Through the narrative device that Watt has defined as “delayed decoding,” Conrad records first the impressions that an event makes on Marlow and only later Marlow’s arrival at an explanation of the event. As Conrad’s interpreter, Ian Watt, has observed, “the abstract geometry of the metaphor is symbolist because the meaning of the story, represented by the shell of a nut or the haze around the glow, is larger than its narrative vehicle, the kernel or the glow but the sensory quality of the metaphor, the mist and haze, is essentially impressionist.” Most of the story is told from the perspective of Marlow, and much of the time he seems unsure what is happening to him. Bibliographic Record Number: 39002036137827.Ĭonrad’s use of polyvalent symbols like the knitters of black wool, the grove of death, or Kurtz himself, suggests his connection to symbolist tendencies, but his famously hazy literary technique owed more to impressionism. Source: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. “Oh! The horror!”: page 285 of the original manuscript of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (click to enlarge).

No single interpretation exhausts its meaning. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character.” One reason for the centrality of Heart of Darkness to the history of modernism is its openness to interpretation: Marlow’s journey to central Africa to confront the power-mad Kurtz can be interpreted as a political statement about imperialism and race, a critique of bureaucracy, a journey to the center of the self, a descent into Hell, or a voyage up the birth canal. While not aligning himself specifically with French symbolism, he wrote that “a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion.

Rather, its meanings evade the interpreter they are larger than the story itself.Ĭonrad, a Pole who had worked as a sailor and then captain on French and British ships before becoming a naturalized British subject, admired Flaubert and knew French literature well. In the voice of his frame narrator, Conrad provides a crucial image for understanding the symbolism of modern literature when he explains that the stories of Marlow, the narrator of most of the novella, differ from those of other sailors: “The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut… 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.” Heart of Darkness does not reveal its meaning in digestible morsels, like the kernel of a nut. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ( 1899) is an early and important example of modernist experimentation in English fiction.

Heart of darkness cliff notes