Primitivism and Meaning in Heart of Darkness

Abstract

The melancholic mood of Heart of Darkness is unmistakeable. In 1958, Albert Guerard described Heart of Darkness as ‘one of the purest expressions of a melancholy temperament’ (Guerard, 1958, p. 48). This purity notwithstanding, the melancholia of Conrad’s novella has received little attention in its own right. This is not only astonishing; it also points to the difficulties of a psychological analysis. To what extent can a literary text be melancholic at all? Only, it seems, if narrative enacts the struggles and conflicts of a melancholic consciousness. Even then, however, a psychological analysis produces discomfort, for what is at stake in Conrad’s narrative is not the psychology of an actual existing person but the perspective provided by a narrator who is — obviously — a literary device. Furthermore, if Conrad’s novella is psychological at all it is concerned with a cultural imaginary, not with an individual case history. Conrad ties melancholia to the relentless drive of evolution and a discontent with civilisation, not to personal love-objects. The problem of modernist melancholia needs to be unravelled in the context of narrative perspective, cultural phantasms and consciousness. It is in this context that melancholia sheds its psychological clothing and emerges as a mode of experience and style of fictional world construction.