1. Heart of Darkness &The Secret Sharer
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness &The Secret Sharer

2. Doppelganger “A ghostly counterpart or double of a living person”

3. The Double
A device whereby a character is self-duplicated, as in the case of Leggatt and the Captain in Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, or divided into two distinct, usually antithetical, personalities, as in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which objectifies the internal struggle of good against evil (primal self).

4. Doubling by Division
The counterpart represents one facet of the character, customarily spiritual or psychological in nature
The counterpart can personify one’s demonic counterpart
Alter ego—dark and light—id, superego

7. Trivia
Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was convinced he had a doppelganger?

8. “the horror, the horror”
Heart of Darkness is a classic because of its capacity to be interpreted in so many ways…
Marlon Brando’s Kurtz cried “the horror, the horror,” which has become a classic, yet cliché line.
The scathing reviews of the book, which label it racist, sexist, and/or imperialist, has ironically revived the interest in the book.

9. Doppelganger reviews
Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, called Conrad a “bloody racist” (1975)
British and European colonialism in Africa
A book that looks at Africa through “western” eyes and muffles the brutality of colonialism
Sparked interest in Conrad’s personal journey to the Congo June-December 1890, documented in his Personal Record

10. King Leopold Belgian King reigned1865 – 1909
Sovereign of the Congo Free State 1885 – 1908
believed he had a sacred mission to civilize the Congo

11. fear of the barbarian Charles Darwin, Decent of Man (1871)
misconception of his interest in the differences of the races
love vs. competition
Alfred Russel Wallace
Humans may at one time may have been “a homogeneous race” with common origin, but that subsequent differential development of the “higher faculties” had resulted in the formation of distinctly different races.

13. Victorian England vs the subaltern (Spivak)

14. George Washington Williams (African American minister and lawyer) letter to Leopold describes “the deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave-raiding, and general policy of cruelty… to the natives” he observed upon visiting the Congo.

15. Sir Roger Casement 1904 “Congo Report” to British Parliament
Conrad to Casement in 1903: “You cannot doubt that I form the warmest wishes for your success… It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago has put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State today. It is as if the moral clock has been turned back many hours.”

16. Leader of the Congo Reform Association in Britian, Edmund D
Leader of the Congo Reform Association in Britian, Edmund D. Morel used Casement and Conrad’s letter as support for his campaign.
calls Heart of Darkness “the most powerful thing ever written on the subject.” (1909)

17. Mark Twain (1905)

18. A Personal Record “When I grow up I shall go there.”
“Everything here is repellent to me… Men and things, but men above all. And I am repellent to them, also.”

19. “Geography and Some Explorers” written in 1924 about Stanley Falls:
“A great melancholy descended on me. Yes, this was the very spot. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory, but only… the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. What an end to the idealized realities of a boy’s daydreams.”

20. Multiple personality of Conrad
Defends the freedom of the novelist, yet warns that it might be “moral Nihilism”
Lifelong struggle between desire to believe in what he called “a few simple ideas” like the “idea of Fidelity” and a corrosive skepticism that no conviction can withstand sustained critical scrutiny.
Perhaps his own struggle with morality and the working of the conscience explains the brevity and elusiveness of Heart of Darkness.

21. Letter to Richard Curle
“Didn’t it ever occur to you… that I knew what I was doing in leaving the facts of my life and even of my tales in the background? Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion.”

22. Anonymous critic in the Athenaeum
Conrad has “made his own class of work as he has made his own methods,” and “the reader is warned that this book cannot be read understandingly—as evening newspapers and railway novels are perused—with one mental eye closed and the other roving.”

24. Modernism
Many Western European and American writers and artists of the late 19th and early 20th century, seriously questioned or lost altogether their faith in Western civilization: its traditional structures and beliefs in religion, science, technology, progress, political and social systems seemed little more than convenient and bankrupted fictions. The increasingly dominant urban middle classes seemed obsessed with materialistic ambitions (e.g. acquiring wealth, power, social status), caring little for other (e.g. spiritual, humanitarian, or artistic) values.  Works such as Heart of Darkness exposed the realities of European imperialism in the non-Western world, revealing the rhetoric of the “white man’s burden” and “civilizing mission” to be largely empty rationalizations for brutal military conquest and economic exploitation.  To such Western writers, the modern world emerging at the beginning of the 20th century, seemed alien and senseless, a frightening new world filled with widespread hypocrisy and random violence, devoid of meaning or reason.  No longer sustained by traditional beliefs and institutions and certainties, writers faced the challenge of trying to create some order and value for themselves.

25. Themes to Look For
Dark, chaotic forces threaten to destroy individuals and civilization (“things fall apart”= he was a precursor of existentialism)
The contradictions within the colonial system: bring “enlightenment” vs. exploitation
The Apollonian and Dionysian forces at war (very much connected with Nietzhe’s and Freudian theories of nihilism and Superego/Id tendencies respectively)

26. Style to Look For IMAGERY, IMAGERY, IMAGERY
The ambiguous narrator: Conrad increases the distance between the main character Kurtz by adding several layers of narrative isolation. We start with the character version of Conrad himself, Marlowe, then a narrator who is listening to Marlowe’s story, then back to Marlowe who tells the “inconclusive experiences.” We have to navigate through the layers of narration to find the meaning of Kurtz and his story.