Riassunto Heart of Darkness, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Riassunto Heart of Darkness e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! 2) Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) For the first time, Heart o Darkness was published in 1899 in instalments, episodes in a magazine and only in 1902 it becomes a book. This book is a poem, not a biography as he based it on his own experiences in Congo: Conrad was a sailor, he knew what he was talking about and the places described. The beginning of the book has not been set in Africa but near London, in a city called Gravesend. From the very beginning with the expression “luminous space” we have the opposition between darkness and light that is presented in an unexpected way. Darkness is usually associated to Africa (Africa was the Dark Continent) but in this case darkness is associated to London. As the first narrator says, London is envelope in darkness, because the air over the city was so dark. On this small boat there are different people: the director of the company, the lawyer, the accountant, the first narrator and the protagonist Marlow. They all belong to the same company, so they share “the bond of the sea” (il legame del mare). Marlow is associated to metaphorical images, described as someone different from the rest of this group. He is related to spirituality, wisdom, knowledge. Marlow is not only becoming the protagonist of the novel, but he is also suiting to become the main narrator of this book. He is the one went to Africa, he is the one that is going to tell the others the story of his voyage to Africa. Marlow is going to communicate something very important to the rest of these people. He is seating in this boat as he if were about to start a yoga lesson (that’s the position given by the first narrator “cross-legged”). Narrative structure: the first narrator is also called frame narrator because he starts the book very briefly and then Marlow begins to narrate his voyage to Africa and Marlow’s narrations occupies most of the book almost until the end of the book, so he becomes the 1st narrator. In the very last page, the first narrator retakes the word himself and closes the book. The first narrator begins and closes the book but the main body of it (99%) is occupied by Marlow’s stories narrator in first person. We have two narrators. This structure is called “Russian dole” or “Chinese boxes”: a narration inside a narration. “Heart of Darkness” narrative perspective is very different from general Victorian novels, with a 3 rd person narrator, otherwise here we have a limited prospective because of the first person. The first narrator seems to be describing the right atmosphere for a very important narration by his listeners. “we felt meditative, the day is ending”: little by little the sun is described by setting beyond the horizon. The light is decreasing. And this is what inspired the first narrator to think about the importance of the river Thames. This is the area where historic expeditions started from. John Franklin: a famous traveller who was part in important missions, as he left England to discover the north-west passage. He became popular for his courage. At this point Marlow starts to speak and his prospective is different from the prospective of the first narrator. He is also undermining the idea that England’s noble history is an internal history is something that always existed. Marlow is talking about the historical period when the Romans first conquered the south of England, he is going back several centuries. The Roman’s civilization considered its civilization the highest one and England was a place of barbarity, one of the darkest places of the world. Marlow’s doing is a comparison because when the Romans arrived in England they were the savage ones. He’s relativizing (relativizzando) the superiority of English culture and we can see it when he says “darkness was here yesterday” and “we are different from Romans, we are efficient, we work”. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce published novels where the main interest was not their objective reconstruction of the environment (typical of Victorian novel) but it was something much more subjective (feelings) -> stream of consciousness. In a way Heart of Darkness was one of the initiators of this kind of fiction, it is not easy to describe what Marlow’s narration is about. Sometimes Marlow doesn’t know how to continue the sentences, he’s searching for the right words, so this narration is different from the Virginia Woolf’s one. Years later Woolf wrote an essay called “Modern Fiction” about fiction of their own time. In this essay she employs an image quite popular today among critics which is rather close to the image we found here. She wrote that human life is not a series of lamps symmetrically arranged. Life is an illuminous halo enveloping our consciousness from the beginning to the end. Conrad even though he was writing exotic adventure novels. Novels set in other continents, in distant places. He was also anticipating many of the features of Modernist fiction that will be fully established in the 20’s. “Now when I was….” Here Marlow recalls when he was a child, and when he was a young boy in the map, they were many blank spaces because several areas in the world were not being explored yet. The final decades of the 19th were marked by radical change in the knowledge of the African continent by European colonizers. He has always been fascinated by the center of Africa. If you look the map of Africa in the center there is a river that cross the continent. (the river looks like a snake) He remember that when he was a boy was fascinated by this image of the river (the river Congo). “The snake had charmed me” He found himself at the point in his life where he had no job, he found himself in a land without a ship ready to take him away, without a job and he was suffering for it. At this point in his life he is given a tip by one of his aunts. She said to him that a ship was looking for a captain and it was ready to take off to Africa. In the book he describes why that position was vacant and the reason was because the captain was killed in a fight with African natives. The reason why the Danish captain was killed is very tragic, but the register used to describe this event is ironic and sarcastic. Conrad through Marlow’s voice employs three general strategies to criticize European colonialism in Africa: 1: irony and sarcasm: it has to do with the tone of Marlow’s narration 2: direct critic: sometimes Marlow describes events which present examples of slavery and the way Europeans treat Africans 3: rhetorical language, the use of metaphors, symbols, the opposition between light and darkness is one of them. ■ P.37 The 1st thing Marlow does is crossing the channel and goes to the city where the Company has the offices: Brussels, Belgium. “I was crossing the Channel to show myself to my employers…. In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me thing of whited sepulchre” (sepolcro imbiancato). This expression has a biblic connotatiom because it comes from the gospel Matthew (vangelo secondo Matteo). It’s a critic cause it’s carrying a connotation of death (sepolcro). The colour white has two symbols, both realistic but symbolic. This is white society, white Europe if compared to black Africa but it also a fact that much of the architectural grandeur of the city of Brussels using a lot of marble, white monuments. The marble at “A slight clining behing me…” it’s Marlow’s first shock seeing how the natives are treated by the Europeans. They are slaves and workers at the same time. He described them as “walking deads”.. Marlow finds himself to the mouth of the river and he has still 30 miles before reaching his first stop: the Company’s station. And here is the place where Marlow sees with his own eyes how the Congo is run by the companies. The Company’s station has been set here for the building of a railway, a railway that was supposed to transport people but also goods from the interior to the coast in order to be shipped as fast as possible to Europe; but building a railway in the hard of Africa wasn’t so easy, very difficult and a dangerous work. ■ Pag.44 He’s talking about the “grove of death” (boschetto), a place where the workers/slaves go to die (killed by overwork): “this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn (si erano ritirati) to die”. HISTORICAL FACTS AND LITERATURE In 1998: “King Leopold’s Ghost” by Adam Hochschild. Around 1880 10 million Congolese were willed (genocide) because they refused to work. In 1951: “Le origini del totalitarismo” di Hannah Arende, a Jewish political philosopher. She analysed the European Totalitarian regime such as Nazism. Her main idea is that of the sterminations perpetrated in the XX C. by these totalitarian regimes. In this book she often quotes “Heart of Darkness”, to give examples of what she means. Another book that is about European Colonization is “Exterminate all the brutes” by Sven Lindqvist, which also analyses how the lives of whole populations were considered exterminable, on the same level as animals. The title is also a quotation from “Heart of darkness” and it shows the influence of this novel. At that time one of the discoveries in weapons were “dum dum bullets” that exploded inside the body and that were legal only for animals or wars against non-European populations; that’s another example of this European ideology that considered those population’s lives as worthless. In 2017, Nicoletta Vallorani in her book “Nessun Kurts, Cuore di tenebra e le parole dell’Occidente”, thinks that “Heart of Darkness” can be employed to read our present condition, for example the relation between Europe and other cultures. All the Africans are defined as “Black shadows”, because they are left in confusion, they have no identity. Kurtz indicates the character of Heart of darkness. ■ Pag.45/46 Marlow is horrified but at the same time he’s surprised and amused when he runs into the figure of the Company’s chief accountant (capo contabile della compagnia). In this total confusion, disorder, violence, cruelty and death, comes out as extremely elegant, as impeccably dressed as he was walking in the centre of Paris. He’s completely out of context. Going back to the three forms of criticism, in this case we find the first one (irony and sarcasm) in particular when Marlow says, “He was amazing”, “in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision”, “I shook hands with this miracle”. And later on, he also compares the man to a “hairdresser’s dummy” (manichino nel salotto del parrucchiere), which means completely fake and out of place. Another sarcastic observation is “That’s backbone” (questa è una spina dorsale). Marlow cannot stop himself asking the accountant how he managed to stay like this in that situation, in such a mess of a place. The company’s accountant doesn’t get his irony (ha l’impressione che Marlow lo stia adulando e prende le sue parole come dei complimenti). Then we have another important detail about how things work in this colony: Europeans were sending trinkets (cose di poco valore) “a stream of manufactured goods” such as rubbishy cottons (tessuti di scarsa qualità), beads (perline) and brass- wire (fili di ottone) and they exchanged them with ivory. Other things that are not mentioned here but that they used to exchange for ivory are weapons and liquors. We are told by Marlow that he remains there for ten days until the opportunity comes to move to interior of the continent, to the Central Station which is going to be his final destination. There he finds a very important company manager, Mr. Kurtz, who is often mentioned by the European people working in the station; he’s described as a very remarkable person. So, from now Marlow is going to listen to comments, descriptions, observations about this enigmatic figure, that will be the center of this novel. Everyone is fascinated from Mr Kurtz power and charisma, everyone has profound respect for him as a remarkable person who has achieved great results. Marlow feels curious about him, he wants to get to the Central Station in order to speak to Kurtz in person. Kurtz embodies several features of the European colonialism in Africa. According to critics Kurtz, even though his presence in the novel is very limited, he is the real protagonist of the novel, not Marlow. Marlow manages finally to leave the Company’s Station in order to move to the Central Station in the interior. So, we have the Company’s Station first, then we have the Central Station and then finally the Inner Station, very far away in the center of the continent, which is property of Mr Kurtz. ■ Pag. 47 In order to move he must walk for 15 days for two hundred miles in the African forest and he notices a country which in completely devastated and abandoned. He mentions “a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut” while he was expecting to come across many more people, a much more populated African interior. Here there’s an example of cultural equivalence or cultural relativism: Marlow is establishing an equivalent between Britain, the centre of the empire, and its colonies as he says that the same thing would happen in Britain if it was invaded by a group of mysterious armed niggers, capturing people in order to turn them into slaves. In this case England would also be abandoned as Africa. With this technique Marlow is also telling us how things worked there, that villages where raided, people were captured and made to work forcedly. Then there’s another equivalent between African drums and the bells of a Christian country: “a sound weird, appealing, suggestive and wild and perhaps …. Sound of bells in a Christian country”. Marlow mette allo stesso livello la cultura europea e quella africana, cosa non frequente nelle opere del tempo che invece sottolineavano la superiorità degli occidentali. L’argomento più discusso riguardo a questo romanzo è sul fatto se “Heart of Darkness” sia un libro imperialista e razzista, secondo alcuni critici, oppure no. ■ Pag.49/50/51 When Marlow arrives to the Central Station, he is given the surprising news that his steamer has sunk into the bottom of the river. So, the steamer must be recovered and repaired in order to be used again. Marlow spends months in the Central Station because of the inconvenient. In the meanwhile, he meets the manager of the Central Station who inspires him uneasiness (disagio). He has the impression that this man has no qualities what so ever, he simply began manager because he has a perfect health (fundamental in such an unwelcoming and dangerous environment). So, survival is, according to Marlow, the only reason for this man’s important position. He also has the impression that this man is a sort of empty container, both morally and physically, described as a hollow man (un corpo cavo). “I went to work the next day, tuning my back on the station” Marlow gets to work to recover his steamer and while he’s working, he collects impressions and opinions of people inhabiting the station. They are descripted as pilgrims, by using a religious metaphor but, at the same time, they’re described as faithless. Their only obsession, their God is ivory, for the profits coming from the amassing and the selling of it. This description is significant in relation with the main principals of colonial ideology. Marlow is penetrating deeper and deeper into the African forest and he describes its wilderness as something evil, hostile and negative. But at the same time, he defines it as truth, the bottom reality of our universe. There is a crisis of certainties: “ waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion”: la cultura europea presentava se stessa come l’apogeo dell’umanità, qui invece la realtà che rimane è solo una foresta misteriosa. There are other events happening in the Central Station. Marlow speaks when several Europeans working there and again he comes across people mentioning Kurtz, sometimes in a positive way and sometimes in an enigmatic one: “I heard the name of Kurtz pronounced. He even comes across a painting made by Kurtz which could be something symbolic and Marlow’s curiosity is increasing. ■ Pag.55/58 In this passage Marlow expresses his doubts about Kurtz and the widening his reflections to a morel existential level. Marlow says that this experience was like a “dream” (I’m trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt). “Heart of darkness is also considered a very important novel from a philosophical point of view; it has an oral dimension and it’s considered by many critics as a novel about the limits of communication: il linguaggio è multiforme e suggestive per essere considerato con un singolo significato. There is a description of the manager and other specific individual members of this Central Station all the way to this group of people arriving at the Central Station which he calls the "Eldorado Exploring Expedition", European people leaded by the manager’s uncle. These people are compared by Marlow to pilgrims (religious connotation) and Marlow’s irony comes up when he describes this group of people. The end of the 1st chapter leaves quotations opened, in particular about Mr. Kurtz, making the reader curious. Marlow is wondering how this excellent man can maintains his principles, his ideals, his In the following pages Marlow is getting closer to Kurtz's Inner Station. It’s a very scary moment because they are just 24, surrounded by fog and natives. Africans who are working on the steamer tell to Marlow "capture those natives and give them to us, so we can eat them". this is the only moment that they speak, so just to declare their cannibalism. Conrad with his novel is breaking rules at that time, mainly for his critics about colonialism. Around 1890 there was a very cruel fight in the centre of Africa, between natives and Belgian. During this war cannibalism was practiced. At the beginning of “Heart of darkness” the first narrator mentions John Franklin's expedition to the North Pole that was not successful, they all died. When their rests were found, maybe in the last moments there was cannibalism. The idea that cannibalism is something alien to the European people has been proven wrong many times. At this point Marlow is just 8 miles from Kurt’s station and he starts observing the natives working with him on the steamer. They are 30 against 5. Marlow's asking himself “why they don't attack us?” in order to save their lives. Marlow seems to recognize his ignorance, because he can’t understand them. If he could speak their language, understanding it would be much easier, but he can't. Idea of "restrained" -> hints about the moral superiority of natives over Europeans, something strange for that time. When they get close to the station, Marlow is describing another native working side by side with him, the helmsman (=timoniere) of the steamer who was killed. He doesn't know what to do and from this point his narration becomes very confusing. For some reason he starts to anticipate things that are going to happen much later in the story. It’s unchronological. He is approaching the ending of his voyage. He gets more confused and messier in his narration -> replicating the language of dreams. He is unable to order his narration as if he was getting very emotional. ■ Pag 76-77 “"I laid the ghost of his gifts..." - "My ivory..." He is described Kurtz as a man obsessed by possession: my, my, my. "This was because it could speak English to me": "This" perchè l'ha definito come un fantasma. Kurtz sta lavorando per le società commerciali del Belgio. È una critica al colonialismo belga, alle sue atrocità. Mentre invece leggendo "All Europe crontributed to the making of Kurtz." è chiaro che la critica di Conrad sia da ritenersi rivolta a tutte le nazioni coloniali europee che hanno contribuito. Kurtz comes to incarnate the double-faced nature of the colonialism: a European man full of principles, find himself in a place without social connection and control. "I nostri principi, la nostra moralità, sono innati, sopravviverebbero in qualsiasi contesto anche senza nessuna forma di controllo sociale?" Domanda del romanzo. "Oppure trovandoci in un contesto senza controllo cadremmo completamente a pezzi? E ci farebbero comportare in maniera disumana?" L'importanza di Kurtz sta proprio qui, in questa sua nobiltà d'animo e di principi che crolla miseramente una volta che si trova a faccia a faccia in un contesto completamente diverso. At the end of Chapter 2 Marlow says “I cannot forget Kurtz, anche se non potrei giurare che la sua vita abbia avuto più valore di quella del timoniere africano che ha lavorato al mio fianco." Marlow butta il cadavere del timoniere. Marlow’s steamer is approaching Kurtz’s Inner Station in the heart of the African continent. But the first European person he meets is not Kurtz himself, but a man, in his twenties, who comes from Russia and who is very peculiarly dressed because his clothes are covered in multi-coloured patches: that’s why he’s defined by Marlow “the Harlequin”. His attitude is quite peculiar as well. PART 3 ■ Pag 83 “if the absolutely… of eager fatalism”: The Russian Harlequin distinguishes himself for his enthusiasm. He becomes the incarnation of the youthful enthusiasm and the spirit of adventure. He keeps praising Kurtz (continua a lodarlo), he describes him as a genius, as an outstanding man. This is the object of the Harlequin’s enthusiasm: Kurtz as a model, as a sort of teacher. What it’s not clear is why Conrad decided to describe a character like this in a novel which is dominated by the opposition between light and darkness, black and white, as he’s chromatically out of the context. This could be related to the fact that, at the beginning of the 90th century, partly influenced by the French symbolism of that literary time, the Russian Arlequin is a symbol carrying meanings and it remains open to different interpretations, for example the division of Africa in different colors. The reason why Marlow is fascinated by this character, even if he doesn’t share his enthusiasm, has to do with the fact that little by little, after all he has heard about Kurtz during his voyage, he understands that some things about his job in the station he would never approve. Says : “to speak plainly, he raided (razziava) the country”. The reality is that Kurtz, thanks to his qualities as a leader, has become a sort of divinity, god, for some groups of local natives. He made all these atrocities in order to obtain only one thing: the avory. So, he has completely abandoned all the ideals of colonisation about civilising the savages. Even the Harlequin is reluctant to speak about this side of Kurtz’s life. He tries to justify this and he says, “I kept asking Kurtz to go away” and he would accept but then he would change his mind to go on another ivory hunt. So, he describes Kurtz as swinging between moments in which he realises what he’s doing and moments in which he loses his ethical principles and forgets himself. ■ Pag 85-86 “Now I had suddenly a nearer view…” While Marlow is talking with the Harlequin, he is looking at the station with his binocular (important image of the novel) and he sees something particular about Kurtz’s house that he doesn’t immediately understand. Marlow realizes that Kurtz’s house is surrounded by poles (pali) and on the top of each pole there’s a human head. So not only he committed unspeakable atrocities, he also made it a symbol and a warning about his absolute power there. The word “restraint” (ritegno) here is crucial as it is also used in the second chapter about the natives working on Marlow’s steamer. So it becomes evident that Marlow’s judgements about the natives are more positive compared to the ones he has about Kurtz. But Marlow also found a hand-written sentence by Kurtz at the end of the pamphlet: it’s clear how contradictory the printed version and this written sentence are. “But he wilderness had found him out early”: he came to Africa with many ethical principals but then something happened to him. He found himself in the heart of the African continent, miles away from any manifestation of European civilisation, and he discovered something about himself that he didn’t know: “he was hollow at the core” (vuoto nel nucleo). This is a very important passage of the novel, Kurtz finds out that he had not such innate moral principles. That’s why he devoted himself to such atrocities, he discovers an evil part of himself (like in “Dr. Jekyl and Mr Hyde”). “The hollow men” is also the title of a poem written by T.S. Eliot, who is the most famous anglophone poet from that period. As typical of Conrad this definition contains an ambiguity: what is the origin Kurtz’s discovery? On one hand it seems that it was caused by the wilderness surrounding him and so once again the African forest is presented as something hostile for human beings. On the other hand, we are told “he took counsel with this great solitude” so this seems to come from inside himself. Conrad is not clear about this point that and the novel was criticised for an excess of ambiguity. ■ Pag.87-91 Kurtz appears for the first time but he’s severely ill, so he’s transported on a stretcher (barella) by a group of armed, very aggressive looking natives. The Harlequin says “Now, if he does not say the right thing to them, we are all done for” so it becomes clear that their lives are in danger and that Kurtz is absolutely obeyed by these natives. He is so suffering, and he is described as an “atrocious phantom”: ill and weak. “I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving” this first description of Kurtz given by Marlow, an animated image of death carved out of ivory (morte scavata nell’avorio): he is comparing Kurtz’s grotesque face to a sort of African mask. This is the period in which much of European figurative and visual arts were influenced by the so-called “primitive societies art” (Picasso for example). Kurtz becomes a caricature: “I saw him open his mouth wide” could be taken as a symbol of Kurtz’s voracity. He is described as someone undergoing a sort of degeneration (physical and psychological). The standard colonial exotic novels of the XIX century usually had two kinds of European characters: the hero that was the embodiment of the European civilisation and who remained untouched by non- European cultures and people, and the European who degenerated when coming in contact with non- European people. It’s important the fact of “going native” (as Kurtz) which means “degenerating”. Marlow is neither the hero which remains untouched by the native culture nor the one going native, he’s a middle way between of the two. The centre of the empire, Britain, was supposed to be the civilized part, natives were supposed to remain where they lived, in their own country, in their own culture; there was not supposed to be any contact between them. In this kid of novel, the European hero was supposed to go back home untouched by the native culture while the one going native was supposed to die in this colony. Marlow is a middle way between the two, as he goes back to Europe, but he is not untouched by this experience, so brings back to Europe all his doubts and “darkness” of Africa. Kurtz is very ill, and he has to be taken back to be cured. He wants to save first the ivory he had collected in order to protect it from other people: ”At this moment, I heard Kurt’s deep voice behind the curtain: Save me! Save my ivory!” ■ Pag.92 to the end. The Russian Harlequin clearly tells Marlow that he’s afraid about Kurtz’s conditions. The following night something very peculiar happens: Marlow is sleeping on the steamer and Kurtz too, but Marlow wakes up suddenly and realizes that Kurtz has moved away: “a light was burning within, but Mr.Kurtz was not there, I thing I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes..” Marlow is terrified by a possible attack by natives, something that he can’t understand (un terrore puramente astratto). That’s a typical Conrad’s strategy called the “delayed codification”: Conrad