Historical Approach to Heart of Darkness.
/based on Frederick Temple's excerpt/.
Joseph Conrad's narrative is a series of enigmas, a truly great parable. The events of the story accumulate surprises and strangenesses where things mostly were menacing. Be-sides, the events turned upside-down, concealed or transposed.
In the novel Conrad concerns himself with "darkness" (like Golding later). He repre-sents darkness as an unknown and (because of this) frightening symbol of universal and innermost reality. He reflects the dark side of the nature of human beings, and contradicts the innocence with this experience. .
Nevertheless, the story incorporates ambiguities and tensions of the nineteenth-century historical concepts and doubts the benevolent intentions of civilised society. .
The modernistic narrative technique gives many different interpretations of the novel. It is not an adventure story or an autobiographical book. It is rather built around the oppositions between the moral values of work and the fascination of the wilderness. .
The wealth of interpretation arises from its symbolic force. Marlow's extraordinary adventures down the Congo in search of Kurtz are symbols of mythic journeys into the depth of the unconscious and to the prehistoric time.
Therefore, we can also draw attention to psychoanalytic, social, political, biblical or mythological projection of Heart of Darkness. However, in my essay I would like to exam-ine and demonstrate how the novel is both incorporating and challenging Victorian histori-cal issues.
In the nineteenth century the notion of history was arranged as a system throughout different states of human development. "We may speak of a childhood, a youth, and a manhood of the world" (Temple). Besides, it was "the venerable stream" (Conrad 10), the successful, straightforward progress of Western culture towards a preordained end.This organic sense of history considers other cultures as inferior, primitive stages of European civilisation.