Words on Words on Words

For me, analyzing a WHOLE text is very hard. (Especially in a short blog post) But there is so much to "Heart of Darkness" that it definitely needs some more attention than I was able to give it in my last post. 

As a semi simple person...

(It's actually a family trait)

....I need to zero in on specific aspects when I do analysis. Let's talk about how Conrad uses copious amounts of words when he writes about something. Check out this passage:

"Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.'” 

Whoa. Right?

A deconstructuralist approach informs this verse well. Deconstructuralists focus on the concept that words are as important as thinking. (Maybe more imporant?) They are the frame through which we form thoughts. The words of this paragraph are to teach us about thinking, specifically thinking about an "enigma." By definition an enigma is "a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation." Words are all we have to understand this thought process. The way that Conrad does this is by creating a paradox by describing the coast as "smiling, frowning." This language is self-aware of the fact that it is contradictory, therefore not only describing how the coast was like "thinking about an enigma" but also WHAT an enigma is. This sentence is an enigma! 

Now let's see if we can do a little bit of Russian Formalist analysis. The Formalists felt that literature was important because the form would allow the author to take a habitual experience, something normal, and recast it in a way that we as readers could have a fresh experience. To them literature was literature if the work caused the reader to sort of "wake up" and see something in a new way. 

Here Conrad uses an extreme amount of description (a common thing for him) to take the experience of watching a coast from a ship and renew it for the reader. This is a decently familiar experience, most have watched a coast at some point. But most haven't thought about how the experience is like "thinking about an enigma." Or what about those adjectives he uses? A smiling coast? Mean? Savage? As "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism" notes, "There are several ways to achieve defamiliarization in literature. A writer can draw out an experience with extreme detail or can otherwise interrupt an ordinary description." Now, this is a fairly short example of this (especially for Conrad) but you get the idea of how extending a description can facilitate this "dehabituation" experience. And according to Russian Formalists, this is exactly what makes great literature! 

To see another example of how Conrad's intense descriptions reinvent an experience check out this analysis.

So together these forms of analysis show us that Conrad's verbose form (that is sometimes interpreted by high schoolers on Amazon as worse than "breathing in a pail of cat hair") is a actually a means of giving us readers an experience that shakes up our familiar world through powerfully self-aware writing. He is not long-winded, he is actually using each word carefully for this purpose.