Heart of Darkness—Psychoanalytic Criticism

Works of art, in terms of the psychoanalytic critics’ perspective, are interesting precisely because they contain reticence and repression, which are both forms of shame. This theory stems from Freud’s psychological beliefs. Therefore, this form of literary criticism involves the study of the id (the unrepressed sexual state), the superego (the repressed state), and the ego (a commingling of the two states). The writer, in Freud’s estimation, hides their sexual goals by concentrating on larger themes, in the form of a social context. However, psychoanalytic critics feel that those repressed feelings do come out; in this sense, writing is an unconscious expression of the artist’s personal feelings. A book is basically, if the reader examines the work deeply enough, a form of a dream.

When a reader reads Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, they immediately feel that they are in a dream-like state (or that the main character Marlowe is). Anyone that picks up the book, and reads a sentence like this one, “…you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps,” knows that they as readers are reading fictional accounts of a psychological journey, and that the work itself is primarily a psychoanalytic one. The book does, indeed, deal with repression and reticence. Heart of Darkness is about a blasé confused person (Marlowe) who needs to repress the outside world around him: that of the Congo. Marlowe does this because he’s torn between believing whether or not what the Europeans were doing to the land was a good thing or not; he doesn’t necessarily know, so in effect he doesn’t want to deal with that reality.

Here’s an example of Marlowe being torn in terms of ideological belief: this is when he describes Kurtz’s report, “I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his—let us say—nerves went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which—as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times—were offered up to him—do you understand?—to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them (savages) in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity,’ and so on and so on.” (pg. 66) At first Marlowe feels that Kurtz’s writing is “eloquent.” Then, he says that the writing is too “high strung” which is a negative word that distracts the reader from the real reasoning in Kurtz’s report. In other words, Kurtz’s writing doesn’t necessarily have to be well written to be politically sound. Marlowe then returns to his initial belief that Kurtz’s writing is “beautiful.” He then goes on with more usages of negatives like ominous, which is another dream like word that distracts the reader from the real matter at hand. What is really transpiring throughout this book is the sensation of a character who for the first time in their life meets their id, in the form of another person. The reader knows that Marlowe will always stay within the confines of European ideology (the superego), even though he wants to join Kurtz in his supposedly “peaceful” quest (the id). Either way, both states of being lead to forms of racism, and Marlowe doesn’t necessarily want the listener listening to his story to know that. All throughout the book, Marlowe will distract the listener (or the reader) through the process of his sang-froid descriptions of his journey. They are beautiful descriptions, but they conceal the hidden truth, the horror in Kurtz’s estimation, of hypocritical racism.