Heart of Darkness and Modernist Literature - Blurring the Lines of Distinction

Written at the turn of the century, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darknesspresupposed the modernism movement in literature in form and theme, if not in style, setting the stage and inspiring the writers who would work in the last days of global imperialism, and under the shadow of two world wars.

When we look at the essential texts of the modernist period in literature, the books are highly complex (almost) without exception. Though they may be difficult and intellectually challenging in different ways, Ulysses, "The Wasteland", The Sound and the Fury, and From the Lighthouse are bound together by an interest in formally conveying the wrinkles and nuances of the human mind, exploring the convolutions of thought; the concatenations of the emotions and the spirit, and questioning the relationship of man to mind, mind to self, and self to truth.

The world spins, in these works, with unarrestable speed and noise. And this huffing, puffing, explosion of a world exists in the mind, which, in the modernist novel, exists in the text.

Heart of Darkness focuses on the same series of relationships: man to mind, mind to self, and self to truth.

The formal structure of the novel removes us from the possibility of full confidence as to the truth of the story. An unnamed "frame narrator" introduces us to Marlow who then tells us a story. This story takes place some time in the past, so that even the teller of the story is removed from the immediacy of fact and experience by some distance of time.

As Heart of Darkness progresses, a certain theme of relationship to truth becomes central, first evidenced by the symbolic and mysterious character of Kurtz.

The test is run again and again. What is a character's relationship to Kurtz? This is a principal question. It is asked of Marlow by the men he encounters and it is asked by Marlow of each man he encounters.

The radical, maverick, genius - Kurtz - he exists somewhere in the heart of the jungle, cut off from civilization by miles and miles of dark forest, a murky river the only line that connects him still to humanity. Kurtz is very much a modernist figure posed, in Heart of Darkness, as a question that spirals inward on itself, endlessly complicating man's ability to achieve purity, true knowledge of his own nature, and peace in a dying world.

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Pushing the novel's thematic complexity to a new level, the mythical prize is won. Kurtz is discovered, dying, in his jungle home. Where he had been the symbol of impossible knowledge, he becomes the actual knowledge, attained. He is the hidden power laid to hand. And he is impotent like a stone tossed into the sea.

Kurtz' relationship to his project in the jungle (and to a human, value-oriented world) is brought into question at the same time his relationship to his hard-won insight is shown to be hollow. Kurtz peers over the edge of order into chaos, to see the meaning of what it means to be human in the modern world, and he comes back to whisper, "the horror, the horror."

Industrialization has already begun. The age of imperialism is rapidly coming to a end. The shape of the the world is changing.

This was, for Kurtz, an effort to ride the dying horse - his own dying historical moment - up a mountain top and it turns out that just because the horse is dying, or dead, the view does not transform one with glory. There is no final soliloquy on the mountaintop. There is just air, just a lot of air and darkness.

Maybe it is the horse's fault. History, it would seem, does not deliver epiphanies. History does not deal in endings.

It is a body of facts, doings, sayings, all gone. And, as it has always done, history just keeps going regardless of the death of any one "historical moment".

Modernism, as a literary movement, embraces the concept of history as value-neutral, though beautiful, and rhapsodizes on the subject of subjectivity and perspective. The glory may still be there, undiminished, if we can accept the notion that it won't apply to everyone. So we should seek to say, not the "one great true thing", but, instead, one thing that is great and true.

Kurtz, however, cannot contain the truth he has discovered. He cannot contain it in his mind and he cannot bear it in his soul. As the world marches ahead, he runs into the heart of the jungle, a man that once held to progressive beliefs. He is brought to write in his last letter to humanity, "Kill the brutes."

When the animal fact is made clear to him that there is no super-animal truth which might pull all the backwards world up from the muck, he says, "Kill the brutes."

When Kurtz realizes that he cannot save anyone with this truth, he whispers, "the horror, the horror."

When he senses that history and progress are not synonymous with improvement, he runs away entirely from morality and philosophy and so dies, a wreck at the end of a wild river, overcome, as a consciousness, inchoate and primordial like the earth and its people who will go on living long after he is dead, always the seed and never the flower.

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By the time we reach this pivotal episode in the novel Marlow has learned to doubt the sanity of those around him, including Kurtz. Kurtz stands as an extreme example of a man who has stripped the trappings of the world away so that he stands bare, more savage while also more a spirit of pure intellect than any other the African continent can boast. He is "self" laid bare. How does he relate to the truth? How does the truth receive him? How does he perceive the sublime insight, in the end, when he has reached the point of true, animal-spiritual-psychological liberation?

The answer is less important than the fact that these questions are integral to the novel. Heart of Darkness, because it reaches for these themes regarding modern man, is a modernist novel. Perhaps, it is the quintessential modernist novel.

Reference:
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_literature