Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

172 Pages·2008·0.92 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Heart of Darkness—New Edition
Copyright © 2008 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
—New ed.
p. cm.— (Modern critical interpretations)
Rev. ed. of: 1987.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7910-9825-7 (hardcover)
1. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924. Heart of darkness. 2. Psychological fiction, English—
History and criticism. 3. Africa—In literature. I. Bloom, Harold.
PR6005.O4H477 2008
823’.912—dc22
2007051300
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Two Visions in Heart of Darkness 5
Edward W. Said
Heart of Darkness 19
Cedric Watts
The Opaque and the Clear: The White Fog
Incident in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” 37
John G. Peters
“His Sympathies Were in the Right Place”:
Heart of Darkness and the Discourse of National Character 51
Pericles Lewis
Surface as Suggestive Energy: Fascination
and Voice in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” 79
Hans Ulrich Seeber
Harlequin in Hell: Marlow and the
Russian Sailor in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 95
James Morgan
The Rescue: Conrad, Achebe, and the Critics 105
Padmini Mongia
vi Contents
Should We Read “Heart of Darkness”? 115
J. Hillis Miller
The Journey to the Inner Station 131
Bernard J. Paris
Chronology 145
Contributors 147
Bibliography 149
Acknowledgments 155
Index 157
Editor’s Note
My Introduction judges Heart of Darkness to be obscurantist, since neither
Marlow nor Conrad always seems to know what he is talking about.
The late Edward Said folds Conrad’s short novel into a dogma of culture
and imperialism, while Cedric Watts defends Conrad against political critics
like Said.
The celebrated “white fog incident” is seen by John Peters as an emblem
of the entire story, after which Pericles Lewis finds in Marlow Conrad’s
English version of himself.
Hans Ulrich Seeber studies images of voice in the book, while James
Morgan meditates upon the grotesque Russian sailor.
Padmini Mongia makes a qualified defense of Conrad against Achebe’s
charge of “racism,” after which Hillis Miller more strongly endorses the book,
and Bernard Paris returns us to the iconic figure of Marlow.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
I
In Conrad’s “Youth” (1898), Marlow gives us a brilliant description of the
sinking of the Judea:
“Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning
fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of
gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear
flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean,
and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the
sky. She burned furiously; mournful and imposing like a funeral
pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by
the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift,
like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious day. The
surrender of her weary ghost to the keeper of the stars and sea was
stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph. The masts fell just
before daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil
of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and
watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the sea. At daylight she
was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and
bearing a glowing mass of coal within.”
1