《黑暗的心脏》与解读误区

Reading or Misreading?——The Case of Heart of Darkness

小说《黑暗的心脏》完整地见证了20世纪西方文论风云激荡的过程。《黑暗的心脏》这部公认的文学经典,具有一定的复杂性,立足人性批评、形式批评、后殖民批评和女权批评的多个角度对它进行的解读,拓展了我们的阐释思路。《黑暗的心脏》寓意深远,人性批评与语言形式批评充分揭示了作品的多元内涵,而后殖民批评和女权批评对于丰富我们对于小说的理解也大有裨益。

Critics in China have recently written against that they see as a whole series of misreadings of Joseph Conrad＇s Heart of Darkness. This article offers a critique of monistic views of literary meaning underlying such attacks by calling attention to some of the most interesting insights produced by the symbolist, the formal-linguistic, the postcolonial and the feminist perspectives on the novella. I argue that, while it＇s perfectly right to warn against overinterpretation, the complexity of a work such as Heart of Darkness does seem to invite new interpretations. Reexamining Conrad＇s use of symbols and language, for instance, enables us to get a glimpse of the semantic complexity of the text while analyzing cross-racial and gender politics helps reveal other possibilities of the book＇s interpretation. Heart of Darkness does more than condemn the evils of colonialism. As a literary text, it still carries numerous other things awaiting readers＇ discoveries.