Riassunto Introduzione ad Heart of Darkness, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Riassunto Introduzione ad Heart of Darkness e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Elisabetta Areniello 1 Letteratura Inglese II When he was 9, Conrad pointed at Africa on a geographical map and wished he could explore that “blank space” because then it was unexplored. At the beginning of “Heart of Darkness”, Marlow tells the same episode to his listeners, with his wish to visit specially Congo, the blankest of all. Conrad went to Africa in 1890 and came back almost dead with memories and disillusions from which he took inspiration for “Heart of Darkness”. His events are told in his letters and in the two “Congo Diaries”in which Conrad wrote his impressions. About the Congo history, when Conrad went to Congo, between 1884 and 1885 the Independent State of Congo was born, and Leopold II of Belgium was king as a personal title. Congo would become a colony just in 1908, as the final act of Leopold’s settlement policy, because it was the last unexplored land in Africa and not yet subject of partition, so that was a desired prey for the colonial grandeur of a little State like Belgium. In 1876 Leopold summoned an international geographic Convention in Bruxelles, ended with the foundation of the Association internationale pour l’exploration et la civilisation en Afrique, of which Leopold himself was president. He gave Stanley the job to complete the African exploration. Theoretically, that land should have been a place for free commerce open to all the European nations. Instead, each one of these nations followed its own colonial policy. The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 wanted by Otto von Bismarck, ended with the allocation of the lands at the north of the river to France, and with the birth of the Etat Indépendent du Congo, whose king was Leopold who drew the borderlines himself. But Congo was not that independent, because in reality it was a private reign governed through an administrator, 15 commissioners (one for each province) and the omni powerful Société anonyme belge pour le commerce du Haut-Congo. Leopold exalted the European mission into the African wilderness. But, in fact, he conducted a brutal exploitation policy, causing almost a genocide. Elisabetta Areniello 2 Letteratura Inglese II The natives, that Leopold said to “free from slavery”, were forced to work as slaves (even if formerly “free”), and the order was kept by soldiers to grant the respect of the law and the maximum profit through violence. Leopold’s true plan wanted to create a great central African Empire extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This policy caused strong reactions from Europe. In the end of the 18th century, England established different trading stations on the coast that had to make agreements with the local kings and contribute to the abolition of slavery and the conversion of the pagans. If England supported these policies in the first place, when the Belgian’s real goals were evident the support transformed into opposition. The Lower Congo was so important because, before the Suez Canal, it was the only way to India. Hostility against Leopold grew strong and the public opinion mobilised a press campaign that focused of the Belgium violence. The British Consul in charge of investigating, presented a report that forced Leopold to nominate an International Commission in 1905. In “Heart of Darkness” there’s the echo of that British press campaign against Leopold II and his colonial policy. Conrad defined a contemporary topic not topically treated, so he deletes every reference to history or geography, to make the story exemplar by making Belgium like Europe’s and Western’s metaphor. “Heart of Darkness” has to be read on multiple levels: 1. : Conrad depicts an act of accusation towards any white colonialism, proved by the fact that many characters belong to different European Countries, like Kurtz (he summarizes all Europe, as he is a German at Belgium’s services, his father is half-French and his mother is half-British). The whole colonial policy is targeted, included the idea of colonisation itself as an act of violence on populations believed as inferiors and became the objective of the civilization mission. Those are nothing more than alibis to promote trade and death. So, even though Conrad was a conservator, all Europe is summoned and its past too. That explains the references, at the beginning of the novel, to the Elizabethan Age and the Roman Age. The writer wanted to involve the whole European civilization’s history, from its origins, to his peak, until his decline. Drake and the other explorers weren’t different from the 19th-century explorers, which are actually worse because at least, at the time the violence wasn’t hidden and occulted behind the hypocrite pretence of the civilizing mission. Recalling the Romans demonstrates that the whole European civilization is born from an act of robbery with violence, and now they reproduce it. The story begins and ends with two scenes of darkness about the centre of Civilization: London, the Capital of Modern World, the Western Man’s city. The gloom that floats through London has become the Elisabetta Areniello 5 Letteratura Inglese II The only darkness that Marlow meets, his Kurtz’s, like proved on his death scene. Marlow realizes that Kurtz’s tragic destiny are somewhat possible for him as well, and that’s why he recognizes himself in him, but with a difference: he reacts to this temptation. The voice speaking to Marlow, is his moral consciousness, a whole with his civil identity that he will defend by focusing on his job. Job’s duty and ethic represent the fidelity to the code of the bourgeois Victorian life. The job is seen as a restraint against the seductive wilderness and, like Freud said, as a mean of repression, even though Marlow knows it is just a fiction, a salvific illusion, a mask used by civilization and consciousness to be what they are not and to hide what they are. Marlow employs the same strategy with Kurtz: he doesn’t want to know anything about the unspeakable rituals and he will look away when Kurtz dies. Marlow resists once more when there’s the announcement of Kurtz’s death and the crew run to see him while he stays in the cafeteria eating because “darkness was too frightening inside there” and he wants to stay in the light. That’s just because Marlow really understood Kurtz’s tragedy and saw the abyss that he wants to stay as far as possible from it and stick to the everyday routine, the only available mean of salvation. This bitter disenchantment, mixed with scepticism and stoicism, is the ultimate wisdom that Marlow brings from his journey from the heart of darkness. It is an initiation because, following Kurtz through the forest of the same shadows that overwhelmed him, Marlow tested himself and came out as safe for his resistance and self-consciousness. 3. : for all of his journey, Marlow can’t stop asking himself the significance of everything. Here, the topic has to split, because Marlow questions himself about 2 principal subjects: • Wilderness; • White’s society. But everything stays an enigma to which we can’t find an answer. Finding himself in a different world, Marlow feels dizzy: each time he thinks he understood something, he has to change his mind. Each belief vacillate, and Marlow is forced to surrender and accepting the fact that he just won’t understand. At most, he reaches a negative knowledge about wilderness, which means he guesses what the wilderness is not, but he can’t understand what it actually is. In the very moment he confesses he can’t understand, Marlow frees himself from the presumption of being able to understand, which is the congenital vice of his culture to project the removed part on the Other and making it his spiritual double. Africa’s truth is destined to stay beyond Marlow’s possibilities just for the fact that he is white. The scene in which he and his crew are surrounded by the milky fog when they arrive, is the symbol of their impossibility to see and to understand what the fog hides: the waste land. Here, Africa returns to be a blank space. Elisabetta Areniello 6 Letteratura Inglese II On the way back, the novel touches his highest (auto critical) point. Marlow renounces because he understands that every cognitive act is not different from every other act of dominance. Knowledge itself is a kind of power too, and executing it on Another is like a violence that deprives him of his own identity to force on him a different one. The only way to really know the Other, is becoming the Other, which would be like losing yourself like Kurtz does. That’s why, at a certain point, Marlow stops questioning about the savages. But if he can’t understand the wilderness, he can understand his own civilization, as he is a witness of colonialism’s tragedy and he unmasked its hypocrisy. The dreamlike traits intensify as Marlow gets close to Kurtz and configure his quest like a downhill to the Western identity’s underworld, in its darkness. Marlow, posing like the Enlightened Buddha, wants to transmit to his listeners that horrific truth. Having discovered that the darkness belongs to his world and his fellow, Marlow comes back where it is originated and spreads. There, in the only true heart of darkness, knowledge can and must be exercised. Beyond the edge where Marlow stops, Kurtz lost himself. But this loss is also a conquest of experience and knowledge that go beyond Marlow’s. That’s the price that Kurtz had to pay to reach the end of his journey and to really see to the core the horror. Marlow recognises him this tragic greatness, that’s why he calls him a remarkable man. Kurtz lived all the illusions and disillusions, but he chose the wilderness, without trying to turn that darkness into a new light or that evil into a new kind of good. Negative stayed as negative, and Kurtz practised like it, perfectly conscious. This consciousness, to which Marlow is just a spectator, is expressed in Kurtz’s last words: “The horror! The horror!”. He had summed up and judged himself. But this verdict was a moral victory, not because Kurtz repented, but because that scream expresses a supreme knowledge of the negative which is a sort of self-awareness. In opposition to Kurtz, Marlow is a sort of anti-hero, as that self-awareness will remain inaccessible to him. Kurtz dumped himself in the abyss while Marlow just took a look at it. Marlow feels the temptation to choose the negative, but he steps back, because saving the looks prevents him to follow Kurtz, who chooses to die to his world. Marlow, instead, chose to stay in that place in between, tepid and grey, the compromise and the scepticism. He understood that values and principles are useless, but he decided to stick with them anyway, and to come back to that lie. If Marlow would have followed Kurtz, his truth would have died with him. Now, instead, someone can tell it, even if in an uncertain and unclear way. As he came back in Bruxelles, everyone wanted to know informations about the extinguished Kurtz, but Marlow doesn’t tell anyone about Kurtz’s secret. Truth is not for everyone, and Marlow only decides to give some slices of Kurtz’s surface. Marlow thinks he can tell the truth to one person only: the Intended, Kurtz’s fiancé. Elisabetta Areniello 7 Letteratura Inglese II The meeting with the Intended, pathetic and fictive epilogue of the tragedy that Marlow witnessed, is one of the most memorable and Jamesian scenes in Conrad, where he used the same chromatic symbolism that governs the entire story: black vs white. In Marlow’s hopes, that scene should have been the victory in extremis of truth upon lies, light upon darkness, but in reality it’s the opposite. As the conversation goes on, the darkness spreads in the room. In the end, when Marlow stops talking, he can’t almost see anything and he himself becomes just a voice in the dark. Marlow betrayed Kurtz by not giving him the justice he deserved: even though he hates lying among everything, he lies to the pure Intended, by telling her that Kurtz’s last words were her name, like in a fin de siècle melodrama. Nobody, except Marlow, heard Kurtz, and no one will. The European citizens will keep living as if nothing happened. Marlow saves the illusions by lying to Kurtz’s fiancé with his comforting words that darken and makes him an accomplice. That’s his cowardice: where he stands in front of the supreme occasion to speak, Marlow, unlike Kurtz, hesitates and steps back, failing his quest. But actually, he doesn’t really fail. He lies to the Intended, but not to the Nellie’s crew, the listeners. Conrad tells the truth to the readers. There’s one more problem: how to tell that truth, because, gone in the heart of darkness, Marlow/Conrad went beyond the boundaries of language. Kurtz’s example is a lesson for Marlow. Kurtz fancies his listeners with a hollow eloquence, a manipulatory instrument, a seductive strategy. Through Kurtz, Marlow realizes that even language is power. Words don’t just occult reality, but they can be a mean of dominance as well. His voice is Kurtz’s essence until the very last, and it resists when his life slips away. He uses words to cover and not to be able to look at his other self. He wants to restate his identity in extremis by speaking. When his time has come, the double joins his consciousness and becomes the words: “The horror! The horror!”. Marlow wants to stick on this word. Marlow is just a voice for his listeners as well, but his speech is antithetic to Kurtz’s because he doesn’t use language to manipulate and occult, but to reveal. His dry, bitter and sarcastic report is Kurtz’s counterpart: not an apology, but a denunciation; an unmasking of colonialism’s fiction.