108, 114). He repeats words until they are nothing but sounds, polysyllabic mouthfuls devoid of real meaning: “palpable,” “inestimable,” “inscrutable,” “impenetrable.” Thick layers of images accumulate until all senses are enshrouded in mist, darkness, and distance. And yet, even in the face of the Unknowable, there is still an adamantly declared sense of understanding, however elusive or inadequate it may be. Marlow recalls that his experience in the Congo, for example, “seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me — and into ...
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...ose of the earth,” according to the Saussurean linguistic theory that Conrad seems to support. “There was nothing either above or below him,” Marlow observes, “and I knew it... I … did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.” In his essay, “The Failure of the Imagination,” James Guetti writes that in Heart of Darkness, language has meaning “in terms of the exterior of experience — the coast of a wilderness, the surface of a river, a man's appearance and his voice — and the meaning can exist as a reality so long as one remains ignorant, deliberately or otherwise, of all that lies beyond these exteriors, of what language cannot penetrate. For with the intimation that there is something beyond verbal, and indeed, intellectual capacities, comes the realization that language is fiction” (SOURCE). Perhaps this is the ultimate horror.
The mind is a wonderful thing. It allows us to think on three very different levels. One we choose to express, one we don’t choose to express, and one we do not even know exists. All these stages of thinking are clouded over in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Three menacing forces occur that completely take over the white man to act inappropriately. They accuse others of acting savage, when they violently act against people of other cultures. They conform to specific beliefs, and push aside their subconscious thoughts. These men also have an abundance of ignorance that makes them feel false superiority. The Heart of Darkness reaches into the minds of readers, to prove that all of civilization is surrounded by an abundance of forces that can fog our mind, and darken our hearts.
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.
In the passage of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad utilizes syntax that captures Marlow’s conscience with his mental process of perception filled with contradiction and uncertainty. Because Marlow expressed his perspective of the bond with the natives, he pointed out that every men on earth has similar characteristics of prehistorics traits. Conrad employs imagery which can permits his reader to visualize how Marlow is feeling when he took the opportunity in seeing the natives and their lifestyle. Because of viewing their natives lifestyle, Marlow has stirred his emotion in being overwhelmed and terrified. A rhetorical question was used at the end of the passage to show how Marlow is dealing with his trouble with what he sees in his surroundings.
The book features many poetic passages such as the description of the Thames, the description of the city Marlow visits, and the description of Kurtz’s mistress as well as his wife. To give an example, Marlow says “the fact dazzling, to be seen, like foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma” (Conrad, 23), describing his confusion on why the Africans did not mutiny his steamer. Conrad’s verbose use of language is shown by using two similes to describe Marlow’s confusion. High schoolers can learn from this verbosity as it gives them plenty of examples of literary techniques to observe. However, racism lurks in this poetic writing. Achebe believes that the writing helps delay the reader from seeing Conrad’s racism. As Achebe describes it, “their impact in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery” (Achebe, 1785). If high schoolers approach the book equipped with the assumption of its racism, they can see the whited sepulchre of Conrad’s poetic writing. It may be beautiful but in substance but also holds racist beliefs. Thus, high schoolers can learn the division between form and substance. Heart of Darkness should be taught to high schoolers as its language can improve their reading skills and it also can, as long as they are aware of its
Beckoning readers closer, the gloomy foreboding of a mysterious darkness has typically been indicative of an antagonist or a horror that is to follow, and the glory of a shining light has signified a positive connotation. The pair is often utilized to express an author’s ideas and theme and Joseph Conrad uses the two paradigms liberally in his interpretation of European colonialism in Heart of Darkness. While Conrad employs the typical binary of light and darkness as positive and negative forces, respectively, he also challenges this notion by exposing the contradictions of misdeeds done in light and the portrayal of darkness as a sanctuary.
Heart of Darkness is Joseph Conrad's tale of one man's journey, both mental and physical, into the depths of the wild African jungle and the human soul. The seaman, Marlow, tells his crew a startling tale of a man named Kurtz and his expedition that culminates in his encounter with the "voice" of Kurtz and ultimately, Kurtz's demise. The passage from Part I of the novel consists of Marlow's initial encounter with the natives of this place of immense darkness, directly relating to Conrad's use of imagery and metaphor to illustrate to the reader the contrast between light and dark. The passage, although occurring earlier on in the novel, is interspersed with Marlow's two opposing points of view: one of naïveté, which comes before Marlow's eventual epiphany after having met Kurtz, and the matured perspective he takes on after all of the events leading up to his and Kurtz's encounter.
In Joseph Conrad’s short story, “Heart of Darkness,” the narrator, Marlow language, and point of view to convey the conflicting emotions he has about Kurtz due to the image he fabricated Kurtz to be, and the reality of Kurtz. Marlow’s language throughout the piece reveals to the reader how he feels about Kurtz and how he perceives Kurtz’s actions. Marlow’s point of view also allows him to support both of his perceptions of Kurtz because he doesn’t see only bad or only good in
Without personal access to authors, readers are left to themselves to interpret literature. This can become challenging with more difficult texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Fortunately, literary audiences are not abandoned to flounder in pieces such as this; active readers may look through many different lenses to see possible meanings in a work. For example, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be deciphered with a post-colonial, feminist, or archetypal mindset, or analyzed with Freudian psycho-analytic theory. The latter two would effectively reveal the greater roles of Kurtz and Marlow as the id and the ego, respectively, and offer the opportunity to draw a conclusion about the work as a whole.
Watts, Cedric. 'Heart of Darkness.' The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J.H. Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 45-62.
Heart of Darkness describes a voyage to Africa, common for the British still, despite the horrific treatment which was apparent of colonization. The chaotic, stream-of-consciousness style Conrad took on helped to display the confusion, and made the reader have to interpret for themselves what they thought the writer meant. Conrad experiments with this style, leaving some sentences without ending: "not a sentimental pretense but an idea;…something you can set up…and offer a sacrifice to…." (Conrad, Longman p. 2195), a very choppy form of literature and causes the reader to fill in the holes and interpret themselves, alone. Conrad skips about from talking of the "two women knitted black wool feverishly" at the gate of the city (of hell), to his aunt which he feels women are "out of touch with truth," to how the British are as "weak-eyed devil(s) of a rapacious and pitiless folly" (Conrad, Longman pp. 2198, 2199, & 2202). Conrad's mind moves about as ours do along a large duration of literary monologue to convey to the reader the author's ideas, as interpreted by the reader.
As Marlow assists the reader in understanding the story he tells, many inversions and contrasts are utilized in order to increase apperception of the true meaning it holds. One of the most commonly occurring divergences is the un orthodox implications that light and dark embody. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness brims with paradoxes and symbolism throughout its entirety, with the intent of assisting the reader in comprehending the truth of not only human nature, but of the world.
Man has explored many places on earth and even the moon, but places like the congo have not been explored as much. This makes it tough to try to travel and explore the unknown. This novel has symbolism throughout the entire story that leads the readers to believe something before it even happens. In this Novel “Heart of Darkness”, written by Joseph Conrad, the meaning and its development can be shown through the symbolism of the journey, the test of man’s mind, and lastly the test of man’s soul.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a great example of a Modernist novel because of its general obscurity. The language is thick and opaque. The novel is littered with words such as: inconceivable, inscrutable, gloom. Rather than defining characters in black and white terms, like good and bad, they entire novel is in different shades of gray. The unfolding of events takes the reader between many a foggy bank; the action in the book and not just the language echoes tones of gray.
The "Heart of Darkness," written by Joseph Conrad in 1899 as a short story, is about two men who face their own identities as what they consider to be civilized Europeans and the struggle to not to abandon their themselves and their morality once they venture into the "darkness." The use of "darkness" is in the book's title and in throughout the story and takes on a number of meanings that are not easily understood until the story progresses. As you read the story you realize that the meaning of "darkness" is not something that is constant but changes depending on the context it used.
He follows the crawling Kurtz through the grass, comes upon him - "long, pale, indistinct like a vapour exhaled by the earth." When Marlow finds it hard to define the moral shock he received on seeing the empty cabin or when he says he does not know why he was jealous of sharing his experience we can take him literally, and in a sense be thankful for his uncertainty. `Heart of Darkness' takes us into a deeper region of the mind, quite similar to the psychic union between Legatt and his secret sharer in Conrad's short story, "The Secret Sharer." We ought to share F.R. Leavis, who emphasizes the fact that Conrad was probably staring at the devil when he transmuted his experiences into fictionalized form.