Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary (4 page)

In addition, Marlow has a growing tendency to be so obsessed by Kurtz's ‘gift' of eloquence as to relegate his actions to a secondary place: ‘Hadn't I been told…that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together. That was not the point. The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words' (58). If there is some oddity here, it derives from the fact that the Marlow of the early narrative had learned that actions speak louder than words, which can rarely be taken at face value. Here he appears to be haunted by the growing idea that the promise of words from a special being can, in some sense, redeem or justify actions: the pathway to the ‘heart of darkness', it seems, now leads to a powerful oracle.

As if in response to Marlow's deepest wishes, Kurtz does finally emerge–by means of a sudden deathbed redemption–as a significant ‘voice' and hero of the spirit. Marlow's approach to the spectacle involves a somewhat awkward readjustment of his previous convictions. Perhaps drawing upon an established nineteenth-century view that genius and madness are closely allied, he tells us that Kurtz is no ‘lunatic' because his ‘intelligence' is perfectly clear, if intensely self-centred; but, he adds, ‘his soul was mad' (83). In a darkened cabin, the terminally ill Kurtz is seemingly allowed the privilege of the dying man to survey his entire life in flashback, with Marlow, his disciple, in attendance to catch the whisper of his final words, ‘The horror! The horror!', this severely bare exclamation being apparently an involuntary one, made in response to ‘some image…some vision' (86). The emerging view of Kurtz combines elements of the Promethean quester, philosopher-outlaw and deranged genius, whose isolated self-absorption is the condition of both his eventual greatness and consuming madness. In addition, Kurtz's deathbed scene brings with it the vindicatory suggestion that the ‘criminal hero' discovers in the ultimacy of evil redemptive possibilities not open to average pilgrims of the world (‘It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors' (88)) and is therefore able to see into the essence of things, like the hero described by Thomas Carlyle: ‘A Hero, as I repeat, has this first distinction…That he looks through the shows of things into
things
. Use and wont, respectable hearsay, respectable formula: all these are good, or not good.'
¹⁰

Given the scarcity of substantiating details about the wraith-like Kurtz, the problems posed by his metamorphoses are especially acute. How, for example, do we identify a logic that can explain the development of a figure ‘hollow' at the core into a veritable hero of the spirit? Is it possible to find any secure foothold in a simulated nightmare where Kurtz seems at once ‘without a substance' (57) and is, at the same time, everything and everywhere in its formation? Some of the best-known literary works are associated with what appear to be unfolding enigmas or riddles, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(1798), a poem echoed in the story, and the developing
Heart of Darkness
has some claim to belong to this tradition. In fact, Marlow himself uses the word ‘riddle' to describe the form of ‘ultimate wisdom' that makes of life a ‘mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose' (87). He seems to imply that riddles can have a pattern or ‘logic', but that the pattern does not really signify anything–it is fundamentally mysterious.

In many ways, the tale might be said to reproduce the riddle of a structured pattern that is growingly opaque. As Marlow's quest evolves, the relationship between its early beginnings and its developing ‘secondary' intuitions becomes increasingly enigmatic. But the medley effect inherent in the later stages of Marlow's quest presents a further order of difficulty. As the spectral Kurtz forms and re-forms, some of his incarnations overlap and some have a parallel life, but others seem actively to quarrel with each other. This medley effect also, of course, makes for an uncommon mixture of styles and genres–ranging from the spare style of polemic, through the excited stream of consciousness of a confessional, to the breathless fear of a Victorian sensation novel.

The problem of how and what ‘Kurtz' signifies raises other implications of a general nature. Leavis's complaint about a persistent ‘magazineish' element
¹¹
in
Heart of Darkness
acts as a reminder that the professional Conrad was writing the story for
Blackwood's Magazine
, a monthly that welcomed fiction of a colourful medley nature. According to a spoof by Edgar Allan Poe, it preferred a style ‘elevated, diffusive, and interjectional', where the ‘words must be all in a whirl, like a humming top…which answers remarkably well instead of meaning'.
¹²
Other readers have felt that the ‘whirling' words of the story's later part are signally important in emphasizing that the final horror assailing Marlow is grounded in his discovery that it is impossible to disclose a central core or an essence, even a firm basis for what Kurtz has done and what he is.

In other words, Kurtz's protean incarnations reflect upon the insufficiency of language to express anything more than a frustrated desire for meaning. That such extreme linguistic scepticism should appear in an apparently topical work about Africa is foreshadowed in Conrad's comments upon a vitriolic attack on imperialism mounted by his friend R. B. Cunninghame Graham in ‘Bloody Niggers' (1897): ‘There are no converts to ideas of honour, justice, pity, freedom. There are only people who…drive themselves into a frenzy with words, repeat them, shout them out, imagine they believe in them…And words fly away; and nothing remains, do you understand? Absolutely nothing, oh man of faith!' (
Collected Letters
, vol. II, p. 70). If, finally, the figure of Kurtz may be taken as a summarizing rubric for a larger free-wheeling medley of styles and genres, then one other implication tends to emerge: the quest for a presumed unity in the story may turn out to be less rewarding than one focusing upon the elisions, tensions and even collisions in its negotiation with shiftingly plural ‘hearts' of darkness.

IV

It is hardly surprising that
Heart of Darkness
is often used to pursue an inquiry into the more general nature and practice of reading, and particularly into the perils and pitfalls of reading a Modernist text. The early part of the story offers a forewarning of challenges to come:

While offering a familiar point of reference in Marlow's incorrigible tendency to ‘yarn', the description otherwise emphasizes an extreme version of the nebulous and penumbral–meaning inheres not in a glow, but as in a silhouette produced by a glow, which itself can be ‘spectral'. So pictorial is the analogy here that some readers have been prompted to make a link with, for example, the chromatic vibrations and atmospheric mistiness in paintings by the early nineteenth-century painter J. M. W. Turner, in whose works an ‘obscure' revelation is effected by means of intermingled light and shade, or
chiaroscuro
(from the Italian
chiaro
or ‘clear' +
oscuro
or ‘obscure').

The reference to a ‘misty halo' serves as a reminder that a cognate image in the story is that of the veil, as in the opening description of the mist as being ‘like a gauzy and radiant fabric …draping the low shores in diaphanous folds' (4), with its accompanying implication that moments of revelation only arrive when the veil is lifted or torn. It also anticipates the ways in which Marlow's characteristic acts of seeing are so literally obstructed (the journey downriver in Part II finds him successively peering through darkness, impenetrable fog and then dark smoke from the steamer's funnel) that he is allowed only glimpses of a ‘veiled' kind. That the tale may also tease the reader with something akin to optical illusion is perhaps also hinted at in the word ‘moonshine'.

An equivalent sense of expressive riddle inheres not only in how we see things, but also in how we hear them. An episode at the beginning of Part II presents Marlow drowsing on the deck of his steamer and suddenly disturbed by broken fragments of a conversation between The Manager and his nephew, who are sometimes too far away for him to hear them properly. Marlow's imperfect overhearing means that the conversation emerges without a connective logic. It brings him revealing but puzzling ‘snatches' (39) that only serve to generate further glimpses of Kurtz. A more important form of partial hearing arrives through the constant ellipses that steadily invade Marlow's narration in the form of unfinished or interrupted sentences marked by agitated pauses and silences: ‘And I heard—him—it—this voice—other voices…Voices, voices—even the girl herself—now——' (59). The problem of what and how we hear operates at two levels here. Marlow's struggle to decipher what he has ‘heard' is directly relayed to readers as a problem in how
we
decipher his chosen ‘snatches'. Do his pauses signify a persistent confusion, a willed determination to leave something unspoken, or a panic-stricken sense of the unspeakable?

The fashioning of such glimpses into a sequential narrative has the constant effect of deferring any promise of full insight. So, at one point, Marlow with typical indirection peers through binoculars to catch sight of what appear to be carved balls stuck on posts or discovers a book with a mysterious cipher pencilled on its margins. Only later does it transpire, with an accompanying shock and need for readjustment on the observer's part, that the objects are shrunken heads and that the cipher is a form of annotation in Russian made by The Harlequin. In the case of the discovered heads on sticks, a further trap awaits the reader, since one puzzle is solved only to generate another–when, that is, Marlow goes on to deem the heads to be ‘symbolic' and adds that they were ‘expressive and puzzling…food for thought' (71).

The most extreme forms of expressive puzzle arrive with Marlow's attempts to glimpse his own obscure motives. The causal logic of a narrative sequence usually depends upon the reader's more or less clear perception of human motive. But Marlow the aspiring narrative-maker is sometimes defeated by an inability to fathom even his own governing motives. No explanation is given for his desire to confront Kurtz in isolation (‘to this day I don't know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar blackness of that experience' (80)) or why he wishes to visit the Intended (‘I had no clear perception of what it was I really wanted' (91)) or whether he has acquired the correct papers of Kurtz to hand to her (‘I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle' (94)). Such deferrals of meaning could not, it might be supposed, prolong indefinitely. Yet the tale's ending tends to do just this when it returns to the point at which it began–with the narrator sitting among his friends aboard a boat on the River Thames–and implies that the end is but a beginning to another telling.

V

‘Come and find out' (15). The African jungle's teasing invitation to Marlow is also projected to the story's readers with the implication that, even with a full command of the evidence it has to offer, they will need to read inferentially and conjecturally. The history of
Heart of Darkness
criticism vividly indicates how the invitation has been taken up by successive generations and how, in the process, the work has undergone constant renewal.

The responses of late-Victorian readers bear little similarity to those of modern ones. Nor, among modern readers, is there a comfortable consensus, since
Heart of Darkness
has the power to divide opinion sharply, particularly in its treatment of race and imperialism. Yet the story continues to find a wide audience by virtue of the subliminal power at work in its treatment of collapse and breakdown. As T. S. Eliot seems to have recognized in 1925, the work's path-finding significance lies in its use of a simulated nightmare-quest by which to dramatize the relationship between the self and the modern world, with its attendant feelings of moral and metaphysical panic: ‘I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold' (93). Written in 1898–9, a dark sentiment of this kind helps to explain why Conrad's ‘line' in the twentieth century–from T. S. Eliot through Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul, William Golding and beyond–has been such a powerful one.

Owen Knowles

NOTES

Works cited in the text of the Introduction can be found in Further Reading.

 

1.
Last Essays
, in
Dent's Collected Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad
, 22 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1946–55), p. 17.

2. Edward Garnett, ed.,
Letters from Conrad, 1895–1923
(London: Nonesuch, 1928), p. xii.

3. Beatrice Webb,
Our Partnership
, ed. Barbara Drake and Margaret Isobel Cole (London: Longmans Green, 1948), p. 140.

4. C. de Thierry, ‘Imperialism',
New Review
17 (1897), p. 318.

5.
Last Essays
, in
Works of Joseph Conrad
, p. 17.