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.
Watts, Cedric. 'Heart of Darkness.' The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J.H. Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 45-62.
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.
Many times, words by themselves do not convey an idea wholly or conceal it altogether. Instead, the voice carrying the words conveys the idea, lending shape and new meaning to the familiar syllables. Words resonate with prescribed meanings, whereas voice creates its own meaning and identity. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, voice comprises the primitive component of language, with words existing only as a secondary function of voice. Glimpsing a “primitive truth,” Kurtz’s voice and soul unite so that his knowledge speaks through his voice, rather than through his words. Alternately draining words of their meaning and filling them with new meaning, Kurtz’s voice contains the power to define his own words. Strip Kurtz of his common syllables, and what remains is a terse note in a margin of seventeen eloquent pages, a frightening voice shaped by unfamiliar words. Marlow first hears of Kurtz as a word repeatedly spoken by others. As Marlow navigates down the river, traveling farther from civilization, Kurtz’s voice amplifies, ultimately consuming the name and the man himself.
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.
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism , ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.
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
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.
In the novella, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad uses diction, imagery and syntax to create a mood of mystery in the scene where Marlow, the narrator, begins his journey up the coast. The reader gets caught up in a sense of wonderment, as Conrad’s vivid descriptions of this coast raise more questions than provide answers.
His words are a trap that carries readers into the perception of the most complete darkness in a phonological cradle. The frame narration used by Conrad provides Marlow the chance to exit from the story and speak directly to his audience, and he often uses this occasion to remark, “No, it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence,—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is not possible to do that. We live, as we dream—alone” (Conrad, 130).
...o, while the novella’s archetypal structure glorifies Marlow’s domination of Kurtz. These two analyses taken together provide a much fuller and more comprehensive interpretation of the work. Conrad presents the idea that there is some darkness within each person. The darkness is is inherited and instinctual, but because it is natural does not make it right. He celebrates – and thereby almost advises – the turn from instinct. By telling Marlow’s tale, Joseph Conrad stresses to his audience the importance of self-knowledge and the unnecessity of instinct in civilization.
Every story has a plot, but not every story has a deeper meaning. When viewed superficially, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a tragic tale of the white man's journey into the African jungle. When we peel away the layers, however, a different journey is revealed - we venture into the soul of man, complete with the warts as well as the wonderful. Conrad uses this theme of light and darkness to contrast the civilized European world with the savage African world in Heart of Darkness.
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.
Chinua Achebe views Conrad’s use of a “narrator behind a narrator” (342) as a failed attempt to draw a “cordon sanitaire” (342) between author and perspective which is an extremely interesting conclusion. Unfortunately Achebe’s criticism falls short of recognising the power of the implicit in Conrad’s text, focusing too heavily on the obvious effect and ignoring a more profound role of this narrative technique. The double narration of the story, along with having a protagonist narrator in the first...
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.
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.