TOPIC: UNSPEAKABLE

RITES IN “HEART OF

DARKNESS”Design by NASEEM HASRAT

KIU skardu campus

UNSPEAKABLE RITES ACCORDING TO THE CTITICS These rites are so horrible and terrible

to the extent that critics have refused to examine them.

These critics take such a stand as they tend to associate the ambiguity centering around Kurtz's rites with Conrad's desire to leave them covered in uncertainty. 

Some critics are keen to examine

UNSPEAKABLE RITES IN “HEART OF DARKNESS” One of the critics notes, we cannot be

sure that Kurtz's "unspeakable" crimes in Africa extended to cannibalism, yet he may be wrong in claiming that Conrad himself cannot bear to speak the unspeakable by explicitly depicting a white man such as Kurtz as cannibal.  

In fact, Heart of Darkness opens and closes with subtle hints of white or European cannibalism.

Marlow tells his listeners that cannibals are "fine fellows . . . in their place"

UNSPEAKABLE RITES IN “HEART OF DARKNESS” Heart of Darkness refuses to keep them

in their place by beginning and ending with oblique references to cannibalism, not in the "heart of darkness," but rather in the heart of whiteness.  

In this way, while the center of the text is essentially empty of acts of cannibalism, its extremities provide clues that hint at white anthropophagic.

UNSPEAKABLE RITES IN “HEART OF DARKNESS” A number of readers have recently identified

a similar, subtle hint of white cannibalism very early in Heart of Darkness. 

There is a hole in the heart of Heart of Darkness, and this absence is the "cannibal.“

Conrad's readers would have been conditioned by previous exotic stories set in Africa to expect the sorts of savage native behavior—and in particular, cannibalism—one sees in British colonial fiction from Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

UNSPEAKABLE RITES IN “HEART OF DARKNESS” Conrad's stress on cannibalism, his

identification of African customs with violence, lust, and madness, his metaphors of bestiality, death, and darkness.

his suggestion that traveling in Africa is like traveling backward in time to primeval, infantile, but also hellish stages of existence.

these features of the story are drawn from the repertoire of Victorian imperialism and racism that painted an entire continent dark.

UNSPEAKABLE RITES IN “HEART OF DARKNESS” Readers encountering Heart of

Darkness for the first time at the turn of the century must then have been puzzled by the absence of the alleged cannibal practices.

They would have expected to see as a primary signifier of "darkness" and savagery as the plot developed.

UNSPEAKABLE RITES IN “HEART OF DARKNESS”  Kurtz’s unspeakable rites and secrets

concern (with whatever attendant bestiality) human sacrifice and Kurtz’s consuming a portion of the sacrificial victim.

Further, these sacrifices were established in the interest of effecting Kurtz’s position as a man-god. 

UNSPEAKABLE RITES IN “HEART OF DARKNESS”  one of the critics depicts the

unspeakable rites, “Kurtz had assumed a position of power with respect to the natives and had been a participant in “unspeakable rites,” where sacrifices had been made in his name.”

UNSPEAKABLE RITES IN “HEART OF DARKNESS”

UNSPEAKABLE RITES IN “HEART OF DARKNESS”