Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: That notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams... Conrad, Heart of Darkness One of Western culture's major literary works to be inspired by the colonial situation is undoubtedly Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902).The symbolist procedures that make Conrad's narrative discourse often ambiguous decisively contribute to preserve the sense of mystery that is the central aim of the novel's fictional construction.This sense of mystery encompasses the presentation of characters, the description of territory, and the relations established between them.In this essay, I will try to show the way in which some aspects of two of Saramago's novels ( The Stone Raft [1986] and Blindness [1995]) can best be understood in the light of the cultural legacy bequeathed by Conrad's novella and how they can be interpreted from a contemporary postcolonial perspective.Given the diversity of textual procedures used by Conrad, it appears that the absence of precise references to the African territory (very probably the territory of Congo, as is now generally accepted by critics) cannot be the result of an unlikely narrative lapse.The strangeness of the details describing the environment where Marlow's voyage takes place may in fact connect the plot to any exotic country subject to colonial exploration, and the story acquires, by way of this careful erasure of most of the African specificities, an exemplary, even transcendental, dimension that is reinforced not only by its title and by the motifs of shadow and darkness constantly present in its PORTUGUESE LITERARY & CULTURAL STUDIES 6 semantic construct, but also, and very particularly, by the enigma that the core of the narrative intriguingly builds up, elevating the primarily biological notion of "heart" to an ineffable dimension of humanism.This enigma is simultaneously that of all narrative construction, the veil of obscurity surrounding the beginning of every story that can ever be told, and of this one in particular: as Marlow says, nostalgically contemplating the sunset over the Thames: "And this also ... has been one of the dark places of the earth" ( 6).An enigmatic aura dominates also the main character's sense of behavior; while many answers regarding Mr. Kurtz's identity and nature are progressively given to Marlow and to the reader, they only contribute to further envelop that character in an atmosphere of mystery: "a first-class agent," "a very remarkable person" (30), "a prodigy" (42).But that enigma consists mainly of the difficulty in understanding the nature of a man acting in a position of command over other men, that is, of exploitation, which in fact is Kurtz's role, who represents moreover the occupation of a land where he, a non-native, must be viewed as a declared and accepted master; in other words, an entirely strange entity made up of people's beliefs, the force of the earth, and the assumption of power by a singular, individual human being.That combination, experienced as simultaneously positive and negative (both "a heart of a conquering darkness" and "the horror" [130]), is viewed in the text as both inevitable and unintelligible; moreover, its culmination in a process of human behavior that can not be considered accomplished by the satisfaction of greed and by the practice of power opens a clear path for postcolonial reasoning.In fact, Heart of Darkness remains throughout a narrative minutely engaged with the colonial project, specifically exploration and trade, dealing both with goods (ivory) and with human feelings (a taste for adventure).In this sense, it treats particular semantic concerns, such as knowledge and otherness, voyaging and the river, earth and the emergence of races, intention and contingency, the search and the enigma, and, finally-in the return to England and the Nellie, the cruising yawl where the story is told-the island and the unbounded vastness of the sea.But what seems particular and enticing in this narrative, and what was rendered emblematic during the widespread decolonization process of the twentieth century, is the fact that greatness is emphasized in projects, feelings and ways of acting that are turned into forms of tragic derision, into deception and the impossibility of understanding human relations and events.What is more, the spirit of adventure and the exercise of mastery seem to be reabsorbed by an ultimate
DOI: 10.62791/23rk6n60
Author: Maria Alzira Seixo
Language: English
Topic: Joseph Conrad and Literature
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2782678685