Modernism in Heart of Darkness Essay

Modernism is one of the most interesting projects of West European and American literature, which identified the backbone movement culture of the 20th century. A new image of man, a new view of space and time, a rigorous analytic abilities, which replaced the inspiration, selfless play with traditional literary techniques – all these combined with the desire of poets and writers of the 20th century to learn to speak on behalf of his ego (self), not superficial, but present, deep… One of the most outstanding representatives of modernism was the great classics of English literature Joseph Conrad, who wrote the famous novel “Heart of Darkness.”
The novel presents the story of the narrator Charlie Marlow about his journey into the depths of the equatorial Africa, to the trading station of the European company to pick up the accumulated goods there – ivory – and take out the sick agent of the company, Mr. Kurtz. The novel can be read as a story about the adventures of Marlowe in the heart of Africa, but it has such a great complexity of organization and is perceived as a philosophical novel that gives an opportunity to directly opposite and mutually exclusive readings.
The novel contains the fundamentally new literary feature of the upcoming 20th century – an unprecedented degree of problems and pluralistic concentration, the ambiguity of their ideological and artistic decisions. After a century of domination of the positivist self-confidence when it seemed that science and literature have already been or are about to find definitive answers to all questions, the coming century epistemological doubts, doubts about the knowability of the world and the human soul.
The world in the literature of modernism is presented as eternally hostile to human chaos, knowing if which is difficult, not available, and only the art (the word) is a mean of organizing the world. Modernists believe that only the art offers a holistic model of reality, and this model should be as complex and internally contradictory as life is, as the secrets of the human soul are. This new concept of world and man require new ways of artistic expression, new ways to interaction with the reader. One of the founders of modernism – Conrad – combines a tendency for a spectacular adventure plot, which is typical for an ordinary adventure novel, with an astounding wealth of content and dramatic complexity of narrative structure.
The literature of that time showed the interest to the problem of evil, its nature and origins. If in the literature of the 19th century, the evil is treated as an integral part of life, which should be recognized and expressed in the work, and thereby expose, then Conrad’s evil, darkness and gloomare leitmotifs of the novel, the evil is incomprehensible and unavoidable. Conrad’s evil is concentrated in the “heart of darkness” – the meaning of the novel’s title is gradually revealed as a comprehension of the heart of black Africa, as a comprehension of evil in human nature. The author doesn’t give the unambiguous answer to the question of what the evil is and where its origins are. There is a story and social motives, exposure of predatory exploitation of colonies, there are anti-racist theme; evil is also spread in nature – African nature is hostile and destructive for Europeans, but the main evil, perhaps, is in the human soul. Evil in Conrad’s novel looks like good. Marlow realizes that his loyalty to humanity goes against all his experience, suggests that the world has no truth, no justice; there is only stupidity idealism, cunning selfishness, greed and fanaticism. Such concept of the world and human impacts shows pessimism that is characteristic for modernism.
Adventures novel acquires a philosophical sense; the same complication occurs in the art of Conrad’s narration. Charlie Marlow is the narrator in several works of Conrad. This is not just a functional character of the narrator, but a vividly outlined image. The author gives him some autobiographical features – he is a sailor with a great life experience (Conrad, 2004). Marlow is not conditional narrator, inherent to the earlier literature.
In the “Heart of Darkness” Conrad is presented as a vindicator of imperialism and it can proved by text of the novel. The author depicts Africa the same as the “heart of darkness”, the negative sense, the metaphor can not be ignored. The river is winding, dangerous, sinister and is a symbol of darkness. Some racial prejudice is also present in the text, but any purely ideological approaches to the text do not answer the question: what is the power of the novel?
Conrad comes from the recognition of an insoluble contradiction of the world, so his artistic world has everything. The action takes place on the backdrop of nature, in comparison with which a person is ridiculously small, and the human story is ridiculously arrogant presumption. Conrad’s world is really tragic – it is full of terrible secrets, for which there are no words in human language, and which better to remain nameless. Here comes silence (skipping the most important) – an important method for the Conrad and the poetics of modernism. The plot, content, style of the novel are inseparably fused to achieve a single, common effect, which is multilayered, ambiguous, fascinating complexity of the work, which opens new sides for reader while reading (Kolocotroni, 2010).
Aestheticism with its mannered affectations, reminding the late romanticism, together with modernism, with its grim, unflinching look at the world and man, fully absorbed the lessons of realism and naturalism, are equally obliged to the literature of the 19th century – both trends at the turn of the century are equally seen as new, rebellious. However, the allocation of different set of problems and their solutions set up different proportion of these areas in the history of literature from a historical perspective – aestheticism became a monument of past age, while modernism in the next stage of literary development became a leading trend in world literature.