Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Contemporary Thought

Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Labarthe

Nidesh Lawtoo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781441101006
• eBook ISBN: 9781441123770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

With its innovative narrative structure and its controversial explorations of race, gender and empire, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a landmark of 20th century literature that continues to resonate to this day. This book brings together leading scholars to explore the full range of contemporary philosophical and critical responses to the text. Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought includes the first publication in English of philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, 'The Horror of the West', described by J. Hillis Miller as 'a major essay on Conrad's novel, one of the best ever written'. In the company of Lacoue-Labarthe, leading scholars explore new readings of Conrad's text from a full range of theoretical perspectives, including deconstructive, psychoanalytic, narratological and postcolonial approaches. Drawing on the very latest insights of contemporary thought, this is an essential study of one of the most important literary texts of the 20th century.

PART ONE

Mythic Darkness

1

Heart of Darkness revisited

J. HILLIS MILLER

I begin with three questions: Is it a senseless accident, a result of the crude misinterpretation or gross transformation of the mass media that the cinematic version of Heart of Darkness is called Apocalypse Now, or is there already something apocalyptic about Conrad’s novel in itself? What are the distinctive features of an apocalyptic text? How would we know when we had one in hand?

I shall approach an answer to these questions by the somewhat roundabout way of an assertion that if Heart of Darkness is perhaps only problematically apocalyptic, there can be no doubt that it is parabolic. The distinctive feature of a parable, whether sacred or secular, is the use of realistic story, a story in one way or another based firmly on what Marx calls man’s ‘real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’, to express another reality or truth not otherwise expressible.¹ When the disciples ask Jesus why he speaks to the multitudes in parables, he answers, ‘Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand’.² A little later Matthew tells the reader that ‘without a parable spake he not unto them: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world’.³ Those things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world will not be revealed until they have been spoken in parable, that is, in terms which the multitude who lack spiritual seeing and hearing nevertheless see and hear, namely, the everyday details of their lives of fishing, farming and domestic economy.

Conrad’s story is a parable, in part, because it is grounded firmly in the details of real experience. Biographers such as Ian Watt, Frederick Karl and Norman Sherry tell us all that is likely to be learnt of Conrad’s actual experience in the Congo as well as of the historical originals of Kurtz, the parti-coloured harlequin-garbed Russian and other characters in the novel. If parables are characteristically grounded in representations of realistic or historical truth, Heart of Darkness admirably fulfils this requirement of parable. But it fills another requirement too. Conrad’s novel is a parable because, although it is based on what Marx called ‘real conditions’, its narrator attempts through his tale to reveal some as-yet-unseen reality.

Unlike allegory, which tries to shed light on the past or even on our origins, parable tends to be oriented toward the future, toward last things, toward the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven and how to get there. Parable tends to express what Paul at the end of Romans, in echo of Matthew, calls ‘the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began, but now is made manifest’.⁴ Parable, as we can now see, has at least one thing in common with apocalypse: it too is an act of unveiling that which has never been seen or known before. Apocalypse means unveiling; an apocalypse is a narrative unveiling or revelation. The last book of the Bible is the paradigmatic example of apocalypse in our tradition, though it is by no means the only example. The Book of Revelation seeks to unveil a mystery of the future, namely, what will happen at time’s ending.

My contention, then, is that Heart of Darkness fits, in its own way, the definitions of both parable and apocalypse and that much illumination is shed on it by interpreting it in the light of these generic classifications. As Marlow says of his experience in the heart of darkness: ‘It was sombre enough too—. . . not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light’ (51). A narrative that sheds light, that penetrates darkness, that clarifies and illuminates – this is one definition of that mode of discourse called ‘parabolic or apocalyptic’, but it might also serve to define the work of criticism or interpretation. All criticism claims to be enlightenment or Aufklärung.

How, though, does a story enlighten or clarify: in what ways may narratives illuminate or unveil? Conrad’s narrator distinguishes between two different ways in which a narrative may be related to its meaning:

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 [Ms: 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 these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (48)

The narrator here employs two figures to describe two kinds of stories: simple tales and parables. Through the two figures, moreover, Conrad attempts to present the different ways in which these two kinds of narration relate to their meanings.

The meanings of the stories of most seamen, says the narrator, are inside the narration like the kernel of a cracked nut. I take it the narrator means the meanings of such stories are easily expressed, detachable from the stories and open to paraphrase in other terms, as when one draws an obvious moral: ‘Crime doesn’t pay’ or ‘Honesty is the best policy’ or ‘The truth will out’ or ‘Love conquers all’. The figure of the cracked nut suggests that the story itself, its characters and narrative details, are the inedible shell which must be removed and discarded so the meaning of the story may be assimilated. This relation of the story to its meaning is a particular version of the relation of container to thing contained. The substitution of contained for container, in this case meaning for story, is one version of that figure called in classical rhetoric synecdoche, but this is a metonymic rather than a metaphorical synecdoche.⁵ The meaning is adjacent to the story, contained within it as nut within shell, but the meaning has no intrinsic similarity or kinship to the story. Its relation to the story that contains it is purely contingent. The one happens to touch the other, as shell surrounds nut, as bottle its liquid contents or as shrine-case its iconic image.

It is far otherwise with Marlow’s stories. Their meaning – like the meaning of a parable – is outside, not in. It envelops the tale rather than being enveloped by it. The relation of container and thing contained is reversed. The meaning now contains the tale. Moreover, perhaps because of that enveloping containment, or perhaps for more obscure reasons, the relation of the tale to its meaning is no longer that of dissimilarity and contingency. The tale is the necessary agency of the bringing into the open or revelation of that particular meaning. It is not so much that the meaning is like the tale. It is not. But the tale is in preordained correspondence to or in resonance with the meaning. The tale magically brings the ‘unseen’ meaning out and makes it visible.

Conrad has the narrator express this subtle concept of parabolic narration according to the parabolic ‘likeness’ of a certain atmospheric phenomenon. ‘Likeness’ is a homonym of the German Gleichnis, which is a term for parable. The meaning of a parable appears in the ‘spectral’ likeness of the story that reveals it or, rather, it appears in the likeness of an exterior light surrounding the story, just as the narrator’s theory of parable appears not as such but in the ‘likeness’ of the figure he proposes. Thus, the figure does double duty, both as a figure for the way Marlow’s stories express their meaning and as a figure for itself, so to speak; that is, as a figure for its own mode of working. This is according to a mind-twisting torsion of the figure back on itself that is a regular feature of such figuration, parables of parable, or stories about storytelling. The figure both illuminates its own workings and at the same time obscures or undermines it, since a figure of a figure is an absurdity or, as Wallace Stevens puts it, there is no such thing as a metaphor of a metaphor. What was the figurative vehicle of the first metaphor automatically becomes the literal tenor of the second metaphor.⁶

Let us look more closely at the exact terms of the metaphor Conrad’s narrator proposes. To Marlow, the narrator says, ‘the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these spectral Illuminations of moonshine’. The first simile here (‘as a glow’) is doubled by a second, similitude of a similitude (‘in the likeness of. . .’). The ‘haze’ is there all around on a dark night, but, like the meaning of one of Marlow’s tales, it is invisible, inaudible, intangible in itself, like the darkness, or like that ‘something great and invincible’ Marlow is aware of in the African wilderness, something ‘like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away off this fantastic invasion’ (76). The haze, too, is like the climactic name for that truth, the enveloping meaning of the tale: ‘the horror’, those last words of Kurtz that seem all around in the gathering darkness when Marlow makes his visit to Kurtz’s Intended and tells his lie. ‘The dusk’, Marlow says, ‘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!”’ (149).

The workings of Conrad’s figure is much more complex than perhaps it at first appears, both in itself and in the context of the fine grain of the texture of language in Heart of Darkness as a whole, as well as in the context of the traditional complex figures, narrative motifs and concepts to which it somewhat obscurely alludes. The atmospheric phenomenon that Conrad uses as the vehicle of this parabolic metaphor is a perfectly real one, universally experienced. It is as referential and as widely known as the facts of farming Jesus uses in the parable of the sower. If you sow your seed on stony ground, it will not be likely to sprout. An otherwise invisible mist or haze at night will show up as a halo around the moon. As in the case of Jesus’ parable of the sower, Conrad uses his realistic and almost universally known facts as the means of expressing indirectly another truth less visible and less widely known, just as the narrative of Heart of Darkness as a whole is based on the facts of history and on the facts of Conrad’s life but uses these to express something trans-historical and trans-personal, the evasive and elusive ‘truth’ underlying both historical and personal experience.

Both Jesus’ parable of the sower and Conrad’s parable of the moonshine in the mist, curiously enough, have to do with their own efficacy – that is, with the efficacy of parable. Both are posited on their own necessary failure. Jesus’ parable of the sower will give more only to those who already have and will take away from those who have not even what they have. If you can understand the parable, you do not need it. If you need it, you cannot possibly understand it. You are stony ground on which the seed of the word falls unavailing. Your eyes and ears are closed, even though the function of parables is to open the eyes and ears of the multitude to the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. In the same way, Conrad, in a famous passage in the preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, tells his readers, ‘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’. No reader of Conrad can doubt that he means to make the reader see not only the vivid facts of the story he tells but the evasive truth behind them, of which they are the obscure revelation, what Conrad calls, a bit beyond the famous phrase from the preface just quoted, ‘that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask’. To see the facts, out there in the sunlight, is also to see the dark truth that lies behind them. All Conrad’s work turns on this double paradox: first the paradox of the two senses of seeing, seeing as physical vision and seeing as seeing through, as penetrating to or unveiling the hidden invisible truth, and second the paradox of seeing the darkness in terms of the light. Nor can the careful reader of Conrad doubt that in Conrad’s case too, as in the case of the Jesus of the parable of the sower, the goal of tearing the veil of familiarity from the world and making us see cannot be accomplished. If we see the darkness already, we do not need Heart of Darkness. If we do not see it, reading Heart of Darkness or even hearing Marlow tell it will not help us. We shall remain among those who ‘seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand’. Marlow makes this clear in an extraordinary passage in Heart of Darkness, one of those places in which the reader is returned to the primary scene of narration on board the Nellie. Marlow is explaining the first lie he told for Kurtz, his prevarication misleading the bricklayer at the Central Station into believing he (Marlow) has great power back home:

I became in an instant as much of a pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims. This simply because I had a notion it somehow would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see—you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams. . . .

He was silent for a while.

No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone. . . .

He paused again as if reflecting, then added:

Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know. . . .

It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake. 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 that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river. (82–3)

The denial of the possibility of making the reader see by means of literature is made here through a series of moves, each one ironically going beyond and undermining the one before. When this passage is set against the one about the moonshine, the two together bring out into the open, like a halo in the mist, the way Heart of Darkness is posited on the impossibility of achieving its goal of revelation, or to put this another way, the way it is a revelation of the impossibility of revelation.

In Conrad’s parable of the moonshine, the moon shines already with reflected and secondary light. Its light is reflected from the primary light of that sun which is almost never mentioned as such in Heart of Darkness. The sun is only present in the glitter of its reflection from this or that object, for example, the surface of that river which, like the white place of the unexplored Congo on the map, fascinates Marlow like a snake. In one passage it is moonlight, already reflected light, which is reflected again from the river: ‘The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver—over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: ‘An emotion of thought’
• Prologue: Revisiting ‘Heart of Darkness Revisited’ (in the company of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe)
• Part One: Mythic Darkness
• Part Two: Conrad avec Lacoue-Labarthe
• Part Three: The Affect of Ideology
• Part Four: The Echo of the Horror
• Postface: A talk with Avital Ronell (about Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe)
• Bibliography
• Index