8. Hypograms, Hypocrits, and Hippos: Conrad's Heart
of Darkness
His flowing English seemed to be derived from
a dictionary compiled by a lunatic.
--Lord Jim
Is the difficulty with Heart of Darkness the portentous mysteriousness
so regretted by E. M. Forster and F. R. Leavis, or with
its being, in the author's words, "too symbolic or rather symbolic
at all"? Or ... or is the horror of Heart of Darkness the
apparently endless circulation of its signs in lies and irony? In as
much as the story raises questions of lies, hypocrisy, and
ambiguity, it concerns the duplicity of language, the preeminent medium
of the existence and expression of those conditions. As
the imagined written record of an imagined oral yarn, some distinction
between "sound" and "unsound" method looms large.
And as the product of a fluently trilingual author obsessed with ambiguity,
hypocrisy, and lies--his own not least-- Conrad's
Congo-book solicits watchful reading.
The more one reads of Conrad's life, the more one finds in the celebrated
words from the Preface to The Nigger of the
"Narcissus" (1897 [NN]) another schizoid instance of someone addressing
the self in disguise: "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" (59).
Brave words these, especially when one sees the author argue shortly
thereafter that "[h]alf the words we use have no meaning
whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after
the fashion of his own folly and conceit" (14 Jan. 1898,
Collected Letters [CL] 2.17). "If I succeed, you shall find," continues
the Preface, offering, in addition, "perhaps, also that
glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask" (59). Evidently
Conrad had already forgotten his dictum of the previous
year that "the truth is ... that one's own personality is only a ridiculous
and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly
unknown" (24 Mar. 1896, CL 1.267). But he had a strong reasons for
seeing that he forgot and we not find (i.e., "if I succeed,
you shall fail").
The detailed biographies by Frederick Karl (1979) and Zdislaw Najder
(1983) demonstrate how the facts pertaining to
Conrad's unimaginable childhood are (as always) involved in illusion
retrospectively created by the interpretation which cites
(and sites) them. But whether his father was a noble democrat or a
hopeless romantic and however his mother felt about her
husband's political activities, one cannot doubt the searing impress
of early experience on their only child, Józef Teodor Konrad
Nalecz Korzeniowski. Two days after Conrad's birth (3 Dec. 1857), his
father, Apollo, commemorated the occasion and his
own patriotic preoccupation with a poem "To My Son Born in the 85th
Year of Muscovite Oppression, A Song," which urged:
"Baby son, tell yourself / You are without land, without love, / Without
country, without people, / While Poland--your Mother
is entombed" (Najder 11-12). When his son was almost four, the father,
active in clandestine resistance to Poland's Russian
occupiers, was arrested, and the small family was condemned to join
a tiny, desolate community of exiles in northern Russia.
Konrad evidently spent most of his early youth without playmates. A
few months after he turned seven, his long-declining
mother died of tuberculosis, and he was left with an increasingly melancholy
and ailing father who eked out small funds
translating and writing. Finally, returned to Poland with his ten-year-old,
Apollo published his Studies on the Dramatic
Element in the Works of Shakespeare just in time to serve as a kind
of testament for the the son who shortly saw "entombed"
Poland receive his father's body to the accompaniment of a demonstration
by Cracow university students. So Konrad passed
to the practical care of his mother's brother, Tadeusz Brobowski.
Little wonder, then, that when not yet seventeen, Konrad sheered off
from the landlocked scene of all that woe and paternal
writing for Marseilles and the sea, where, after three desultory years,
he attempted a more definitive break with his past by
shooting himself in the chest. Much later, in the different fiction
of A Personal Record (PR) Conrad looks back at the boy
Konrad and "the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself" and notes
that there was "no precedent" for "a boy of my nationality
and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial
surroundings and associations" (121, italics added).
Konrad's departure from Poland has led critics to compare Conrad's
Lord Jim's desertion of his ship, the Patna: "`"I had
jumped ..." He checked himself, averted his gaze .... "It seems," he
added'" (Lord Jim [LJ] 125). Marlow reports that Jim's
"`references to "my Dad"'"--the pater with whom Jim will never have
any further contact--gave the patriarchal image of "`about
the finest man that had been worried by the cares of a large family
since the beginning of the world'" (101). There was indeed
among the overdeterminations of the real world a ship named Patna (to
which nothing occurred like the Jeddah incident used
in the novel), but as early as 1930 Gustav Morf suggested that the
name of this ship was chosen for its resemblance to Polska
(Poland)--and hence, also, that nation-ship's rescue by France in the
form of a French vessel (Meyer, Conrad 63). But a more
graphic instance of condensation might evoke all "enfants de la patrie"
and that sentiment engraved on monuments all over
Europe: Pro Patria (and cited in A Personal Record [PR] 35). In this
case, "r i" literally, graphically, coalesces to "ri" or "n"
and enacts the denial of the feminine native land as Patria becomes
Patna.
One consideration in Konrad's jump to the sea must have been the memories
reverberating from within a year of his mother's
death, when he read aloud the proofs of his father's translation of
Hugo's Les Travailleurs de la mer ("my first introduction to
the sea" [PR 72]). So did the sea perhaps become for a little boy who
had never seen it a maternal figure: sailors on the
Narcissus hear "a beshrouded ocean whisper its compassion afar-- in
a voice mournful, immense, and faint" (129). One
character writes in his diary to his beloved: "And also I was afraid
of your mother. I never knew mine. I've never known any
kind of love. There is something in the mere word ... " (Under Western
Eyes 360). Perhaps in this "mere" word one sees the
mother (mère), whose French homophone makes her "the mirror
of the sea" (mer). In A Personal Record Conrad remembers
his mother as "a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting presence,
whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness" (24).
Konrad's imagination was thus shaped by "the greatest misfortune that
can assail a child--the loss of its Parents" (as his uncle
wrote him in 1869 after his father's death [Najder 31]); and the overwhelming
sense of what he missed, of what was missed,
and of the massive deprivations to his narcissism (intensified by proximal
satisfaction) made life a mystery which, wish what he
might, could never be solved by a word or story: "art ... like life
itself, is ... obscured by mists" (NN 60). So the missed story,
the mystery of "my story" (as Conrad might see it) must--like the Ancient
Mariner's--be endlessly reformulated, bearing witness
to how, "young at sea" ("Youth" 42), "I missed my late helmsman awfully--I
missed him" (Heart of Darkness [HD] 51). When
Jim tells Marlow that "`"Some day one's bound to come upon some sort
of chance to get it all back again. Must!,"'" Marlow
thinks, "`I did not even know what it was he wished so much to regain,
what it was he had so terribly missed. It might have
been so much that it was impossible to say'" (LJ 174). And when Jim
blazes out, "`"Ah! what a chance missed! My God! what
a chance missed!,"'" Marlow comments that "`the ring of the last "missed"
resembled a cry wrung out by pain'" (104--in the
earlier story Marlow imagines "the mist itself" to scream in "mournful
uproar" [HD 41]). This intimation of what he has missed
constitutes (in another author's appropriation of Acts 17:28) "the
mist in which [Jim] moved and had his being" (136); he has
come "from home" into the present, "with his miserable trouble and
his shadowy claim, like a man panting under a burden in a
mist" (206). 1
Conrad believed that "the power of sound has always been greater than
the power of sense" (PR x), and this recurrent sound
association of mystery / mist [story] / missed [story] can help explain
how earlier critics, interested like F. R. Leavis in "charged
concreteness" (rather than charged semantics) could not make sense
of Conrad's "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and
incomprehensible mystery" (Leavis 177) or would wonder, like E. M.
Forster, about "a central obscurity" which left Conrad
"misty in the middle as well as at the edges" (Forster 173). But Conrad
knows that the author "is only writing about himself"
(PR xiii), especially, his "young days, the days when one's habits
and character are formed" (PR xx): for him, such effort means
encountering "billowing mists from ... the dead" and seeking "discourse
with the dead" (PR 87, xv). So this would-be honest
author has to reiterate "the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself,"
and that what "perhaps must remain for ever obscure
even to [oneself], will be [one's] unconscious response to the still
voice of that inexorable past" (PR 24-25). Such an inexorable
but unacceptable past constitutes the region of Conrad's wandering:
the "grands ‚spaces remplis des formes vagues" where "les
spectres se changent en chair vivante, les vapeurs flottants se solidifient"
(29 Mar. 1894, CL 1.150 ["great spaces filled with
vague forms where ghosts transform into living flesh, floating vapours
turn solid"].) 2
"Mistah" Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, is one of Korzeniowski's revenants:
"He rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct like a
vapour exhaled by the earth, and swayed slightly, misty and silent
before me" (64). Kurtz originates in the "misseds" of
time--after the brief attack by the natives, Marlow concludes that
Kurtz is now missing-- "vanished"--and confesses, in his most
intimate moment, that his sorrow at this thought "had a startling extravagance
of emotion." Seized with "lonely desolation," he
feels as if he had "been robbed of a belief or had missed [his] destiny
in life" (48). This sense of lack helps us understand why
Conrad's Marlow "was anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone"--even
though, he adds, "to this day I don't know why
I was so jealous of sharing with anyone the peculiar blackness of that
experience" (64). He is, so to speak, niggard of his
narcissism: he cannot truly share experience, coming as it does out
of his past, because, being known, it would no longer be his
unique, individual, peculiar past, and he would then no longer be his
present self. As an author "unconsciously compelled now
to write volume after volume" (PR 18), he no doubt feels unconsciously
compelled to protect his (self-)investment. Besides, as
Marlow says of his fellow man upon his return from the depths of Congo-Conrad's
"Inner Station," "I felt so sure they could not
possibly know the things I knew" (70)--and why? "I had no clear perception
of what it was I really wanted" (71). Critics now
commonly point to Marlow's nervous disorder at the end (hence, beginning)
of the tale, but above that narrator (like the eye
above the writing hand) is another who, paradoxically, writes so as
not to be understood--so to have the job, the occupation
of going-on-not-being- understood--and so as not to understand himself.
"The inner truth is hidden--luckily, luckily" (36).
When this subtle psychological machine functions ("`"You are so subtle,
Marlow"'" [LJ 112]), Conrad has the pregnant
satisfaction of experiencing the "brooding gloom," "gloom brooding"
whose inspiring presence he signals no less than five times
at the beginning of Heart of Darkness. Later he confides to his old
friend Edward Garnett, "before everything switch off the
critical current of your mind and work in darkness--the creative darkness
which no ghost of responsibility will haunt" (11 Aug.
1920, Garnett 273). But working with mystery, in darkness, in dream,
unconsciously--"all my work is produced unconsciously"
(24 Sep. 1895, CL 1.246)--one rarely finds anything definite, words
least of all. In The End of the Tether, for instance, a
father decides on the name "Ivy" for his daughter "because of the sound
of the word, and obscurely fascinated by a vague
association of ideas" (174).
The more duplicitous Marlow gives this challenge regarding Kurtz: "I
did not see the man in the name any more than you do"
(29). He draws attention to the name again with "Kurtz--Kurtz--that
means `short' in German--don't it?" (59). Well, yes,
"short," or "brief," or "concise," but the spelling is kurz. One critic
details similarities between Kurtz and Apollo Korzeniowski,
beginning with the likeness of their names (Crews 522 fn.), and another
argues that, "To call his villain Kurtz ... was to
memorialize this phase of his life when he was not yet Joseph Conrad
but still Konrad Korzeniowski--a name prone to be
shortened to Korz" (Ellmann 18). No evidence is offered for such shortening,
but it's hardly necessary given the text's clear
suggestion of a curtailed Korzeniowski. The connection is pressing
enough to be made earlier, as Marlow discovers on the
copy of An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship by "Towser, Towson--some
such name," "a signature, but it was
illegible--not Kurtz--a much longer word" (39)--implying that the name
at least began Kur--or Kor. (One might remark the
pivotal role of the word "cur" in drawing together Marlow and Jim [LJ
94-102]). Conrad writes, anyway, that "the name was
as true as everything else in his life--and death" (59; never mind
who it is: Konrad is as dead--or live--as Apollo).
"I am missing innumerable shades," 3 says Marlow; "--they were so fine,
so difficult to render in colourless words" (LJ 112).
Absence of color is absence of light, and in Heart of Darkness we hear
the trick of using black, dark, colorless words to
render some of the missing shades--as with the women so dramatically
absent from the narrative, for example. Forgetting his
Nietzsche, Marlow remarks that "It's queer how out of touch with truth
women are!" (16). 4 Then, emphasizing the truth of the
phrase crediting their being in the present ("women are"), he continues:
"They live in a world of their own and [shifting
graphemes] there [shifting tenses] had never been anything like it
and [arrogating perspective] never can be." Their world which
he imagines "is too beautiful altogether," and "if they were to set
it up it would go to pieces ..." [emphasis added]. To
appreciate the pun which then follows, note that Conrad had already
written a female acquaintance that "[w]omen have a more
penetrating vision, and a greater endurance of life's perversities"
(27 Jan 1897, CL 1.334): "Some confounded fact which we
men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation,
would start up and knock the whole thing over" (emphasis
added). The confounded fact, it seems, is patriarchy itself. In an
adjacent pun, Marlow remarks that to his aunt's eyes, "It
appears however that I was also one of the Workers, with a capital--you
know" (15). What we know is that with no Capital he
is, following Marx, a Worker indeed. Though considered by his aunt
"something like a lower sort of apostle," Marlow casts off
the prophet-motive by venturing "to hint that the Company was run for
profit" (16).
The way to the realm of the missed lies beyond "the door of Darkness"
(14). To get to his story Marlow comes to "a city that
always reminds me of a whited sepulchre" (13), and passes through "narrow
and deserted streets" to arrive at a house "as still
as a house in a city of the dead" (14). Slipping through a crack, he
ends up before two women dressed in black, whose knitting
has for some critics associated them with the first two fates, Lachesis
and Clotho, though their activity might equally evoke one
of Conrad's fantasies of "it": a universal "knitting machine" which
"knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain,
death, corruption, despair and all the illusions--and nothing matters"
(20 Dec. 1897, CL 1.425). One knitter "wore a starched
white affair on her head" and seems to know all about Marlow since,
he reports, "An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed
uncanny and fateful. Often far away there [appropriately weird syntax]
I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness"
(14). The uncanny, Freud argues, comes from experiencing, dimly perceiving,
our compulsion to repeat--and certainly
Conrad's narrator has been nearby this door before (in 1869) and will
be there again (in 1914). In "Poland Revisited" (1915)
the author relates how a return visit to Cracow the previous year brought
back the memory of "a small boy of eleven," beset by
"a private gnawing worm of my own" at "the time of my father's last
illness" (223). Recalling his return from school each evening
he continues:
I walked all the way to a big old house in
a quiet narrow street .... There, in a large drawing- room, panelled and
bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling,
in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk, I sat
at a little table to worry and ink myself
all over till the task of my preparation was done. The table of my toil
faced
a tall white door, which was kept closed;
now and then it would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would
squeeze herself through the crack, glide across
the room, and disappear. There were two of these noiseless
nursing nuns.
(223-24)
The "prep." finished, "I would have had nothing to do but sit and watch
the awful stillness of the sick room flow out through the
closed door and coldly enfold my scared heart. I suppose that in a
futile childish way I would have gone crazy. But I was a
reading boy" (224-25). Become a writing man, he pens through Marlow
a greeting suitable for Korzeniowski pèŠre et fils:
"Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant" (HD 14).
One imagines inevitable misrepresentations to and by Konrad concerning
his father's--and earlier, his mother's--health, so that
their deaths emphatically cancelled all hope of security, stripping
off, as he writes, "my simple trust in the government of the
universe" ("Poland Revisited" 225). More particularly, after the death
of his father, Konrad was cared for and instructed by his
hard-working, common-sensical uncle Tadeusz who, though he prided himself
on his justice, had little sympathy for his
nephew's paternal memories, since he held Apollo responsible for his
beloved sister's death. Growing up with competing visions
of the past, Konrad would have to conclude that someone was not telling
the truth--or that no one was--or perhaps, finally, that
there was no one truth. Hence, also, a concern for hypocrisy and the
conscious or unconscious motives for dissembling; these
Conrad could study in himself, if he chose, since he "altered facts,
confused dates, and changed effects into causes, even in his
private correspondence" (Najder 39). Finally, as an acutely sensitive
writer, Conrad lived with a daily awareness of what was
missed in words--his fore- note to A Personal Record contains what
almost sounds a private joke: "Let me only find the right
word! Surely it must be lying somewhere ..." (xii). Someone who wants
truth--an answer--will forego direct questions in favor
of silent attentiveness, like the frame narrator of Heart of Darkness:
"I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the
word that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by
this narrative" (30). This tells us how to proceed as readers
of Conrad's narrative.
We begin with the passage that leads up to the frame-narrator's anxiety.
Marlow senses "the silence of the land" in his own
"very heart--its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its
concealed life" (HD 28). While the brickmaker runs on in the
background, we read:
What were we who had strayed in here? 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. What was in there? I could
see a little ivory coming out from there and
I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there. I had heard enough about it too--
God knows! Yet somehow it didn't bring any
image with it ... (29)
As the brickmaker "jabber[s] about himself," so our narrator gives vent
to his profound confusion about "it." "What is life worth
if one cannot jabber to one['s] heart's content?" asks Conrad in 1896
(22 Feb., CL 1.262), but in fact the problem is that the
real content of the heart cannot be addressed; "in my case when the
heart is full the words are scarce," he confesses (27 Sep.
1885, CL 1.11), and much later he puts the dynamic to Henry James in
a pun: "Quand je suis ému je deviens muet" (Karl 772).
The "thing that couldn't talk" is then the heart, the unconscious,
but also, recalling Plato's famous image in the Phaedrus (275d),
anything written: a text: this story ("What was in there?"). One tangible
good seems to be ivory, but even there the actual word
which "rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed" (26) would have
been ivoire, mocking the claim of what "I" am able "to see"
(voir). In any event, "I believed it in the same way one of you might
believe there are inhabitants in the planet Mars," and one
notes that "lie" is the heart of "believe."
Marlow then digresses to tell of a Scotch sailmaker so certain in his
belief that there were "people" in Mars he would offer to
fight at the slightest doubt. Then this:
I would not have gone so far as to fight for
Kurtz, but I went for him near enough to a lie. You know I hate,
detest, and can't bear a lie, not because
I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There
is a taint of death, a flavour 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. (29)
Going "near enough to a lie," Marlow becomes in sound and fact "an ally,
a helper, an accomplice" (LJ 111, italics added) of
Kurtz's; that Marlow "did not go to join Kurtz there and then" (69)
only raises the suggestion of later alliance. In fact, soon
enough Marlow will say, "I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with
a lie" (49). 5 This lie, to draw on Marlow's formulation in Lord
Jim, would be "for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of
man's creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist,
secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude
of death--the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a
fixed standard of conduct" (80). Lies are to allay doubt, but doubt
leads us to expect lies. No wonder the frame narrator grows
uneasy.
So he suggests, in effect, that one listen, listen "on the watch for
the sentence, for the word" that might supply some clue. One
word for what he wants might be "hypogram," the term used by Michael
Riffaterre (taking it from de Saussure's remarkable
anagrammatical speculations) to denote an under[hypo]lying key word
or kernel or nucleus around which a body of text or
discourse revolves (Riffaterre, Semiotics 12-13 et seq.). After the
interruption of the narrator's cue, the text reminds us that all
this while Marlow is letting the brickmaker "run on." Then Marlow goes
off about rivets--"Rivets I wanted" (30)--which he
needs to get on with the work, and the author, analogously, to hold
the story-work together. The brickmaker, who now turns
out to be the Central Station secretary, assumes a confidential air
and offers to take Marlow's request "`from dictation'" (31).
But listen with the frame- narrator to the rivetting account:
I demanded rivets. There was a way--for an
intelligent man. He changed his manner; became very cold and
suddenly began to talk about a hippopotamus;
wondered whether sleeping on board the steamer (I stuck to my
salvage night and day) I wasn't disturbed.
There was an old hippo that had the bad habit of getting out on the
bank and roaming at night over the station
grounds. The pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle
they could lay hands on at him. Some even
had sat up o' nights for him. All this energy was wasted though. `That
animal has a charmed life,' he said ... (31)
Such a sudden and apparently unmotivated appearance gives "hippo" some
promise of revealing itself as a hypogram,
particularly as it roams through the ensuing narrative. 6 Marlow recalls
the "fine fellows" of the native crew who, after all, didn't
eat each other before his face, and, he adds, "they had brought along
a provision of hippo-meat which went rotten and made
the mystery of the wilderness stink in my nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff
it now" (36). Later he dwells again on that nourishment:
Certainly they had brought with them some rotten
hippo-meat which couldn't have lasted very long anyway, even
if the pilgrims hadn't, in the midst of a
shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable quantity of it overboard. It
looked like a high- handed proceeding, but
it was really a case of legitimate self-defense. You can't breathe dead
hippo waking, sleeping, and eating and at
the same time keep your precarious grip on existence. (42)
In its last direct appearance, the word denotes a chief object of moral
endeavor, as Marlow reflects that for most of us, the
earth
is a place to live in, where we must put up
with sights, with sounds, with smells too, by Jove!-- breathe dead
hippo so to speak and not be contaminated.
And there, don't you see, your strength comes in, the faith in your
ability for the digging of unostentatious
holes to bury the stuff in ... (50).
These accounts are somewhat contradictory--did the meat go rotten? or
was it rotten when brought on board? or did it just
offend delicate Western sensitivity, seeing as how the remaining meat
evidently continues to be eaten? But clearly Marlow links
hippo-meat (dead hippo), nourishing and desirable though it be to some,
to a lie, with its "taint of death" that makes him "sick
like biting something rotten would do." Why? One explanation for this
particular hypogram and its associations lies buried back
in the early description of the city where "the Company's offices"
are located (Bruxelles / Brussels) and which, reports Marlow,
"always makes me think of a whited sepulchre." The allusion recalls
Matthew 23:27-29:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrits!
for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear
beautiful outward, but are within full of
dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.
Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrits!
His appropriation of this harsh denunciation in part identifies Marlow
with its original speaker, an identification strengthened a
few paragraphs on by his reference to "all my sorrows" (14). Our new
man of sorrows, Marlow is acquainted with the modern
grief of pervasive doubt; according to his good news about life, "[t]he
most you can hope from it is some knowledge of
yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets"
(69). Marlow describes the self-encounter in the Congo as
the "culminating point" of his experience, and leaves us to infer that
it muted his earlier "heavenly mission to civilise you" (11).
Precisely in taking to heart the gospel injunction to the hypocrite,
"first cast out the beam out of thine own eye" (Matt. 7:5),
Marlow changes from a Jesus to a Buddha figure (at the story's beginning
and end), Christ having been irrecoverably
contaminated by the cultural hypocrisies committed in his name.
In denouncing the hypocrisy of others, one has necessarily to disclose,
or at least hint at, the standards and beliefs assumed for
one's own judgement. Marlow, for instance, scorns the "rot let loose
in print and talk" (15-16) and "the philanthropic pretence"
(27) of the imperial enterprise. But doing so, one is open to the relativizing
tu quoque of a pervasive individualism: "Hypocrite
lecteur,--mon semblable,--mon frère!" (Baudelaire, "Au Lecteur").
Such an alliance, however, with its suggestion of mutual
recognition and understanding, threatens the narcissism that depends
on the subject's mystery to itself and others (mystery
permits [the illusion of] mastery). As Hegel sees it in the Phenomenology
of Spirit, the denouncer of hypocrisy posits its
judging as correct consciousness, "setting itself up in this unreality
and conceit of knowing well and better above the deeds it
discredits, and wanting its words without deeds to be taken for a superior
kind of reality" (405). This places the judging
consciousness on a level with what it denounces, but rather than advance
to mutual recognition, the judging consciousness
repels the prospect of "community of nature, and is the hard heart
that is for itself, and which rejects any continuity with the
other" (405). As a result, the situation is reversed, and the judging
consciousness is now the hypocrite whose "respect for duty
and virtue" become "a mask to hide itself from its own conscious- ness,
no less than from others" (401). So the narcissistically
disordered subject will guard its commitments, its comments, the better
to mysteriously occlude the dilemma posed by its desire
to be known and open and by its desire to control:
"`My dear chap,' I cried, `you shall always remain for them an insoluble mystery.' Thereupon we were silent.
"`Mystery,' he repeated, before looking up. `Well, then let me always remain here.'"
(LJ 269)
One possible outcome to the mysterious burden of narcissistic deprivation
is suicide; another is the ego-diminishing assumption
of powerlessness and nihilism, as in Marlow's "flash of insight" that
nothing matters, since "[t]he essentials of this affair lay deep
under the surface, beyond my reach and beyond my power of meddling"
(40); another is simply to go on talking or writing,
even if only to tell: "I don't know. I can't tell. But I went" (72).
Writing was for Conrad like going to sea--a jump, an attempt at
escape--and of those two "impulses" which ordered his life, he did
not know which was the "more mysterious" (PR 18). Both
involve transiting the abyss, but writing, more than sailing, never
arrives. It was always so, but perhaps only with the advent of
electro- magnetic writing (telegraph, phonograph) and wide-scale advertising
has "missing presence" become a criticial part of
social experience and the human archive. At the same time, not coincidentally,
hypocrisy became banalized, replaced by the
more private, psychologized concerns of "sincerity" or "authenticity."
According to Nietzsche, "Hypocrisy has its place in ages
of strong belief" (77), which wouldn't give it much to do with Marlow's
sense of "ultimate wisdom," discovered "in a sickly
atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right,
and still less in that of your adversary" (69). As a writer,
Conrad wants to believe in his own right and writing, but at the same
time, the "unsound method" of writing doesn't permit him
to hear himself and so takes him further from self-presence and closer
to death:
... I heard him mutter, `Live rightly, die,
die...' I listened. There was nothing more. Was he rehearsing some speech
in his sleep, or was it a fragment of a phrase
from some newspaper article? [curious article that would be!] He had
been writing for the papers and meant to do
so again, `for the furthering of my ideas. It's a duty.' (HD 68).
Kurtz's "duty," à la Hegel, is "consciousness of duty" as itself
"the hypocrisy which wants its judging to be taken for an actual
deed, and instead of proving its rectitude by actions, does so by uttering
fine sentiments" (403). So, "uttering fine sentiments" or,
more particularly, writing them--since the "unsound method" facilitates
unctuousness, lies, and manipulation--becomes
equivalent to hypocrisy. The writer who sees this comes to a difficult
position, the more so as any desire to write against
hypocrisy must first confront the hypocrisy of writing "I" when that
itself is a mystery and contradiction.
In fact, Conrad's contradictions cannot decide themselves, and his doubts,
duplicities, and dilemmas of ambivalence continually
shuttle from one form of sublimation to another, ever reinscribing
themselves: himself ("a novelist .... is only writing about
himself" [PR xiii]). Even in trying to name his condition to a compatriot
he tropes himself: "Homo duplex has in my case more
than one meaning" (5 Dec. 1903, CL 3.89). Another key word, then, for
considering the art of Conrad's darkness, is or. Even
"the word `ivory'" rings in the air (26, 36). "Or" is the sign of undecidability,
hence indecision, inaction, and lack of care.
Concerning some recently landed soldiers, Marlow reports that, "Some
I heard got drowned in the surf, but whether they did
or not nobody seemed particularly to care" (16). Later he claims to
"have a voice" which, ambiguously, "for good or evil ...
cannot be silenced" (38). Just as quickly, however, he asks, "What
did it matter what any one knew or ignored?" (40). A later
equivocation concludes, "I don't know which"; and another, "I won't
pretend to say" (50).
Readers are quick to pick up the theme: "Is Marlow Kurtz's antagonist,
critic and potential redeemer? Or is he Kurtz's pale
shadow and admirer, his double, finally one more idolator in a story
full of fetishists and devil worship?" (Brantlinger 264; italics
added here and all following instances). Another finds that the novel
"embodies an insight which has been brought home to
humanity time and time again during the Twentieth Century: elevated
words can serve the light or the dark depending upon the
way their embodied ideas and aims are, or are not, put into practice"
(McLauchlan 390). Another sees that "We are left with
the question: does the mind seek order or truth?" (Said 112). All of
this can perhaps encourage us to hear Kurtz's memorable
last words in a way worthy of Kurtz's "unsound method" and of the story's
self-avowed "dream sensation, that commingling of
absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment," the sense of what it calls
"the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dream" (30, 65).
Conrad, after all, knows that aitches can be dropped ("Yer bloomin'
lot of yrpocrits" [NN 174]) and elsewhere imagines
making "experimental essays in combining detached letters and loose
syllables" (Victory 153); 7 more importantly, the doubled
phrasing of Kurtz's summing up signals an impossible choice. Worse
then, than any either-or is "`The horror! The horror!'"
(68). "Scorching last words," one reader subvocalizes (Stewart 365).
Another finds "horror" the "culminating instance of ...
almost punning Conradian concepts engendering an unmistakable moral
assessment out of an intuitive psychic spasm"
(Levenson 404)--which one might reconceive as words that engender a
misty moral assessment out of an intuitive lexical
spasm.
Marlow, of course, latches onto Kurtz's curt formula as if it offered
some absolution: "He had summed up--he had judged. `The
horror!' He was a remarkable man" (69). By one view, Kurtz heroically
articulates a deathbed self-condemnation for past lack
of restraint, one according with Conrad's "positive horror of losing
for one moving moment that full possession of myself which
is the first condition of good service" (PR xvii, italics added). His
is the horror, then, of glimpsing himself "hollow at the core," a
"hollow sham" (58, 67), and his "supreme moment of complete knowledge"
(68) at one with the "moving moment" of
self-dispossession dreaded by Conrad. But we might feel this "expression
of some sort of belief" with what Marlow describes
as its "candour," "conviction," and "note of revolt" (69) rather undercut
by the repeated description immediately leading up to it,
of Kurtz "lying on his back" like "a man who is lying at the bottom
of a precipice," and, in his own words, "lying here in the
dark"--though the light is "within a foot of his eyes" (68). Someone,
at any rate, is obviously lying when Kurtz cries out "in a
whisper" (68). And as Marlow reflects further, the very sounds begin
to betray him: "It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid
for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions.
But it was a victory" (70). 8 The way in which
"`The horror! The horror!'" resounds through the final interview foregrounds
that phrase as the embodiment of the novel's
contradictions or ambiguities or pluralities--or whatever one chooses
(if one can decide) to call them. Conrad's sense that the
final scene "locks in--as it were--the whole" (31 May 1902, CL 2.417;
or, so to speak, the hole) has not stopped one anxious
admirer from disparaging its "cheaply ironic double-talk" as "a jumble
of melodramatic tricks" (Mudrick 188).
Marlow begins the intended ending, one of literature's great "double
sessions," outside a door, finding that "while I waited he
seemed to stare at me out of the glassy panel .... I seemed to hear
the whispered cry, `The horror! The horror!'" (72). Kurtz,
evidently, is now Marlow's direct reflection at the same time that
Marlow is the object of Kurtz's cry. Admitted to the
Intended's drawing-room, Marlow sees Kurtz and her "together--I heard
them together. She had said with a deep catch of the
breath, `I have survived'" (73), and the scene becomes for us a kind
of phantasmagoria or horror show in which the undead
Kurtz now possesses Miss Intended's body and says "with a deep catch
of the breath, `I have survived'" (73). The "cruel and
absurd mysteries" which follow in the form of painful conversation
pose the undecidable as drawing-room norm for a culture
which affords no vocabulary, much less sympathy, for the unconscious.
"`I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to
know another,'" Marlow says, asking us to decide what it means for
one man "to know" another.9
For her part, Miss Intended has a kind of double discourse which enables
her to say what we hope she understands despite
herself. She enacts the inevitable failure of repression which lies
behind the whole story: the hidden comes to light in accordance
with Freud's dictum that "the influence of thoughts that lie outside
the intended speech ... determines the occurrence of the slip"
(Psychopathology 80). "It is not pride...," the Intended begins, characterizing
her desire to have Marlow know that she has
been "worthy" of Kurtz. Then, after the pause, "Yes! I am proud ..."
(74). Then, having referred to Kurtz's ability to speak, she
cries, "But you have heard him. You know!" Her exclaimed assumption
neatly completes the reader's long developing wariness
concerning the text's many chummy "you know's," so that one hears Marlow's
response, "Yes, I know," as affirming a negative.
And when the Intended says that she is "unhappy for--for life" (74),
or that she "cannot ... cannot believe--not yet" (75), one
has hopeful evidence of a new kind of strength and intelligence able
to respond to Marlow's "`We shall always remember him'"
as she does, initially, "`No! ... It is impossible'" (74). One critic
notes that with her remark, "`He died as he lived,'" the Intended
"has unwittingly summarized the nature of a corrupt life coextensive
with death and equivalent to it" (Stewart 374), so
complimenting what can be read as an intended witty summary. Then comes
the great closing moment where she wants to hear
Kurtz's last words; as Marlow is later to say of Jim's Jewel, "She
wanted an assurance, a statement, a promise, an
explanation--I don't know how to call it: the thing has no name" (LJ
269). Since such states are calling for an answer to loss
and lack, some way out of the endless circulation of signs with its
unavoidable lies, hypocrisies, and ambiguities, what better
way to trip the circuit than to answer with "`your name,'" you
know? 10 Chapter 8 -- Notes
1. Cf. Keats, and his concluding quotation of Wordsworth's "Tintern
Abbey": "This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes
gradually darken'd and at the same time on all sides of it many doors
are set open--but all dark--all leading to dark
passages--We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist--We
are now in that state--We feel the `burden of the
Mystery'" (3 May 1818).
2. Blake also knows this misty space where texts take shape, which he
describes in a letter as a "Land of Abstraction where
Spectres of the Dead wander" (11 Sept. 1801).
3. "And now ... these Shades may be allowed to return to their place
of rest ..."; "literary life must ... seek discourse with the
shades" (PR x, xv).
4. Later Marlow will say that women "are out of it--should be out of
it" and must be helped to stay "in that beautiful world of
their own" (49); but less than a year before writing that, Conrad confided
to a friend that "reason is hateful" because "it
demonstrates ... that we, living, are out of life-- utterly out of
it" (14 Jan. 1898, CL 2.16).
5. Kimbrough's text here prints "least" for "last."
6. Gary Adelman notes the oddity of the digression, only to ask, "Is
this meant as an allegory of [Marlow's] own inexplicable
behavior, and of his thick-skinned temperament?" (84).
7. Cf. Freud on the "analysis and synthesis of syllables--a syllabic
chemistry" which he finds in a great number of jokes
(Interpretation 332).
8. Benita Perry, one might add here, sees "[t]he joining of disparities
in unorthodox and unexpected conjunctions" as "a
deliberate and ostentatious feature of the novel's discourse," and
points to the phrase "abominable satisfactions" in particular as
one of the work's "overt signs of its heterogenous and incompatible
meanings" (39). But "covert" signs can be as much at work
in cuing response as overt ones.
9. Regarding the inevitable homo-erotic suggestion, consider how Marlow
saw the Russian and Kurtz: "They had come
together unavoidably, like two ships becalmed near each other, and
lay rubbing sides at last." The Russian lad recalls that Kurtz
talked of "`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" (55). Indeed--the son's "homo-erotic" desire for
a father[-figure] remains a neglected dimension of infantile
sexuality.
10.
"Even as he signed his novels and stories Joseph
Conrad, he was writing to Polish friends and relatives as
Korzeniowski, but with unusual variations.
He signed, alternately, Konrad Korzeniowski, Jph Conrad
Korzeniowski, J. C. Korzeniowski, K. N. Korzeniowski,
Konrad N. Korzeniowski, simply Konrad, Conrad
Korzeniowski, Conrad N. Korzeniowski, Joseph
Conrad (Korzeniowski), J. Conrad K., Konrad Korzeniowski
(Joseph Conrad); or, on occasion, J. Conrad,
Conrad, Joseph Conrad. To non- Polish friends, he signed Jph.
Conrad, Joseph Conrad, J. Conrad, Conrad,
even Jph Cd" (Karl 20).