freud and conrad body paragraph 1

As Ross Murfin aptly points out in Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, Conrad’s “darkness” and Freud’s “unconscious” are one and the same. Murfin’s book is about how authors use their books to demonstrate the phenomena that psychoanalysts use to understand psychology. This connection does not stop with Conrad and Freud. “Conrad, Freud’s contemporary, [was] a writer who meant by “darkness” what Freud meant by “unconscious” and who, like Freud, believed human beings to be largely motivated by the irrational side of the mind” (Murfin, 122). As Murfin says, Conrad and Freud talk about the same irrational and immoral core of mankind; they just have different names for it. The parallel nature of Freud’s unconscious and Conrad’s darkness becomes strikingly similar when one reads their two main works. The last line of Heart of Darkness reads: “the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (Conrad, 93). In this quote the Thames (the “waterway”), the heart of England’s empire, is used to represent the hearts of all men, the clouds are the shroud of unconsciousness preventing our moral “god” from seeing the true darkness of man (England), and the “immense darkness” is the evil that all men eventually come to. As the last line of the book, this quote has the responsibility of driving the books central message: the hearts of men inevitably drift towards evil and because men are unaware of it, there is nothing they can do to stop it. This message is strikingly similar to the unconscious Freud describes which drives all conscious behaviors. When talking man’s about the cruel, selfish violent instincts that communism naïvely seeks to eliminate by means of total equality, Freud lays out the nature of the unconscious. “This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty… it is at the bottom of all the relation of affection and love between human beings” (Freud, 3). Freud says, here, that our unconscious instincts to steal, harm, fornicate, and covet are innate and control every relationship and action we have—even love. Conrad and Freud saw at the core of men unknown desires that drive them to do evil things and control every aspect of their lives. Conrad called it darkness and Freud called it the unconscious id.

intro paragraph

In the early 1900’s, two brilliant men wrote about the internal drives of men. Sigmund Freud saw a dark, natural unconscious at the heart of man that drives our conscious behaviors. Joseph Conrad saw an evil within every man that makes us treat each other horribly. Both Freud and Conrad wrote about the same darkness at the core of men that drives their behaviors and enslaves them to their desires: Freud from a psychological perspective and Conrad from a literary perspective.

this is VERY rough, i am going to edit this like crazy.

HOD essay idea

My first idea is your generic compare and contrast essay. Like compare and comtrast Freud and Conrad's representation of the darkness in all of us, or something like that. My basic thesis would be that they both saw the darkness in all of us, something about how they differ in their explanation if it (but not different enough to need a contrast paragraph), and how they differ on what men should do about it/accept it or not. I would then separate my paragraphs into how the darkness in us is the unconscious, the nature of that darkness, and what humanity should do about it. I've also structured the paragraphs, but that's too much to put in this blog post. Oh yeah, and I would use murfin to glue to two writers together

If I feel that i should do a more specific essay, I will do slavery. The question would be something like how do Freud and Conrad differ in their representations (or whatever) of slavery in their books. I would basically say that Conrad says its because we are just bad at heart, and Freud says that it is because our suppressed ids come out. Maybe I'd use murfin to connect the two. This one has some very vivid and good quotes I could use.

Those are my two best at the moment. Maybe an essay about vivid imagery or symbols would work too.

Murfin

so, i read the murfin thing. it wasn't great because i didn't agree with everything that he said. There were some things that definitely resonated with me though. The bit about Jung that said that stories like HOD are comments on the collective unconscious of society sounded right. By the way, my grandma is a Jungian analyst. The bit about the characters of books being representations/sides/repressions of the author's personality sounded right to me too. Unfortunately for Murfin, Freud is no longer widely used in the psychology community because of his crazy theories about kids and sex, and that really detracts from this paper because Freud is the paper's focus. I also think that he is right to point out that Freud and Conrad wrote about the "darkness" that is in all of us. Freud's was the unconscious/id and Conrad's was innate desires and evils. Murfin talked a lot about dreams and about books being like the dream's of authors. I'm not sure why he felt the need to make that connection, but he did and it's not great. Yes, it makes it easier to talk about psychology when you can talk about a dream, but it's not. Making up a story, especially one with so many metaphors and symbols as HOD, requires a great deal of conscious thought. so saying that the story is purely the unconscious representation of whatever is in the author is just not true. And that's what i have to say about that.

The end of HOD

I finished the book in class. So good! I didn't get all of the intricacies and stuff the first time I read it (well, heard it). The end was awesome! I think that every other word was an adjective or adverb. I liked that he lieder a pure, moral woman who has had all of the light sapped out of her soul at the end of his story... It really fits the story (for obvious reasons). The poetic end of the novel closes the depressing book with a beautiful paragraph and makes the points of the novel more accessible. In the end. The people who have just heard Marlow's story are enlightened and so are we. We see the problems with men and society, we see what Conrad was saying about unrestrained men, and we see all of the intertwining messages converge in one beautiful line "The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness." This book leaves the reader with a lot to digest (mentally), so that's what I'm going to do.

Hod to page 90

I read to page 90, only 9 more pages!!! Marlow stops Kurtz from being killed or captured by the natives only to have him die slowly on the way back to Europe and be buried in a shallow, muddy grave. Then, Marlow thinks about meanings and kurtz's legacy and other stuff like that. Then some people come to get the papers Kurtz left with him and he was sentimentally stingy with them. He was very annoying towards the end of that section. The most famous line of the book appears in this section: "The horror! The horror!" The meaning of this line is up to interpretation. I personally think that it is referring to the horrors of society back then. But it could also be about the horrors he has seen/ caused or even the horrors to come.

HOD blog to page 80

I liked this part. I realize I am saying this a lot, so i must just like the book. This ten pages was all about Kurtz and Marlow. You explained the plot in class, so I won't bother to summarize it again here. This section was full of lines that I want to use as quotes for essays. The one that is most salient in my mind (probably because it was the one I read most recently) is on the last page 79 at the bottom of the first paragraph starting with though and going to the end of that paragraph (the subtext app doesn't allow me to copy text) . It beautifully summarizes Marlow's relationship with Kurtz, the Europeans and the Africans, provides a nice counterpoint for possible essay questions, and so much more. I don't know what else to talk about. I guess that is a problem with the blogging of homework (and the only problem with it): I don't know what to say because there is no specific direction. But, I think the blogging homework is great other than that.