Toward a New Critical Approach

Research Article| December 01 2004 Bound in Blackwood’s: The Imperialism of “The Heart of Darkness” in Its Immediate Context William Atkinson William Atkinson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2004) 50 (4): 368–393. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2004-1001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation William Atkinson; Bound in Blackwood’s: The Imperialism of “The Heart of Darkness” in Its Immediate Context. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2004; 50 (4): 368–393. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2004-1001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

"The horror! The horror!":Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a Gothic Novel Jennifer Lipka (bio) The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous, so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction. —"Joseph Conrad (Qtd. in Swisher 12) [The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives, to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—"and to the subtle but invisible convictions of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—"the dead to the living and the living to the unborn [ . . . ] My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—"it is, before all, to make you see. That—"and no more, and it is everything. —"Joseph Conrad (Qtd. in Swisher 34-35) Joseph Conrad said much regarding his role as author to make you see the truth. However, he also said that he didn't like to explain what his books were about, because that would open him up to the criticism that he had failed as an artist to achieve understanding in the audience regarding what he could say the work was "really" about. Fortunately, [End Page 25] the field of literary criticism, theory, and interpretation have stepped in to (ad)venture failure in explaining the meaning and significance of Heart of Darkness. This is another such (ad)venture into the teeming jungle of Conrad's long short story (or short novel), and the equally wild overgrowth of vegetation that is Conrad studies, criticisms, commentaries, and interpretations. According to the editor of the most recent Heart of Darkness casebook, "[t]he cutting edge of literary criticism seems to swing between formal and cultural-historical approaches every twenty years or so" with a pendulum whose swath swings (cuts) through postcolonialism, the adventure genre, historicism, irony, metaphor, the imagery of language, modernism, postmodernism, feminism, deconstructionism, psychology and psychoanalysis, authorial intention, and the philosophical branches of epistemology, morality, and metaphysics (Moore 7). Certainly no Castle of Otranto. Ironically, that is exactly what the lack and void is regarding this novel, where "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine" (Heart 68). Not enough attention has been given to Heart of Darkness as a serious novel of horror, a prime example of the highest of British Gothic fiction. This hero's quest, then, is to examine the flaws and benefits of the more famous works regarding Heart of Darkness and then discuss the work as a Gothic novel, all in terms of the question, Can "traditional" examinations of Heart of Darkness do the story the justice that an interpretation of the novel focusing on its Gothic elements can? Woe to Walter F. Wright, who in his 1949 essay "Ingress to the Heart of Darkness" wrote "[w]e perceive that Africa itself, with its forests, its heat, and its mysteries, is only a symbol of the larger darkness, which is in the heart of man." (Qtd. in Harkness, Conrad's 155) In 1975, all discussion of the Western literary canon, Joseph Conrad, and Heart of Darkness "burst into a blaze so suddenly that you would have thought the earth had opened to let an avenging fire consume all that trash" (Heart 90). Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, a nonfictional African raised in a non-fictional African society shaped by European colonialism, denounced Conrad as a "bloody racist" with "a problem with niggers"; Heart of Darkness as a portrayal of Africans as dumb brute (animal) rudimentary soul savages in a frenzy; and...

The literature addressing colonialism have been produced both by colonizers and colonized. The variances of their perspective on colonialism can be found in their writings. This study, using textual analysis, explores Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali through the lens of postcolonial theory, focusing on the psychological, cultural, and political ramifications of colonialism. The study is qualitative in nature, and the sample passages for analysis from the novels have been selected by using the technique of purposive sampling. Conrad’s work critiques the moral corruption and inhumanity embedded in European imperialism, using Africa as a symbolic landscape to reflect the inner darkness of the colonizers. In contrast, Ali’s novel presents an intimate portrayal of cultural decline and identity loss under British colonial rule in India. While Heart of Darkness reveals the dehumanizing effects of colonial power from the oppressor’s perspective, Twilight in Delhi captures the emotional and cultural disintegration experienced by the colonized. Together, these texts illuminate the complex dynamics of power, resistance, and historical memory central to postcolonial discourse. The significance of the study lies in the fact that it can be used by the teachers, researchers and students as it develops the understanding about the analysis of text written on the subject of colonization.

Tayeb Salih is one of the most influential writers of post-colonial period who bear a torch to devastation and multifaceted and far-reaching results of colonial time by their critical approach. To turn the tables, armed struggle was the first step of resistance for independence in the process of decolonization. But later on, intellectual exertion to construct a national identity was debated aloud to take place the violent opposition because colonizers had not only invaded lands but also they interposed identity, culture and language of colonized people into East-West axis (traditional-modern, barbaric-civilized, underdeveloped-developed) which would be never the same as it had been before colonialism. In this sense, this study aspires to set forth how Season of Migration to the North responds to colonial discourses of Heart of Darkness which springs out of the rooted perspective against the East. At first, Salih makes quiet and passive colonized native characters of Conrad to be heard and then shows how they survive while struggling with doubled identity interposed between East-West and the periods before and after colonization. Salih humanizes who Conrad dehumanizes in Heart of Darkness . However, Joseph Conrad denies offering a solution to the problems of natives like hybridity; Salih comes through a final point for the colonized people. By compare and contrast, the study will try to show how Conrad’s criticism is superficial, insufficient and paradoxical in the means of not providing a remedy for identity problem unlike Tayeb Salih who resolves rooted troubles of colonialism through “mental miscegenation” as Benedict Anderson put forward many years after Salih’s death.

This research paper highlights Joseph Conrad’s satirical portrayal of "The Heart of Darkness" and shows how the white European people, the colonizers, take their lead in the novel to be civilized enough to go over the world and civilize people. Among those people the black people of Dark Continent Africa who were marginalized in the novel and to be called ‘uncivilized’ and ‘savage’ people. Some great empires like the British Empire used the cover of the civilization so as to achieve their desires over the third world countries. Joseph Conrad in his Heart of Darkness talked about these important themes, by showing the hypocritical ways that the British Empire used to colonize the third world countries and how did they use wicked plans to convince the world with their occupation. The British Empire colonized Africa so as to exploit their main resources, especially ivory, to use them in their manufactories. Also, this study aims to show how the British Empire used the cover of religion so as to convince the world of their deeds and to make them legal. This study focuses on the real ‘savagery’ concealing under the cover of ‘civilization’ and the real darkness existing inside the veil of white men. This study is based on historical research linked with a political background of imperialism. This study comes to its conclusion by showing the wicked ways that great empires used to colonize other countries, like Great British, and their policy to spread their control.

Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is one of the chief focal aspects of critical controversy and debate in the fields of literary theory and literary criticism. The aim of the study is to examine the ideological background to viewing Conrad as anti-imperialist in ‘Heart of Darkness’, while dealing also with the presentation of imperialism and racism. The study reveals that Conrad was consciously anti-imperialist but he unconsciously or carelessly employed racist terminology. The novel is a moving record of White imperialism in the Belgian Congo and of the intense suffering of the Africans. It conveys Conrad's nihilistic impression of the Whites who exercised unpardonable authority over natives. As Conrad sets up Africa as a foil to Europe and a place of negation and cannibalism, many contemporary critics viewed the text as a racist work. But in writing about the diabolical practice of White imperialism in Africa, can Conrad be seen as an extremist in terms of racism? Does he support the dehumanization of natives which is practiced by the Whites in the name of a civilizing role? The study scrupulously examines these controversial elements in the text and concludes that Conrad's impressionistic narrative technique, incorporating a pessimistic viewpoint, along with his disillusioned emotions over what seems to be White cannibalism in the Congo, and the excessively grim nature of the novel Heart of Darkness, all serve Conrad's anti-imperialistic perspective effectively. Conrad's anti-imperialistic ideology employed in Heart of Darkness provides then a tremendous attack on inhuman, brutalized White imperialism. The absence of joys, success and optimism that strengthen the impression of extreme negation throughout the novel is evidence of Conrad's deeply anti-imperialistic perspective.

This research emphasizes their narrative stances and criticisms of colonialism. It compares and contrasts Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. The study uses narratological and postcolonial theories to analyze how the characters' experiences mirror and challenge European imperial ideas. Through Robinson Crusoe's claim of dominance over the natural world and indigenous peoples, the story creates a colonial worldview that embodies the Enlightenment-era rationale for imperial expansion. Heart of Darkness, on the other hand, exposes the degrading impacts of colonization on both the colonizers and the colonized by dissecting the beliefs of European supremacy through a fractured narrative and an uncertain moral tone. The study emphasizes how narrative tactics shape ideological underpinnings by tracing the development of colonial discourse from affirmation in Robinson Crusoe to critique in Heart of Darkness. By contrasting these writings, the study highlights their continuing significance in comprehending the intricacies of colonialism and how it is portrayed in literature, providing insights into the relationship between historical context and narrative form.

The critical school of ‘new historicism’ is very much at the centre of contemporary debates on literary studies and theory. Much ‘new historicist’ writing has focused on Renaissance texts, and this book is a timely exploration of that connection and its significance for ‘English’ as a whole. This book subjects many of the most challenging claims of ‘new historicism’ to rigorous analysis, distinguishes sharply between its American and British versions, and probes the causes and consequences of its politicization of literary studies. The philosophical as well as political issues central to current debates are examined and the uses served by the canonical texts at their centre analysed within a broad cultural and historical perspective. This searching reconsideration of contemporary critical theory and practice yields fresh readings of a number of classic texts — including those of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Thomas More's Utopia, John Donne's poetry, and Robert Conrad's Heart of Darkness — as well as a deepened understanding of the complex and changing functions of the canon itself.

This new collection of essays on key Conrad texts - Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and The Secret Agent - will help students to assess the different critical and theoretical approaches which have emerged over the past thirty years. These approaches include post-colonial discourse, feminism, developments in Marxist critical theory as well as narrative theory and the influence of psychoanalysis.

Conrad’s <i>Heart of Darkness</i> and Salih's <i>Season of Migration to the North</i> are about Man’s journey into his self, and the discoveries to be made there about the 'other'. Both novels present the unpleasant and painful experience of colonialism in Africa which has great effects on almost all faces of life such as language, education, religion, popular culture and the like. If Salih's <i>Season of Migration to the North</i> (1966) deals with the perceptions of people in the third world to the West, Conrad's <i>Heart of Darkness</i> deals with the perceptions of Europeans to the third world in Africa. The two novels illustrate that the clashes between East and West are not only external but they are internal too, forcing one to question one's place in a new culture. Marlow's self-concept consists of mental images he has of himself: physical appearance as a white, accomplishments, skills, social talents, roles, intellectual traits, and emotional states. Thus, he feels superior to other Africans. Mustafa Sa’eed's self-concept is that he is intelligent but black and inferior to the Europeans. When he talks about himself Saied sees that he has a wonderful ability for understanding and his mind is like a sharp knife. But he never made use of his intelligence as it should be. Sa’eed emerges as a person who has abused the colonial system because he was abused and destroyed by it, and who has returned to the Sudan, bearing with him the rot and destruction he has come to embody. In both novels the 'self' and the 'other' can be compared in terms of the past colonial experience. The colonial 'other' in Conrad's <i>Heart of Darkness</i> is presented as a vital, alive, wild, superior, triumphant and has an identity, a face, and a personage. But in <i>Season of Migration to the North</i>, the narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed are presented as inferior, passive and degraded. If the narrative of <i>Season</i> expresses a concern about future relations between Arabs and English and asks the question of whether or not Arabs and English can ever truly co-exist, the narrative of <i>Heart of Darkness</i> investigates the same theme but at large. Both novels are based mostly on the cultural and imperial background.

Past, Present and Future: New Historicism versus Cultural Materialism Jürgen Pieters John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: MacMillan, 1998. One of the most conspicuous trends in the recent history of contemporary literary and cultural theory—a field dominated since the early eighties by the so-called “historical turn”—has been the extraordinarily rapid institutionalization of the twin movements of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism within literary studies. Proclaimed by Stephen Greenblatt in 1982 as a novel reading method that would shy away from the critical deficiencies of both the traditional historical school and the various formalist movements by which it was replaced, the New Historicism as it was practiced by Greenblatt and many other Anglo-American Renaissance scholars gained the immediate interest of those who had become dissatisfied with the stringent textualist ideology upheld by most American deconstructionists. Part of the attraction of the New Historicism was the double promise which it contained for practitioners of theory who wanted to move on instead of returning to the practical—i.e. untheoretical—paradigm that had been dominant in the heyday of New Criticism. To these critics, the New Historicism seemed to have it all: not only was it based upon the best of post-structuralist thought (Foucault, Derrida, de Certeau, Barthes and so on), it also applied that thought to the broad investigative field for which it was initially devised—not just to the self-deconstructive rhetorics of canonical literary texts. As Greenblatt himself once put it, post-structuralism in its deconstructive guise “was not only the negative limit but the positive condition for the emergence of New Historicism.”1 As a consequence of this double promise, then, the New Historicism was embraced by many. It became the hotly debated subject of conferences, articles, studies, and special issues of academic journals. From 1985 onwards, a number of critical collections were published that attempted to combine the practical and the theoretical focus inherent to the object of their attention.2 Most of these included, on the one hand, a number of practical pieces in which the New Historicist reading method was applied and/or tested, and, on the other, a number of theoretical articles which reflected upon the critical axioms that, from the beginning, had served as the conceptual basis of the method. Most of the latter, written mainly by scholars supportive of the New Historicist project, were meant as a contribution to the ongoing elaboration of the method under scrutiny. Despite this gradual proliferation of critical attention, however, it has taken quite a while for the first book-length monograph on New Historicism to appear. In 1997, Manchester University Press published Claire Colebrook’s New Literary Histories, a mainly theoretical survey of the movement’s affiliations with the work of contemporary theoreticians such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams and Michel de Certeau. One year later, Colebrook’s study was followed by the book under review here, John Brannigan’s New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. In contrast to that of Colebrook, Brannigan’s study is characterized by an attempt to couple theoretical analysis to practical reading. While the larger part of it is devoted to theoretical and methodological issues, the book also contains four “applications and readings,” in which Brannigan analyzes several literary texts—Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a number of poems by Tennyson, and Yeats’s “Easter 1916.” The purpose of these applications is not only to describe and illustrate the preferred reading tactics of New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, but also to lay bare the critical constraints with which their readings have to cope. Ideally, the latter aim is prepared for in the preceding, theoretical half of the book, which is intended to give the reader an idea of the genesis and the development of both movements and of the critical dilemmas surrounding them. Brannigan concludes his book with two briefer chapters which consider the future of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Brannigan’s work, a critical introduction initially aimed at a general audience of students and other non-specialist readers, suffers both the positive and the negative consequences of its generalist purpose. On the one...

American readers of literature are in general more familiar with Joseph Conrad and his modernist novel Heart of Darkness than with Chinese author Wu Cheng-en (1500-1582) and his classical novel The Journey to West. Readers' uneven acquaintance with two authors makes it necessary to begin this essay with a short account of background of Wu's novel and with a brief plot summary. Published in 1592, The Journey to West is one of four monumental novels of Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), other three being The Romance of Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, and The Golden Lotus. For over three hundred years, author of The Journey to West was thought to be a Taoist patriarch who lived during Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), until Chinese scholar Hu Shih confirmed Wu Cheng-en's authorship in 1923 (Yeh 17). Loosely based on true story of Hsuan-tsang (596-664), a Chinese Buddhist monk who took seventeen years to travel to India and fetch Buddhist scriptures for his people, The Journey to West depicts fictional monk Tripitaka's journey to India to obtain Mahayana scriptures for Tang Emperor. (1) In Sanskrit, name Tripitaka, consisting of tri, which means three, and pitaka, which means basket, alludes to The Three Baskets, title of most basic and possibly earliest body of sacred [Buddhist] writings (Nigosian 142), made up of three collections or principles: theVinayana, Sutta, and Abhidhamma. The Buddhism represented in novel is largely Mahayana Buddhism, which teaches crossing over to other shore of salvation (Plaks 279). (2) The journey begins with Tripitaka and his first disciple Monkey, who, taking shape of a monkey but bearing many humanlike and Godlike attributes, serves as Tripitaka's protector. As journey progresses, more characters are converted and join it, and pilgrims encounter all kinds of monsters, .ends, demons, and perils. Assisted by Monkey and various deities, however, notably Bodhisattva Kuan Yin, pilgrims heroically overcome obstacles, reach their destination, and fulfill their holy mission. At first glance, Heart of Darkness (1902) and The Journey to West seem to have little in common. The former narrates an early twentieth-century English sailor's adventures in Africa on Congo River; latter delineates a seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk's pilgrimage to India. One has been assimilated into canon of modern narrative; other belongs to subgenre of so-called Chinese literati novel. One involves a sailor-hero who serves great cause of British Empire; other portrays a monk-hero acting as messenger for an emperor of Tang dynasty (618-907). Yet a close examination of both novels suggests that despite their apparent disparity, they share a remarkable textual affinity. Both authors employ narrative strategies to diffuse narrative centers (usually constituted by coherent and sometimes monolithic themes) and appeal to narrative voices that create ambiguous epistemological, religious, and ideological points of view. In Heart of Darkness, narrative ambiguity is deployed chiefly by Conrad's play with textual symbol of darkness, which is simultaneously aligned with conflicting epistemological and moral points of view; that is, darkness simultaneously evokes moral decadence of imperialism and inhuman abjection of primitive Africa. In The Journey to West, narrative ambiguity is enacted by Wu's play with intricate, multilayered narrative episodes that simultaneously affirm and undercut multiple themes: Buddhist quest, romantic heroism, and indigenous Taoism and Confucianism. For this reason, Anthony Yu is right to caution that the work [the novel] itself makes constant demand of its readers to heed many levels of nonliteral meaning structured therein (Religion and Literature 133).While narrative ambiguity in Heart of Darkness remains unresolved in end, with such famously ambiguous words as the horror, horror (68) and with such ambiguous references to Africa as the uttermost ends of earth . …

Against common postcolonial and historical readings, this article argues that the rise of the primitive urge to dominate and exploit others is what drives Kurtz and Mustafa Sa’eed, the two main characters in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1966), respectively, to act as primal fathers and thus commit violence on others. Adopting Freud’s theory on the primal-horde and notions like “hypnosis” and “suggestion,” this article reveals the universal theme of the primal father as disguised in an imperial mask in the two novels under discussion. The article argues that the recurrence of the primal father is manifest in narcissistic, paranoid, and sexually rapacious yet apparently gifted characters who act as the Nietzschean “superman.” It then sheds light on the infectious germ of the primal father as reactivated in the narrators of the novels, i.e. in the form of rival Oedipal sons in Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness and the anonymous narrator of Season of Migration to the North. Each narrator (Oedipal son) identifies with the respective protagonist (primal father), and both are fascinated yet repelled by such an affinity. This study is thus an attempt to justify the prevalent darkness haunting the human psyche by arguing that the germ of primitivism recurs in history and world cultures. Though it can lay dormant, it is ready to resurface anytime among the uncivilized or even “the civilized” who claim the white man’s burden. Therefore, this article provides an essential psychoanalytic and comparative intervention to understand the underlying motivations behind imperialism and master/slave power relations.

African literature has often been theorized through an implicit act of adaptation. If orality is the material foundation of African literature, as many have claimed, then the story of modern African literature often turns out to be the development from spoken to written forms (Chinweizu and Madubuike, 1980, p. 4; Irele, 2001, p. 11). But it is easy to find other examples of ‘adaptation’ as an implied metaphor or metadiscourse for the African literary. Chinua Achebe, for example, inspired fiction writers to take up the work of writing history by describing the African novel in terms of its recovery (or rediscovery) of the past (1964; 1965); Okot p’Bitek wrote poems as ‘songs,’ melding musical performance with the written word (1966); the Sundiata epic was rendered as a prose narrative by Djibril Tamsir Niane and Camara Laye (Niane, 1965; Laye, 1978); and Wole Soyinka recast Greek drama in an African context (1973). One might even regard the broad appropriation of Africanist narrative itself — the monopoly on representation enjoyed by texts like Heart of Darkness — as a kind of adaptation: Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, for example, adapts Joseph Conrad’s famous novella, a revisionary inversion which reframes and reconceives the object of its quasi-oedipal antagonism.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart provides an in-depth exploration of Igbo society, its customs, and the devastating effects of European colonization. This paper examines the foundational beliefs of the Igbo people, including their socio-political structures, religious practices, gender roles, and agricultural dependence, which shaped their identity and way of life. The arrival of Christian missionaries and colonial administrators disrupted these traditions, creating conflicts between generations, families, and societal structures. The introduction of Western education, legal systems, and monotheistic beliefs challenged the Igbo worldview, leading to a gradual cultural disintegration. Through an analysis of key events, symbolic elements, and character transformations in the novel, this study highlights the internal and external forces that contributed to the collapse of Igbo society. Additionally, a comparative perspective with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is presented to contrast Achebe’s authentic depiction of African identity with Western portrayals of imperialism. By examining both historical and literary perspectives, this paper underscores the broader implications of colonialism on indigenous societies, emphasizing the loss of cultural heritage, identity, and autonomy.