# LongBench v2 / 66ebed525a08c7b9b35e1cb4

task_id: 697c33fb-17ac-55f8-b913-57641c9eba06
task_key: train--66ebed525a08c7b9b35e1cb4
task_revision_id: 3

{"choice_A":"Each must read for himself or herself and testify anew.","choice_B":"Readers must reach a high standrad to some degree.","choice_C":"It is the readers' obligation to get the \"truth\" from the primary narrator.","choice_D":"The performative interpretation of language transforms what it interprets.","context":"Chapter Five\nJOSEPH CONRAD:\nSHOULD WE READ\nHEART OF DARKNESS}\nThe inaccessible incites from its place of hiding.\n\n\nSHOULD WE READ Heart of Darkness} May we read it? Must we read it?\nOr, on the contrary, ought we not to read it or allow our students and the\npublic in general to read it? Should every copy be taken from all the\nshelves and burned? What or who gives us the authority to make a deci-\nsion about that? Who is this \"we\" in whose name I speak? What commu-\nnity forms that \"we\" ? Nothing could be more problematic than the bland\nappeal to some homogeneous authoritative body, say professors of En-\nglish literature everywhere, capable of deciding collectively whether \"we\"\nshould read Heart of Darkness. By \"read\" I mean not just run the words\npassively through the mind's ear, but perform a reading in the strong\nsense, an active responsible response that renders justice to a book by\ngenerating more language in its turn, the language of attestation, even\nthough that language may remain silent or implicit. Such a response testi-\nfies that the one who responds has been changed by the reading. Part of\nthe problem, as you can see, is that it is impossible to decide authorita-\ntively whether or not we should read Heart of Darkness without reading\nit in that strong sense. By then it is too late. I have already read it, been\naffected by it, and passed my judgment, perhaps recorded that judgment\nfor others to read. Which of us, however, would or should want to take\nsomeone else's word for what is in a book? Each must read again in his\nor her turn and bear witness to that reading in his or her turn. In that\naphorism about which Jacques Derrida has had so much to say, Paul\nCelan says, \"Niemand / zeugt fur den / Zeugen (Nobody / bears witness\nfor the / witness).\"1 This might be altered to say, \"No one can do your\nreading for you.\" Each must read for himself or herself and testify anew.\nThis structure is inscribed in Heart of Darkness itself. The primary\nnarrator bears witness through exact citation to what he heard Marlow\nsay one night on the deck of the cruising yawl Nellie, as he and the other\nmen, the Lawyer, the Accountant, the Director of Companies, representa-\nMiller, Joseph Hillis. \"Chapter Five. Joseph Conrad: Should We Read Heart \nof Darkness?\" In Others, 104-136. Princeton: Princeton University Press, \n2002.\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n105\ntives of advanced capitalism and imperialism, waited for the tide to turn\nso they could float down the Thames and out to sea, presumably on a\npleasure cruise.2 They have enough wealth and leisure to take time off to\ndo as an aesthetic end in itself what Marlow has done for pay as a profes-\nsional seaman. The profession of the primary, framing narrator is never\nspecified. He cites with what the reader is led to believe is conscientious\nand meticulous accuracy just what Marlow said. What Marlow said, put\nwithin quotation marks throughout, is a story, the recounting of and ac-\ncounting for what he calls an \"experience\" that \"seemed somehow to\nthrow a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It\nwas sombre enough too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—\nnot very clear either. No, not very clear, and yet it seemed to throw a kind\nof light.\"3 That recounting and accounting centers on an attempt to \"ren-\nder justice,\" as Marlow puts it (94), to Kurtz, the man he meets at \"the\nfarthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience\"\n(22). What Marlow says at the beginning is also an implicit promise to his\nlisteners and to us as readers. He promises that he will pass on to them\nand to us the illumination he has received.\nThe observant reader will note that the language Conrad gives Marlow\nmixes constative and performative dimensions. On the one hand, Mar-\nlow's experience shed a kind of light on everything. It made him \"see\" in\nthe double meaning Conrad habitually gives to \"see,\" as does everyday\nlanguage: see as visual seeing and see as understanding, acquiring new\nknowledge. On the other hand, Marlow's experience conferred an obliga-\ntion that can only be fulfilled by performative language, by \"rendering\njustice\" (94) or \"remaining loyal\" (88). The performative and constative\ndimensions of any \"accounting\" or \"recounting\" are, necessarily, inter-\ntwined, as they are in any speech act. Heart of Darkness, however, is\nunusually explicit in its emphasis on the performative side of Marlow's\nlanguage, the way it is a specific kind of speech act, namely, an attesta-\ntion. \"I have remained loyal to Kurtz,\" says Marlow, \"to the last, and\neven beyond\" (88). \"I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was ordered I should\nnever betray him—it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my\nchoice\" (81). Who did the \"ordering\" or the \"writing\" here is not said\nexplicitly. Presumably Marlow means it was written down in the book of\nhis Fate, a sufficiently vague notion. It was because it was to be. Actually\nit was written down in the book Conrad made up about Marlow, as the\nreader may happen to reflect. Or rather, as Marlow confesses in his ac-\ncount of the last episode, his visit to Kurtz's \"Intended\" (after Kurtz has\ndied on the journey back down the African river and Marlow has re-\nturned to the city that \"always makes [him] think of a whited sepulcre\"\n[24]), he has by telling his lie to the Intended failed to render full justice\nto Kurtz: \"It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could\n\n\n106 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nescape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened.\nThe heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I won-\nder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said\nhe wanted only justice?\" (94). Kurtz had indeed said to Marlow just that:\n\"I want no more than justice\" (91).\nEarlier Marlow had said, \"I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie\"\n(64). Mariow's lie was to tell the Intended, with her soul as pure as a cliff\nof crystal, with her candid brow, that Kurtz's last words were her name,\nwhereas his actual last words were, in \"a cry that was no more than a\nbreath,\" \"The horror! The horror!\" (86). Is Marlow's lie justified? Can\nwe exonerate Marlow for it? Was this lie in any sense a way of rendering\nKurtz justice? Marlow has told us he abhors lies, that they have a taint of\nmortality about them: \"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie,\" he\nsays, \"not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because\nit appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies—which\nis exactly what I hate and detest in the world—what I want to forget. It\nmakes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do\"\n(42). To say a lie has a taint of death is odd. It suggests that only by telling\nthe truth can we hold off death, though Marlow says just the reverse\nconcerning his lie. It has laid the ghost of Kurtz's gifts, the greatest of\nwhich was the gift of speech, \"the gift of expression, the bewildering, the\nilluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating\nstream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable\ndarkness\" (63).\nA lie puts us in complicity with death, at the mercy of death. A lie lets\ndeath into the human community. This is a somewhat hyperbolic version\nof the repudiation of the right to lie in Immanuel Kant's opuscule, \"On\nthe Presumed Right to Lie Out of Love for Humanity.\" A lie is never jus-\ntified, says Kant, even to save someone's life, since any lie radically threat-\nens human society. The latter depends on strict truth-telling in every cir-\ncumstance, even the most extreme. \"Truth\" is a key word, though an\nexceedingly ambiguous one, in Marlow's narration in Heart of Darkness.\nHis whole story is put under the aegis of giving a true account of his\nexperience. That obligation is passed on to the primary narrator and then\non to you and me as readers. The promise to give faithful testimony is,\nlike promises in general, always messianic. It has to do with death and the\nlast days, with the sort of promise an Apocalypse makes. Even so routine\na promise as the one made by the signatory of a mortgage note invokes\ndeath, as the etymology of \"mortgage\" indicates. To sign a mortgage note\nis to engage one's life unto death, to put one's death on the line. The great\nexemplary apocalypse in our tradition, the last book of the Christian\nBible, Revelations, ends with the promise and invocation of an imminent\nunveiling that always remains future, never quite yet here and now: \"He\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n107\nwhich testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so,\ncome, Lord Jesus\" (Rev. 22:20).\nMarlow is in the position of someone who survives the death of an-\nother. In Kurtz's end, death and the consequent responsibilities of the\nsurvivor enter as central issues in the novel. As Marlow says, \"I was to\nhave the care of his memory\" (66), just as the Intended's first words to\nMarlow about Kurtz are \"I have survived\" (91). Surely the first obliga-\ntion of the survivor is to tell the truth about the dead. What is peculiar\nabout Marlow's survival of Kurtz is that Kurtz is presented when Marlow\nfinally encounters him as already the survivor of his own death. Kurtz is\nalready the ghost of himself. In that sense he cannot die. This is testified\nto in the way he survives in Marlow's narration and in the way the dusk\nstill whispers his last words when Marlow returns to Europe and visits\nKurtz's \"Intended.\" It is hardly the case that Marlow has laid the ghost of\nKurtz's gifts with a lie, since the ghost still walks, even in the room where\nMarlow tells his lie to the Intended. That ghost, far from being laid, is\nresurrected, invoked, conjured up, each time Heart of Darkness is read.\nPerhaps Marlow means no more than that he appeased the Intended's\ndesire to keep Kurtz's eloquence alive by lying about what that eloquence\nreally said and what its source was. It is not Kurtz the spectral survivor\nand revenant who is buried when Kurtz \"dies,\" but his mere bodily en-\nvelope or cadaver: \"But I am of course aware that next day the pilgrims\nburied something in a muddy hole\" (87). The chain of obligation begins\nwith Kurtz, who has passed judgment in those words \"The horror! The\nhorror!\" He \"had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his\nsoul on this earth. . . . He had summed up—he had judged. 'The horror!'\nHe was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort\nof belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of\nrevolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the\nstrange commingling of desire and hate\" (87). The chain then goes to\nMarlow, who testifies as survivor for Kurtz, keeping Kurtz alive in his\nnarration, and telling to his auditors on the Nellie the truth he had with-\nheld from the Intended. The primary narrator in his turns bears witness\nto what Marlow said by citing it exactly and by placing it in an exegetical\ncontext that is implicitly a reading.\nExact citation, prior to any interpretation, is one of the most important\nways to testify or to render justice, as in my citations from Conrad's\nHeart of Darkness here. Each quotation is accompanied by an implicit\noath: \"I swear to you this is what Conrad really wrote, or at least what\nConrad's most authoritative editors attest he wrote.\"4 The obligation to\nrender justice is then passed from Conrad's primary narrator to any\nreader, each one of whom nowadays is Conrad's survivor. From each\nreader it is demanded once again to do justice to Conrad and to Heart of\n\n\n108 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nDarkness, to attest to what happens when the book is read—telling the\ntruth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.\nBearing witness in an interpretation or reading, for example of Heart\nof Darkness, is a performative speech act, but of a peculiar and even\nanomalous kind. This kind is not accounted for by J. L. Austin's speech\nact theory in How to Do Things with Words.5 A performative interpreta-\ntion transforms what it interprets. It therefore cannot be fully justified by\nconstative, verifiable evidence, any more than can acts of bearing witness\nin general. No one bears witness for the witness. That the witness saw\nwhat he or she says he or she saw, or that he or she responded in a certain\nway in an act of reading, has to be taken on faith. That is why, in murder\ncases in the United States for example, the jury is asked to decide not\nwhether the defendant is guilty but whether they believe \"beyond a rea-\nsonable doubt\" that the defendant is guilty. As Jacques Derrida and Wer-\nner Hamacher have in different ways affirmed, interpretation in this per-\nformative sense, an interpretation that is inaugural, that intervenes to\nchange what is read and to initiate something new, fulfills in a paradoxi-\ncal way the eleventh of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach: \"The philosophers\nhave only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to\nchange it.\"6 In this case, the interpretation does the changing. It changes\nthe world, in however small a way, by changing once and for all an ele-\nment of that world that has power to make things happen, in this case a\nliterary text, Heart of Darkness.\nNor have Conrad's readers failed to respond to this demand for inter-\npretation. A large secondary literature has sprung up around Heart of\nDarkness. These essays and books of course have a constative dimension.\nThey often provide precious information about Conrad's life, about his\nexperiences in Africa, about late nineteenth-century imperialism, espe-\ncially about that terrible murderous devastation wrought by King Leo-\npold of Belgium in the Belgian Congo, as it was then called, about the\nsupposed \"originals\" of characters in Heart of Darkness, and so on. This\nsecondary literature, however, often also has an explicit performative di-\nmension. Conrad's novel is brought before the bar of justice, arraigned,\ntried, and judged. The critic acts as witness of his or her reading, also as\ninterrogator, prosecuting attorney, jury, and presiding judge. The critic\npasses judgment and renders justice.\nHeart of Darkness has often received a heavy sentence from its critics.\nIt has been condemned, often in angry terms, as racist or sexist, some-\ntimes as both in the same essay. Examples are the influential essay of 1975\nby the distinguished Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe (\"Conrad was a\nbloody racist\"), or an essay of 1989 by Bette London: \"Dependent upon\nunexamined assumptions, themselves culturally suspect, the novel, in its\nrepresentations of sex and gender, supports dubious cultural claims; it\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n109\nparticipates in and promotes a racial as well as gender ideology that the\nnarrative represents as transparent and 'self-evident.'\"7 Edward Said's\njudgment in Culture and Imperialism, though giving Conrad his due as a\ncritic of imperialism and recognizing the complexity of doing justice to\nHeart of Darkness, is in the end equally severe in his summing up: \"The\ncultural and ideological evidence that Conrad was wrong in his Eurocen-\ntric way is both impressive and rich.\"8 These are powerful indictments. If\nwhat they say renders justice to Heart of Darkness, if their witness may be\ntrusted, it might seem inevitably to follow that the novel should not be\nread, taught, or written about, except perhaps as an example of some-\nthing detestable. Nevertheless, according to the paradox I have already\nmentioned, you could only be sure about this by reading the novel your-\nself, thereby putting yourself, if these critics are right, in danger of becom-\ning sexist, racist, and Eurocentric yourself. Even so, no one bears witness\nfor the witness, and no one else can do your reading for you.\nTo pass judgment anew, it is necessary to take the risk and read Heart\nof Darkness for yourself. I shall now try to do that. First, however, I must\nask a final question. Suppose I or any other reader or community of read-\ners were to decide that Conrad, or rather Heart of Darkness, is indeed\nracist and sexist. Would it be possible, after passing that verdict, to par-\ndon Conrad or the novel he wrote, to exonerate Heart of Darkness in\nsome way, and get him set free, so to speak? To put this another way,\nwould truth in this case lead to reconciliation? To be reconciled is to be\nable to say, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa\nhas hoped would happen, \"I forgive you. I am reconciled with you,\nthough I now know you tortured and murdered my father or mother,\nhusband or wife, brother or sister, or my neighbor, my friend.\" Though\nthe slaves were emancipated in the United States 130 years ago and\nwomen given the vote 80 years ago, the United States is still in many ways\na racist and sexist country. The sins of the fathers are visited on the chil-\ndren even unto the third generation. One might add that those sins are\nvisited also on the children and the children's children of those whom the\nfathers have wronged. The United States, like all of Africa in different\nways, will take many more generations to become reconciled to its his-\ntory, to reach anything like the horizon of a more perfect democracy. This\nis that democracy that is always, as Jacques Derrida says, \"to come.\"\nThomas Mann, in \"Death in Venice,\" cites a French proverb, \"Tout com-\nprendre c'est tout pardonner. [To understand everything is to forgive\neverything.]\"9 \"Death in Venice\" powerfully ironizes or puts in question\nthat cheerful enlightenment confidence in the exonerating power of com-\nprehension. It may be that the more knowledge we have the less able we\nare to pardon, or that pardoning, a speech act of the most exemplary and\nsovereign kind, has to occur, if it occurs, in the teeth of knowledge. On\n\n\n110 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nthe one hand, to understand everything is, it may be, to find it almost\nimpossible to forgive. Certainly that is the case with the critics I have\nmentioned. On the other hand, perhaps a true pardon is only of the unfor-\ngivable, as Derrida has been arguing in his recent seminars on \"Pardon\nand Perjury.\" If it is forgivable it does not need forgiveness. Only the\nunforgivable requires forgiveness.\nThe question of forgiveness is inscribed within Heart of Darkness in\nthe way Marlow's narrative is an implicit appeal to his listeners on the\nNellie, and indirectly also to us as readers, to forgive him for his choice of\nnightmares, for his loyalty to Kurtz. We are also asked, paradoxically, to\nforgive him for his perjury, for the lie he tells the Intended, an act of\ndisloyalty to Kurtz. Marlow's narrative is a species of confession. A con-\nfession is always a demand or prayer for forgiveness. It often reveals more\nthat needs forgiveness than the confessor knows. In this case that might\nbe the presumed racism and sexism of which Marlow (or Conrad) seems\nunaware. In his confession Marlow makes up for his lie by telling the\ntruth, unless, in a \nfinal \nirony, \"The horror!\" and the Intended's name (just\nwhat that is the reader never learns) come to the same thing, so that Mar-\nlow uttered the truth after all, even the first time. That, however, it might\nbe argued, is no excuse, even if for those in the know. Marlow, it could be\nsaid, tells the truth obliquely, but the result of his lie is that the Intended\nlives out the rest of her life within the shadowy confines of an illusion,\nthat is, within a \"horror\" that she does not even know is a horror. Mar-\nlow's lie, \"white lie\" though it is, is performatively effective because it is\nbelieved. Kant would have condemned it for unraveling the social fabric.\nNothing is said about the response of those on board the Nellie to\nMarlow's story. We do not know whether or not they forgive him his lie.\nThe Director of Companies, after Marlow \nfinishes \nhis story, says no more\nthan \"We have lost the first of the ebb\" (95), meaning that Marlow's\nstory has kept them from leaving when they ought. The primary narrator\nends his account by making an observation that might seem to be evi-\ndence of the effect of Marlow's story on his way of seeing: \"the tranquil\nwaterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under\nan overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness\"\n(95). Any further or more explicit passing of judgment is left to the\nreader. It is up to us—or rather up to me, since reading and bearing wit-\nness to what happens in reading are always solitary, lonely acts. This is\nthe case however much such judgments may be performed within the\ncoercive and determining context of codes, conventions, and protocols of\nreading. Historically and geographically determined ideologies also\nspeak through the solitary reader when he or she sums up and passes\njudgment, as Kurtz did when he said \"The horror! The horror!\" or as\nMarlow did when he said of Kurtz, \"He had summed up—he had judged.\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n111\n'The horror!' He was a remarkable man\" (87), or as Achebe did when he\nsaid \"Conrad was a bloody racist.\" Nevertheless, each person who passes\njudgment must take personal responsibility for doing so. He or she must\nalso take responsibility for whatever further consequences that act of\nreading may have.\nThe first thing to say in passing judgment on Heart of Darkness is that it\nis a literary work, not history, not a travel book, a memoir, an autobiog-\nraphy, or any other genre but some form of literature. It is a literary work,\nmoreover, belonging to a particular historical time and place. It is, that is,\na work of English literature written at the moment of high capitalism and\nimperialism. This may seem obvious enough, but much criticism forgets\nthis fact or elides it. An example is what the editor of the Norton Critical\nEdition, Robert Kimbrough, says about the \"Backgrounds and Sources\"\nsection of the volume. The first part of this, says Kimbrough, \"sets the\nstory within its historical context.\" The second \"offers all that Conrad\never biographically recorded concerning his Congo experience, the artis-\ntic projection of which is Heart of Darkness.\" The third \"reminds us that,\nautobiographical though it may be, the story was to Conrad a significant,\nbut objective work of art\" (N, 84). Kimbrough, the reader can see, wants\nto have it several ways at once. Heart of Darkness is an objective work of\nart (whatever that means), but it is at the same time embedded in a histor-\nical context, the \"projection\" (whatever that means) of Conrad's \"bio-\ngraphical\" experience, and it is, after all, \"autobiographical.\" These\n\"backgrounds and sources\" invite the reader to measure the novel by its\nreferential accuracy. It is an almost irresistible temptation to do so, espe-\ncially once you know these background \"facts.\" An example of such\nyielding is talking about the place where the main events occur as the\nCongo or about the sepulchral city where Marlow gets his job as Brussels,\nwhereas neither the Congo nor Brussels is anywhere named as such in the\nnovel, while the Thames is named in the third sentence. At the very least\nsuch reticence needs to be recognized as a symptom. More radically, it is\na signal that the only way to enter the countries where the events of Heart\nof Darkness occur is by reading the novel, not by visiting Belgium or what\nis now again called the Congo.\nConrad fought a lifelong battle in his letters, prefaces, essays, and\novertly autobiographical writing, such as The Mirror of the Sea (1906), A\nPersonal Record (1912), and Notes on Life and Letters (1921), to get\nhis readers and critics to accept that his work is literature, not thinly\ndisguised autobiography or travel literature. I give two examples out of a\nlarge number. Arthur Symons, in Notes on Joseph Conrad: With Some\nUnpublished Letters (1925), cites a letter to him from Conrad in which\nthe latter rejects Symons's identification of Conrad with his fictive\n\n\n112 \nCHAPTER FIVE\ncharacter, Kurtz: \"For the rest I may say that there are certain passages in\nyour article which have surprised me. I did not know that I had 'a heart\nof darkness' and 'an unlawful soul.' Mr. Kurtz had—and I have not\ntreated him with easy nonchalance\" (N, 153). A letter of July 14, 1923,\nto Richard Curie, responding to Curie's Times Literary Supplement re-\nview of the recently published Dent Uniform Edition of Conrad's works,\ncomplains bitterly of the way Curie has perpetuated the falsehood that\nhe, Conrad, is no more than a writer of sea stories. \"I was in hopes,\"\nwrites Conrad,\nthat on a general survey it could also be made an opportunity for me to get\nfreed from that infernal tale of ships, and that obsession of my sea life which\nhas about as much bearing on my literary existence, on my quality as a\nwriter, as the enumeration of the drawing-rooms which Thackeray fre-\nquented could have had on his gift as a great novelist. After all, I may have\nbeen a seaman, but I am a writer of prose. Indeed the nature of my writing\nruns the risk of being obscured by the nature of my material. . . . That the\nconnection of my ships with my writings stands, with my concurrence I\nadmit, recorded in your book is, of course, a fact. But that was a biographi-\ncal matter, not literary. (N, 152)\nWhat is the difference between biography and literature? Conrad goes\non in his letter to Curie to specify the difference in a striking figure. Al-\nmost all his \"art,\" says Conrad, consists \"in my unconventional grouping\nand perspective\" (N, 153). Artistic grouping of what? Of the apparently\nreferential or historical material of the story that is placed within the\ngrouping and lighting. This material is necessary to the illuminating\ngrouping and to its artistic effect in the same way that invisible radio\nwaves require sending and receiving apparatuses to be detected, even\nthough what is important is the invisible waves, not the apparatus: \"Of\ncourse the plastic matter of this grouping and of those lights has its im-\nportance, since without it the actuality of that grouping and that lighting\ncould not be made evident any more than Marconi's electric waves could\nbe made evident without the sending-out and receiving instruments\" (N,\n153). The referential, mimetic, or representational aspect of his works,\nConrad is saying, is all for the sake of providing a necessary material base\nfor bringing something invisible into visibility through an artful arrange-\nment of that material. This figure is consonant with the often-cited pas-\nsage within Heart of Darkness itself about the peculiar nature of Mar-\nlow's stories as opposed to the usual stories seamen tell. I shall return to\nthat passage.\nMuch Conrad criticism recognizes tacitly that Heart of Darkness is\nliterature but then talks about it as if it were something else. Indeed it is\nalmost impossible to avoid making this elementary error, since every text\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n113\ninvites a referential or what Derrida calls, following Sartre, a \"transcen-\ndent\" reading, that is, a reading going beyond the work's language to-\nward the exterior world to which it presumably refers.10 To put this an-\nother way, to call Heart of Darkness a literary work, as I just have, is a\nspeech act that responds to certain possibilities in the text. I have im-\nplicitly said, \"I declare Heart of Darkness is literature.\" It would be\nequally possible to declare that Heart of Darkness is history, or memoir,\nor autobiography. To do this would be in one way or another to label the\nnovel a straightforwardly mimetic or referential work that deserves to\nbe judged by its truth value, its accuracy of representation. Many critics\nhave done just that. No distinguishing marks certainly identify a given\ntext as literary or as nonliterary, in spite of the many conventional codes\nthat ordinarily indicate a text is literature or not literature. This uncer-\ntainty results from the way each may present itself in the guise of the\nother. A page from a telephone book can be taken as literature. One can\nimagine a fictitious telephone book that would look exactly like a real\none, though the numbers would not work if you were to try to use them\nto call someone.\nIf taking Heart of Darkness as literature or as not literature is a speech\nact, an act of belief or of bearing witness, not a constative statement, this\nmeans that whoever declares it to be one or the other must take responsi-\nbility for his or her declaration. He or she must say, \"I did it. I have\ndeclared that Heart of Darkness is literature (or, on the contrary, is his-\ntory or autobiography). I accept responsibility for the consequences of\nsaying that.\" I hereby do that now for my claim that Heart of Darkness\nbelongs to literature. To say Heart of Darkness is a literary work, I hasten\nto add, by no means exonerates Conrad from responsibility for what is\nsaid within it, but it does change the terms and conditions of that respon-\nsibility. Just how?\nLiterature as an institution in the West is of relatively recent date. It\nbegan more or less in the Renaissance. \"Literature\" as we Westerners\nknow it is a radically overdetermined historical product belonging only\nto Western societies. Greek tragedy is not literature in the modern West-\nern sense, nor is classical Chinese poetry, however much these may look\nlike more or less the same thing as our literature. Greek tragedy was a\nspecies of quasi-religious ritual, and Chinese poetry had class and institu-\ntional functions, not to speak of a texture of political or historical allu-\nsions, that were not quite like anything in the West. Whether United\nStates so-called literature or South African Anglophone so-called litera-\nture is literature in the same sense that Conrad's Heart of Darkness is\nliterature is a subtle and difficult question, a question whose answer must\nby no means be taken for granted. I suspect the nature and social function\nof United States and South African literature are significantly different\n\n\n114 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nfrom those of British literature. Certainly it is difficult, for example, to\napply (without distorting them) to Melville, Hawthorne, or Dickinson\nparadigms developed for English Victorian literature, though they are\ncontemporary with it.\nLiterature in the modern Western sense is a concomitant of democracy\nwith its precious right to free speech, of the modern nation-state, of Euro-\npean worldwide economic and political imperialist hegemony, of print\nculture, of modern notions of authorship, of copyright laws, and of post-\nCartesian notions of subjectivity and of the subject/object dichotomy.\nDemocratic freedom of speech, as guaranteed by a particular nation state,\nis, as Jacques Derrida has cogently argued in the prefatory interview in\nActs of Literature, essential to literature in the modern European sense.\nSince it would be difficult to convict Derrida of either racism or sexism\n(though attempts have been made), his testimony may be valuable here in\nworking out how to pass judgment on Heart of Darkness. Though of\ncourse free speech always has its limits and is never more than imperfectly\nachieved, always something yet to come, nevertheless in principle it\nmakes literature possible by making it permissible to say anything and, in\na certain specific sense, to disclaim responsibility for it by saying, \"That\nis not me speaking but an imaginary character. I am exercising my right\nto free speech in the name of a higher responsibility.\"11\nAll these features I have named (democratic free speech, the nation\nstate, European hegemony, print culture, copyright laws, Cartesian no-\ntions of the ego), make a heterogeneous system, of which literature in the\nmodern Western sense is only one element. If one element is changed, the\nwhole system is changed, including any member of it. Several of these\nintertwined elements are in our time being radically altered. We hear on\nall sides these days of the decline of the nation state. Cartesian or He-\ngelian notions of subjectivity are no longer taken for granted, to say\nthe least. Print culture is being rapidly replaced by a new regime of tele-\ncommunications: television, cinema, videotapes, faxes, e-mail, computer\ndatabases, the Internet with its unimaginable and incoherent multiplicity\nof data, including literature (that is being transformed by this new me-\ndium) and literary scholarship—all floating freely in global cyberspace.\nAmong all that chaotic wealth I discovered, for example, a hypercard\nversion of Heart of Darkness and downloaded it into my computer. It\nwas prepared partly in Florida, partly in Norway, though the e-mail ad-\ndress is Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Reading Heart of Dark-\nness in this version is different in many hard-to-define ways from reading\nit in a printed book. We live in a postcolonial world in which Europe and\neven the United States are less and less dominant, as, for example, East\nAsian economies challenge the hegemony of Western ones in size and\nglobal power. Freedom of speech on the Internet does not mean the same\n\n\nCONRAD: \nHEART \nOF \nDARKNESS \n115\nthing as freedom of speech in face-to-face encounters in an old-fashioned\nNew England town meeting, or freedom of speech as exercised in a\nprinted text. The result of these changes may be that we are coming to the\nend of Western-style literature as it extended from Shakespeare to Con-\nrad and his European contemporaries. The study of this literature was\ninstitutionalized in departments of national literatures in Western-style\nuniversities all over the world. Those universities are part of the legacy of\nimperialism and colonialism.\nLiterature in the modern Western sense is, it may be, already a thing of\nthe past. It is now an object of historical investigation and imaginative,\nspectral resurrection, not something that is or could be currently pro-\nduced, since the enabling conditions have changed so radically. Misread-\nings of Heart of Darkness as though it were a straightforwardly his-\ntorical, referential, or autobiographical document may be evidence that\nliterature can no longer easily be understood in terms of older protocols,\ncodes, and conventions of reading, though of course such mimetic mis-\nreadings of literature have always been current. They too are part of our\nlegacy from the now-vanishing regime of print culture. As I have said, a\nfictional telephone book can always be taken as a real one. The need for\nthe ritual disclaimer (often a manifestly lying one) saying \"any resem-\nblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental\" testifies to\nthe ubiquity of the confusion and the need to try to ward it off.\nIn just what way does Heart of Darkness invite reading as literature\nrather than, say, as a historical account or as an autobiography? The\nmost obvious way is in the displacement from Conrad to two imaginary\nnarrators, neither of whom is to be identified with Conrad, any more than\nSocrates, in the Platonic dialogues, is to be identified with Plato. The\nreader who says Conrad speaks directly for himself either in the words\nof the frame narrator or in Marlow's words does so at his or her peril\nand in defiance of the most elementary literary conventions. Whatever\nthe frame narrator or Marlow says is ironized or suspended, presented\nimplicitly in parabasis, by being given as the speech of an imaginary\ncharacter.\nConrad's way of talking about Marlow's origin, nature, and relation\nto his creator is peculiar, evasive. It is a little like the response \"R.,\" pre-\nsumably Rousseau himself, though this is not confirmed, gives, in the\nsecond preface to Rousseau's La nouvelle Heloise, when he is asked by\n\"N.\" whether the letters that make up the novel are real letters or fictive\nones. \"R.\" says he does not know and, when pressed by \"N.,\" says he is\nafraid of lying if he answers definitely one way or the other.12 In the \"Au-\nthor's Note\" of 1917 to Youth, the volume that contains Heart of Dark-\nness, as well as \"Youth\" (in which Marlow first appeared) and \"The End\n\n\n116 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nof the Tether,\" Conrad responds to \"some literary speculation\" about\nMarlow's \"origins.\" \"One would think that I am the proper person to\nthrow a light on the matter;\" says Conrad, \"but in truth I find that it isn't\nso easy\" (N, 155). Marlow, he goes on to say, \"was supposed to be all\nsorts of things: a clever screen, a mere device, a 'personator,' a familiar\nspirit, a whispering 'daemon.' I myself have been suspected of a meditated\nplan for his capture\" (ibid.). Conrad continues to talk ironically and am-\nbiguously about Marlow as if he were a real not a fictive person. Or\nrather he speaks of Marlow as a fictive person whose existence is never-\ntheless inseparable from that of Conrad himself in the sense that neither\nwould \"care\" to survive the other:\nThat is not so. I made no plans [to \"capture\" him]. The man Marlow and I\ncame together in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances\nwhich sometimes ripen into friendships. This one has ripened. For all his\nassertiveness in matters of opinion he is not an intrusive person. He haunts\nmy hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great\ncomfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of a tale I am never sure that\nit may not be for the last time. Yet I don't think that either of us would care\nmuch to survive the other. In his case, at any rate, his occupation would be\ngone and he would suffer from that extinction, because I suspect him of\nsome vanity. (Ibid.)\nBy denying that he had made premeditated plans for Marlow's capture,\nConrad means to deny, I assume, that Marlow was the product of a calcu-\nlated literary artifice. He just appeared, spontaneously, like a ghostly\ndouble or like that \"secret sharer\" who appears on the protagonist's ship\nin \"The Secret Sharer,\" subject of the next chapter of this book. Marlow\nappears to \"haunt\" Conrad's hours of solitude, that is, the hours he does\nhis writing. They then \"part at the end of a tale.\" A ghost, especially one's\nown specter, is both the same as oneself and yet different. This one has\nhis own assertive opinions. These are not, Conrad implies, Conrad's\nown opinions, any more than Kurtz's opinions are the same as Marlow's.\nJust as Conrad is \"haunted\" by Marlow, so Marlow is haunted by Kurtz,\nwho is spoken of repeatedly as a ghost. Marlow speaks of \"the shade\nof Mr. Kurtz,\" \"this initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere\" (65—\n66), of Kurtz as an \"apparition\" (76), a \"shadow\" or \"Shadow\" (81,\n82), \"like a vapour exhaled by the earth\" (82), again as a \"shade\" (85),\nas \"an eloquent phantom\" (94), as a \"disinterred body\" (64). A ghost\ndoes not, cannot, die. It returns, as a revenant, just as Marlow hears\nKurtz's voice still whispering his last words when he visits the Intended\nback in Europe: \"The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all\naround us\" (94).\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n117\nHeart of Darkness is made of a chain of these ambiguous doublings and\nhauntings: of Marlow by Kurtz, of the primary narrator by Marlow, of\nConrad by Marlow, of the Intended by the African woman who is presum-\nably Kurtz's mistress, and of the reader by the whole series. The reader is\nhaunted by the tale, made to feel a \"faint uneasiness\" by it just as the frame\nnarrator is by Marlow's story (43). The reader pores over and over the text\ntrying to come to terms with it so it can be dismissed and forgotten.\nA second way Heart of Darkness presents itself as literature is in the elab-\norate tissue of figures and other rhetorical devices that make up, as one\nmight put it, the texture of the text. The simplest and most obvious of\nthese devices is the use of similes, signaled by \"like\" or \"as.\" These similes\ndisplace things that are named by one or the other of the narrators. They\nassert that this (whatever it is) is like something else. This something else\nforms through recurrence a consistent subtext. This subtext functions as\na counterpoint defining everything that can be seen as a veil hiding some-\nthing more truthful or essential behind.\nThe first of many uses of the \nfigure \nnaming things veils that are lifted to\nreveal more veils behind comes when the frame narrator, describing the\nevening scene just before sunset, when the sky is \"a benign immensity of\nunstained light\" (N, 4), as it looks from the Nellie at anchor in the\nThames estuary, says: \"the very mist on the Essex marshes was like [my\nemphasis] a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland,\nand draping the low shores in diaphanous folds\" (18). Such recurrent\nfigures establish a structure that is apocalyptic in the etymological sense\nof \"unveiling,\" as well as in the sense of having to do with death, judg-\nment, and other last things.\nThese similes, as they follow in a line punctuating the text at rhythmic\nintervals, are not casual or fortuitous. They form a system, a powerful\nundertext beneath the first-level descriptive language. They invite the\nreader to see whatever either of the narrators sees and names on the first\nlevel of narration as a veil or screen hiding something invisible or not yet\nvisible behind it. When each veil is lifted, however, it uncovers only an-\nother veil, according to a paradox essential to the genre of the apocalypse.\nApocalypse: the word means \"unveiling\" in Greek. If one had to name\nthe genre to which Heart of Darkness belongs, the answer would be that\nit is a failed apocalypse, or, strictly speaking, since all apocalypses ulti-\nmately fail to lift the last veil, it is just that, a member of the genre apoca-\nlypse. The film modeled on Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, was\nbrilliantly and accurately named, except for that word \"now.\" Apoca-\nlypse is never now. It is always to come, a thing of the future, both infi-\nnitely distant and immediately imminent.\n\n\n118 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nIn Heart of Darkness it is, to borrow Conrad's own words, as if each\nepisode were \"some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister back-cloth\"\n(28). The novel is structured as a long series of episodes. Each appears\nwith extreme vividness before the reader's imaginary vision, brought\nthere by Conrad's remarkable descriptive power. It then vanishes, to be\nreplaced by the next episode, as though a figured screen had been lifted to\nreveal yet another figured screen behind it. The darkness lies behind them\nall, like that \"sinister back-cloth\" Marlow names. The misty Essex shore\nin the opening frame episode is, in the passage already cited, \"like a gauzy\nand radiant fabric\" (18). The fog that obscures the shore just before Mar-\nlow's ship is attacked is said to have \"lifted as a shutter lifts\" and then to\nhave come down again, \"smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves\" (55).\nThe change that comes over Kurtz's features just before he utters his judg-\nment is \"as though a veil had been rent\" (86), in an explicit reference to\nthe figure of apocalypse as unveiling, revelation, as well as to the rending\nof the Temple veil at the time of Christ's crucifixion.\nHeart of Darkness is structured by this trope of successive revelations.\nThese unveilings unveil not so much the truth behind as the act of unveil-\ning itself, since no \"bottom\" to the series is reached, no ultimate revela-\ntion given. Each scene is in a sense just as close and just as far away from\nthe unnamable \"truth\" behind it as any other. Marlow's journey in Heart\nof Darkness and that of the reader as he or she gets deeper and deeper into\nthe book is a movement in place. The scene on the Nellie is replaced by\nthe scenes in the offices of the trading company in the sepulchral city: the\ntwo old women in black at the entrance, knitting and knitting, like two\nFates; the doctor who measures Marlow's head and says \"the changes\ntake place inside, you know\" (26). These scenes give place to the sequence\nof brief episodes that makes up the central story, as Marlow makes his\nway deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness: the French ship firing\npointlessly into the bush (\"Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a\nsmall flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear,\na tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened.\nNothing could happen\" [29]); the dying \"workers\" in the grove of death;\nthe starched and scented accountant, keeping perfect records in the midst\nof pointless confusion; the corpse with a bullet-hole in its forehead Mar-\nlow \"absolutely stumble[s]\"(35) upon during his two-hundred-mile trek\nto reach the beginning of inland navigation on the river, where he finds\nhis ship has been wrecked; his encounter with the skeleton of his prede-\ncessor, who has been killed in an absurd dispute over two chickens; the\nstorage shed at the Central Station that suddenly bursts into flames in the\nmiddle of the night; the macabre dance on the tinpot steamer's deck per-\nformed by Marlow and the chief mechanic to celebrate their expecta-\ntion that rivets will come; the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, with its\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n119\n\"absurd air of disorderly flight with the loot of innumerable outfit shops\nand provision stores,\" which vanishes \"into the patient wilderness, that\nclosed upon it as the sea closes over a diver\" (46, 49); the finding of the\nbook about seamanship, Towson's Inquiry, annotated in what Marlow\ntakes to be cipher; the death of Marlow's African helmsman as the ship\napproaches Kurtz's station and is attacked from the shore; the encounter\nat the station with the Russian dressed like a harlequin; the appearance\nthrough Marlow's telescope of those \"symbolic\" heads on stakes; Mar-\nlow's rescue of Kurtz when the latter tries to crawl back to join the Afri-\ncans he has commanded and bewitched, so that they worship him; the\napparition on the shore of what the reader supposes is Kurtz's African\nmistress; Kurtz's death and summing up, \"in a whisper at some image, at\nsome vision—. . . 'The horror! The horror!'\" (86); the echo or repetition\nof the African woman's gesture of raising her arms in the final episode of\nMarlow's encounter back in Europe with Kurtz's \"Intended,\" when he\ntells his lie; the return in the final brief paragraph to the deck of the Nellie\nwhere Marlow has been telling his story and to the concluding vision of\nthe Thames as a \"tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the\nearth [that] flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into\nthe heart of an immense darkness\" (95).\nYou may say that of course any narrative consists of a sequence of\nepisodes that give place to one another. Heart of Darkness is nothing\nspecial in doing that. The difference, however, is in the way the materials\nand personages of each episode vanish, never to return again except in\nMarlow's memory. A novel roughly contemporary with Heart of Dark-\nness, Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, for example, consists of a\nseries of episodes all right, but the same characters are returned to again\nand again in a slow rotation of encounters that advances the action. In\nHeart of Darkness each episode is like a separate sinister farce enacted\nbefore a black backcloth. The whole is like a sequence of dream visions,\neach with little connection to the ones before and after. Each vanishes for\ngood, as though a veil had been lifted to reveal yet another such scene\nbehind it that vanishes in its turn, in a rhythm of ironic undercutting and\ndisplacement that punctuates Marlow's journey. He journeys deeper and\ndeeper toward the fulfillment of an implicit promise, the promise to make\nor find a final revelation or unveiling. That promise, it hardly needs say-\ning, is never kept. It cannot be kept. Just why that is so and just what that\nnonfulfillment means remain to be seen.\nA third distinctively literary feature of Heart of Darkness has already\nbeen named in passing. The novel is ironic through and through. The\nreader might wish this were not the case. We may deplore Conrad's\nradical irony, but there it is, an indubitable fact. Heart of Darkness is a\n\n\n120 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nmasterwork of irony, as when the eloquent idealism of Kurtz's pamphlet\non \"The Suppression of Savage Customs\" is undercut by the phrase\nscrawled at the bottom: \"Exterminate all the brutes!\" (66), or as when the\ndying Africans in the grove of death are called \"helpers\" in the great\n\"work\" of civilizing the continent (32). Marlow's narrative in particular\nis steeped in irony throughout. The problem is that it is impossible to be\ncertain just how to take that irony. Irony is, as Hegel and Kierkegaard\nsaid, \"infinite absolute negativity,\" or, as Friedrich Schlegel said, a \"per-\nmanent parabasis,\" a continuous suspension of clearly identifiable mean-\ning. It is a principle of unintelligibility, or, in Schlegel's word, JJnver-\nstdndlichkeit.u Irony is a constant local feature of Marlow's narrative\nstyle. He says one thing and means another, as when the Europeans at the\nCentral Station engaged in the terrible work of imperialist conquest, the\n\"merry dance of death and trade\" (29), are said to be, in yet another\nsimile, like \"pilgrims\": \"They wandered here and there with their absurd\nlong staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside\na rotten fence\" (38).\nThis stylistic undercutting is mimed in that larger structure of the re-\nplacement of each episode by the next, so that each is undermined by the\nreader's knowledge that it is only a temporary appearance, not some ulti-\nmate goal of revelation attained. Each is certain to vanish and be replaced\nby the next scene to be enacted before that sinister backcloth.\nA fourth ostentatious literary feature of Heart of Darkness is the use of\nrecurrent prosopopoeias. The personification of the darkness (whatever\nthat word means here) begins in the title, which gives the darkness a\n\"heart.\" Prosopopoeia is the ascription of a name, a face, or a voice to the\nabsent, the inanimate, or the dead. By a speech act, a performative utter-\nance, prosopopoeia creates the fiction of a personality where in reality\nthere is none. Or is there? Once the personifications are in place, it seems\nas if the personality had been there all along, waiting to be recognized by\na name. All prosopopoeias are also catachreses. They move the verbal\nfiction of a personality over to name something unknown and unknow-\nable. The \"something\" is, therefore, strictly speaking, unnamable in any\nliteral language. It is something radically other than human personality:\nsomething absent, inanimate, or dead. It is no accident that so many tra-\nditional examples of catachresis are also personifications: \"headland,\"\n\"face of a mountain,\" \"tongue of land,\" \"table leg.\" The phrase \"heart\nof darkness\" is such a catachrestic prosopopoeia, to give it its barbarous-\nsounding Greek rhetorical name. We project our own bodies on the land-\nscape and on surrounding artifacts. In Heart of Darkness the proso-\npopoeias are a chief means of naming by indirection what Conrad calls,\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n121\nin a misleading and inadequate metaphor, \"the darkness,\" or, \"the wil-\nderness,\" or, most simply and perhaps most truthfully, \"it.\"\nMore than a dozen explicit personifications of this \"it\" rhythmically\npunctuate Heart of Darkness, like a recurring leitmotif. The darkness is\nnot really a person, but an \"it,\" asexual or transsexual, impersonal, indif-\nferent, though to Marlow it seems like a person. The wilderness sur-\nrounding the Central Station, says Marlow, \"struck me as something\ngreat and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing\naway of this fantastic invasion\" (38). A little later Marlow says \"the si-\nlence of the land went home to one's very heart—its mystery, its great-\nness, the amazing reality of its concealed life\" (41). Of that silent, noctur-\nnal wilderness Marlow asserts, \"All this was great, expectant, mute,\nwhile the man [one of the agents at the station] jabbered about himself. I\nwondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us\ntwo were meant as an appeal or as a menace... . Could we handle that\ndumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big,\nwas that thing that couldn't talk and perhaps was deaf as well\" (42). \"It\nwas the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable in-\ntention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.... I felt often its mysteri-\nous stillness watching me at my monkey-tricks, just as it watches you\nfellows [his listeners on the Nellie] performing on your respective tight-\nropes for—what is it? half a crown a tumble—\" (49, 50). The wilderness\ndestroys Kurtz by a kind of diabolical seduction: \"The wilderness had\npatted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it\nhad caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved\nhim, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his\nsoul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initia-\ntion. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite\" (64). The Africans at\nKurtz's Inner Station vanish \"without any perceptible movement of re-\ntreat, as if the forest that had ejected these beings so suddenly had drawn\nthem in again as the breath is drawn in a long aspiration\" (76).\nThis last citation indicates another and not unpredictable feature of the\nprosopopoeias in Heart of Darkness. The personification of the wilder-\nness is matched by a corresponding transformation of the African people\nwho intervene between Marlow and the \"it.\" Just as, in Thomas Hardy's\nThe Return of the Native, the extravagant personification of the night-\ntime heath that opens the novel leads to the assertion that Eustacia Vye,\nwho rises from a mound on the heath to stand outlined in the darkness,\nis, so to speak, the personification of the personification, its exposure or\nvisible embodiment, so, in Heart of Darkness, all the Africans Marlow\nmeets are visible representatives and symbols of the \"it.\" Though it may\nbe racist for Marlow (who is not necessarily Conrad, the reader should\n\n\n122 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nremember) to see the Africans as an inscrutably \"other,\" as simple \"sav-\nages\" or \"primitives,\" when their culture is older than any European one\nand just as complex or sophisticated, if not more so, this otherness is\nstressed for the primary purpose of making the Africans visible embodi-\nments and proofs that the \"it,\" the darkness, is a person.\nThis personification of personification is an underlying feature of all\nMarlow's prosopopoeias, but it is made most explicit in the scene where\nthe woman the reader may presume is Kurtz's African mistress appears\non the shore:\nShe was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something\nominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had\nfallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the\ncolossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pen-\nsive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and\npassionate soul. . . . She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wil-\nderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. (77)\nThis passage, like the one describing the way the wilderness has seduced\nKurtz, seems to indicate that this \"it\" is after all gendered. It is female, a\ncolossal body of fecund and mysterious life. Since the wilderness is sup-\nposed to represent a mysterious knowledge, \"like evil or truth,\" this per-\nsonification does not jibe very well with the \"sexist\" assertions Marlow\nmakes about the way women in general, for example Marlow's aunt or\nKurtz's Intended, are \"out of it,\" invincibly innocent and ignorant. At the\nleast one would have to say that two contradictory sexist myths about\nwomen are ascribed to Marlow. One is the European male's tendency to\npersonify the earth as a great mother, full of an immemorial, seductive\nwisdom. The other is the European male's tendency to condescend to\nwomen as innately incapable of seeing into things as well as men can.\nStrong hints of homosexual or at least homosocial relations complicate\nthe sexual politics of Heart of Darkness. Other critics have seen this in\nConrad's work. Those businessmen gathered on the Nellie for a weekend\naway from any women are a splendid example of what Eve Sedgwick\nmeans by male homosociality. The pleasure yacht is suggestively, though\nof course also conventionally, given a familiar woman's name. Most of\nthe doublings that organize the novel are of male by male, in that long\nchain I have identified. The most important of these is Marlow's infatua-\ntion with Kurtz, his extravagant fidelity to him, even beyond the grave. I\nhave scrupulously in this chapter referred to the reader as \"he or she.\" A\nmoment's reflection, however, will show that men and women are un-\nlikely to read the novel in just the same way or to feel just the same kind\nof obligation to account for it, to render it justice. Both genders will have\nthat obligation, but each in a different way.\n\n\nCONRAD: \nHEART \nOF \nDARKNESS \n123\nThe final scene pits Marlow's intimacy with Kurtz against the In-\ntended's. \"Intimacy grows quickly out there,\" Marlow tells the Intended.\n\"I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know another\" (92).\nA strong suggestion is made that Marlow is jealous of the Intended, as a\nman who loves another man is jealous of that man's heterosexual loves.\nMarcel Proust, however, who presumably knew about this, has Marcel in\nA la recherche du temps perdu claim that the Baron de Charlus was only\njealous of his lovers' other male lovers, not at all of their heterosexual\npartners. In any case, to the other doublings I have listed would need to\nbe added the way Marlow doubles the particolored Russian in his fasci-\nnation with Kurtz. Again hints are given that Marlow envies the Russian\nhis intimacy with Kurtz. He wants to have Kurtz all to himself, to be\nKurtz's sole survivor, so to speak, the sole keeper of his memory. The only\novert reference to homosexuality occurs in an interchange between Mar-\nlow and the Russian: \"We talked of everything,' he [the Russian] said,\nquite transported at the recollection. 'I forgot there was such a thing as\nsleep. The night did not seem to last an hour. Everything! Everything! . . .\nOf love too.' 'Ah, he talked to you of love!' I said, much amused. 'It isn't\nwhat you think,' he cried, almost passionately. 'It was in general. He\nmade me see things—things'\" (71-72).\nConrad's invention of Marlow at once embodies, reveals, and ironi-\ncally puts in question the complex system of Western imperialist and cap-\nitalist ideology. I mean \"invention\" here in both senses—as \nfinding \nand as\nmaking up. Among the ingredients of this system are not just a certain\n\"sexist\" vision of women but also a strand of homosociality or even ho-\nmosexuality. This was certainly an important feature of English society in\nConrad's day. It has also been shown to be a feature of the imperialist\nenterprise generally, for example in the European presentation of non-\nEuropean men as exotic, often even, in an obvious wish-fulfillment, as\nsexually perverse.\nAll four of the stylistic features I have identified—the use of fictional\nnarrators, of recurrent tropes, of irony, and of personification—consti-\ntute a demand that Heart of Darkness be read as literature, as opposed\nto being taken as a straightforwardly mimetic or referential work that\nwould allow the reader to hold Conrad himself directly responsible for\nwhat is said as though he were a journalist or a travel writer. Of course\nany of these features can be used in a nonliterary work, but taken all\ntogether as they are intertwined in Heart of Darkness, they invite the\nreader to declare, \"This is literature.\"\nIn the name of what higher responsibility does Conrad justify all this\n\"literary\" indirection and ironic undercutting, all this suspending or re-\ndirecting of his novel's straightforwardly mimetic aspect? In the name of\n\n\n124 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nwhat higher obligation is everything that is referentially named in a\npseudo-historical or mimetic way displaced by these ubiquitous rhetori-\ncal devices and made into a sign for something else? If Heart of Darkness\nis a literary work rather than history or autobiography, just what kind of\nliterary work is it? Just what kind of apocalypse, if it is an apocalypse?\nWhat lies behind that veil? The frame narrator, in a passage often cited\nand commented on, gives the reader a precious clue to an answer to these\nquestions, though it is left to the reader to make use of the clue in his or\nher reading:\nThe yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which\nlies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his\npropensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode\nwas not inside like a kernel but outside [the ms has \"outside in the unseen\"],\nenveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in\nthe likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by\nthe spectral illumination of moonshine. (20)\n\"To spin yarns\" is a cliche for narration. To tell a story is to join many\nthreads together to make a continuous line leading from here to there. Of\nthat yarn cloth may be woven, the whole cloth of the truth as opposed to\na lie that, as the proverbial saying has it, is \"made up out of whole cloth.\"\nThe lie as cloth makes a web, screen, or veil covering a truth that remains\nhidden behind or within. This inside/outside opposition governs the nar-\nrator's distinction between two kinds of tales. On the one hand, the first\nkind is the sort of seaman's yarn it has been assumed by many reader's\nand critics Conrad was telling in his stories and novels. The meaning of\nsuch a tale lies within, like the kernel within the shell of a cracked nut. I\ntake it this names a realistic, mimetic, referential tale with an obvious\npoint and moral. Marlow's tales, on the other hand, and by implication\nthis one by Conrad, since so much of it is made up of Marlow's narration,\nhave a different way of making meaning. All the visible, representational\nelements, all that the tale makes you see, according to that famous claim\nby Conrad in the preface to The Nigger of the \"Narcissus\", that his goal\nwas \"before all, to make you see,\"14 axe there not for their own sakes, as\nnumerically valuable and verifiable, for example for the sake of giving the\nreader information about imperialism in the Belgian Congo. Those ele-\nments have as their function to make something else visible, what the\nmanuscript calls the \"unseen,\"15 perhaps even the unseeable, as the dark\nmatter of the universe or the putative black holes at the center of galaxies\ncan in principle never be seen, only inferred.\nConrad's figure is a different one from those black holes about which\nhe could not have known, though his trope is still astronomical. It is an\nexample of that peculiar sort of figure that can be called a \nfigure \nof figure\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n125\nor a \nfigure \nof figuration. Just as the mist on a dark night is invisible except\nwhen it is made visible as a circular halo around moonlight, light already\nsecondary and reflected from the sun, and just as the mimetic elements of\nMarlow's tale are secondary to the putatively real things they represent at\none remove, so the meaning of Marlow's yarns is invisible in itself and is\nnever named directly. It is not inside the tale but outside. It is \"brought\nout\" indirectly by the things that are named and recounted, thereby made\nvisible, just as, for example, Marlow when he visits the Intended hears\nKurtz's last words breathed in a whisper by the dusk: \"The dusk was\nrepeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that\nseemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The\nhorror! The horror!'\" (94). The reader will note the way the whispered\nsound is onomatopoetically echoed here in the repetition three times of\nthe word \"whisper,\" with its aspirant and sibilant \"whuh\" and \"isp\"\nsounds. The illumination provided by the tale is \"spectral,\" like a liminal,\nghostly sound. It turns everything into a phantom, that is, into something\nthat has come back from the dead, something that cannot die, something\nthat will always, sooner or later, just when we least expect it, come again.\nThe miniature lesson in aesthetic theory the frame narrator presents\nhere is an admirably succinct expression of the distinction between mi-\nmetic literature and apocalyptic, parabolic, or allegorical literature. In the\nlatter, everything named, with however much verisimilitude, stands for\nsomething else that is not named directly, that cannot be named directly.\nIt can only be inferred by those that have eyes to see and ears to hear and\nunderstand, as Jesus puts it in explaining the parable of the sower in\nMatthew 13. All these genres have to do with promising, with death, with\nthe truly secret, and with last things, \"things,\" as Jesus says, \"which have\nbeen kept secret from the foundation of the world\" (Matt. 13:35).\nIt is not so absurd as it might seem to claim that Heart of Darkness is\na secular version of what are, originally at least, intertwined religious or\nsacred genres: apocalypse, parable, and allegory. Conrad himself spoke\nof the \"piety\" of his approach to writing and of his motive as quasi-\nreligious. \"One thing that I am certain of,\" he wrote in that letter to\nSymons already quoted, \"is that I have approached the object of my task,\nthings human, in a spirit of piety. The earth is a temple where there is\ngoing on a mystery play childish and poignant, ridiculous and awful\nenough in all conscience. Once in I've tried to behave decently. I have not\ndegraded the quasi religious sentiment by tears and groans: and if I've\nbeen amused and indifferent, I've neither grinned nor gnashed my teeth\"\n(N, 154).\nIn the case of Heart of Darkness, just what is that \"something else\" for\nthe revelation of which the whole story is written? The clear answer is\nthat the something else is the \"it\" that Marlow's narration so persistently\n\n\n126 \nCHAPTER FIVE\npersonifies and that Kurtz passes judgment on when he says \"The hor-\nror! \" All details in the story, all the mimetic and verisimilar elements, are\npresented for the sake of bringing out a glimpse of that \"it.\" The revela-\ntion of this \"it\" is promised by the frame narrator when he defines the\ncharacteristic indirection of meaning in Marlow's yarns. Many critics of\nHeart of Darkness have made the fundamental mistake of taking the\nstory as an example of the first kind of seaman's yarn. Those critics, like\nF. R. Leavis, who have noticed all the language about the unspeakable\nand \"inscrutable\" \"it\" have almost universally condemned it as so much\nmoonshine interfering with Conrad's gift for making you see the mate-\nrial world, his gift for descriptive vividness and verisimilitude. At least\nsuch critics have taken the trouble to read carefully and have noticed that\nthere are important verbal elements in the text that must be accounted for\nsomehow and that do not fit the straightforward mimetic, descriptive\nparadigm.\nIs the \"something,\" the \"it,\" ever revealed, ever brought into the open\nwhere it may be seen and judged? The clear answer is that it is not. The\n\"it\" remains to the end unnamable, inscrutable, unspeakable. The \"it\" is\nConrad's particular version, in Heart of Darkness at least, of those\n\"others\" that are the subject of this book. The \"it\" is falsely, or at any\nrate unprovably, personified by Marlow's rhetoric as having conscious-\nness and intention. It is named only indirectly and inadequately by all\nthose similes and figures of veils being lifted. How could something be\nrevealed that can only be encountered directly by those who have crossed\nover the threshold of death? The reader is told that \"it\" is \"The horror!\"\nbut just what that means is never explained except in hints and indirec-\ntions. Nothing definite can be said of the \"it\" except that it is not nothing,\nthat it is, though even that is not certain, since it may be a projection, not\na solicitation, call, or demand from something wholly other. Of the \"it\"\none must say what Wallace Stevens says of the \"primitive like an orb,\"\n\"at the center on the horizon\": \"It is and it/Is not and, therefore, is.\"16 If\n\"it\" is wholly other it is wholly other. Nothing more can be said of it\nexcept by signs that confess in their proffering to their inadequacy. Each\nveil lifts to reveal another veil behind.\nThe structure of Heart of Darkness is a self-perpetuating system of an\nendlessly deferred promise. This is the implicit promise that Marlow\nmakes at the beginning of his tale when he says that though his meeting\nwith Kurtz, \"the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of\nmy experience,\" was \"not very clear,\" nevertheless \"it seemed to throw a\nkind of light\" (7). This illumination he implicitly promises to pass on to\nhis hearers. The primary narrator passes it on to us, the readers. The\nfulfillment of this promise to reveal, however, remains always future,\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n127\nsomething yet to come, eschatological or messianic rather than teleologi-\ncal. It is an end that can never come within the series of episodes that\nreaches out toward it as life reaches toward death. In this Heart of Dark-\nness works in a deferral analogous to the way Revelations promises an\nimminent messianic coming that always remains future, to come, beyond\nthe last in the series, across the threshold into another realm and another\nregime. It is in the name of this unrevealed and unrevealable secret, out of\nobligation to it, in response to the demand it makes, though it still re-\nmains secret and inaccessible, that all Heart of Darkness is written. The\npresence within the novel of an inaccessible secret, a secret that neverthe-\nless incites to narration, is what makes it appropriate to speak of Heart of\nDarkness as literature.\nThe place where this ultimate failure of revelation is made most explicit\nis Marlow's comment on the difference between Kurtz, who summed up\nat the moment of his death, giving words to \"the appalling face of a\nglimpsed truth\" (87), and Marlow's own illness that took him to the\nbrink of death and then back into life again, therefore not quite far\nenough to see what Kurtz saw:\nAnd it is not my own extremity I remember best—a vision of greyness with-\nout form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanes-\ncence of all things—even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I\nseemed to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had\nstepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitat-\ning foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom,\nand all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable\nmoment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps!\n(87-88)\nHow would one know without crossing that bourne from which no\ntraveler returns? You cannot \"live through\" another's death. The other\nmust die his or her own death; you must die yours—both in incommuni-\ncable solitude. To \"know\" you must die first. If you know, you are, nec-\nessarily, no longer around to tell the tale. Even knowing this remains,\nnecessarily, a matter of \"perhaps.\" It is, nevertheless, in the name of this\nnonrevelation, this indirect glimpse, as the moon spectrally illuminates a\nring of mist, that Marlow's judgment of imperialism is made. The \"it\"\nis the sinister backcloth before which all the seriocomic antics of those\ncarrying on the merry dance of death and trade, including their racism\nand sexism, are ironically suspended, made to appear both horrible and\nfutile at once. The ubiquity of the \"it\" allows Marlow to imply the iden-\ntity between the African woman and Kurtz's Intended that is so crucial to\nthe story. This ubiquity also allows him to assert an all-important iden-\ntity between the early Roman conquerors of Britain, present-day British\n\n\n128 \nCHAPTER FIVE\ncommerce as represented by the Director of Companies, the Lawyer, and\nthe Accountant, and the enterprise of imperialism in Africa. Of the El-\ndorado Exploring Expedition, Marlow says, \"To tear treasure out of the\nbowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the\nback of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe\" (46). Something\nsimilar, however, is said about the Romans near the beginning of Mar-\nlow's narration. It is said in a way that gives it universal application: \"The\nconquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those\nwho have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,\nis not a pretty thing when you look into it too much\" (21). Heart of\nDarkness looks into it. Early readers saw the novel as an unequivocal\ncondemnation of Leopold II and of Belgian imperialism in the Congo. I\nnote in passing that now (2000), when a new regime has taken over in the\nCongo, transnational companies are fighting for the rights to exploit min-\neral deposits there, for example copper. This new global economy is not\nall that different from the imperialism of Conrad's day. Of course the\nnovel represents, in Marlow, Eurocentric views. It was written by a Euro-\npean with the apparent intent of evaluating such views by embodying\nthem in a narrator. Of course it represents sexist views. It was written to\ndramatize what might be said by an imaginary character, Marlow, a\nwhite male of Conrad's class and time, just as Conrad's critics today rep-\nresent their times, races, sexes, and nations, however superior, more just,\ntheir judgments may be. I claim, however, that by being displaced into\nMarlow as narrator and by being measured against the \"it,\" these Euro-\ncentric views are radically criticized and shown as what they are, that is,\nas elements in a deadly and unjust ideology.\nWhat of Kurtz, however? Is he not different from the other agents of\nimperialism? The latter are possessed by \"a flabby, pretending, weak-\neyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly\" (31). They have no insight\ninto the way they are victims of the imperialist ideology as well as victim-\nizers of those it exploits. Kurtz, on the other hand, \"was a remarkable\nman,\" as Marlow himself repeatedly asserts, in a phrase he picks up from\none of the agents. Kurtz was a kind of universal genius: a painter, a musi-\ncian, a poet (he recites his own poetry to the Russian), spectacularly suc-\ncessful in getting ivory, an extremely gifted journalist, a brilliantly power-\nful speaker, a forceful writer, the author of a stirring pamphlet, his report\nto \"the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs\":\n\" 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practi-\ncally unbounded,' etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with\nhim. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you\nknow. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august\nBenevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n129\npower of eloquence—of words—of burning noble Words\" (66). Kurtz\nwas potentially a great politician, as the journalist Marlow meets back in\nEurope after Kurtz's death assures him: \"'but Heavens! how that man\ncould talk! He electrified large meetings. He had faith—don't you see—he\nhad the faith. He could get himself to believe anything—anything. He\nwould have been a splendid leader of an extreme party. 'What party?' I\nasked. 'Any party,' answered the other. 'He was an—an—extremist'\"\n(89). The famous scrawled note at the end of the pamphlet's manuscript,\n\"Exterminate all the brutes!\" (66), says with brutal candor the truth, that\nthe suppression of savage customs culminates in the suppression of the\n\"savages\" themselves. That footnote scrawled \"in an unsteady hand\" tes-\ntifies to Kurtz's remarkable understanding of the imperialist, philan-\nthropic, and missionary enterprise.\nJust what goes wrong with Kurtz? His case is obviously of greater in-\nterest than that of any of the others Marlow meets or even than that of\nMarlow himself. The latter has survived and speaks as a sane man, \"one\nof us,\" in the voice of ironic, European, enlightened rationality. Or rather\nhe could be said to speak in that voice except for his fascination with\nKurtz and with that \"it\" that solicits him to speech. What he says of the\nRussian's infatuation with Kurtz could be said of his own fascination:\n\"He had not meditated over it. It came to him, and he accepted it with a\nsort of eager fatalism. I must say that to me it appeared about the most\ndangerous thing in every way he had come upon so far\" (71). Marlow\ngives the reader his diagnosis of Kurtz's \"madness.\" Speaking of those\nheads on stakes, Marlow says:\nthere was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only\nshowed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various\nlusts, that there was something wanting in him—some small matter which,\nwhen the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent\neloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the\nknowledge came to him at last—only at the very last! [The ms originally\nadded here: If so, then justice was done.] But the wilderness had found\nhim out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic\ninvasion. I think that it whispered to him things about himself which he did\nnot know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with\nthis great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It\nechoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core. (58-59)\nOn the one hand, the story of Kurtz's degradation is an example of\nthe familiar narrative cliche of the European who \"goes native.\" Kurtz,\nlike Lingard in The Rescue, like Lord Jim in Lord Jim, and like Charles\nGould in Nostromo, crosses over a border and ceases to be wholly Euro-\npean. Kurtz sets himself up as a sort of king in the alien land, thereby\n\n\n130 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nanticipating the destiny of most colonies to become ultimately indepen-\ndent nations. In doing so, they thereby betray in one way or another the\nideals, the ethos, the laws and conventions of the colonizing country. The\nUnited States did that in 1776. The somewhat hysterical fear that this will\nhappen, or that it will necessarily be a disaster if it does happen, has\nhaunted the colonial enterprise from the beginning. On the other hand,\nKurtz never completely makes that break. After all, he allows Marlow to\nrescue him when he has crawled back ashore in his attempt to join the\nAfricans who have become his subjects. He dies oriented toward Europe\nand toward the desire that he will \"have kings meet him at railway sta-\ntions on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to\naccomplish great things\" (85).\nWhat goes wrong with Kurtz? How might he, or another person, Mar-\nlow for example, protect himself from the corrupting whisper of the wil-\nderness? Just here Marlow's rhetoric, or Conrad's rhetoric as ascribed to\nMarlow, is contradictory. It is contradictory in an interesting and symp-\ntomatic way. Marlow names several different ways to protect oneself\nfrom the threat of counterinvasion by the \"it\" that has entered Kurtz\nbecause he is \"hollow at the core\" (74).\nOne way is blind insensitivity: \"Of course a fool, what with sheer\nfright and fine sentiments, is always safe\" (52). That includes most of the\n\"pilgrims,\" the agents of imperialism.\nAnother way to protect oneself from the darkness is through devotion\nto hard but routine physical or mental work, what Conrad calls \"the\ndevotion to efficiency\" (21). This he identifies as a fundamental feature of\nthe capitalist and imperialist ethos. Indeed it still is a feature of our ideol-\nogy in the United States. The stated mission of the University of Califor-\nnia, for example, is to \"help make California competitive in the global\neconomy.\" University \"downsizing\" for efficiency's sake matches corpo-\nrate downsizing for profit's sake. The starched and scented accountant in\nHeart of Darkness is protected by his fanatical devotion to keeping his\nbooks accurate and neat. Marlow, so he tells the reader, is saved from\nsuccumbing to the darkness through his focus on getting his wrecked\nsteamer back in working order and then getting it safely up the river:\n\"Fine sentiments be hanged. I had no time. I had to mess about with\nwhite-lead and strips of woollen blanket helping to put bandages on\nthose leaky steam-pipes—I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and cir-\ncumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook.\nThere was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man\" (52).\nThe third way to protect oneself seems clear enough. It turns out, how-\never, to be the most equivocal. This is indicated by changes and omissions\nin the manuscript. Just after saying \"the conquest of the earth . . . is not\na pretty thing when you look into it too much,\" Marlow goes on to add:\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n131\n\"What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a senti-\nmental [ms: mouthing] pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the\nidea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacri-\nfice to\" (21). The ironic religious language at the end here sounds a little\nominous. More or less the same thing, however, with much less evident\nirony is asserted much later in the story when Marlow is talking about the\nappeal made to him by the dancing, shouting Africans on the shore: \"Let\nthe fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a\nwink. But he must meet that truth [the truth of the \"prehistoric\" men's\ndancing that is closer to the origin of mankind: certainly a familiar racist\ncliche there, since modern African cultures are no closer to the origins of\nmankind than modern European ones are] with his own true stuff—with\nhis own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions,\nclothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No;\nyou want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is\nthere? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or\nevil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced\" (52).\nThe contradiction here is a double one. In an excised passage from the\nearly place where, apropos of the Roman invasion of Britain, Marlow\nsays the idea redeems it, he says that he admires the Roman conquerors\njust because they did not have any redeeming idea but were just robbers\nand murderers on a grand scale: \"The best of them is they didn't get up\npretty fictions about it. Was there, I wonder, an association on a philan-\nthropic basis to develop Britain, with some third rate king for a president\nand solemn old senators discoursing about it approvingly and philoso-\nphers with uncombed beards praising it, and men in market places crying\nit up. Not much! And that's what I like!\" (from the ms, cited N, 7). No\ndoubt this was cut in part because it was too overt an attack on King\nLeopold, but it is also in direct contradiction to Marlow's claim a mo-\nment later in the published version, just after where the cut passage would\nhave gone, that \"what redeems it [imperialism whether Roman or mod-\nern] is the idea only. An idea at the back of it;... and an unselfish belief\nin the idea\" (21).\nThe other contradiction, however, lies in that phrase \"deliberate be-\nlief\" and in the way Kurtz is defined as an adept at deliberate belief: \"He\ncould get himself to believe anything—anything\" (89). A deliberate be-\nlief is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You either believe or do\nnot believe. A deliberate belief is a pretense to believe even though you\nknow the belief is a fictional confidence in something that does not exist\nor that you do not really believe exists, in this case a solid base for the\nphilanthropic ideals that justify imperialism. To say \"I declare I believe so\nand so\" or \"I will myself deliberately to believe so and so\" is a paradig-\nmatic speech act of a kind not envisioned by Austin. It is an anomalous\n\n\n132 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nperformative, in the strong sense of anomalous: outside the law. This sort\nof performative creates its own ground out of whole cloth. It lifts itself by\nits own bootstraps. A deliberate belief, praised so unreservedly here by\nMarlow, is, however, what makes Kurtz hollow at the core and so vulner-\nable to invasion by the \"wilderness.\" You must believe and not believe.\nSuch a belief undoes itself in the act of affirming itself. It is hollow at the\ncore. Belief in what? In the capitalist idea, but in that idea as promise, as\nthe promise of an ultimate messianic revelation and an ultimate millen-\nnial reign of peace and prosperity for the whole world. This is that \"ex-\notic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence\" that Kurtz's pamphlet\npromises is to come. This promise is still being made today on behalf of\nthe new global economy and the new universal regime of scientifico-\nbio-techno-tele-mediatic communications.\nThe reader will perhaps have foreseen the conclusion toward which my\nevidence is drawing me. The complex contradictory system of Kurtz's\nimperialist ideology matches exactly the ideology that proposes a liter-\nary work as the apocalyptic promise of a never-quite-yet-occurring reve-\nlation. It would not be a promise if it were not possible that the promise\nmight not be kept. The literary promise of an always postponed reve-\nlation is strikingly exemplified not only by Marlow's narration but also\nby Heart of Darkness as a whole. Conrad's novel, not just Marlow's fic-\ntive account, fits this paradigm. The novel is made up of a chain of spec-\ntral duplications that is reinforced by formal and figural features I have\ndescribed.\nJust how does Kurtz's ideology repeat that of Marlow and of Conrad?\nThe literary work, for example Heart of Darkness or Marlow's narration\nwithin it, is governed by what Derrida calls \"the exemplary secret of liter-\nature,\"17 This secret makes it possible for the work to be the endlessly\ndeferred promise of a definitive revelation that never occurs. This pattern\nis not only literary but also linguistic. It depends on the way a work of\nliterature is made of language and not of any other material or substance.\nMarlow stresses over and over that though Kurtz was a universal genius,\nan artist, musician, journalist, politician, and so on, his chief characteris-\ntic was his gift of language: \"A voice! a voice! It was grave, profound,\nvibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper. . . . Kurtz\ndiscoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his\nstrength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness\nof his heart\" (77, 85). Kurtz, in short (a pun there on Kurtz's name, which\nmeans \"short\" in German; Marlow makes a similar joke [76]), has a mag-\nnificent mastery of language that is similar to Marlow's own, or to Con-\nrad's. \"An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is there? Very well; I hear;\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n133\nI admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that\ncannot be silenced\" (52).\nWhat does Kurtz talk or write about? The reader is told of the lofty\nidealism of the pamphlet on the Suppression of Savage Customs. Kurtz\nhas bewitched the particolored Russian, as Marlow ironically attests, by\n\"splendid monologues on, what was it? on love, justice, conduct of life—\nor what not\" (75). Most of all, however, Kurtz's discourse is dominated\nby unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable promises made to the whole\nworld on behalf of Eurocentric imperialist capitalism and in support of\nhis role own as its embodiment: \"All Europe contributed to the making of\nKurtz\" (66). Kurtz is like a John the Baptist announcing the new capitalist\nmessiah, or perhaps is himself that self-proclaimed messiah. That his be-\ntrothed is called \"the Intended\" is the emblem of this future-oriented,\nproleptic feature of Kurtz's eloquence. \"I had immense plans,\" he \"mut-\nters,\" when Marlow is trying to persuade him come back to the boat. \"I\nwas on the threshold of great things\" (82). Later, as he lies dying on the\nship that is taking him back toward Europe, his \"discourse\" is all future-\noriented, all promises of great things to come: \"The wastes of his weary\nbrain were haunted by shadowy images now—images of wealth and fame\nrevolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty\nexpression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas—these were\nthe subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments\" (85).\nThe fulfillment of these promises is cut short by a death that seals a\nsecret or \"mystery\" that Kurtz carries with him to the grave. This secret\nis the necessary accompaniment of his grandiose promises. In being in-\nhabited by this mystery, Kurtz is the embodiment not just of European\ncapitalist imperialism's ideology but also of its dark shadow, a ghost that\ncannot be laid, the \"it\" that is the inevitable accompaniment of imperial-\nism. Marlow identifies this \"it,\" in figure, both with Kurtz and with the\n\"wilderness\" that has invaded his soul. Since Kurtz embodies the dark-\nness, when it has invaded his hollowness, it is logical that he himself\nshould become the \"god\" that the Africans worship and crawl before.\nThis strikingly anticipates the fascist or violent authoritarian possibilities\nwithin capitalist imperialism. Kurtz's soul, like the \"it,\" is \"an inconceiv-\nable mystery\" (83). He has \"a smile of indefinable meaning\" (84). \"His\nwas an impenetrable darkness\" (86). Marlow's allegiance to Kurtz and\nthrough Kurtz to the wilderness makes him feel as if he too were \"buried\nin a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets\" (79), just as the African\nwoman matches the wilderness in having \"an air of brooding over an\ninscrutable purpose\" (77). The forest has an \"air of hidden knowledge, of\npatient expectation, of unapproachable silence\" (72). It was \"the stillness\nof an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention\" (49).\n\n\n134 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nThese words—\"unspeakable,\" \"inscrutable,\" \"unapproachable\"—must\nbe taken literally. Kurtz in his actions and words is no more able to re-\nmove the last veil in an ultimate revelation than Marlow or Conrad can\nin their narrations. In all three cases a promise is made whose fulfillment\nor definitive nonfulfillment always remains yet to come.\nWhat can one say to explain this contradiction: that Kurtz's magnifi-\ncent idealistic eloquence is at the same time inhabited by an impenetrable\ndarkness? Both Mar \nlow's narration and Kurtz's eloquence, since both are\nbased on that special speech act called a promise, are subject to two in-\neluctable features of any promise: (1) A promise would not be a promise\nbut rather a constative statement of foreknowledge if it were not possible\nthat the promise will not be kept. A possible nonfulfillment is an inalien-\nable structural feature of any promise, whether made in literature or in\npolitics. (2) Any promise is an invocation of an unknown and unknow-\nable future, of a secret other that remains secret and is invited to come\ninto the hollow uncertainty of the promise.\nIn the case of Marlow's narration, which I claim is an exemplary liter-\nary work, what enters the narration is all that talk of the inscrutable, the\nimpenetrable mystery, the unspeakable secret, and so on, that has so of-\nfended some of Conrad's readers. In Kurtz's case the millennial promise\nmade by imperialist capitalism, since it is hollow at the core, cannot be\nseparated from the possibility, or perhaps even the necessity, of invasion\nby the \"it,\" what Conrad calls the \"heart of darkness.\" Kurtz's case is\nexemplary of that. It is a parable or allegory of this necessity. No imperi-\nalist capitalism without the darkness. They go together. Nor has that\nspectral accompaniment of capitalism's millennial promise of worldwide\npeace, prosperity, and universal democracy by any means disappeared\ntoday. Today the imperialist exploitation of Conrad's day and its accom-\npanying philanthropic idealism have been replaced, as I have said, by the\nUtopian promises made for the new global economy and the new regime\nof telecommunications, but injustice, inequality, poverty, and bloody eth-\nnic conflicts continue all over the world.\nAs Jacques Derrida and Werner Hamacher have recognized, the politi-\ncal left and the political right are consonant in the promises they make.\nThe promise of universal prosperity made for the new economy domi-\nnated by science and transformative communications techniques echoes\nthe messianic promise, a messianism without messiah, of classical Marx-\nism. It also echoes the promises made by right-wing ideologies, even the\nmost unspeakably brutal, for example the Nazi promise of a thousand-\nyear Reich. We are inundated, swamped, and engulfed every day by the\npresent form of those promises—in newspapers and magazines, on tele-\nvision, in advertising, on the Internet, in political and policy pronounce-\nments. All these promise that everything will get bigger, faster, better,\n\n\nCONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS \n135\nmore \"user-friendly,\" and lead to worldwide prosperity. These promises\nare all made by language or other signs, \"the gift of expression, the bewil-\ndering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the\npulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an im-\npenetrable darkness\" (63).\nI return to my beginning. Should we, ought we to, read Heart of Dark-\nness} Each reader must decide that for himself or herself. There are cer-\ntainly ways to read Heart of Darkness that might do harm. If it is read,\nhowever, as I believe it should be read, that is, as a powerful exemplary\nrevelation of the ideology of capitalist imperialism, including its racism\nand sexism, as that ideology is consonant with a certain definition of\nliterature that is its concomitant, including the presence in both capital-\nism and literature of a nonrevelatory revelation or the invocation of a\nnonrevealable secret, then, I declare, Heart of Darkness should be read. It\nought to be read. There is an obligation to do so.\nNOTES\n1. Paul Celan, \"Aschenglorie (Ashglory),\" in Breathturn, trans. Pierre Joris,\nbilingual ed. (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), 178-79.\n2. The \"original\" (but what is more problematic than this concept of an origi-\nnal base for a \nfictional \nwork?) of the framing scene was, if Ford Madox Ford is to\nbe believed, Conrad's residence in Stamford-le-Hope in Essex from September\n1896 to September 1898. There he knew various businessmen who did indeed\ntake weekend cruises on a yawl. \"[H]e was still quivering,\" says Ford, \"with his\nattempt, with the aid of the Director, the Lawyer, and the Accountant, to float a\ndiamond mine in South Africa. For Conrad had his adventures of that sort, too—\nadventures ending naturally in frustration. . . . while waiting for that financial\nflotation to mature, he floated physically during week-ends in the company of\nthose financiers on the bosom of that tranquil waterway [the Thames]\" (Joseph\nConrad, Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text; Backgrounds and Sources;\nEssays in Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough, Norton critical ed. [New York: Nor-\nton, 1963], 127, henceforth cited as N). \"To float a diamond mine in South Af-\nrica\"! Nothing is said about this in the story itself, and Marlow, the reader must\nalways remember, must be kept strictly separate from Conrad himself, as separate\nas the narrator of \"The Secret Sharer\" must be kept from his ghostly double.\nFord's testimony, however, shows that Conrad himself was complicit, or wanted\nto be complicit, if he could have raised the money for it, in an exploitative imperi-\nalist enterprise that is not so different from Leopold IPs merciless and murderous\nexploitation of the Congo or from Kurtz's raiding the country for ivory. He ap-\npears momentarily to have fancied himself a miniature Cecil Rhodes.\n3. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Ross C. Murfin, Bedford Case\nStudies, 2d ed. (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1966), 22, hence-\nforth cited by page number in the text. I have cited this edition because it is easily\navailable and contains other useful material. It reprints Heart of Darkness from\n\n\n136 \nCHAPTER FIVE\nthe 1921 Heinemann edition of Conrad's Collected Works, the last version of the\ntext that had Conrad's approval.\n4. The original manuscript is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The\nNorton Critical Edition cites some important manuscript passages omitted from\nthe printed version. I shall cite from the Norton edition a few of these in my turn,\ntrusting the Norton editor to have cited accurately.\n5. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina\nSbisa, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).\n6. See Werner Hamacher, \"Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-\nLanguage and Derrida's Specters of Marx,\" in Ghostly Demarcations: A Sympo-\nsium on Jacques Derrida's \"Specters of Marx,\" ed. Michael Sprinker (London:\nVerso, 1998), 189-91; Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilee, 1993),\n89; Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 51.\nDerrida speaks here of \"performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation\nthat transforms the very thing it interprets,\" and he observes that this definition\nof the performative does not fit Austin's definition of a speech act, any more than\nit fits the orthodox understanding of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.\n7. These citations are from the \"Critical History\" section in Conrad, Heart of\nDarkness, ed. Murfin, 107, 109.\n8. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994),\n30.\n9. Thomas Mann, \"Death in Venice,\" in Death in Venice and Seven Other\nStories (New York: Vintage, 1956), 13.\n10. See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York:\nRoutledge, 1992), 44: \"'Transcend' here means going beyond interest for the\nsignifier, the form, the language (note that I do not say 'text') in the direction of\nthe meaning or referent (this is Sartre's rather simple but convenient definition of\nprose).\"\n11. See ibid., 37-38.\n12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La nouvelle Heloi'se, Oeuvres completes, ed. Ber-\nnard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Pleiade ed., 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard,\n1964), 2:27-29.\n13. I discussed Schlegelian irony in detail in chapter 1.\n14. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the \"Narcissus\" (London: Penguin, 1989),\nxlix: \"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word,\nto make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.\"\n15. Chapter 8 will show the importance of the word \"unseen\" in E. M. For-\nster's Howards End.\n16. Wallace Stevens, \"A Primitive Like an Orb,\" in The Collected Poems\n(New York: Knopf, 1954), 440-43,11. 87, 13-14.\n17. Jacques Derrida, \"Passions,\" trans. David Wood, in On the Name, ed.\nThomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 29.","difficulty":"hard","domain":"Single-Document QA","length":"short","question":"When Miller tried to answer the question \"should we read Heart of Darkness?\", he put forward a new concept for read \"but perform a reading in the strong\nsense, an active responsible response that renders justice to a book by generating more language in its turn\". However, he actually laid an implied premise for his argument, which one of the followings is true?","sub_domain":"Academic"}

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