Heart of DarknessIMPRESSIONISTIC STYLE

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Impressionism: 1870s-80s

Why are these paintings so blurry?

Since human sense is unreliable, impression is ambiguous.

Impressionist artists accept the ambiguity inherent in perception, using distortion, blurriness, or fogginess to illustrate the division or distance between what the observer perceives and the reality of the object.

Conrad uses a similar technique in his writing, creating a sense of ambiguity, vagueness, and ambivalence in order to convey a truth about life.

Conrad described his work as “foggish” in its dramatization of Marlow's perceptions of the horrors he encounters.

For Conrad, the world as we experience it (at least as we understand it now) is not the sort of place that can be reduced to a set of clear, explicit truths.

Its truths—the truths of the psyche, of the human mind and soul—are messy, vague, confusing, irrational, and even dark.

Conrad’s style leads his readers to a personal experience of the “heart of darkness.”

It makes no attempt to shed the light of reason on his object; instead, the style attempts to recreate the experience of darkness so that readers can feel it and understand it.

The heart of darkness is something within each of us, something we can recognize and sympathize with.

Ambiguity in the Text (so far)

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him 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, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. “

“to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough, too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.”

“Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.”

Some critics did complain about the

pervasive ambiguity of Heart of Darkness…

Paul O’Prey writes, “It is an irony that the ‘failures’ of Marlow and Kurtz are paralleled by a corresponding failure of Conrad’s technique—brilliant though it is—as the vast abstract darkness he imagines exceeds his capacity to analyze and dramatize, and the very inability to portray the story’s central subject, the ‘unimaginable,’ the ‘impenetrable’becomes a central theme.”

Conrad Responded…

“Explicitness is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion. You seem to believe in literalness and explicitness, in facts and in expression. Yet nothing is more clear than the utter insignificance of explicit statement and also its power to call attention away from things that matter in the region of art.”