“To Make Us See What We See”: Impressionism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

This book is an intriguing and intimate study of the dialogues forged between different forms
of art, paintings and texts in particular. It entwines art with literature to create a complex yet
marvellous mosaic of textures hitherto undiscussed in this manner. Reading, here, becomes
both painting and travelling through Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the works of the
French Impressionist painters of the nineteenth century. Through an exploration of the
distinctive characteristics of the paintings of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne and
even Van Gogh and Gauguin, this book tries to decipher the codes and symbols of Conrad’s
enigmatic novella. By taking the help of intertextuality, interdisciplinary and
multidisciplinary approaches, detours and retours through time and space, this book offers
extensive readings of texts on art, literature and Conrad’s works. Reading Heart of Darkness
in this manner emerges as a kind of journey through the continents of imperial Europe and of
colonized Africa, through diverse cultures, imaginary geographies, psychological processes
that separate one human from another, through the metaphors and metonymies of the modern
malaise that vacillated from Darwinian theories of evolution to Nietzsche’s proclamation of
the death of God.