Inner Darkness Essays - Literature, Fiction, Culture, Orientalism

" Inner Darkness" Inner Darkness Reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a true study of how men come to lose their hope in humanity. It also displays the overtly cynical and sometimes racist and purist overtones that plagued Europe in its early days. During a cruise along the River Thames, Charles Marlowe reminisces on his days sailing through Africa, and how the experience has shaped his life. The supporting players in his life, and his selective memories of each one, paints a picture of the unknowing, rather prejudiced man he was before, and the wiser man he has become. In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness , a combination of orientalism's view of "the other," feminism's patriarchal socialization, and Friedrich Nietzsche's nihilistic theories illustrates how overall prejudice leads to a fear of the unknown and clashes between cultures. Rather than trying to understand the natives, Marlowe and his colleagues take a position of control and sometimes antagonism towards them, leading to a realization that they have been sheltered by their Occidental lifestyles and missed out on vital life experience. Their only relation to the white man is as slaves, and to Marlowe, this is precisely how it should be. Watching the African-American rowers, he remarks "'We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fellowscannibalsin their place'" (Conrad 35). What does Marlowe truly mean by this last portion? Is he simply happy for the extra hands, or glad to see black men working for the whites as they were meant to do for so long? Edward Said's discourse on Orientalism strongly supports the latter. In his essay, simply titled "Orientalism," he notes that the dynamic between whites and Orients "[Is] a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony" (Said 1870). And we do not help that relationship at all by using phrases such as "in their place," which only serve to bring the Orients down and strain the already complex relations that exist between the two parties. Because of this, the few complimentary gestures extended towards the natives feels slightly less significant and makes the contrasting portrayals all the more representative of Marlowe's lack of understanding. Although he considers the black sailors to be "in their place," he still extends the occasional expression of sympathy. Watching the slaves practically on their deathbeds, he marvels that "They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly nownothing but black shadows of disease and starvation'" (Conrad 11). The word "shadows" says a good deal about how the blacks had been treated even before illness consumed them. Even watching them seconds from death, Marlowe cannot seem to get away from seeing in only the most negative terms possible. It seems to indicate that once they are gone, what little sympathy he has for them will cease, and they will be all but forgotten. In his own essay on Heart of Darkness , Chinua Achebe mentions Conrad's "[Bestowal] of human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other" (1616). Indeed, the black characters remain all but wordless for most of the story. Even the portrayal of the African coast is plagued by obscurity, and treated as otherworldly when compared to Europe. In her article "Unspeakable Secrets," Anne McClintock describes Marlowe's first view of the coast as "[A] struggle that goes beyond the question of perception and involves the very stuff of language itselfAfrica is protean and featureless' because it has withdrawn beyond the horizon of new language" (41). Knowing the historical context, the reasoning could be that the whites have kept the inhabitants in their place for so long that speech has completely escaped them. The problem is that by depriving them of their faculties of speech, Conrad has upset the balance between Apolline and Dionysiac contrasts, as detailed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. He describes the differing ideals with "[The] Appoline art of the imagemaker or sculptor ( Bildner ) and the imageless art of music, which is that of Dionysos " (Nietzsche). There must always be a certain contrast between the simple and Appolinic themes and the more bombastic, Dionysiac scenes, something that Marlowe seems