Literature and myth. A Bachofen-inspired reading of Heart of Darkness

Résumé

The contribution examines Heart of Darkness, the famous novella by Joseph Conrad. Its interpretive key, however, does not lie in biographical or historical-literary reconstructions, nor in criticism in the strict sense, but rather in reference to what we may call the hidden substrata of the text, namely, the relationship, as manifold as it is secret, between literature and mythology, or, more precisely, between literature and symbol. What emerges is an unprecedented portrait of Conrad’s writing, marked by very distant “sources”: not a direct influence, but an inevitable inspiration for what we may call “great literature”, such as Conrad’s novella itself. In particular, aspects of the works of Friedrich Creuzer (1819) and Johann Jakob Bachofen (1861) are analyzed in order to illuminate fundamental passages of Heart of Darkness that have often been overlooked.