Conrad e la natura selvaggia: lo scrittore come antropologo in Heart of Darkness

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a groundbreaking text not only from a stylistic and nar- rative point of view, but also because of its peculiar way of treating the “wild” and “dark” Africa, which is very different from the one conveyed by traditional travel nar- ratives, by late-Victorian ethnographic studies and by “exotic” romances. The connec- tion between the human and the natural landscape represents a fundamental element in order to study the novelty of Conrad’s text, since Africa is described by him as a place defaced by Western colonial exploitation (specifically by the Belgian monarchy) and as very different from the myth of the uncontaminated lands. In this respect, Conrad antic- ipates the opinions of anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, who in Tristes Tropiques reflected on the impossibility to perceive in a “pure” way the territories he visited (as well as the people he met during his fieldworks), because these places had already come in contact with Western civilisation. More than any other anthropologist, Bronisław Malinowski has been associated to Conrad. The distinctive mark that Con- rad and Malinowski share regarding the relationship with the (colonial) other is repre- sented by the perennial oscillation between here (the places to which one belongs) and beyond (the unexplored places), and by the resulting dismantling of the ontological cer- tainties that have been given for granted. As such, Heart of Darkness suggested, and continues to suggest, that it is the advanced West that identifies the real dark and unex- plored lands.