When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy and more blinding than the night. At eight or nine perhaps, it lifted, as a shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees, of the immense matted jungle, with the blazing little ball of the sun hanging over it- all perfectly still- and then the white shutter came down again, smoothly as if sliding on greases grooves...(p.55) What we could see was just the steamer we were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of dissolving and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around her-and that was all...(p.57) Heart of Darkness , is infact, a kind of little world in itself. As a writer, with cinematic leanings, Conrad attempts to make the reader enter into the experience it contains " to sit on the deck of the Nellie as night comes on and listen to the story Marlow has to tell; to be curious with Marlow about Mr Kurtz ;to smell dead hippo and hear the drumbeat of the natives and sense the implacable vastness of the wildness, with all its multitude of claims upon his". In doing so Conrad becomes one with Norman Holland's concept of 'interiorization Of exposition' where the author and the reader, the director and the audience share one experience, one world. Conrad " seeks to lead his readers to an experience of the 'heart of darkness' -it is not to shed the light of reason on itor to analyze and define it in some abstract way- but rather to recreate in all its fulness ,his experience of darkness in our feelings, our sensibilities, our own dark and mysterious hearts". In order to create an experience, a world, a journey, not to the "centre of the continent" but to the " centre of the earth",
Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2007