Heart of Darkness: London as the Center of the Civilized World - Research Paper Example

Heart of Darkness In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the main character Marlow continuously calls into question the modern assumptions that are made by his listeners as well as his readers, blurring the lines between inward and outward, civilized and savage and, most especially, dark and light. The bulk of the book concentrates on Marlowe’s telling of his adventures on the Congo River as a steamboat captain sent in to find a station master who has gone missing. As he struggles to make his way up the river to the interior where this man is supposed to be waiting for him, Marlowe begins to gain a deeper understanding of what is actually occurring in the forest outside the realm of what he’s been told by the Company. It is explained from the beginning of the book that Marlowe is different from most men in that he does not search for a great depth of meaning on the inside, as had been the tradition in everything from art analysis to psychology, but rather that he seeks meaning from the outside of things, by what can be seen and touched about a man and therefore proved to no false assumptions. However, what he sees in the Congo makes gaining meaning from the story difficult at best as nothing seems to be established in such dyadic certainty, a fact that is underscored as the story begins. Like the rest of the story, in which everything seems to be reversed with its opposite or at best misunderstood in its entirety, the opening of the novel takes place many years after the rest of the story and offers a summation prior to the story’s being told. In making his comments upon London, Marlowe, and Conrad by extension, illustrates how the lessons learned in the jungle regarding society’s unreasonable dependence upon false cultural definitions are as applicable to the outside world as they were to the alien world of the Congo shown in the rest of the story. The concepts of inward and outward, civilized and savage and light and dark are recurrent themes throughout the novel, introduced at the novel’s beginning and illustrating how each of these words are actually defined by cultural rather than actual standards. They are brought forward in a variety of ways beginning with Marlowe’s observations on the Thames River and his comparison of same with his experiences on the Congo. As the narrator notices the sun setting over the Thames, a condition that most would view as the onset of darkness, the narrator notes that “the serenity became less brilliant but more profound” (Part 1). This in itself suggests that though the sky is becoming darker, the meaning of this darkness is becoming clearer. The picture that immediately springs to mind is that of an individual squinting into the sunlight to make out a shape on the horizon. When the brightness is suddenly dimmed, plunging things into a greater darkness, the individual is able to now recognize the shape as something intimately familiar to them. This image is at the heart of the story and is illustrated so eloquently now as a means of bringing this concept to the attention of the reader and the listener so it perhaps will not be lost in the greater telling. Light and dark is also used to illustrate the difference between civilized and savage, with the light always referring to the civilized world. This is obvious as the other men sitting on the ship on the Thames at the opening to the story have been discussing how the great heroes, the knights-errant of the sea, have made their way in similar fashion down the Thames and out into the dark places of the world, suggesting they were bringing light to other places of the world and defending the light of England against the dark hordes of other nations. They also comment upon the way in which this light was kindly distributed throughout the dark places of the world as the settlers and colonists bravely left their bright land and traveled down the Thames to dark areas that wanted exploration. In this, it is seen that bringing light to dark areas is a positive thing, always helping the savage people who are affected by it whether they know they want it or not. However, in this scene, as in the bulk of the novel, Marlowe tends to turn everything inside out, making dark seem light, in seem out and civilized seem barbaric. Keeping in mind how the light tends to blind people to the truth, Marlowe suddenly breaks the reverie with a startling observation. “And this also … has been one of the dark places of the earth” (Part 1). In this line, he could as easily be talking about the blindness of his comrades in not seeing past the propaganda of the trading companies regarding the effects of their activities in the darker regions of the world as he is discussing the distant past history of England. To make his point clear regarding England’s own experience with light, Marlowe explains himself by illustrating how this lead-gray, bleak land was once the savage, dark place visited by the Romans. Despite finding a flourishing society on these islands, the Romans felt lost in the darkness themselves. “Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages – precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. … Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay – cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death – death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush” (Part 1). Much of this description could be equally applied to the lands of the Congo, in which Europeans died in great numbers as they fell to the strange diseases and other hazards of an unfamiliar world. The Romans, like the younger Marlowe and his associates in the Congo, had no light to guide their way to the interior of a land defined by them as dark, but that operated well enough on its own with its own people. The Englishmen to whom Marlowe was speaking were well aware of the brutality of the Romans as well, knowing them as conquerors, who “grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness” (Part 1). Despite any claims to the contrary, Marlowe is indicating here, as he will throughout his adventurous story, that the claims of imperialism are little more than an excuse to plunder and steal, blinding outsiders with the light they’re supposedly bringing to the interior so little can be seen of the ravages occurring on the edges as the savages are brutally killed and the civilized men profit from their spoils. Thus, starting from the very first chapter as Marlow challenges the assumption that London is the center of the civilized world, Heart of Darkness can be seen to challenge many of the assumptions regarding basic values as they relate to those who exist outside one’s personal cultural background. In making this speech, Marlowe sums up a great deal of what he has to say throughout the remainder of the novel. By confusing the concepts of light and dark, civilized and savage and inside and outside, he makes it clear that no single definition of such terms can be applied as universally good or bad. Instead, through his London analogy as well as the inconclusive tale he tells regarding the Congo, he suggests that the actions of men, looked at from the outside and as objectively as possible, can only indicate where definitions fail and new understandings must be sought. Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. The Literature Network (2006). Read More