Keywords

literary studies, pendulum, post-colonial world

Abstract

Even in a day when historicism in literary studies is ubiquitous, the pitch and duration of historicist fervor that has surrounded Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is extraordinary. Since its original publication over a century ago, the text has flourished amid a swarm of meta-textual narratives variously critical, political, philosophical, and historical. As Benita Parry attests, Heart of Darkness has enjoyed a “singular afterlife” (41), one that Allan Simmons aptly captures in the metaphor of “a pendulum swinging back and forth between aesthetics and history” (104). First appearing serially as “The Heart of Darkness” in three monthly installments of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine running from February to April of 1899 (Simmons 91), the narrative has interested those with an interest in Africa from the start. The initial February installment garnered Conrad an invitation to address a British pacifist’s rally in March (Najder 288). He declined. The narrative, as he saw it, was not primarily political, nor was he inclined to be. Yet for friendship’s sake he attended the rally and, as he later put it, “revolted a little” (qtd. in Najder 288). The mixed aspect of this literary beginning echoes the larger historical, political, aesthetic, and deeply personal ambiguities of the novel—a book that won’t hold still.

Original Publication Citation

Eastley, Aaron. “Conrad, The Times, and Some Explorers.” Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies 44.2-3 (2012): 91-125. Print.