The Novella: A Fitting Choice for Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

While there is much contestation over the definition of a novella, most agree that 1) it is a piece of prose fiction that is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel and 2) Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (HD) is one such text.

I would like to suggest that the significance of Conrad's choice of genre, the novella, goes beyond that of a lighter read for students such as ourselves. Given the subjects that Conrad tackles, the novella is an appropriate form for his text.

What exactly does Conrad tackle in HD? (Arguably), HD reflects upon the late 19th-early 20th century anxiety of the fragmentation and collapse of empire. This is best seen through the character of Kurtz, the face of colonialism gone 'mad', 'echo[ing] loudly within [itself] because [it is, in reality,] hollow at the core'. In addition, a sense of uncertainty pervades his text with words such as 'inscrutable', 'indefinable' occurring. This is compounded with a smattering of ellipses that ultimately deny 'comprehension'. This emphasizes the text's modernist aesthetic, with an acute sense of awareness that one is never able to know something fully, and cannot claim to.

Going back to Conrad's choice of genre, the novella is a departure from the conventional triple-decker Victorian novel that tries to enclose the world within its covers. It is instead a more modest piece of work that reflects skeptically on the tradition of assuming the 'representability' or 'wholeness' or of an entity, be it a person, a place, a story, a history, etc. The novella, with its absence of 200 more pages, is therefore an appropriate form within which Conrad can place his tale, because the 'meaning of an episode [lies not] inside like a kernel but outside', always elusive, just 'as a glow brings out a haze'.

(300 words)

- Kelly Tay