Heart of Darkness: The Road Back to Tallahassee

There is another blog post in the works, but it is taking a while. I am compiling different feminist theorists and it is a lot to tackle.

For now, I am driving back to Tallahassee. Any good road trip needs tasty snacks and a solid soundtrack. My go-to road food are the original Combos. Now I know they are a garbage food. I know there is no redeeming nutritional value in them. I know I should be ashamed of myself. BUT I AM NOT. Combos are delicious and I love them. I love them so much. They are salty and creamy and taste like sodium. C'est magnifique. But anyways, because I am an adult and try to take care of myself, I only allow myself to eat them when I am driving long distances. Or when I am sad. But I am not sad today--I am driving!

As for my soundtrack? Well, no music for me today. I have six hours of road ahead of me and I am prepared to make good use of my time. I got an audiobook all lined up through Spotify. This book leads to a different sort of excellent combo: Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford.

Last time I read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), I was fifteen years old. I had read Achebe's Things Fall Apart the year prior and had decided Achebe's conclusions were correct: Conrad was a racist. I still think Achebe was right. Heart of Darkness is incredibly dehumanizing in its depiction of the horrors of colonization. I kept thinking about Yeats and the symbolists: was this the Symbolist movement's influence on Conrad? To see the suffering of human beings as nothing more than a representation of some more intangible "truth"?

Okay, so where does Ford fit into this "combo"?

Another part of the Symbolist movement is to consciously create art, and Conrad is certainly constructing an aesthetic. Ford Madox Ford claimed that Conrad, along with Ford himself, intentionally developed a literary impressionism. We can locate the beginnings of this literary impressionism in Heart of Darkness.

I want to locate a few moments where this impressionism emerges.

1. The descriptions of the landscape

• "The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Here and there greyish-whitish specks showed up clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than pinheads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers—to take care of the custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various places—trading places—with names like Gran’ Bassam, Little Popo; names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister back-cloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning. Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality." (he then launches into a super racist description of black slaves/sailors).

• Conrad takes care to use his descriptions not only to establish setting, but to establish tone. Although the narrator, Marlow, gives us the facts of the landscape, he embeds his own perceptions into his account. The land isn't just humid: it "glistens" and almost sweats with perspiration. His description is peppered with "seems," "presumably" and "like's." The monotony experienced by Marlow becomes a part of the landscape itself. Rather than the adventure and excitement that Marlow (and the reader) may have expected from such a journey, the isolation and repetition get associated with the "oily and languid sea" and the "uniform sombreness of the shore." The landscape reflects and exudes the very personality of the novel.

1. The positioning of perspective

• "I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn’t a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to do. I don’t know. Then I nearly fell into a very narrow ravine, almost no more than a scar in the hillside. I discovered that a lot of imported drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in there. There wasn’t one that was not broken. It was a wanton smash-up. At last I got under the trees. My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound—as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly become audible."

• Conrad moves in and out of physical perspectives very easily in this passage. We see one hole in immediate proximity (it is simply a hole, a hole in front of him) before being shown a ravine. The description of the ravine--"no more than a scar in the hillside"--takes us swiftly to a bird's eye view. It is no longer a hole the narrator almost slips into, but a mark on a landscape, the shadowy line across a painting. This more expansive view allows Conrad to travel through time as well, leaving the litany of events as they occurred to show us a glimpse of the future to learn the purpose of the ravine. Conrad then repositions us again underneath the trees. Here, he provides a montage of senses so we receive an impression of the entire forest at once. In a sentence so sudden it is almost breathless, we are shown rapids, trees, shadows, the earth itself. We are everywhere all at once while still being grounded in a precise moment.

1. The construction of time

• "Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for a two-hundred-mile tramp.

“No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through the long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut. The population had cleared out a long time ago. Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon. Only here the dwellings were gone, too. Still I passed through several abandoned villages. There’s something pathetically childish in the ruins of grass walls. Day after day, with the stamp and shuffle of sixty pair of bare feet behind me, each pair under a 60-lb. load. Camp, cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a carrier dead in harness, at rest in the long grass near the path, with an empty water-gourd and his long staff lying by his side. A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild—and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country."

• Again, Marlow infuses tone into every bit of his descriptions. Conrad uses this tone to establish time. Marlow's story jumps through time as he is forced to wait for long periods without much action. But rather than simply saying, "After a few days" or "Once two months had passe," Conrad uses this as an opportunity. By transforming the chronology into an experience of monotony, the reader perceives the passing of time rather than simply being told of the passing of time. Conrad uses repetition to drive home the monotony and boredom. And finally, Conrad uses cultural references to drive home the passing of time but then makes it unfamiliar. By defamiliarizing time markers, the long expanse feels alien and the tension builds--despite nothing happening. The action no longer matters: it is only perception.

Through this early development of the impressionist technique, Conrad, and later Ford, gradually forms one of the aesthetic strands of modernism.

#conrad #heartofdarkness #modernism #aesthetic #impressionism #fordmadoxford