While I read, think, and write about many things, it’s the analysis of literary texts that got me hooked on the intellectual life. And that’s still the center of it all.
So, how can LLMs benefit literary critics?
I’ve taken the whole text of Heart of Darkness, almost 39,000 words, and loaded it into Claude 3.5 Sonnet. To date, my interaction with Claude on HoD totals almost 7000 words, most of them produced by Claude. I have no intention of reporting all of them in this post, but I will offer you a judicious selection.
Claude has been an interesting interlocutor in this matter, interesting enough that I’m willing to hazard the view that, in the future, when I work on a literary text, I would like to be able to load the whole thing in whatever LLM or LLM-based tool I’m using. I note, however, in working with Claude on HoD I’m dealing with a text I know fairly well and have even written about: Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales. It’s not clear how things would go with a text I’ve not worked with.
Let’s get on with it. I’m appending three things: 1) the second of 2 summaries Claude produced, along with a question I asked about them, 2) Claude’s exegesis of texts fragments I call the emblem, because I take them as being emblematic of the whole text, and 3) Claude’s remarks about a passage late in the book. The second and third indicate that so-called close analysis is not the exclusive province of human literary critics. As a fourth appendix, I’ve included that passage.
A Summary of Heart of Darkness
This is the second summary I asked Claude to produce:
Marlow, a sailor, tells fellow passengers aboard a boat on the Thames about his journey up the Congo River. His story begins with him taking a job as a steamboat captain for a Belgian trading company. Before leaving Europe, he encounters several disturbing signs of colonialism's dark nature, including two women knitting black wool who seem like figures of fate.
In Africa, Marlow becomes increasingly fascinated by Mr. Kurtz, an extraordinary ivory trader stationed deep in the interior. As Marlow makes his difficult journey upriver, repairing his damaged steamboat and witnessing the brutal exploitation of Africans, he hears conflicting stories about Kurtz - that he's a remarkable success, that he's ill, that he's gone native, that he's bringing extraordinary profits in ivory.
When Marlow finally reaches Kurtz's station, he finds a man who has essentially become a demigod to local inhabitants, decorating his station with severed heads and conducting brutal raids for ivory. Though physically ill, Kurtz remains powerful through his charismatic personality and extraordinary gift for speech. Despite his noble intentions and grand ideals about civilizing Africa (expressed in a report he wrote for the "International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs"), Kurtz has succumbed to the darkness of unchecked power and greed.
Marlow gets the dying Kurtz onto his steamboat. Before dying, Kurtz cries out "The horror! The horror!" - words that seem to sum up both his experience and the entire colonial enterprise. After returning to Europe, Marlow visits Kurtz's Intended (fiancée), who still idealizes Kurtz. Unable to shatter her illusions, Marlow lies and tells her Kurtz's last words were her name.
The story is structured as a frame narrative, with Marlow telling his tale to men on a boat, and explores themes of colonialism, civilization versus savagery, and the darkness that lurks in human nature when moral restraints are removed. It moves from the "civilized" Thames to the "savage" Congo and back, suggesting that darkness exists everywhere, even in the heart of the empire.
The narrative emphasizes both the horror of European colonialism in Africa and the more universal horror of confronting human nature's capacity for evil. Through Marlow's journey into the heart of darkness - both geographical and moral - Conrad examines how the veneer of civilization can crack, revealing humanity's potential for savage behavior.
A bit later I asked about an omission in both summaries (my prompt is set in bold):
On two times I’ve asked you to summarize Heart of Darkness. You don’t mention the death of the helmsman in either summary. Why not?
Ah - this is a very important observation. You're absolutely right. In both summaries I failed to mention this crucial death, which is a significant oversight because:
- It's a pivotal moment in the narrative
- It provides the context for that crucial nexus paragraph we discussed
- It gives concrete weight to the human cost of the colonial enterprise
- It creates a personal connection between Marlow and Africa
- It sets up the moral question of whether Kurtz was "worth the life we lost"
This omission from my summaries reveals how easy it is to focus on the more obvious elements (Kurtz, the journey, the Intended) while missing crucial structural and thematic elements. The helmsman's death isn't just another event in the story - it's a critical moment that brings together many of the story's concerns.
My summaries would have been better if they had included this death and its significance. It's a good reminder that even when we think we understand a text well, we can miss important elements.
Thank you for pointing out this blind spot. It's a useful lesson in how to read and summarize more carefully.
Explicating the emblem
During the interaction I explain why I’ve chosen the word “emblem,” which Claude then comments on, introducing the idea of a fractal. Claude’s “close reading” of the emblem is remarkable.
Here’s the issue: I identified those phrases based on my years of experience as a critic. Would an LLM be able to spot such emblems on its own, for some reasonable definition of “on its own”? I’m not sure, not even sure about the question. How can LLMs help us to track down fractal structures in literary texts?
At one point Kurtz utters the phrase, “My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas.” At another point he utters a very similar phrase, “My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my...” How do the items in those phrases relate to the whole story. Trace out some of the linkages.
These two phrases are fascinating echoes of each other and reveal much about Kurtz's character and the novel's themes. Let me trace the key elements:
"My Intended"
- Represents European civilization, purity, and idealism
- Her presence bookends the story - she exists in the "civilized" world Kurtz left and to which Marlow must return
- Her naive faith in Kurtz's "nobility" contrasts sharply with the reality Marlow witnessed
- The repetition of "my" before her shows Kurtz's possessive nature even toward what he supposedly loves
- She represents the "white lie" of colonialism - the noble intentions that mask darker realities
"My station/my career"
- Represents Kurtz's original civilizing mission and professional ambitions
- The station becomes a place of horror, decorated with severed heads
- His "career" evolves from trading to essentially becoming a tribal deity
- Shows how his professional goals degraded into megalomania
- The repetition emphasizes his growing obsession with power and control
"My ivory"
- Not in the first utterance but appears in the second - showing his corruption
- Represents the material wealth and exploitation at the heart of colonialism
- The pursuit of ivory leads to Kurtz's moral destruction
- It's what the company really cares about, despite their civilizing pretense
- The possessive "my" shows how he's claiming what he's essentially stolen
"My river"
- Added in the second utterance
- The Congo River serves as both literal path and metaphorical journey into darkness
- His claiming of the river shows his grandiose delusions of control over nature
- The river is described as snake-like, suggesting temptation and evil
- It's the pathway between civilization and savagery
"My ideas"
- Present in first utterance but absent in second - showing his loss of intellectual pretense
- His report for the International Society for Suppression of Savage Customs ends with "Exterminate all the brutes!"
- Shows how his enlightenment ideals devolved into brutality
- His "ideas" about bringing civilization become hollow justifications for atrocity
The progression between these two utterances reveals Kurtz's transformation:
- The first version emphasizes his civilized roles and ideas
- The second version shows his obsession with possession and power
- The shift from "ideas" to "ivory" shows his moral deterioration
- The addition of "river" shows his delusion of controlling nature itself
- Both versions reveal his fundamental character flaw - treating everything and everyone as possessions
This progression mirrors the larger themes of the novel:
- The facade of civilization versus its reality
- The corruption of noble intentions
- The possessive nature of colonialism
- The thin line between civilization and savagery
- The self-deception involved in imperialism
The repetitive use of "my" in both phrases emphasizes:
- Kurtz's megalomaniacal personality
- The possessive nature of colonialism
- The way imperialism treats both people and nature as things to be owned
- The self-centered nature of supposedly civilizing missions
Would you like me to elaborate on any of these connections or explore other aspects of these key phrases?
Given that range of reference could we say that those phrases are emblematic of the whole story?
Yes, absolutely! Those phrases are like miniature versions of the entire narrative, containing within them all the major themes and movements of the story. They're remarkable examples of how Conrad could compress the essence of his entire work into just a few carefully chosen words.
Let me explain why these phrases are so emblematic:
1. They Capture the Story's Core Movement
- From civilization to savagery
- From idealism to corruption
- From noble intentions to brutal reality
- From professional ambition to primitive power
- From European refinement to primal darkness2. They Contain All the Major Characters/Forces
- The Intended (European civilization)
- The Station (colonialism in action)
- The River (nature/journey/darkness)
- The Ivory (material greed/exploitation)
- The Ideas (intellectual justification for imperialism)3. They Reveal the Story's Central Ironies
- The civilizing mission that becomes savage
- The idealist who becomes a tyrant
- The professional who becomes a god-king
- The European who "goes native" while claiming to civilize
- The enlightened man who embraces darkness4. They Demonstrate the Story's Key Technique
- The use of parallel structures that reveal deterioration
- The power of repetition with variation
- The way seemingly simple words carry complex meanings
- The use of possession ("my") to reveal character
- The technique of saying much with little5. They Embody the Story's Moral Concerns
- The nature of possession and power
- The relationship between civilization and savagery
- The self-deception in colonial enterprise
- The corruption of ideals
- The darkness in human natureThese phrases work as a kind of fractal - a small pattern that contains within itself the structure of the whole. They're like DNA sequences that carry the complete genetic code of the larger narrative. This is part of what makes "Heart of Darkness" such a masterful work - its ability to fold its largest themes into its smallest details.
I think this is why these phrases have such power in the story - they're not just character moments, they're crystallizations of the entire narrative. Each word carries the weight of the whole story's meaning, making them perfect emblems of Conrad's larger vision.
The murder of Kurtz’s African mistress
Finally, we have Claude’s astute analysis of a crucial, but enigmatic, passage. Even allowing for the fact that Claude must have encountered quite a bit of material about this text in the course of its training, its analysis of that passage is astute.
When the steamer is pulling away from Kurtz's station, with Kurtz on board. We see his African mistress on the shore. What happens to her?
The African mistress appears on the shore in a dramatic moment as the steamer is departing. She's described in magnificent terms - striding forward, adorned with ornaments, reaching out her arms. She remains proud and unbowed, leading a kind of lament, while the other natives flee when Marlow blows the steam whistle.
The last we see of her is this: "And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck started their little fun, and I could see nothing more for smoke."
The implication seems to be that the pilgrims are shooting at her and the other natives. We never learn her fate explicitly, but the scene's construction - her proud defiance, the pilgrims' "fun," and then the obscuring smoke - suggests something terrible.
This moment carries tremendous symbolic weight - the proud African woman who truly knew Kurtz being shot at by the petty European "pilgrims" who represent colonial power, with the truth of what happens to her obscured by smoke, just as the truth of colonialism is obscured by rhetoric and lies.
The scene forms a devastating contrast with the later scene of the Intended in Europe, who lives in preserved illusion while this woman who knew the real Kurtz likely meets a violent end.
Yes. I believe she was murdered. Samuel Delaney said that in an interview in 2011, but as far as I know not many critics have picked up on that.
Yes, it's a devastating realization. The scene's construction powerfully implies her murder without directly stating it:
1. The sequence is chilling:
- She stands proud and defiant
- The pilgrims treat it as "fun"
- Smoke obscures the outcome
- We never see her again
2. The "obscuring smoke" works on multiple levels:
- Literally hides her death
- Symbolizes how colonial violence is hidden
- Represents the way truth is obscured
- Parallels how Marlow will later obscure truth from the Intended
3. The contrast with the Intended becomes even starker:
- One woman is murdered
- The other is protected by lies
- One knew the real Kurtz
- The other preserves a false image
- One faces brutal reality
- The other lives in comfortable illusion
It's remarkable that this implication of murder isn't more widely discussed by critics. Perhaps this blind spot itself reflects how colonial violence can be hidden in plain sight, even in a text that's explicitly about colonial horror.
Delaney's observation helps us see how Conrad constructed the scene to simultaneously reveal and conceal this act of violence - much like colonialism itself.
The murder passage from Heart of Darkness
I’m using the Project Gutenberg text (this is from the third section of the text):
“We had carried Kurtz into the pilot-house: there was more air there. Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter. There was an eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman with helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream. She put out her hands, shouted something, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.
“’Do you understand this?’ I asked.
"He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes, with a mingled expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer, but I saw a smile, a smile of indefinable meaning, appear on his colorless lips that a moment after twitched convulsively. 'Do I not?' he said slowly, gasping, as if the words had been torn out of him by a supernatural power.
“I pulled the string of the whistle, and I did this because I saw the pilgrims on deck getting out their rifles with an air of anticipating a jolly lark. At the sudden screech there was a movement of abject terror through that wedged mass of bodies. ‘Don’t! Don'’ you frighten them away,’ cried someone on deck disconsolately. I pulled the string time after time. They broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they swerved, they dodged the flying terror of the sound. The three red chaps had fallen flat, face down on the shore, as though they had been shot dead. Only the barbarous and superb woman did not so much as flinch, and stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the somber and glittering river.
“And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck started their little fun, and I could see nothing more for smoke.
“The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz's life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time. The manager was very placid, he had no vital anxieties now, he took us both in with a comprehensive and satisfied glance: the 'affair' had come off as well as could be wished. I saw the time approaching when I would be left alone of the party of 'unsound method.' The pilgrims looked upon me with disfavor. I was, so to speak, numbered with the dead. It is strange how I accepted this unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms.
What was hidden in the smoke in the penultimate paragraph?
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