Deconstructing Heart of Darkness...Quickly

Deconstruction, I have decided, would be a truly fascinating branch of theory if it wasn’t, by its very nature, impossible to definitively, clearly, succinctly define. As Barry says, post-structuralists feel “a certain masochistic intellectual pleasure from knowing for certain we can’t know anything for certain” (61) which includes knowledge about their own theory, causing people like Derrida to equivocate when qualifying and quantifying his own theories. After all, they have what Barry calls “terminal anxieties about the possibility of achieving any knowledge through language” and language is how they attempt to communicate their theories (62): quite the conundrum if you ask me.

One seemingly solid fact appears to be their interest in binary oppositions such as light/dark, sound/silence, and male/female. Binary oppositions are hierarchical in nature, meaning one term is given precedence over the other; one term is more highly valued or ‘privileged’. A deconstructionist will show how a literary text establishes the traditional binary and then point to places in the text where the hierarchy of terms is violated.

The most obvious – completely in your face – binary opposition in Heart of Darkness is light and dark. The more highly valued of these terms, culturally, is light. Heart of Darkness establishes this traditional binary for much of the text by associating negativity with dark, in the form of the black natives, jungle, wilderness, nature, savagery, and opposing it with the positivity of light, in the form of white Europeans, civilization, intellect.

Almost everything, from people to objects to places to ideas, within the text is described at one point or another in terms of light and dark. For me, the most interesting is people. The text uses light and dark (and their associated terms) to describe a person’s features and to describe the person’s situation, whether geographical or psychological. Instead of continuously reaffirming the traditional binary, the text does, however, reverse the assumed hierarchy of terms from time to time; or at least it doesn’t allow any one object, place, person, or idea to be all one or the other.

For example, when Marlow worries that he won’t get the chance to meet Kurtz, he is concerned he won’t be able to experience Kurtz’s “ability to talk, his words…the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness” (Conrad 47). Kurtz, in Marlow’s mind and in the readers, is a combination of light and dark.

Immediately following this description, the primary narrative intrudes upon the secondary and Marlow lights a cigarette. The match’s flame flickers – illuminating and obscuring his face in turn – bringing the notion of both light and dark within one man to the forefront yet again (Conrad 47).

Later in the text when describing the man who approaches Marlow’s ship as it arrives at the Inner Station, Conrad writes (Marlow says): “His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next” (53). And again, when discussing some natives: “Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance…and near the river two bronze figures leaning on tall spears stood in the sunlight” (60).

Then we have the actual blending of light and dark, in their related colors (white and black) as exemplified in the following: “It was as though an animated image of death carved of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze” (Conrad 59). Here we have ivory (less light) and bronze (less dark).

This is just a tiny scratch in the very large surface that is the light/dark binary that is Heart of Darkness.

Barry, Peter. “Post-structuralism and Deconstruction.” Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. 59-77. Print.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical Edition). Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. 4^th ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Print.