LongBench v2 / 66ebed525a08c7b9b35e1cb4 / When Miller tried to answer the question "should we read Heart of Darkness?", he…

Chapter Five
JOSEPH CONRAD:
SHOULD WE READ
HEART OF DARKNESS}
The inaccessible incites from its place of hiding.


SHOULD WE READ Heart of Darkness} May we read it? Must we read it?
Or, on the contrary, ought we not to read it or allow our students and the
public in general to read it? Should every copy be taken from all the
shelves and burned? What or who gives us the authority to make a deci-
sion about that? Who is this "we" in whose name I speak? What commu-
nity forms that "we" ? Nothing could be more problematic than the bland
appeal to some homogeneous authoritative body, say professors of En-
glish literature everywhere, capable of deciding collectively whether "we"
should read Heart of Darkness. By "read" I mean not just run the words
passively through the mind's ear, but perform a reading in the strong
sense, an active responsible response that renders justice to a book by
generating more language in its turn, the language of attestation, even
though that language may remain silent or implicit. Such a response testi-
fies that the one who responds has been changed by the reading. Part of
the problem, as you can see, is that it is impossible to decide authorita-
tively whether or not we should read Heart of Darkness without reading
it in that strong sense. By then it is too late. I have already read it, been
affected by it, and passed my judgment, perhaps recorded that judgment
for others to read. Which of us, however, would or should want to take
someone else's word for what is in a book? Each must read again in his
or her turn and bear witness to that reading in his or her turn. In that
aphorism about which Jacques Derrida has had so much to say, Paul
Celan says, "Niemand / zeugt fur den / Zeugen (Nobody / bears witness
for the / witness)."1 This might be altered to say, "No one can do your
reading for you." Each must read for himself or herself and testify anew.
This structure is inscribed in Heart of Darkness itself. The primary
narrator bears witness through exact citation to what he heard Marlow
say one night on the deck of the cruising yawl Nellie, as he and the other
men, the Lawyer, the Accountant, the Director of Companies, representa-
Miller, Joseph Hillis. "Chapter Five. Joseph Conrad: Should We Read Heart 
of Darkness?" In Others, 104-136. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 
2002.


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
105
tives of advanced capitalism and imperialism, waited for the tide to turn
so they could float down the Thames and out to sea, presumably on a
pleasure cruise.2 They have enough wealth and leisure to take time off to
do as an aesthetic end in itself what Marlow has done for pay as a profes-
sional seaman. The profession of the primary, framing narrator is never
specified. He cites with what the reader is led to believe is conscientious
and meticulous accuracy just what Marlow said. What Marlow said, put
within quotation marks throughout, is a story, the recounting of and ac-
counting for what he calls an "experience" that "seemed somehow to
throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It
was sombre enough too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—
not very clear either. No, not very clear, and yet it seemed to throw a kind
of light."3 That recounting and accounting centers on an attempt to "ren-
der justice," as Marlow puts it (94), to Kurtz, the man he meets at "the
farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience"
(22). What Marlow says at the beginning is also an implicit promise to his
listeners and to us as readers. He promises that he will pass on to them
and to us the illumination he has received.
The observant reader will note that the language Conrad gives Marlow
mixes constative and performative dimensions. On the one hand, Mar-
low's experience shed a kind of light on everything. It made him "see" in
the double meaning Conrad habitually gives to "see," as does everyday
language: see as visual seeing and see as understanding, acquiring new
knowledge. On the other hand, Marlow's experience conferred an obliga-
tion that can only be fulfilled by performative language, by "rendering
justice" (94) or "remaining loyal" (88). The performative and constative
dimensions of any "accounting" or "recounting" are, necessarily, inter-
twined, as they are in any speech act. Heart of Darkness, however, is
unusually explicit in its emphasis on the performative side of Marlow's
language, the way it is a specific kind of speech act, namely, an attesta-
tion. "I have remained loyal to Kurtz," says Marlow, "to the last, and
even beyond" (88). "I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was ordered I should
never betray him—it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my
choice" (81). Who did the "ordering" or the "writing" here is not said
explicitly. Presumably Marlow means it was written down in the book of
his Fate, a sufficiently vague notion. It was because it was to be. Actually
it was written down in the book Conrad made up about Marlow, as the
reader may happen to reflect. Or rather, as Marlow confesses in his ac-
count of the last episode, his visit to Kurtz's "Intended" (after Kurtz has
died on the journey back down the African river and Marlow has re-
turned to the city that "always makes [him] think of a whited sepulcre"
[24]), he has by telling his lie to the Intended failed to render full justice
to Kurtz: "It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could


106 
CHAPTER FIVE
escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I won-
der, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said
he wanted only justice?" (94). Kurtz had indeed said to Marlow just that:
"I want no more than justice" (91).
Earlier Marlow had said, "I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie"
(64). Mariow's lie was to tell the Intended, with her soul as pure as a cliff
of crystal, with her candid brow, that Kurtz's last words were her name,
whereas his actual last words were, in "a cry that was no more than a
breath," "The horror! The horror!" (86). Is Marlow's lie justified? Can
we exonerate Marlow for it? Was this lie in any sense a way of rendering
Kurtz justice? Marlow has told us he abhors lies, that they have a taint of
mortality about them: "You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie," he
says, "not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because
it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies—which
is exactly what I hate and detest in the world—what I want to forget. It
makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do"
(42). To say a lie has a taint of death is odd. It suggests that only by telling
the truth can we hold off death, though Marlow says just the reverse
concerning his lie. It has laid the ghost of Kurtz's gifts, the greatest of
which was the gift of speech, "the gift of expression, the bewildering, the
illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating
stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable
darkness" (63).
A lie puts us in complicity with death, at the mercy of death. A lie lets
death into the human community. This is a somewhat hyperbolic version
of the repudiation of the right to lie in Immanuel Kant's opuscule, "On
the Presumed Right to Lie Out of Love for Humanity." A lie is never jus-
tified, says Kant, even to save someone's life, since any lie radically threat-
ens human society. The latter depends on strict truth-telling in every cir-
cumstance, even the most extreme. "Truth" is a key word, though an
exceedingly ambiguous one, in Marlow's narration in Heart of Darkness.
His whole story is put under the aegis of giving a true account of his
experience. That obligation is passed on to the primary narrator and then
on to you and me as readers. The promise to give faithful testimony is,
like promises in general, always messianic. It has to do with death and the
last days, with the sort of promise an Apocalypse makes. Even so routine
a promise as the one made by the signatory of a mortgage note invokes
death, as the etymology of "mortgage" indicates. To sign a mortgage note
is to engage one's life unto death, to put one's death on the line. The great
exemplary apocalypse in our tradition, the last book of the Christian
Bible, Revelations, ends with the promise and invocation of an imminent
unveiling that always remains future, never quite yet here and now: "He


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
107
which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so,
come, Lord Jesus" (Rev. 22:20).
Marlow is in the position of someone who survives the death of an-
other. In Kurtz's end, death and the consequent responsibilities of the
survivor enter as central issues in the novel. As Marlow says, "I was to
have the care of his memory" (66), just as the Intended's first words to
Marlow about Kurtz are "I have survived" (91). Surely the first obliga-
tion of the survivor is to tell the truth about the dead. What is peculiar
about Marlow's survival of Kurtz is that Kurtz is presented when Marlow
finally encounters him as already the survivor of his own death. Kurtz is
already the ghost of himself. In that sense he cannot die. This is testified
to in the way he survives in Marlow's narration and in the way the dusk
still whispers his last words when Marlow returns to Europe and visits
Kurtz's "Intended." It is hardly the case that Marlow has laid the ghost of
Kurtz's gifts with a lie, since the ghost still walks, even in the room where
Marlow tells his lie to the Intended. That ghost, far from being laid, is
resurrected, invoked, conjured up, each time Heart of Darkness is read.
Perhaps Marlow means no more than that he appeased the Intended's
desire to keep Kurtz's eloquence alive by lying about what that eloquence
really said and what its source was. It is not Kurtz the spectral survivor
and revenant who is buried when Kurtz "dies," but his mere bodily en-
velope or cadaver: "But I am of course aware that next day the pilgrims
buried something in a muddy hole" (87). The chain of obligation begins
with Kurtz, who has passed judgment in those words "The horror! The
horror!" He "had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his
soul on this earth. . . . He had summed up—he had judged. 'The horror!'
He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort
of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of
revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the
strange commingling of desire and hate" (87). The chain then goes to
Marlow, who testifies as survivor for Kurtz, keeping Kurtz alive in his
narration, and telling to his auditors on the Nellie the truth he had with-
held from the Intended. The primary narrator in his turns bears witness
to what Marlow said by citing it exactly and by placing it in an exegetical
context that is implicitly a reading.
Exact citation, prior to any interpretation, is one of the most important
ways to testify or to render justice, as in my citations from Conrad's
Heart of Darkness here. Each quotation is accompanied by an implicit
oath: "I swear to you this is what Conrad really wrote, or at least what
Conrad's most authoritative editors attest he wrote."4 The obligation to
render justice is then passed from Conrad's primary narrator to any
reader, each one of whom nowadays is Conrad's survivor. From each
reader it is demanded once again to do justice to Conrad and to Heart of


108 
CHAPTER FIVE
Darkness, to attest to what happens when the book is read—telling the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Bearing witness in an interpretation or reading, for example of Heart
of Darkness, is a performative speech act, but of a peculiar and even
anomalous kind. This kind is not accounted for by J. L. Austin's speech
act theory in How to Do Things with Words.5 A performative interpreta-
tion transforms what it interprets. It therefore cannot be fully justified by
constative, verifiable evidence, any more than can acts of bearing witness
in general. No one bears witness for the witness. That the witness saw
what he or she says he or she saw, or that he or she responded in a certain
way in an act of reading, has to be taken on faith. That is why, in murder
cases in the United States for example, the jury is asked to decide not
whether the defendant is guilty but whether they believe "beyond a rea-
sonable doubt" that the defendant is guilty. As Jacques Derrida and Wer-
ner Hamacher have in different ways affirmed, interpretation in this per-
formative sense, an interpretation that is inaugural, that intervenes to
change what is read and to initiate something new, fulfills in a paradoxi-
cal way the eleventh of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers
have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to
change it."6 In this case, the interpretation does the changing. It changes
the world, in however small a way, by changing once and for all an ele-
ment of that world that has power to make things happen, in this case a
literary text, Heart of Darkness.
Nor have Conrad's readers failed to respond to this demand for inter-
pretation. A large secondary literature has sprung up around Heart of
Darkness. These essays and books of course have a constative dimension.
They often provide precious information about Conrad's life, about his
experiences in Africa, about late nineteenth-century imperialism, espe-
cially about that terrible murderous devastation wrought by King Leo-
pold of Belgium in the Belgian Congo, as it was then called, about the
supposed "originals" of characters in Heart of Darkness, and so on. This
secondary literature, however, often also has an explicit performative di-
mension. Conrad's novel is brought before the bar of justice, arraigned,
tried, and judged. The critic acts as witness of his or her reading, also as
interrogator, prosecuting attorney, jury, and presiding judge. The critic
passes judgment and renders justice.
Heart of Darkness has often received a heavy sentence from its critics.
It has been condemned, often in angry terms, as racist or sexist, some-
times as both in the same essay. Examples are the influential essay of 1975
by the distinguished Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe ("Conrad was a
bloody racist"), or an essay of 1989 by Bette London: "Dependent upon
unexamined assumptions, themselves culturally suspect, the novel, in its
representations of sex and gender, supports dubious cultural claims; it


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
109
participates in and promotes a racial as well as gender ideology that the
narrative represents as transparent and 'self-evident.'"7 Edward Said's
judgment in Culture and Imperialism, though giving Conrad his due as a
critic of imperialism and recognizing the complexity of doing justice to
Heart of Darkness, is in the end equally severe in his summing up: "The
cultural and ideological evidence that Conrad was wrong in his Eurocen-
tric way is both impressive and rich."8 These are powerful indictments. If
what they say renders justice to Heart of Darkness, if their witness may be
trusted, it might seem inevitably to follow that the novel should not be
read, taught, or written about, except perhaps as an example of some-
thing detestable. Nevertheless, according to the paradox I have already
mentioned, you could only be sure about this by reading the novel your-
self, thereby putting yourself, if these critics are right, in danger of becom-
ing sexist, racist, and Eurocentric yourself. Even so, no one bears witness
for the witness, and no one else can do your reading for you.
To pass judgment anew, it is necessary to take the risk and read Heart
of Darkness for yourself. I shall now try to do that. First, however, I must
ask a final question. Suppose I or any other reader or community of read-
ers were to decide that Conrad, or rather Heart of Darkness, is indeed
racist and sexist. Would it be possible, after passing that verdict, to par-
don Conrad or the novel he wrote, to exonerate Heart of Darkness in
some way, and get him set free, so to speak? To put this another way,
would truth in this case lead to reconciliation? To be reconciled is to be
able to say, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa
has hoped would happen, "I forgive you. I am reconciled with you,
though I now know you tortured and murdered my father or mother,
husband or wife, brother or sister, or my neighbor, my friend." Though
the slaves were emancipated in the United States 130 years ago and
women given the vote 80 years ago, the United States is still in many ways
a racist and sexist country. The sins of the fathers are visited on the chil-
dren even unto the third generation. One might add that those sins are
visited also on the children and the children's children of those whom the
fathers have wronged. The United States, like all of Africa in different
ways, will take many more generations to become reconciled to its his-
tory, to reach anything like the horizon of a more perfect democracy. This
is that democracy that is always, as Jacques Derrida says, "to come."
Thomas Mann, in "Death in Venice," cites a French proverb, "Tout com-
prendre c'est tout pardonner. [To understand everything is to forgive
everything.]"9 "Death in Venice" powerfully ironizes or puts in question
that cheerful enlightenment confidence in the exonerating power of com-
prehension. It may be that the more knowledge we have the less able we
are to pardon, or that pardoning, a speech act of the most exemplary and
sovereign kind, has to occur, if it occurs, in the teeth of knowledge. On


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the one hand, to understand everything is, it may be, to find it almost
impossible to forgive. Certainly that is the case with the critics I have
mentioned. On the other hand, perhaps a true pardon is only of the unfor-
givable, as Derrida has been arguing in his recent seminars on "Pardon
and Perjury." If it is forgivable it does not need forgiveness. Only the
unforgivable requires forgiveness.
The question of forgiveness is inscribed within Heart of Darkness in
the way Marlow's narrative is an implicit appeal to his listeners on the
Nellie, and indirectly also to us as readers, to forgive him for his choice of
nightmares, for his loyalty to Kurtz. We are also asked, paradoxically, to
forgive him for his perjury, for the lie he tells the Intended, an act of
disloyalty to Kurtz. Marlow's narrative is a species of confession. A con-
fession is always a demand or prayer for forgiveness. It often reveals more
that needs forgiveness than the confessor knows. In this case that might
be the presumed racism and sexism of which Marlow (or Conrad) seems
unaware. In his confession Marlow makes up for his lie by telling the
truth, unless, in a 
final 
irony, "The horror!" and the Intended's name (just
what that is the reader never learns) come to the same thing, so that Mar-
low uttered the truth after all, even the first time. That, however, it might
be argued, is no excuse, even if for those in the know. Marlow, it could be
said, tells the truth obliquely, but the result of his lie is that the Intended
lives out the rest of her life within the shadowy confines of an illusion,
that is, within a "horror" that she does not even know is a horror. Mar-
low's lie, "white lie" though it is, is performatively effective because it is
believed. Kant would have condemned it for unraveling the social fabric.
Nothing is said about the response of those on board the Nellie to
Marlow's story. We do not know whether or not they forgive him his lie.
The Director of Companies, after Marlow 
finishes 
his story, says no more
than "We have lost the first of the ebb" (95), meaning that Marlow's
story has kept them from leaving when they ought. The primary narrator
ends his account by making an observation that might seem to be evi-
dence of the effect of Marlow's story on his way of seeing: "the tranquil
waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under
an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness"
(95). Any further or more explicit passing of judgment is left to the
reader. It is up to us—or rather up to me, since reading and bearing wit-
ness to what happens in reading are always solitary, lonely acts. This is
the case however much such judgments may be performed within the
coercive and determining context of codes, conventions, and protocols of
reading. Historically and geographically determined ideologies also
speak through the solitary reader when he or she sums up and passes
judgment, as Kurtz did when he said "The horror! The horror!" or as
Marlow did when he said of Kurtz, "He had summed up—he had judged.


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
111
'The horror!' He was a remarkable man" (87), or as Achebe did when he
said "Conrad was a bloody racist." Nevertheless, each person who passes
judgment must take personal responsibility for doing so. He or she must
also take responsibility for whatever further consequences that act of
reading may have.
The first thing to say in passing judgment on Heart of Darkness is that it
is a literary work, not history, not a travel book, a memoir, an autobiog-
raphy, or any other genre but some form of literature. It is a literary work,
moreover, belonging to a particular historical time and place. It is, that is,
a work of English literature written at the moment of high capitalism and
imperialism. This may seem obvious enough, but much criticism forgets
this fact or elides it. An example is what the editor of the Norton Critical
Edition, Robert Kimbrough, says about the "Backgrounds and Sources"
section of the volume. The first part of this, says Kimbrough, "sets the
story within its historical context." The second "offers all that Conrad
ever biographically recorded concerning his Congo experience, the artis-
tic projection of which is Heart of Darkness." The third "reminds us that,
autobiographical though it may be, the story was to Conrad a significant,
but objective work of art" (N, 84). Kimbrough, the reader can see, wants
to have it several ways at once. Heart of Darkness is an objective work of
art (whatever that means), but it is at the same time embedded in a histor-
ical context, the "projection" (whatever that means) of Conrad's "bio-
graphical" experience, and it is, after all, "autobiographical." These
"backgrounds and sources" invite the reader to measure the novel by its
referential accuracy. It is an almost irresistible temptation to do so, espe-
cially once you know these background "facts." An example of such
yielding is talking about the place where the main events occur as the
Congo or about the sepulchral city where Marlow gets his job as Brussels,
whereas neither the Congo nor Brussels is anywhere named as such in the
novel, while the Thames is named in the third sentence. At the very least
such reticence needs to be recognized as a symptom. More radically, it is
a signal that the only way to enter the countries where the events of Heart
of Darkness occur is by reading the novel, not by visiting Belgium or what
is now again called the Congo.
Conrad fought a lifelong battle in his letters, prefaces, essays, and
overtly autobiographical writing, such as The Mirror of the Sea (1906), A
Personal Record (1912), and Notes on Life and Letters (1921), to get
his readers and critics to accept that his work is literature, not thinly
disguised autobiography or travel literature. I give two examples out of a
large number. Arthur Symons, in Notes on Joseph Conrad: With Some
Unpublished Letters (1925), cites a letter to him from Conrad in which
the latter rejects Symons's identification of Conrad with his fictive


112 
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character, Kurtz: "For the rest I may say that there are certain passages in
your article which have surprised me. I did not know that I had 'a heart
of darkness' and 'an unlawful soul.' Mr. Kurtz had—and I have not
treated him with easy nonchalance" (N, 153). A letter of July 14, 1923,
to Richard Curie, responding to Curie's Times Literary Supplement re-
view of the recently published Dent Uniform Edition of Conrad's works,
complains bitterly of the way Curie has perpetuated the falsehood that
he, Conrad, is no more than a writer of sea stories. "I was in hopes,"
writes Conrad,
that on a general survey it could also be made an opportunity for me to get
freed from that infernal tale of ships, and that obsession of my sea life which
has about as much bearing on my literary existence, on my quality as a
writer, as the enumeration of the drawing-rooms which Thackeray fre-
quented could have had on his gift as a great novelist. After all, I may have
been a seaman, but I am a writer of prose. Indeed the nature of my writing
runs the risk of being obscured by the nature of my material. . . . That the
connection of my ships with my writings stands, with my concurrence I
admit, recorded in your book is, of course, a fact. But that was a biographi-
cal matter, not literary. (N, 152)
What is the difference between biography and literature? Conrad goes
on in his letter to Curie to specify the difference in a striking figure. Al-
most all his "art," says Conrad, consists "in my unconventional grouping
and perspective" (N, 153). Artistic grouping of what? Of the apparently
referential or historical material of the story that is placed within the
grouping and lighting. This material is necessary to the illuminating
grouping and to its artistic effect in the same way that invisible radio
waves require sending and receiving apparatuses to be detected, even
though what is important is the invisible waves, not the apparatus: "Of
course the plastic matter of this grouping and of those lights has its im-
portance, since without it the actuality of that grouping and that lighting
could not be made evident any more than Marconi's electric waves could
be made evident without the sending-out and receiving instruments" (N,
153). The referential, mimetic, or representational aspect of his works,
Conrad is saying, is all for the sake of providing a necessary material base
for bringing something invisible into visibility through an artful arrange-
ment of that material. This figure is consonant with the often-cited pas-
sage within Heart of Darkness itself about the peculiar nature of Mar-
low's stories as opposed to the usual stories seamen tell. I shall return to
that passage.
Much Conrad criticism recognizes tacitly that Heart of Darkness is
literature but then talks about it as if it were something else. Indeed it is
almost impossible to avoid making this elementary error, since every text


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
113
invites a referential or what Derrida calls, following Sartre, a "transcen-
dent" reading, that is, a reading going beyond the work's language to-
ward the exterior world to which it presumably refers.10 To put this an-
other way, to call Heart of Darkness a literary work, as I just have, is a
speech act that responds to certain possibilities in the text. I have im-
plicitly said, "I declare Heart of Darkness is literature." It would be
equally possible to declare that Heart of Darkness is history, or memoir,
or autobiography. To do this would be in one way or another to label the
novel a straightforwardly mimetic or referential work that deserves to
be judged by its truth value, its accuracy of representation. Many critics
have done just that. No distinguishing marks certainly identify a given
text as literary or as nonliterary, in spite of the many conventional codes
that ordinarily indicate a text is literature or not literature. This uncer-
tainty results from the way each may present itself in the guise of the
other. A page from a telephone book can be taken as literature. One can
imagine a fictitious telephone book that would look exactly like a real
one, though the numbers would not work if you were to try to use them
to call someone.
If taking Heart of Darkness as literature or as not literature is a speech
act, an act of belief or of bearing witness, not a constative statement, this
means that whoever declares it to be one or the other must take responsi-
bility for his or her declaration. He or she must say, "I did it. I have
declared that Heart of Darkness is literature (or, on the contrary, is his-
tory or autobiography). I accept responsibility for the consequences of
saying that." I hereby do that now for my claim that Heart of Darkness
belongs to literature. To say Heart of Darkness is a literary work, I hasten
to add, by no means exonerates Conrad from responsibility for what is
said within it, but it does change the terms and conditions of that respon-
sibility. Just how?
Literature as an institution in the West is of relatively recent date. It
began more or less in the Renaissance. "Literature" as we Westerners
know it is a radically overdetermined historical product belonging only
to Western societies. Greek tragedy is not literature in the modern West-
ern sense, nor is classical Chinese poetry, however much these may look
like more or less the same thing as our literature. Greek tragedy was a
species of quasi-religious ritual, and Chinese poetry had class and institu-
tional functions, not to speak of a texture of political or historical allu-
sions, that were not quite like anything in the West. Whether United
States so-called literature or South African Anglophone so-called litera-
ture is literature in the same sense that Conrad's Heart of Darkness is
literature is a subtle and difficult question, a question whose answer must
by no means be taken for granted. I suspect the nature and social function
of United States and South African literature are significantly different


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from those of British literature. Certainly it is difficult, for example, to
apply (without distorting them) to Melville, Hawthorne, or Dickinson
paradigms developed for English Victorian literature, though they are
contemporary with it.
Literature in the modern Western sense is a concomitant of democracy
with its precious right to free speech, of the modern nation-state, of Euro-
pean worldwide economic and political imperialist hegemony, of print
culture, of modern notions of authorship, of copyright laws, and of post-
Cartesian notions of subjectivity and of the subject/object dichotomy.
Democratic freedom of speech, as guaranteed by a particular nation state,
is, as Jacques Derrida has cogently argued in the prefatory interview in
Acts of Literature, essential to literature in the modern European sense.
Since it would be difficult to convict Derrida of either racism or sexism
(though attempts have been made), his testimony may be valuable here in
working out how to pass judgment on Heart of Darkness. Though of
course free speech always has its limits and is never more than imperfectly
achieved, always something yet to come, nevertheless in principle it
makes literature possible by making it permissible to say anything and, in
a certain specific sense, to disclaim responsibility for it by saying, "That
is not me speaking but an imaginary character. I am exercising my right
to free speech in the name of a higher responsibility."11
All these features I have named (democratic free speech, the nation
state, European hegemony, print culture, copyright laws, Cartesian no-
tions of the ego), make a heterogeneous system, of which literature in the
modern Western sense is only one element. If one element is changed, the
whole system is changed, including any member of it. Several of these
intertwined elements are in our time being radically altered. We hear on
all sides these days of the decline of the nation state. Cartesian or He-
gelian notions of subjectivity are no longer taken for granted, to say
the least. Print culture is being rapidly replaced by a new regime of tele-
communications: television, cinema, videotapes, faxes, e-mail, computer
databases, the Internet with its unimaginable and incoherent multiplicity
of data, including literature (that is being transformed by this new me-
dium) and literary scholarship—all floating freely in global cyberspace.
Among all that chaotic wealth I discovered, for example, a hypercard
version of Heart of Darkness and downloaded it into my computer. It
was prepared partly in Florida, partly in Norway, though the e-mail ad-
dress is Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Reading Heart of Dark-
ness in this version is different in many hard-to-define ways from reading
it in a printed book. We live in a postcolonial world in which Europe and
even the United States are less and less dominant, as, for example, East
Asian economies challenge the hegemony of Western ones in size and
global power. Freedom of speech on the Internet does not mean the same


CONRAD: 
HEART 
OF 
DARKNESS 
115
thing as freedom of speech in face-to-face encounters in an old-fashioned
New England town meeting, or freedom of speech as exercised in a
printed text. The result of these changes may be that we are coming to the
end of Western-style literature as it extended from Shakespeare to Con-
rad and his European contemporaries. The study of this literature was
institutionalized in departments of national literatures in Western-style
universities all over the world. Those universities are part of the legacy of
imperialism and colonialism.
Literature in the modern Western sense is, it may be, already a thing of
the past. It is now an object of historical investigation and imaginative,
spectral resurrection, not something that is or could be currently pro-
duced, since the enabling conditions have changed so radically. Misread-
ings of Heart of Darkness as though it were a straightforwardly his-
torical, referential, or autobiographical document may be evidence that
literature can no longer easily be understood in terms of older protocols,
codes, and conventions of reading, though of course such mimetic mis-
readings of literature have always been current. They too are part of our
legacy from the now-vanishing regime of print culture. As I have said, a
fictional telephone book can always be taken as a real one. The need for
the ritual disclaimer (often a manifestly lying one) saying "any resem-
blance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental" testifies to
the ubiquity of the confusion and the need to try to ward it off.
In just what way does Heart of Darkness invite reading as literature
rather than, say, as a historical account or as an autobiography? The
most obvious way is in the displacement from Conrad to two imaginary
narrators, neither of whom is to be identified with Conrad, any more than
Socrates, in the Platonic dialogues, is to be identified with Plato. The
reader who says Conrad speaks directly for himself either in the words
of the frame narrator or in Marlow's words does so at his or her peril
and in defiance of the most elementary literary conventions. Whatever
the frame narrator or Marlow says is ironized or suspended, presented
implicitly in parabasis, by being given as the speech of an imaginary
character.
Conrad's way of talking about Marlow's origin, nature, and relation
to his creator is peculiar, evasive. It is a little like the response "R.," pre-
sumably Rousseau himself, though this is not confirmed, gives, in the
second preface to Rousseau's La nouvelle Heloise, when he is asked by
"N." whether the letters that make up the novel are real letters or fictive
ones. "R." says he does not know and, when pressed by "N.," says he is
afraid of lying if he answers definitely one way or the other.12 In the "Au-
thor's Note" of 1917 to Youth, the volume that contains Heart of Dark-
ness, as well as "Youth" (in which Marlow first appeared) and "The End


116 
CHAPTER FIVE
of the Tether," Conrad responds to "some literary speculation" about
Marlow's "origins." "One would think that I am the proper person to
throw a light on the matter;" says Conrad, "but in truth I find that it isn't
so easy" (N, 155). Marlow, he goes on to say, "was supposed to be all
sorts of things: a clever screen, a mere device, a 'personator,' a familiar
spirit, a whispering 'daemon.' I myself have been suspected of a meditated
plan for his capture" (ibid.). Conrad continues to talk ironically and am-
biguously about Marlow as if he were a real not a fictive person. Or
rather he speaks of Marlow as a fictive person whose existence is never-
theless inseparable from that of Conrad himself in the sense that neither
would "care" to survive the other:
That is not so. I made no plans [to "capture" him]. The man Marlow and I
came together in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances
which sometimes ripen into friendships. This one has ripened. For all his
assertiveness in matters of opinion he is not an intrusive person. He haunts
my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great
comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of a tale I am never sure that
it may not be for the last time. Yet I don't think that either of us would care
much to survive the other. In his case, at any rate, his occupation would be
gone and he would suffer from that extinction, because I suspect him of
some vanity. (Ibid.)
By denying that he had made premeditated plans for Marlow's capture,
Conrad means to deny, I assume, that Marlow was the product of a calcu-
lated literary artifice. He just appeared, spontaneously, like a ghostly
double or like that "secret sharer" who appears on the protagonist's ship
in "The Secret Sharer," subject of the next chapter of this book. Marlow
appears to "haunt" Conrad's hours of solitude, that is, the hours he does
his writing. They then "part at the end of a tale." A ghost, especially one's
own specter, is both the same as oneself and yet different. This one has
his own assertive opinions. These are not, Conrad implies, Conrad's
own opinions, any more than Kurtz's opinions are the same as Marlow's.
Just as Conrad is "haunted" by Marlow, so Marlow is haunted by Kurtz,
who is spoken of repeatedly as a ghost. Marlow speaks of "the shade
of Mr. Kurtz," "this initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere" (65—
66), of Kurtz as an "apparition" (76), a "shadow" or "Shadow" (81,
82), "like a vapour exhaled by the earth" (82), again as a "shade" (85),
as "an eloquent phantom" (94), as a "disinterred body" (64). A ghost
does not, cannot, die. It returns, as a revenant, just as Marlow hears
Kurtz's voice still whispering his last words when he visits the Intended
back in Europe: "The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all
around us" (94).


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
117
Heart of Darkness is made of a chain of these ambiguous doublings and
hauntings: of Marlow by Kurtz, of the primary narrator by Marlow, of
Conrad by Marlow, of the Intended by the African woman who is presum-
ably Kurtz's mistress, and of the reader by the whole series. The reader is
haunted by the tale, made to feel a "faint uneasiness" by it just as the frame
narrator is by Marlow's story (43). The reader pores over and over the text
trying to come to terms with it so it can be dismissed and forgotten.
A second way Heart of Darkness presents itself as literature is in the elab-
orate tissue of figures and other rhetorical devices that make up, as one
might put it, the texture of the text. The simplest and most obvious of
these devices is the use of similes, signaled by "like" or "as." These similes
displace things that are named by one or the other of the narrators. They
assert that this (whatever it is) is like something else. This something else
forms through recurrence a consistent subtext. This subtext functions as
a counterpoint defining everything that can be seen as a veil hiding some-
thing more truthful or essential behind.
The first of many uses of the 
figure 
naming things veils that are lifted to
reveal more veils behind comes when the frame narrator, describing the
evening scene just before sunset, when the sky is "a benign immensity of
unstained light" (N, 4), as it looks from the Nellie at anchor in the
Thames estuary, says: "the very mist on the Essex marshes was like [my
emphasis] a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland,
and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds" (18). Such recurrent
figures establish a structure that is apocalyptic in the etymological sense
of "unveiling," as well as in the sense of having to do with death, judg-
ment, and other last things.
These similes, as they follow in a line punctuating the text at rhythmic
intervals, are not casual or fortuitous. They form a system, a powerful
undertext beneath the first-level descriptive language. They invite the
reader to see whatever either of the narrators sees and names on the first
level of narration as a veil or screen hiding something invisible or not yet
visible behind it. When each veil is lifted, however, it uncovers only an-
other veil, according to a paradox essential to the genre of the apocalypse.
Apocalypse: the word means "unveiling" in Greek. If one had to name
the genre to which Heart of Darkness belongs, the answer would be that
it is a failed apocalypse, or, strictly speaking, since all apocalypses ulti-
mately fail to lift the last veil, it is just that, a member of the genre apoca-
lypse. The film modeled on Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, was
brilliantly and accurately named, except for that word "now." Apoca-
lypse is never now. It is always to come, a thing of the future, both infi-
nitely distant and immediately imminent.


118 
CHAPTER FIVE
In Heart of Darkness it is, to borrow Conrad's own words, as if each
episode were "some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister back-cloth"
(28). The novel is structured as a long series of episodes. Each appears
with extreme vividness before the reader's imaginary vision, brought
there by Conrad's remarkable descriptive power. It then vanishes, to be
replaced by the next episode, as though a figured screen had been lifted to
reveal yet another figured screen behind it. The darkness lies behind them
all, like that "sinister back-cloth" Marlow names. The misty Essex shore
in the opening frame episode is, in the passage already cited, "like a gauzy
and radiant fabric" (18). The fog that obscures the shore just before Mar-
low's ship is attacked is said to have "lifted as a shutter lifts" and then to
have come down again, "smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves" (55).
The change that comes over Kurtz's features just before he utters his judg-
ment is "as though a veil had been rent" (86), in an explicit reference to
the figure of apocalypse as unveiling, revelation, as well as to the rending
of the Temple veil at the time of Christ's crucifixion.
Heart of Darkness is structured by this trope of successive revelations.
These unveilings unveil not so much the truth behind as the act of unveil-
ing itself, since no "bottom" to the series is reached, no ultimate revela-
tion given. Each scene is in a sense just as close and just as far away from
the unnamable "truth" behind it as any other. Marlow's journey in Heart
of Darkness and that of the reader as he or she gets deeper and deeper into
the book is a movement in place. The scene on the Nellie is replaced by
the scenes in the offices of the trading company in the sepulchral city: the
two old women in black at the entrance, knitting and knitting, like two
Fates; the doctor who measures Marlow's head and says "the changes
take place inside, you know" (26). These scenes give place to the sequence
of brief episodes that makes up the central story, as Marlow makes his
way deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness: the French ship firing
pointlessly into the bush ("Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a
small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear,
a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened.
Nothing could happen" [29]); the dying "workers" in the grove of death;
the starched and scented accountant, keeping perfect records in the midst
of pointless confusion; the corpse with a bullet-hole in its forehead Mar-
low "absolutely stumble[s]"(35) upon during his two-hundred-mile trek
to reach the beginning of inland navigation on the river, where he finds
his ship has been wrecked; his encounter with the skeleton of his prede-
cessor, who has been killed in an absurd dispute over two chickens; the
storage shed at the Central Station that suddenly bursts into flames in the
middle of the night; the macabre dance on the tinpot steamer's deck per-
formed by Marlow and the chief mechanic to celebrate their expecta-
tion that rivets will come; the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, with its


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
119
"absurd air of disorderly flight with the loot of innumerable outfit shops
and provision stores," which vanishes "into the patient wilderness, that
closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver" (46, 49); the finding of the
book about seamanship, Towson's Inquiry, annotated in what Marlow
takes to be cipher; the death of Marlow's African helmsman as the ship
approaches Kurtz's station and is attacked from the shore; the encounter
at the station with the Russian dressed like a harlequin; the appearance
through Marlow's telescope of those "symbolic" heads on stakes; Mar-
low's rescue of Kurtz when the latter tries to crawl back to join the Afri-
cans he has commanded and bewitched, so that they worship him; the
apparition on the shore of what the reader supposes is Kurtz's African
mistress; Kurtz's death and summing up, "in a whisper at some image, at
some vision—. . . 'The horror! The horror!'" (86); the echo or repetition
of the African woman's gesture of raising her arms in the final episode of
Marlow's encounter back in Europe with Kurtz's "Intended," when he
tells his lie; the return in the final brief paragraph to the deck of the Nellie
where Marlow has been telling his story and to the concluding vision of
the Thames as a "tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the
earth [that] flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into
the heart of an immense darkness" (95).
You may say that of course any narrative consists of a sequence of
episodes that give place to one another. Heart of Darkness is nothing
special in doing that. The difference, however, is in the way the materials
and personages of each episode vanish, never to return again except in
Marlow's memory. A novel roughly contemporary with Heart of Dark-
ness, Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, for example, consists of a
series of episodes all right, but the same characters are returned to again
and again in a slow rotation of encounters that advances the action. In
Heart of Darkness each episode is like a separate sinister farce enacted
before a black backcloth. The whole is like a sequence of dream visions,
each with little connection to the ones before and after. Each vanishes for
good, as though a veil had been lifted to reveal yet another such scene
behind it that vanishes in its turn, in a rhythm of ironic undercutting and
displacement that punctuates Marlow's journey. He journeys deeper and
deeper toward the fulfillment of an implicit promise, the promise to make
or find a final revelation or unveiling. That promise, it hardly needs say-
ing, is never kept. It cannot be kept. Just why that is so and just what that
nonfulfillment means remain to be seen.
A third distinctively literary feature of Heart of Darkness has already
been named in passing. The novel is ironic through and through. The
reader might wish this were not the case. We may deplore Conrad's
radical irony, but there it is, an indubitable fact. Heart of Darkness is a


120 
CHAPTER FIVE
masterwork of irony, as when the eloquent idealism of Kurtz's pamphlet
on "The Suppression of Savage Customs" is undercut by the phrase
scrawled at the bottom: "Exterminate all the brutes!" (66), or as when the
dying Africans in the grove of death are called "helpers" in the great
"work" of civilizing the continent (32). Marlow's narrative in particular
is steeped in irony throughout. The problem is that it is impossible to be
certain just how to take that irony. Irony is, as Hegel and Kierkegaard
said, "infinite absolute negativity," or, as Friedrich Schlegel said, a "per-
manent parabasis," a continuous suspension of clearly identifiable mean-
ing. It is a principle of unintelligibility, or, in Schlegel's word, JJnver-
stdndlichkeit.u Irony is a constant local feature of Marlow's narrative
style. He says one thing and means another, as when the Europeans at the
Central Station engaged in the terrible work of imperialist conquest, the
"merry dance of death and trade" (29), are said to be, in yet another
simile, like "pilgrims": "They wandered here and there with their absurd
long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside
a rotten fence" (38).
This stylistic undercutting is mimed in that larger structure of the re-
placement of each episode by the next, so that each is undermined by the
reader's knowledge that it is only a temporary appearance, not some ulti-
mate goal of revelation attained. Each is certain to vanish and be replaced
by the next scene to be enacted before that sinister backcloth.
A fourth ostentatious literary feature of Heart of Darkness is the use of
recurrent prosopopoeias. The personification of the darkness (whatever
that word means here) begins in the title, which gives the darkness a
"heart." Prosopopoeia is the ascription of a name, a face, or a voice to the
absent, the inanimate, or the dead. By a speech act, a performative utter-
ance, prosopopoeia creates the fiction of a personality where in reality
there is none. Or is there? Once the personifications are in place, it seems
as if the personality had been there all along, waiting to be recognized by
a name. All prosopopoeias are also catachreses. They move the verbal
fiction of a personality over to name something unknown and unknow-
able. The "something" is, therefore, strictly speaking, unnamable in any
literal language. It is something radically other than human personality:
something absent, inanimate, or dead. It is no accident that so many tra-
ditional examples of catachresis are also personifications: "headland,"
"face of a mountain," "tongue of land," "table leg." The phrase "heart
of darkness" is such a catachrestic prosopopoeia, to give it its barbarous-
sounding Greek rhetorical name. We project our own bodies on the land-
scape and on surrounding artifacts. In Heart of Darkness the proso-
popoeias are a chief means of naming by indirection what Conrad calls,


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
121
in a misleading and inadequate metaphor, "the darkness," or, "the wil-
derness," or, most simply and perhaps most truthfully, "it."
More than a dozen explicit personifications of this "it" rhythmically
punctuate Heart of Darkness, like a recurring leitmotif. The darkness is
not really a person, but an "it," asexual or transsexual, impersonal, indif-
ferent, though to Marlow it seems like a person. The wilderness sur-
rounding the Central Station, says Marlow, "struck me as something
great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing
away of this fantastic invasion" (38). A little later Marlow says "the si-
lence of the land went home to one's very heart—its mystery, its great-
ness, the amazing reality of its concealed life" (41). Of that silent, noctur-
nal wilderness Marlow asserts, "All this was great, expectant, mute,
while the man [one of the agents at the station] jabbered about himself. I
wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us
two were meant as an appeal or as a menace... . Could we handle that
dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big,
was that thing that couldn't talk and perhaps was deaf as well" (42). "It
was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable in-
tention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.... I felt often its mysteri-
ous stillness watching me at my monkey-tricks, just as it watches you
fellows [his listeners on the Nellie] performing on your respective tight-
ropes for—what is it? half a crown a tumble—" (49, 50). The wilderness
destroys Kurtz by a kind of diabolical seduction: "The wilderness had
patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it
had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved
him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his
soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initia-
tion. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite" (64). The Africans at
Kurtz's Inner Station vanish "without any perceptible movement of re-
treat, as if the forest that had ejected these beings so suddenly had drawn
them in again as the breath is drawn in a long aspiration" (76).
This last citation indicates another and not unpredictable feature of the
prosopopoeias in Heart of Darkness. The personification of the wilder-
ness is matched by a corresponding transformation of the African people
who intervene between Marlow and the "it." Just as, in Thomas Hardy's
The Return of the Native, the extravagant personification of the night-
time heath that opens the novel leads to the assertion that Eustacia Vye,
who rises from a mound on the heath to stand outlined in the darkness,
is, so to speak, the personification of the personification, its exposure or
visible embodiment, so, in Heart of Darkness, all the Africans Marlow
meets are visible representatives and symbols of the "it." Though it may
be racist for Marlow (who is not necessarily Conrad, the reader should


122 
CHAPTER FIVE
remember) to see the Africans as an inscrutably "other," as simple "sav-
ages" or "primitives," when their culture is older than any European one
and just as complex or sophisticated, if not more so, this otherness is
stressed for the primary purpose of making the Africans visible embodi-
ments and proofs that the "it," the darkness, is a person.
This personification of personification is an underlying feature of all
Marlow's prosopopoeias, but it is made most explicit in the scene where
the woman the reader may presume is Kurtz's African mistress appears
on the shore:
She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something
ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had
fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the
colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pen-
sive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and
passionate soul. . . . She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wil-
derness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. (77)
This passage, like the one describing the way the wilderness has seduced
Kurtz, seems to indicate that this "it" is after all gendered. It is female, a
colossal body of fecund and mysterious life. Since the wilderness is sup-
posed to represent a mysterious knowledge, "like evil or truth," this per-
sonification does not jibe very well with the "sexist" assertions Marlow
makes about the way women in general, for example Marlow's aunt or
Kurtz's Intended, are "out of it," invincibly innocent and ignorant. At the
least one would have to say that two contradictory sexist myths about
women are ascribed to Marlow. One is the European male's tendency to
personify the earth as a great mother, full of an immemorial, seductive
wisdom. The other is the European male's tendency to condescend to
women as innately incapable of seeing into things as well as men can.
Strong hints of homosexual or at least homosocial relations complicate
the sexual politics of Heart of Darkness. Other critics have seen this in
Conrad's work. Those businessmen gathered on the Nellie for a weekend
away from any women are a splendid example of what Eve Sedgwick
means by male homosociality. The pleasure yacht is suggestively, though
of course also conventionally, given a familiar woman's name. Most of
the doublings that organize the novel are of male by male, in that long
chain I have identified. The most important of these is Marlow's infatua-
tion with Kurtz, his extravagant fidelity to him, even beyond the grave. I
have scrupulously in this chapter referred to the reader as "he or she." A
moment's reflection, however, will show that men and women are un-
likely to read the novel in just the same way or to feel just the same kind
of obligation to account for it, to render it justice. Both genders will have
that obligation, but each in a different way.


CONRAD: 
HEART 
OF 
DARKNESS 
123
The final scene pits Marlow's intimacy with Kurtz against the In-
tended's. "Intimacy grows quickly out there," Marlow tells the Intended.
"I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know another" (92).
A strong suggestion is made that Marlow is jealous of the Intended, as a
man who loves another man is jealous of that man's heterosexual loves.
Marcel Proust, however, who presumably knew about this, has Marcel in
A la recherche du temps perdu claim that the Baron de Charlus was only
jealous of his lovers' other male lovers, not at all of their heterosexual
partners. In any case, to the other doublings I have listed would need to
be added the way Marlow doubles the particolored Russian in his fasci-
nation with Kurtz. Again hints are given that Marlow envies the Russian
his intimacy with Kurtz. He wants to have Kurtz all to himself, to be
Kurtz's sole survivor, so to speak, the sole keeper of his memory. The only
overt reference to homosexuality occurs in an interchange between Mar-
low and the Russian: "We talked of everything,' he [the Russian] said,
quite transported at the recollection. 'I forgot there was such a thing as
sleep. The night did not seem to last an hour. Everything! Everything! . . .
Of love too.' 'Ah, he talked to you of love!' I said, much amused. 'It isn't
what you think,' he cried, almost passionately. 'It was in general. He
made me see things—things'" (71-72).
Conrad's invention of Marlow at once embodies, reveals, and ironi-
cally puts in question the complex system of Western imperialist and cap-
italist ideology. I mean "invention" here in both senses—as 
finding 
and as
making up. Among the ingredients of this system are not just a certain
"sexist" vision of women but also a strand of homosociality or even ho-
mosexuality. This was certainly an important feature of English society in
Conrad's day. It has also been shown to be a feature of the imperialist
enterprise generally, for example in the European presentation of non-
European men as exotic, often even, in an obvious wish-fulfillment, as
sexually perverse.
All four of the stylistic features I have identified—the use of fictional
narrators, of recurrent tropes, of irony, and of personification—consti-
tute a demand that Heart of Darkness be read as literature, as opposed
to being taken as a straightforwardly mimetic or referential work that
would allow the reader to hold Conrad himself directly responsible for
what is said as though he were a journalist or a travel writer. Of course
any of these features can be used in a nonliterary work, but taken all
together as they are intertwined in Heart of Darkness, they invite the
reader to declare, "This is literature."
In the name of what higher responsibility does Conrad justify all this
"literary" indirection and ironic undercutting, all this suspending or re-
directing of his novel's straightforwardly mimetic aspect? In the name of


124 
CHAPTER FIVE
what higher obligation is everything that is referentially named in a
pseudo-historical or mimetic way displaced by these ubiquitous rhetori-
cal devices and made into a sign for something else? If Heart of Darkness
is a literary work rather than history or autobiography, just what kind of
literary work is it? Just what kind of apocalypse, if it is an apocalypse?
What lies behind that veil? The frame narrator, in a passage often cited
and commented on, gives the reader a precious clue to an answer to these
questions, though it is left to the reader to make use of the clue in his or
her reading:
The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which
lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his
propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode
was not inside like a kernel but outside [the ms has "outside in the unseen"],
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in
the likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine. (20)
"To spin yarns" is a cliche for narration. To tell a story is to join many
threads together to make a continuous line leading from here to there. Of
that yarn cloth may be woven, the whole cloth of the truth as opposed to
a lie that, as the proverbial saying has it, is "made up out of whole cloth."
The lie as cloth makes a web, screen, or veil covering a truth that remains
hidden behind or within. This inside/outside opposition governs the nar-
rator's distinction between two kinds of tales. On the one hand, the first
kind is the sort of seaman's yarn it has been assumed by many reader's
and critics Conrad was telling in his stories and novels. The meaning of
such a tale lies within, like the kernel within the shell of a cracked nut. I
take it this names a realistic, mimetic, referential tale with an obvious
point and moral. Marlow's tales, on the other hand, and by implication
this one by Conrad, since so much of it is made up of Marlow's narration,
have a different way of making meaning. All the visible, representational
elements, all that the tale makes you see, according to that famous claim
by Conrad in the preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus", that his goal
was "before all, to make you see,"14 axe there not for their own sakes, as
numerically valuable and verifiable, for example for the sake of giving the
reader information about imperialism in the Belgian Congo. Those ele-
ments have as their function to make something else visible, what the
manuscript calls the "unseen,"15 perhaps even the unseeable, as the dark
matter of the universe or the putative black holes at the center of galaxies
can in principle never be seen, only inferred.
Conrad's figure is a different one from those black holes about which
he could not have known, though his trope is still astronomical. It is an
example of that peculiar sort of figure that can be called a 
figure 
of figure


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
125
or a 
figure 
of figuration. Just as the mist on a dark night is invisible except
when it is made visible as a circular halo around moonlight, light already
secondary and reflected from the sun, and just as the mimetic elements of
Marlow's tale are secondary to the putatively real things they represent at
one remove, so the meaning of Marlow's yarns is invisible in itself and is
never named directly. It is not inside the tale but outside. It is "brought
out" indirectly by the things that are named and recounted, thereby made
visible, just as, for example, Marlow when he visits the Intended hears
Kurtz's last words breathed in a whisper by the dusk: "The dusk was
repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that
seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The
horror! The horror!'" (94). The reader will note the way the whispered
sound is onomatopoetically echoed here in the repetition three times of
the word "whisper," with its aspirant and sibilant "whuh" and "isp"
sounds. The illumination provided by the tale is "spectral," like a liminal,
ghostly sound. It turns everything into a phantom, that is, into something
that has come back from the dead, something that cannot die, something
that will always, sooner or later, just when we least expect it, come again.
The miniature lesson in aesthetic theory the frame narrator presents
here is an admirably succinct expression of the distinction between mi-
metic literature and apocalyptic, parabolic, or allegorical literature. In the
latter, everything named, with however much verisimilitude, stands for
something else that is not named directly, that cannot be named directly.
It can only be inferred by those that have eyes to see and ears to hear and
understand, as Jesus puts it in explaining the parable of the sower in
Matthew 13. All these genres have to do with promising, with death, with
the truly secret, and with last things, "things," as Jesus says, "which have
been kept secret from the foundation of the world" (Matt. 13:35).
It is not so absurd as it might seem to claim that Heart of Darkness is
a secular version of what are, originally at least, intertwined religious or
sacred genres: apocalypse, parable, and allegory. Conrad himself spoke
of the "piety" of his approach to writing and of his motive as quasi-
religious. "One thing that I am certain of," he wrote in that letter to
Symons already quoted, "is that I have approached the object of my task,
things human, in a spirit of piety. The earth is a temple where there is
going on a mystery play childish and poignant, ridiculous and awful
enough in all conscience. Once in I've tried to behave decently. I have not
degraded the quasi religious sentiment by tears and groans: and if I've
been amused and indifferent, I've neither grinned nor gnashed my teeth"
(N, 154).
In the case of Heart of Darkness, just what is that "something else" for
the revelation of which the whole story is written? The clear answer is
that the something else is the "it" that Marlow's narration so persistently


126 
CHAPTER FIVE
personifies and that Kurtz passes judgment on when he says "The hor-
ror! " All details in the story, all the mimetic and verisimilar elements, are
presented for the sake of bringing out a glimpse of that "it." The revela-
tion of this "it" is promised by the frame narrator when he defines the
characteristic indirection of meaning in Marlow's yarns. Many critics of
Heart of Darkness have made the fundamental mistake of taking the
story as an example of the first kind of seaman's yarn. Those critics, like
F. R. Leavis, who have noticed all the language about the unspeakable
and "inscrutable" "it" have almost universally condemned it as so much
moonshine interfering with Conrad's gift for making you see the mate-
rial world, his gift for descriptive vividness and verisimilitude. At least
such critics have taken the trouble to read carefully and have noticed that
there are important verbal elements in the text that must be accounted for
somehow and that do not fit the straightforward mimetic, descriptive
paradigm.
Is the "something," the "it," ever revealed, ever brought into the open
where it may be seen and judged? The clear answer is that it is not. The
"it" remains to the end unnamable, inscrutable, unspeakable. The "it" is
Conrad's particular version, in Heart of Darkness at least, of those
"others" that are the subject of this book. The "it" is falsely, or at any
rate unprovably, personified by Marlow's rhetoric as having conscious-
ness and intention. It is named only indirectly and inadequately by all
those similes and figures of veils being lifted. How could something be
revealed that can only be encountered directly by those who have crossed
over the threshold of death? The reader is told that "it" is "The horror!"
but just what that means is never explained except in hints and indirec-
tions. Nothing definite can be said of the "it" except that it is not nothing,
that it is, though even that is not certain, since it may be a projection, not
a solicitation, call, or demand from something wholly other. Of the "it"
one must say what Wallace Stevens says of the "primitive like an orb,"
"at the center on the horizon": "It is and it/Is not and, therefore, is."16 If
"it" is wholly other it is wholly other. Nothing more can be said of it
except by signs that confess in their proffering to their inadequacy. Each
veil lifts to reveal another veil behind.
The structure of Heart of Darkness is a self-perpetuating system of an
endlessly deferred promise. This is the implicit promise that Marlow
makes at the beginning of his tale when he says that though his meeting
with Kurtz, "the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of
my experience," was "not very clear," nevertheless "it seemed to throw a
kind of light" (7). This illumination he implicitly promises to pass on to
his hearers. The primary narrator passes it on to us, the readers. The
fulfillment of this promise to reveal, however, remains always future,


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
127
something yet to come, eschatological or messianic rather than teleologi-
cal. It is an end that can never come within the series of episodes that
reaches out toward it as life reaches toward death. In this Heart of Dark-
ness works in a deferral analogous to the way Revelations promises an
imminent messianic coming that always remains future, to come, beyond
the last in the series, across the threshold into another realm and another
regime. It is in the name of this unrevealed and unrevealable secret, out of
obligation to it, in response to the demand it makes, though it still re-
mains secret and inaccessible, that all Heart of Darkness is written. The
presence within the novel of an inaccessible secret, a secret that neverthe-
less incites to narration, is what makes it appropriate to speak of Heart of
Darkness as literature.
The place where this ultimate failure of revelation is made most explicit
is Marlow's comment on the difference between Kurtz, who summed up
at the moment of his death, giving words to "the appalling face of a
glimpsed truth" (87), and Marlow's own illness that took him to the
brink of death and then back into life again, therefore not quite far
enough to see what Kurtz saw:
And it is not my own extremity I remember best—a vision of greyness with-
out form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanes-
cence of all things—even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I
seemed to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had
stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitat-
ing foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom,
and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable
moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps!
(87-88)
How would one know without crossing that bourne from which no
traveler returns? You cannot "live through" another's death. The other
must die his or her own death; you must die yours—both in incommuni-
cable solitude. To "know" you must die first. If you know, you are, nec-
essarily, no longer around to tell the tale. Even knowing this remains,
necessarily, a matter of "perhaps." It is, nevertheless, in the name of this
nonrevelation, this indirect glimpse, as the moon spectrally illuminates a
ring of mist, that Marlow's judgment of imperialism is made. The "it"
is the sinister backcloth before which all the seriocomic antics of those
carrying on the merry dance of death and trade, including their racism
and sexism, are ironically suspended, made to appear both horrible and
futile at once. The ubiquity of the "it" allows Marlow to imply the iden-
tity between the African woman and Kurtz's Intended that is so crucial to
the story. This ubiquity also allows him to assert an all-important iden-
tity between the early Roman conquerors of Britain, present-day British


128 
CHAPTER FIVE
commerce as represented by the Director of Companies, the Lawyer, and
the Accountant, and the enterprise of imperialism in Africa. Of the El-
dorado Exploring Expedition, Marlow says, "To tear treasure out of the
bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the
back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe" (46). Something
similar, however, is said about the Romans near the beginning of Mar-
low's narration. It is said in a way that gives it universal application: "The
conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those
who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,
is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much" (21). Heart of
Darkness looks into it. Early readers saw the novel as an unequivocal
condemnation of Leopold II and of Belgian imperialism in the Congo. I
note in passing that now (2000), when a new regime has taken over in the
Congo, transnational companies are fighting for the rights to exploit min-
eral deposits there, for example copper. This new global economy is not
all that different from the imperialism of Conrad's day. Of course the
novel represents, in Marlow, Eurocentric views. It was written by a Euro-
pean with the apparent intent of evaluating such views by embodying
them in a narrator. Of course it represents sexist views. It was written to
dramatize what might be said by an imaginary character, Marlow, a
white male of Conrad's class and time, just as Conrad's critics today rep-
resent their times, races, sexes, and nations, however superior, more just,
their judgments may be. I claim, however, that by being displaced into
Marlow as narrator and by being measured against the "it," these Euro-
centric views are radically criticized and shown as what they are, that is,
as elements in a deadly and unjust ideology.
What of Kurtz, however? Is he not different from the other agents of
imperialism? The latter are possessed by "a flabby, pretending, weak-
eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly" (31). They have no insight
into the way they are victims of the imperialist ideology as well as victim-
izers of those it exploits. Kurtz, on the other hand, "was a remarkable
man," as Marlow himself repeatedly asserts, in a phrase he picks up from
one of the agents. Kurtz was a kind of universal genius: a painter, a musi-
cian, a poet (he recites his own poetry to the Russian), spectacularly suc-
cessful in getting ivory, an extremely gifted journalist, a brilliantly power-
ful speaker, a forceful writer, the author of a stirring pamphlet, his report
to "the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs":
" 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practi-
cally unbounded,' etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with
him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you
know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august
Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
129
power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble Words" (66). Kurtz
was potentially a great politician, as the journalist Marlow meets back in
Europe after Kurtz's death assures him: "'but Heavens! how that man
could talk! He electrified large meetings. He had faith—don't you see—he
had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything—anything. He
would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party. 'What party?' I
asked. 'Any party,' answered the other. 'He was an—an—extremist'"
(89). The famous scrawled note at the end of the pamphlet's manuscript,
"Exterminate all the brutes!" (66), says with brutal candor the truth, that
the suppression of savage customs culminates in the suppression of the
"savages" themselves. That footnote scrawled "in an unsteady hand" tes-
tifies to Kurtz's remarkable understanding of the imperialist, philan-
thropic, and missionary enterprise.
Just what goes wrong with Kurtz? His case is obviously of greater in-
terest than that of any of the others Marlow meets or even than that of
Marlow himself. The latter has survived and speaks as a sane man, "one
of us," in the voice of ironic, European, enlightened rationality. Or rather
he could be said to speak in that voice except for his fascination with
Kurtz and with that "it" that solicits him to speech. What he says of the
Russian's infatuation with Kurtz could be said of his own fascination:
"He had not meditated over it. It came to him, and he accepted it with a
sort of eager fatalism. I must say that to me it appeared about the most
dangerous thing in every way he had come upon so far" (71). Marlow
gives the reader his diagnosis of Kurtz's "madness." Speaking of those
heads on stakes, Marlow says:
there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only
showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various
lusts, that there was something wanting in him—some small matter which,
when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent
eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the
knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last! [The ms originally
added here: If so, then justice was done.] But the wilderness had found
him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic
invasion. I think that it whispered to him things about himself which he did
not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with
this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It
echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core. (58-59)
On the one hand, the story of Kurtz's degradation is an example of
the familiar narrative cliche of the European who "goes native." Kurtz,
like Lingard in The Rescue, like Lord Jim in Lord Jim, and like Charles
Gould in Nostromo, crosses over a border and ceases to be wholly Euro-
pean. Kurtz sets himself up as a sort of king in the alien land, thereby


130 
CHAPTER FIVE
anticipating the destiny of most colonies to become ultimately indepen-
dent nations. In doing so, they thereby betray in one way or another the
ideals, the ethos, the laws and conventions of the colonizing country. The
United States did that in 1776. The somewhat hysterical fear that this will
happen, or that it will necessarily be a disaster if it does happen, has
haunted the colonial enterprise from the beginning. On the other hand,
Kurtz never completely makes that break. After all, he allows Marlow to
rescue him when he has crawled back ashore in his attempt to join the
Africans who have become his subjects. He dies oriented toward Europe
and toward the desire that he will "have kings meet him at railway sta-
tions on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to
accomplish great things" (85).
What goes wrong with Kurtz? How might he, or another person, Mar-
low for example, protect himself from the corrupting whisper of the wil-
derness? Just here Marlow's rhetoric, or Conrad's rhetoric as ascribed to
Marlow, is contradictory. It is contradictory in an interesting and symp-
tomatic way. Marlow names several different ways to protect oneself
from the threat of counterinvasion by the "it" that has entered Kurtz
because he is "hollow at the core" (74).
One way is blind insensitivity: "Of course a fool, what with sheer
fright and fine sentiments, is always safe" (52). That includes most of the
"pilgrims," the agents of imperialism.
Another way to protect oneself from the darkness is through devotion
to hard but routine physical or mental work, what Conrad calls "the
devotion to efficiency" (21). This he identifies as a fundamental feature of
the capitalist and imperialist ethos. Indeed it still is a feature of our ideol-
ogy in the United States. The stated mission of the University of Califor-
nia, for example, is to "help make California competitive in the global
economy." University "downsizing" for efficiency's sake matches corpo-
rate downsizing for profit's sake. The starched and scented accountant in
Heart of Darkness is protected by his fanatical devotion to keeping his
books accurate and neat. Marlow, so he tells the reader, is saved from
succumbing to the darkness through his focus on getting his wrecked
steamer back in working order and then getting it safely up the river:
"Fine sentiments be hanged. I had no time. I had to mess about with
white-lead and strips of woollen blanket helping to put bandages on
those leaky steam-pipes—I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and cir-
cumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook.
There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man" (52).
The third way to protect oneself seems clear enough. It turns out, how-
ever, to be the most equivocal. This is indicated by changes and omissions
in the manuscript. Just after saying "the conquest of the earth . . . is not
a pretty thing when you look into it too much," Marlow goes on to add:


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
131
"What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a senti-
mental [ms: mouthing] pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the
idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacri-
fice to" (21). The ironic religious language at the end here sounds a little
ominous. More or less the same thing, however, with much less evident
irony is asserted much later in the story when Marlow is talking about the
appeal made to him by the dancing, shouting Africans on the shore: "Let
the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a
wink. But he must meet that truth [the truth of the "prehistoric" men's
dancing that is closer to the origin of mankind: certainly a familiar racist
cliche there, since modern African cultures are no closer to the origins of
mankind than modern European ones are] with his own true stuff—with
his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions,
clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No;
you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is
there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or
evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced" (52).
The contradiction here is a double one. In an excised passage from the
early place where, apropos of the Roman invasion of Britain, Marlow
says the idea redeems it, he says that he admires the Roman conquerors
just because they did not have any redeeming idea but were just robbers
and murderers on a grand scale: "The best of them is they didn't get up
pretty fictions about it. Was there, I wonder, an association on a philan-
thropic basis to develop Britain, with some third rate king for a president
and solemn old senators discoursing about it approvingly and philoso-
phers with uncombed beards praising it, and men in market places crying
it up. Not much! And that's what I like!" (from the ms, cited N, 7). No
doubt this was cut in part because it was too overt an attack on King
Leopold, but it is also in direct contradiction to Marlow's claim a mo-
ment later in the published version, just after where the cut passage would
have gone, that "what redeems it [imperialism whether Roman or mod-
ern] is the idea only. An idea at the back of it;... and an unselfish belief
in the idea" (21).
The other contradiction, however, lies in that phrase "deliberate be-
lief" and in the way Kurtz is defined as an adept at deliberate belief: "He
could get himself to believe anything—anything" (89). A deliberate be-
lief is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You either believe or do
not believe. A deliberate belief is a pretense to believe even though you
know the belief is a fictional confidence in something that does not exist
or that you do not really believe exists, in this case a solid base for the
philanthropic ideals that justify imperialism. To say "I declare I believe so
and so" or "I will myself deliberately to believe so and so" is a paradig-
matic speech act of a kind not envisioned by Austin. It is an anomalous


132 
CHAPTER FIVE
performative, in the strong sense of anomalous: outside the law. This sort
of performative creates its own ground out of whole cloth. It lifts itself by
its own bootstraps. A deliberate belief, praised so unreservedly here by
Marlow, is, however, what makes Kurtz hollow at the core and so vulner-
able to invasion by the "wilderness." You must believe and not believe.
Such a belief undoes itself in the act of affirming itself. It is hollow at the
core. Belief in what? In the capitalist idea, but in that idea as promise, as
the promise of an ultimate messianic revelation and an ultimate millen-
nial reign of peace and prosperity for the whole world. This is that "ex-
otic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence" that Kurtz's pamphlet
promises is to come. This promise is still being made today on behalf of
the new global economy and the new universal regime of scientifico-
bio-techno-tele-mediatic communications.
The reader will perhaps have foreseen the conclusion toward which my
evidence is drawing me. The complex contradictory system of Kurtz's
imperialist ideology matches exactly the ideology that proposes a liter-
ary work as the apocalyptic promise of a never-quite-yet-occurring reve-
lation. It would not be a promise if it were not possible that the promise
might not be kept. The literary promise of an always postponed reve-
lation is strikingly exemplified not only by Marlow's narration but also
by Heart of Darkness as a whole. Conrad's novel, not just Marlow's fic-
tive account, fits this paradigm. The novel is made up of a chain of spec-
tral duplications that is reinforced by formal and figural features I have
described.
Just how does Kurtz's ideology repeat that of Marlow and of Conrad?
The literary work, for example Heart of Darkness or Marlow's narration
within it, is governed by what Derrida calls "the exemplary secret of liter-
ature,"17 This secret makes it possible for the work to be the endlessly
deferred promise of a definitive revelation that never occurs. This pattern
is not only literary but also linguistic. It depends on the way a work of
literature is made of language and not of any other material or substance.
Marlow stresses over and over that though Kurtz was a universal genius,
an artist, musician, journalist, politician, and so on, his chief characteris-
tic was his gift of language: "A voice! a voice! It was grave, profound,
vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper. . . . Kurtz
discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his
strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness
of his heart" (77, 85). Kurtz, in short (a pun there on Kurtz's name, which
means "short" in German; Marlow makes a similar joke [76]), has a mag-
nificent mastery of language that is similar to Marlow's own, or to Con-
rad's. "An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is there? Very well; I hear;


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
133
I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that
cannot be silenced" (52).
What does Kurtz talk or write about? The reader is told of the lofty
idealism of the pamphlet on the Suppression of Savage Customs. Kurtz
has bewitched the particolored Russian, as Marlow ironically attests, by
"splendid monologues on, what was it? on love, justice, conduct of life—
or what not" (75). Most of all, however, Kurtz's discourse is dominated
by unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable promises made to the whole
world on behalf of Eurocentric imperialist capitalism and in support of
his role own as its embodiment: "All Europe contributed to the making of
Kurtz" (66). Kurtz is like a John the Baptist announcing the new capitalist
messiah, or perhaps is himself that self-proclaimed messiah. That his be-
trothed is called "the Intended" is the emblem of this future-oriented,
proleptic feature of Kurtz's eloquence. "I had immense plans," he "mut-
ters," when Marlow is trying to persuade him come back to the boat. "I
was on the threshold of great things" (82). Later, as he lies dying on the
ship that is taking him back toward Europe, his "discourse" is all future-
oriented, all promises of great things to come: "The wastes of his weary
brain were haunted by shadowy images now—images of wealth and fame
revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty
expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas—these were
the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments" (85).
The fulfillment of these promises is cut short by a death that seals a
secret or "mystery" that Kurtz carries with him to the grave. This secret
is the necessary accompaniment of his grandiose promises. In being in-
habited by this mystery, Kurtz is the embodiment not just of European
capitalist imperialism's ideology but also of its dark shadow, a ghost that
cannot be laid, the "it" that is the inevitable accompaniment of imperial-
ism. Marlow identifies this "it," in figure, both with Kurtz and with the
"wilderness" that has invaded his soul. Since Kurtz embodies the dark-
ness, when it has invaded his hollowness, it is logical that he himself
should become the "god" that the Africans worship and crawl before.
This strikingly anticipates the fascist or violent authoritarian possibilities
within capitalist imperialism. Kurtz's soul, like the "it," is "an inconceiv-
able mystery" (83). He has "a smile of indefinable meaning" (84). "His
was an impenetrable darkness" (86). Marlow's allegiance to Kurtz and
through Kurtz to the wilderness makes him feel as if he too were "buried
in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets" (79), just as the African
woman matches the wilderness in having "an air of brooding over an
inscrutable purpose" (77). The forest has an "air of hidden knowledge, of
patient expectation, of unapproachable silence" (72). It was "the stillness
of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention" (49).


134 
CHAPTER FIVE
These words—"unspeakable," "inscrutable," "unapproachable"—must
be taken literally. Kurtz in his actions and words is no more able to re-
move the last veil in an ultimate revelation than Marlow or Conrad can
in their narrations. In all three cases a promise is made whose fulfillment
or definitive nonfulfillment always remains yet to come.
What can one say to explain this contradiction: that Kurtz's magnifi-
cent idealistic eloquence is at the same time inhabited by an impenetrable
darkness? Both Mar 
low's narration and Kurtz's eloquence, since both are
based on that special speech act called a promise, are subject to two in-
eluctable features of any promise: (1) A promise would not be a promise
but rather a constative statement of foreknowledge if it were not possible
that the promise will not be kept. A possible nonfulfillment is an inalien-
able structural feature of any promise, whether made in literature or in
politics. (2) Any promise is an invocation of an unknown and unknow-
able future, of a secret other that remains secret and is invited to come
into the hollow uncertainty of the promise.
In the case of Marlow's narration, which I claim is an exemplary liter-
ary work, what enters the narration is all that talk of the inscrutable, the
impenetrable mystery, the unspeakable secret, and so on, that has so of-
fended some of Conrad's readers. In Kurtz's case the millennial promise
made by imperialist capitalism, since it is hollow at the core, cannot be
separated from the possibility, or perhaps even the necessity, of invasion
by the "it," what Conrad calls the "heart of darkness." Kurtz's case is
exemplary of that. It is a parable or allegory of this necessity. No imperi-
alist capitalism without the darkness. They go together. Nor has that
spectral accompaniment of capitalism's millennial promise of worldwide
peace, prosperity, and universal democracy by any means disappeared
today. Today the imperialist exploitation of Conrad's day and its accom-
panying philanthropic idealism have been replaced, as I have said, by the
Utopian promises made for the new global economy and the new regime
of telecommunications, but injustice, inequality, poverty, and bloody eth-
nic conflicts continue all over the world.
As Jacques Derrida and Werner Hamacher have recognized, the politi-
cal left and the political right are consonant in the promises they make.
The promise of universal prosperity made for the new economy domi-
nated by science and transformative communications techniques echoes
the messianic promise, a messianism without messiah, of classical Marx-
ism. It also echoes the promises made by right-wing ideologies, even the
most unspeakably brutal, for example the Nazi promise of a thousand-
year Reich. We are inundated, swamped, and engulfed every day by the
present form of those promises—in newspapers and magazines, on tele-
vision, in advertising, on the Internet, in political and policy pronounce-
ments. All these promise that everything will get bigger, faster, better,


CONRAD: HEART OF DARKNESS 
135
more "user-friendly," and lead to worldwide prosperity. These promises
are all made by language or other signs, "the gift of expression, the bewil-
dering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the
pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an im-
penetrable darkness" (63).
I return to my beginning. Should we, ought we to, read Heart of Dark-
ness} Each reader must decide that for himself or herself. There are cer-
tainly ways to read Heart of Darkness that might do harm. If it is read,
however, as I believe it should be read, that is, as a powerful exemplary
revelation of the ideology of capitalist imperialism, including its racism
and sexism, as that ideology is consonant with a certain definition of
literature that is its concomitant, including the presence in both capital-
ism and literature of a nonrevelatory revelation or the invocation of a
nonrevealable secret, then, I declare, Heart of Darkness should be read. It
ought to be read. There is an obligation to do so.
NOTES
1. Paul Celan, "Aschenglorie (Ashglory)," in Breathturn, trans. Pierre Joris,
bilingual ed. (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), 178-79.
2. The "original" (but what is more problematic than this concept of an origi-
nal base for a 
fictional 
work?) of the framing scene was, if Ford Madox Ford is to
be believed, Conrad's residence in Stamford-le-Hope in Essex from September
1896 to September 1898. There he knew various businessmen who did indeed
take weekend cruises on a yawl. "[H]e was still quivering," says Ford, "with his
attempt, with the aid of the Director, the Lawyer, and the Accountant, to float a
diamond mine in South Africa. For Conrad had his adventures of that sort, too—
adventures ending naturally in frustration. . . . while waiting for that financial
flotation to mature, he floated physically during week-ends in the company of
those financiers on the bosom of that tranquil waterway [the Thames]" (Joseph
Conrad, Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text; Backgrounds and Sources;
Essays in Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough, Norton critical ed. [New York: Nor-
ton, 1963], 127, henceforth cited as N). "To float a diamond mine in South Af-
rica"! Nothing is said about this in the story itself, and Marlow, the reader must
always remember, must be kept strictly separate from Conrad himself, as separate
as the narrator of "The Secret Sharer" must be kept from his ghostly double.
Ford's testimony, however, shows that Conrad himself was complicit, or wanted
to be complicit, if he could have raised the money for it, in an exploitative imperi-
alist enterprise that is not so different from Leopold IPs merciless and murderous
exploitation of the Congo or from Kurtz's raiding the country for ivory. He ap-
pears momentarily to have fancied himself a miniature Cecil Rhodes.
3. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Ross C. Murfin, Bedford Case
Studies, 2d ed. (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1966), 22, hence-
forth cited by page number in the text. I have cited this edition because it is easily
available and contains other useful material. It reprints Heart of Darkness from


136 
CHAPTER FIVE
the 1921 Heinemann edition of Conrad's Collected Works, the last version of the
text that had Conrad's approval.
4. The original manuscript is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The
Norton Critical Edition cites some important manuscript passages omitted from
the printed version. I shall cite from the Norton edition a few of these in my turn,
trusting the Norton editor to have cited accurately.
5. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina
Sbisa, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
6. See Werner Hamacher, "Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-
Language and Derrida's Specters of Marx," in Ghostly Demarcations: A Sympo-
sium on Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx," ed. Michael Sprinker (London:
Verso, 1998), 189-91; Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilee, 1993),
89; Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 51.
Derrida speaks here of "performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation
that transforms the very thing it interprets," and he observes that this definition
of the performative does not fit Austin's definition of a speech act, any more than
it fits the orthodox understanding of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.
7. These citations are from the "Critical History" section in Conrad, Heart of
Darkness, ed. Murfin, 107, 109.
8. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994),
30.
9. Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice," in Death in Venice and Seven Other
Stories (New York: Vintage, 1956), 13.
10. See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 44: "'Transcend' here means going beyond interest for the
signifier, the form, the language (note that I do not say 'text') in the direction of
the meaning or referent (this is Sartre's rather simple but convenient definition of
prose)."
11. See ibid., 37-38.
12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La nouvelle Heloi'se, Oeuvres completes, ed. Ber-
nard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Pleiade ed., 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard,
1964), 2:27-29.
13. I discussed Schlegelian irony in detail in chapter 1.
14. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (London: Penguin, 1989),
xlix: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word,
to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see."
15. Chapter 8 will show the importance of the word "unseen" in E. M. For-
ster's Howards End.
16. Wallace Stevens, "A Primitive Like an Orb," in The Collected Poems
(New York: Knopf, 1954), 440-43,11. 87, 13-14.
17. Jacques Derrida, "Passions," trans. David Wood, in On the Name, ed.
Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 29.