Joseph Conrad - Heart of darkness, Tesine di Maturità di Inglese

Scarica Joseph Conrad - Heart of darkness e più Tesine di Maturità in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) Life Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 near Berdichev, Poland (now Ukraine) from a revolutionary family: a Polish Catholic family. He had a difficult childhood: his father was a political activist, in exile in Siberia. At the age of 16, Conrad travelled to Marseilles, and for the next four years he worked on French ships as a young sailor. He joined the French Merchant Navy and later in 1886 he became a master mariner in the British Merchant service and a naturalised British subject. For the next decade he travelled widely, mostly in the Far East and Africa. In 1894 he started writing, and his experiences, especially in the Malay Archipelago and in Africa, are reflected in his works. Moreover, his life at sea provided the background for much of his writings. Though highly appreciated by many writers, Conrad’s novels did not become popular or financially successful until the end of his writing career. Infact, he had financial difficulties till 1910, when he gained a better reputation. Conrad died in 1924 in Kent, in south-east England. The first part of Conrad's life seems to be a preparation for the second part: first he lived the adventures, then he transformed them into novels. This transformation is obviously not a simple copy: names, features and details change to adapt to the new, fictional world. A forerunner of modernism Conrad is considered a link between the Victorian age and Modernism Although his contemporary Thomas Hardy was similarly pessimistic, and the duality of man had been explored in the 1890s by other late Victorians, notably Wilde and Stevenson, Conrad takes this approach to the human condition one step further and introduces a psychological in-depth analysis that precedes Freud's psychoanalysis. Contents and form are strictly linked and therefore his prose partly reproduces the mental processes he is describing: the narration is not linear but frequently uses the technique of flashback and flashforward. Contemporary philosophers, Henri Bergson and William James, had described this kind of internal time; later authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would try to reproduce the so-called "stream of consciousness" in their masterpieces of the 1920s, but it was actually Conrad who started the process. Conrad's influence on Modernist novelists and poets is evident and recognised by authors such as the poet T. S. Eliot, his friend and author D. H. Lawrence and novelist Virginia Woolf, who devoted several essays to the analysis of Conrad's style. What makes his books special? It is never the story itself, which is typically just a pretext to analyse deeper truths such as the condition of the human being. Heart of darkness Heart of Darkness begins on a boat on the River Thames as Marlow (the narrator) tells the story of the river journey he once made into the depths of the Belgian Congo to rescue an ivory trader who had disappeared. → Long FLASHBACK and sometimes there are the voices of the listeners. Marlow is employed by a Belgian company to go to the Congo on a steamer. He is horrified by the greed of the ivory traders and by the way they exploit the indigenous peoples. At a company station, one of the trading posts on the way, he hears something about Mr Kurtz, reputed to be the company’s best agent, who has set up his camp in the very heart of ivory country. Marlow learns that Kurtz has been taken ill and that the other ivory agents, who are jealous of his success, hope he does not recover. After much delay, Marlow finally sets off on the final part of his journey upriver to Kurtz’s station. The closer he gets to Kurtz, the more he is assailed by a feeling of dread, a feeling intensified by the surrounding forest and its natives, which give Marlow a feeling of ‘travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world’. His ship is attacked by hostile tribesmen and a member of his crew is killed.Further upriver, Marlow encounters a young Russian sailor who he discovers is a devoted follower of Kurtz’s teachings. The Russian tells him how Kurtz has become like a god to the natives. As the ship approaches Kurtz’s camp, Marlow finds the riverbank lined with rows of severed human heads, along with other evidence of human sacrifice, which tells him that Kurtz has gone beyond the limits of civilization, that he has lost his mind. He attempts to take Kurtz back, but, weakened by his illness, Kurtz dies on the return journey. His last words are ‘the horror, the horror’. ( → In the last moment of his life he realised what he has been). Kurtz has seen into man’s heart of darkness and the experience has destroyed him. When Marlow meets Kurtz’s fiancée in Belgium, he decides to tell her that the last word he spoke before he died was her name. Conrad’s journey to the Congo This story is connected to Conrad’s personal experiences. In 1890, Conrad went to Africa to command a vessel on the Congo river for a Belgian company. His predecessor had been killed by native Africans. Conrad was partly there simply to make a living, but at the same time, he was a romantic for whom sailing was a spiritual vocation, as many of his novels testify. However, this time, his four-month adventure left him near death, devastated by fever. In 1891, after his return to Europe, he wrote in a letter to a friend ‘I am still plunged in deepest night, and my dreams are only nightmares’. → During his African journey he wrote a diary which is the main source and provides both episodes and characters for the plot. HISTORICAL CONTEXT: European colonialism was at its height in "the scramble for Africa", a period (from the 1870s to 1914) which led all the major European countries to invade, occupy and colonise African territories, in search of raw materials and trading opportunities. The local populations were brutally exploited in the name of progress and civilisation, with an attitude of superiority which convinced most Europeans that the whole process was meant to help Africans and to develop their culture. The barbarous colonisation of Congo by King Lepold II of Belgium was an example of particular cruelty and brutality: as a result of inhuman treatments, disease and mass killings to stop revolts, more than half the local population died between 1885 and 1908. He had set up a number of concession companies managed by his own representatives and their private armies to exploit the Belgian Congo’s material resources for his Language and style Conrad was not particularly successful during his lifetime because of the complexity of his English, his third language: ● elaborate sentences with complex syntax; ● very sophisticated vocabulary, full of adjectives, borrowing heavily from French (especially in vocabulary) and Polish (usually in grammar), his two main languages. The oral tradition also influenced his style: many of his stories are narrated orally by a character to one or more listeners, with whom the reader can identify. Critics have defined Conrad's writing as "prose poems" because of the musical quality and the powerful images and symbols that his descriptions can evoke, reminiscent of poetry rather than prose. Conrad’s ideas What is the role of the author and the artist in general? In the Preface to “The Nigger of the Narcissus” Conrad defines art as an attempt to bring the truth to light. Whereas thinkers and scientists use ideas or facts to explain the truth and appeal to their audience's common sense and intelligence, an artist looks into himself and finds deep, hidden secrets that appeal to the reader's inner nature, to the human gifts that make everybody capable of delight and wonder, of recognising pity, beauty and pain, of feeling sympathy for other human beings. Whereas philosophical and scientific truths can be questioned, and may change with every generation, these inner feelings are eternal. Effective art is made up of impressions that speak to our senses, it is a perfect blending of form and substance. In the case of the writer, form corresponds to language, which will only appeal to the reader's senses when the author is able to go beyond the superficial usage of everyday words to create moments of music and magic. Only in this way can he provide the "encouragement, consolation, fear, charm all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask." Moral vision The tragic events in Conrad's childhood and his life away from his homeland can partly account for his pessimism. But there is a deeper understanding of human nature too. Some keywords that can describe his vision of life are betrayal, guilt, brutality, alienation, exploitation and primitive instincts. All these negative elements tend to emerge in moments of crisis, when man loses control and reveals his true nature. A lack of civilization can lead to degeneration and moral failure because social norms save us by imposing limits to our baser instincts, and this is one of the reasons why exotic settings and uncivilised populations are so important in Conrad's works. Life is complex, mysterious and full of contradictions, so everyone risks insanity and can only keep in touch with reality by using restraint: self-control and hard work keep man from precipitating into madness. All these ideas are expressed by the story's characters and are also communicated to the reader by means of different narrative devices. On one hand, the multiple narrators offering different points of view show the complexity of life; on the other hand there is a wide use of symbols, which represent life's negative and positive aspects, in particular the contrast between sanity and insanity, knowledge and superstition, wilderness and civilization. Natural elements such as light and darkness, the sea, rivers, forests, fog or human artefacts including machines, weapons, and even clothes and ornaments, can all add extra-meaning to the narration and should be analysed carefully when reading Conrad's novels. Apocalypse Now and the Vietnam War Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is one of the last great independent movies of the 1970s, the golden age of American independent cinema. The film is set during the Vietnam War, but its narrative source is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It is a film touched by madness and excess, as out of control as the Vietnam War it represents. Since Coppola’s ambitions are on the side of mythology rather than historical fact, the war is used as a screen on which to project the ‘grander drama’ of the American soul. Heart of Darkness provides the perfect mythical framework for Captain Willard’s (Martin Sheen) journey upriver to Cambodia, where he will confront Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has raised a private army to wage a brutal and unsanctioned war against the natives. Coppola films this river journey, a journey of gradual alienation from Western civilisation, in a way that exactly captures the mixture of mystery and fear we find in Conrad’s story. The viewer’s perception of time dilates into a hallucinatory dream state, which at the same time contains familiar voices from the ‘known world’ – The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix on the radio, a tape-recorded message from a soldier’s family. However, these familiar elements are not at all reassuring, but simply add to the bizarre and disturbing quality of the atmosphere. Apocalypse Now is an incredible sensorial experience, one which would be impossible to repeat in today’s Hollywood. The director’s original version, containing scenes that were cut from the first release, was released in 2001 as Apocalypse Now Redux.