UNIVERSIDAD PEDAGÓGICA NACIONAL

DEPARTAMENTO DE LENGUAS
LITERATURA ANGLÓFONA II
PROFESOR ENRIQUE HOYOS

THE HEART OF DARKNESS

A term paper by:

Laura Lizeth Forero, cod 2015134014

Nicolle Torres, cod 2014138051

The Heart of Darkness became a literary reference on European colonization

in Africa, which the author had to live firsthand on his voyages navigating the
waters of the south, and even rivers in Africa, as in the Congo, where he must
have witnessed the genocide of the African people and several diseases that
even he lived.

Later, this novel has been studied extensively from different perspectives
since it symbolizes a great variety of themes despite its short extension,
deepening topics such as political, economic and social. Against these
referents we can say that the novel represents the confrontation between
good and evil through the adventure, both physical and psychological
manifested in the continuous uses of the antithesis: Civilization / extreme
nature, which is exposed in elements such as river, the jungle and human
nature.
As mentioned, from our perspective the confrontation between good and evil
is the central theme of the novel, so Conrad exposes it through the direct
relationship between the physical journey and the moral journey of the
protagonists of the novel, Kurtz and Marlow, resulting in a duality or
antithesis that is present in different forms throughout the novel.

The first one is the starting point of this trip; the representative figure of the
river that will lead to the interior of the forest, where humanity strips itself of
all rationality to let itself be carried away by its deepest instincts and passions.

The trip begins on the River Thames, a river where the dreams of great men
have been realized “The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the
germs of empires” (1) Thus, in the words of Marlow, the Thames in London
represents the known, the quiet, the tranquility and the dignity of the
European, who will be quickly transformed by embarking in the unknown and
uncertain waters of the Congo River, which represents everything contrary to
the Thames; that is, the Congo represents the uncertain, the turbid, the
profound and the improper: “an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the
sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the
depths of the land” (2).
Therefore, for Marlow, as it also represented for many colonizers, the journey
into the heart of Africa also means entering a journey into the unknown and
the incomprehensible, not only from the atmospheric or earthly, but from the
unknown to his identity, his passions and his personality. This uncertainty was
probably suggested through the encounter Marlow had with the woman who
wove in the waiting room when his trip had not yet begun; there Marlow
waiting to be seen by the doctor describes as a premonition that:
She seemed to know all about them and about me, too. An eerie feeling came
over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought of
these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm
pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown (...) (p15)
This feeling, and symbolism that we find in the role that these women
develop, can be understood as the reality faced by hundreds and hundreds of
sailors, captains, soldiers and other workers who had to face colonizing
journeys. Good and evil, at this point has another perspective, even though
they were doing evil to others, in turn their actions could also unleash evil for
themselves; so the figure of these women, weaving with Black wool can
suggest the darkness that is expected in the trip to the unknown, where the
future is unknown.

Suggesting the duality between good and evil, we see how the analogy of the
rivers is supported when Marlow describes the Congo as a serpent, which can
be interpreted due to the bestiality of the territory and its radically jungle
atmosphere; this allusion can also immediately refer the reader to a pagan
meaning, to original sin, to the serpent that has corrupted the human,
therefore, the reader will find towards the end of the river and the novel itself
that there is no moral or ethical; only chaos and horror triumph, due to
savagery, which is not necessarily the product of the natives.
In this way, the river is interpreted as much more than a fluvial path, it is a
path through the life of man which leads to personal knowledge and to the
deepest and darkest territories of oneself.
In addition, the river is also the one that gives way to enter the deepest
recesses of the jungle, that is to say that every time the ship submerges to the
depths of the territory, everything it becomes darker, while in the Thames the
light is the one that predominatest; thus, the African world that Marlow
describes is so turbid that it becomes bleak: “the village was deserted, the huts
gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures” (3). Marlow
advances and begins to submerge in the jungle; “it seemed to me I had stepped
into the gloomy circle of some Inferno” (4). Se trata de un lugar tenebroso “the
grove of death” (4), where nature is disproportionate and devours the human:
“Paths, paths, everywhere; a stamped-in network of paths spreading over the
empty land, through long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down
and up cilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude,
a solitude, nobody, not a hut” (5)

Thus, the jungle is shown as an invincible place, where evil take over and
seizes man: the silence of the land went home to one’s heart – its mystery, its
greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life” For the colonizer the
African jungle is presented as something wild, primitive and irrational, it is
definitely a scenario where laws and rational order do not prevail, where man
can behave as he is. It is nature that has control in the heart of the jungle;
nature gives the possibilities, the rules and transforms the will of the beings
that are before it.

This is sustained, in that the trip in its physical and symbolic character at the
same time, also proposes a change towards another different stage of human
development, to a more primitive stage of man, where it is his natural instincts
that will make decisions above rationality. That is to say, nature, primitive life,
and ignorance in a world where human beings do not reign represents then the
shift from light to darkness, from civilization to barbarism, the encounter
between Marlow and Kurtz, and especially the confrontation of good and evil.
This confrontation can also be understood not only from what nature and
primigenia generates in man, but also from what Aime Césaire described as
the decivilization generated by colonization: colonization works to decivilize
the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to
awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and
moral relativism. (Césaire, pg 2)

That is to say that at this point, although subjection by the unknown disturbs
man, this confrontation between good and evil, where intentions are subject to
the second, is what really corrupts and obscures man, who is transformed
according to Césaire, in what European society had rejected for centuries: in a
barbarian.

This point also suggests that precisely the invasive process that Europe
adopted in its colonization campaigns in Africa, and even America,
overshadowed the centuries of civilization and development that they
proclaimed, so Césaire describes that:
They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized
man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is
based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably
tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to
ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal,
accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to
transform himself into an animal (Césaire, pg 5)
The above quote, stresses that actions that for some are justified, because they
defend them through their own conception of what is good and what is bad, is
really a subjective vision which can reach a point of dehumanization , or in
other words, to propitiate evil without even realizing it.

On the other hand, the relationship with the environment and close contact
with the natives of that place, produce great transformations in the characters
of the narrative. Nature is essential for the development of the work, because
it is which imposes the rules of conduct, producing a necessary adaptation of
the characters to its environment to survive. The doctor who reviews Marlow
before his trip says: “It would be interesting for science to watch the mental
changes of individuals, on the spot” (7) And that is precisely what the story
allows: to see how little by little the characters change and assimilate to the
environment; how their perception about the other and nature is transformed
as they go deeper into the jungle.

In this way, the first moments of the journey for Marlow, when he was still in
Europe and in his first steps through the Congo, he reinforces a colonial
stereotype of the native as "enemy". Education of colonial empires had taught
to Europeans that aborigines are "enemies of civilization," who resist progress
and enlightenment of humanity; so it is their duty as "superiors" to eliminate
all wild custom in them, or in other words, take away the evil and give them
good.
However, in the play we can see how Marlow as he moves deeper and deeper
into the jungle transforms his gaze from those "savages", perceiving them not
as a threat, but on the contrary as simple and incapable malnourished slaves,
weak and passive: “They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were
nothing earthly now, – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation”
(8).

Therefore, the "savagery" that the context suggests, and even the naturalized
belief in how the colonizers see the natives, will be transformed as they move
further and further into "the dark," as Marlow will begin to question about the
way the natives are treated. To that extent, we can understand that although
Conrad does not make a direct denounce of colonialism, he really does to its
methods; i this way the work questions the reader who the savages really are
and where the heart of darkness dwells, since this primitive, wild and free
humanity with which Marlow thought he would find in the native Africans is
now embodied by his own colonizers who, blinded by power, ambition and
greed, committed all kinds of barbarism in the name of power.

It seems that the more the colonizer enters the African jungle, away from
civilized society, it also begins to move away from the way of understanding
and rationalizing the natural, returning to a more reflective and self-critical
stage of the human mind. That is to say, the further away from the territories
in which men colonized nature, the more man faces that nature does not need
to colonize, because it is its the world, which means that now is naturewho
rethinks what is good and bad.

In this way, nature is incomprehensible to those who look at it from the

rational paradigm, for which reason the work suggests that man must put aside
his hegemonizing way of thinking and perceiving reality from multiple
perspectives that must be approached with caution. , with criticism and with
the knowledge that in nature we are just another creatures.

Thus, Conrad exemplifies that when a European, with a slightly more critical
view, set foot in the African jungle, where law, order and Western ethics do
not reach, they confront different positions in the life in order to survive .
Marlow and (above all) Kurtz, are leaving aside, little by little, the colonial
ways of thinking, returning to a more instinctive way of living in order to
survive. For the author, this change of perception does not mean madness, it is
simply the instinctive step that man takes to assimilate to nature, it is the
solitude and the majesty of the jungle appropriating the mind of civilized man:
“his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself,
and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad” (9).

In addition, the work presents us how the human has required civilization to
be able to act under its domain and its laws, however before the domain of
survival man begins to perform instinctive acts that can make him as wild as
animals.
Finally, Kurtz is the perfect example to portray the transformation that
produces man after breaking their conventional paradigms, and go into
attitudes that confront him before good and evil. The heart of darkness, which
in reality is not only the jungle, but is his heart, is eating away in the course of
the months, where evil “it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into
his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the
inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation” (10).
.
REFERENCES:

1. Conrad, J., (1902). The Heart of Darkness. Op. Cit., p. 7.

2. Op. Cit., p. 12.
3. Op. Cit., p. 13.
4. Op. Cit., p. 24.
5.
6. Op. Cit., p. 37.
7. Op. Cit. p. 29.
8. Op. Cit. p. 24.
9. Conrad, J., Op. Cit. p. 95.
10.Op. Cit. p. 95.

Bibliography

Césaire, A. (1955). Discourse on colonialism. Editions Presence Africaine.

Conrad, J. (1899). Heart of darkness. Youth: A Narrative, Heart of Darkness y

The End of the Tether .