THE CRITICS DEBATE General Editor: Michael Scott The Critics Debate General Editor Michael Scott Published titles: Sons and Lovers Geoffrey Harvey Bleak House Jeremy Hawthorn The Canterbury Tales Alcuin Blamires Tess of the d'Urbervilles Terence Wright The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday Arnold P. Hinchliffe Paradise Lost Margarita Stocker King Lear Ann Thompson Othello Peter Davison The Winter's Tale Bill Overton Gulliver's Travels Brian Tippett Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience David Lindsay Measure for Measure T.F. Wharton Hamlet Michael Hattaway The Tempest David Daniell Coriolanus Bruce King Wuthering Heights Peter Miles The Metaphysical Poets Donald Mackenzie Heart of Darkness Robert Burden Further titles are in preparation The Great Gatsby Stephen Matterson To the Lighthouse Su Reid HEART OF DARKNESS Robert Burden M MACMILLAN To H.T. © Robert Burden 1991 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1991 Published by MACMILLAN EDUCATION LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Burden, Robert Heart of darkness -(The critics debate). 1. Fiction in English. Conrad,Joseph, 1857-1924 I. Title II. Series 823.912 ISBN 978-0-333-48309-1 ISBN 978-1-349-21294-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21294-1 Contents General Editor's Preface Vll A Note on Text and References Vlll Prefoce lX Part One: Survey 1 Biographical criticism and source studies 2 Mythic and psychoanalytic criticism 13 3 Anthropological and political criticism 17 4 Realism and modernism 32 5 Stylistic analysis 45 6 Narratology and Marxist criticism 53 Part Two: Appraisal 1 Introduction to discourse theory 65 2 The discourses of Heart ofD arkness 67 3 The clash of discourses 76 4 The post-colonialist reader 78 Bibliography and References 83 Index 88 To cnttctze, however, is to put into cns1s, something which is not possible without evaluating the conditions of the crisis (its limits), without considering its historical moment. (Roland Barthes, 1971) General Editor's Preface OVER THE last few years the practice of literary cntic1sm has become hotly debated. Methods developed earlier in the century and before have been attacked and the word 'crisis' has been drawn upon to describe the present condition of English Studies. That such a debate is taking place is a sign of the subject discipline's health. Some would hold that the situation necessitates a radical alternative approach which naturally implies a 'crisis situation'. Others would respond that to employ such terms is to precipitate or construct a false position. The debate continues but it is not the first. 'New Criticism' acquired its title because it attempted something fresh calling into question certain practices of the past. Yet the practices it attacked were not entirely lost or negated by the new critics. One factor becomes clear: English Studies is a pluralistic discipline. What are students coming to advanced work in English for the first time to make of all this debate and controversy? They are in danger of being overwhelmed by the cross-currents of critical approaches as they take up their study of literature. The purpose of this series is to help delineate various critical approaches to specific literary texts. Its authors are from a variety of critical schools and have approached their task in a flexible manner. Their aim is to help the reader come to terms with the variety of criticism and to introduce him or her to further reading on the subject and to a fuller evaluation of a particular text by illustrating the way it has been approached in a number of contexts. In the first part of the book a critical survey is given of some of the major ways the text has been appraised. This is done sometimes in a thematic manner, sometimes according to various 'schools' or 'approaches'. In the second part the authors provide their own appraisals of the text from their stated critical standpoint, allowing the reader the knowl edge of their own particular approaches from which their views may in turn be evaluated. The series therein hopes to introduce and to elucidate criticism of authors and texts being studied and to encour age participation as the critics debate. Michael Scott A Note on Text and References THE edition of Heart of Darkness referred to throughout the text is the single volume published by Penguin (Harmondsworth, 1982, first published 1902), abbreviated to HD. Critical works are listed in full in the bibliography. Preface LET US begin by justifying this little book. What can my writing, within the strict limits of this series, contribute to your understanding and enjoyment of Conrad's short novel? Heart of Darkness (HD) has become part of an industry within academic criticism, judging by the number of publications which are concerned in part or wholly with it. The author of this latest book on that text feels the weight of all those pages, and all those claims about the meaning and value of a text written, by all accounts, in some haste by an author who needed the money, before he could continue with what he felt to be the more important larger project that was to become Lord Jim. Ironically, HD has become one of the most frequently taught in the Conrad canon, and certainly in modern literature. It is the ideal early modernist set text, brief yet heavy with meaning; a book containing within its covers many of the concerns that were to preoccupy in one way or another a whole generation of writers. We could adopt a slogan from the American critic, Albert Guerard [1958) who reminds us of what Thomas Mann said about his short novel, Death in Venice ( 1912): 'a little work of inexhaustible allusiveness'. The history of the interpretation of HD certainly justifies our adopted slogan. The meaning and value of such a work of fiction has not been settled once and for all. Why should it be? Recent work in the theory of criticism has given us a new set of imperatives. We are now being called upon to negotiate not just between competing readings of the one text, but competing practices of criticism. Herein lies the double task of this study. The first is contained in the following statement: 'The life history of a work of imaginative literature includes the meanings it has had for successive generations of readers ... from the first readers ... with their special advantages and preju dices.' [Dean, 1960 p. 143]. The second derives from the French