Heart of darkness

by

Joseph Conrad

Born Józef Teodor Nałęcz Konrad Korzeniowski, on December 3, 1857 in Berdyczow, in what is now Ukraine, he was brought up in Russian-occupied Poland. His father, an impoverished aristocrat, writer, and militant fighter, was arrested by the occupying regime for his patriotic activities, and was sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia. Shortly after this, his mother died of tuberculosis in exile, and, despite his being allowed to return to Cracow, so did his father four years later.

Subsequently Conrad was brought up by his uncle. Conrad eventually abandoned his education at the age of 17 to become a seaman in the French merchant navy. He lived an adventurous, buccaneering life—sailing off Marseille and becoming involved in gunrunning and political conspiracy. In 1878, after attempted suicide, Józef took service on a British ship in order to avoid French military service. He gained his Master Mariner's certificate, learned English before the age of 21, to finally become a naturalized Briton in 1884. He lived in Lowestoft, Suffolk, and later near Canterbury, Kent.

His first novel, Almayer's Folly, a story of Malaysia, was written in English and published in 1895. It should be remembered that the lingua franca of educated people at that time was French, which was Conrad's second language, thus it is altogether remarkable that Conrad should write so fluently and effectively in his third language.

His literary work bridges the gap between the classical literary tradition of writers such as Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky and the emergent modernist schools of writing. Interestingly, he despised Dostoevsky, and Russian writers as a rule, only making an exception for Ivan Turgenev. Conrad is now best known for the novella, Heart of Darkness.

Joseph Conrad died of a heart attack, and was interred in Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, England, with three mistakes in his name on the grave-stone.

The story within a story device actually descends four levels: Conrad writes the story we read, which is the account of an unnamed man relating Marlow's yarn of his journey down the Congo river to meet and examine the central character Kurtz.

The theme of "darkness" from the title is reflected constantly within the book, in many different senses of the term. It is used to reflect the unknown (as Africa at the time was often called the "Dark Continent" by Europeans), the concept of the "darkness of barbarism" contrasted with the "light of civilization" (see white man's burden), and the "spiritual darkness" of several characters. This sense of darkness also lends itself to a related theme of obscurity - again, in various senses, reflecting the ambiguities in the work. Moral issues are not clear-cut; that which ought to be (in various senses) on the side of "light" is in fact mired in darkness, and so forth.

To emphasize the theme of darkness within ourselves, Marlow's narration takes place on a yacht in the Thames tidal estuary. Early in the novella, the narrator recounts how London, the here-and-now where Conrad wrote and where a large part of his audience lived, was itself in Roman times a dark part of the world much like the Congo then was. Like Marlow himself, the astute reader emerges from the tale with an expanded comprehension of the darkness within his own mind.

Themes developed in the novella's more superficial levels include the naïveté of Europeans - particularly women - regarding the various forms of darkness in the Congo; the Belgian colonialists' abuse of the natives; and man's potential for two-facedness. The symbolic levels of the book expand on all of these in terms of a struggle between good and evil, not so much between people as within every major character's soul.

The novel has been filmed a few times under the name Heart of Darkness; Francis Ford Coppola also based Apocalypse Now loosely on the novel.

(From Wikipedia, The free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org )

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/ConDark.html