Conrad's Marlow

Narrative and death in 'Youth', Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Chance

Paul Wake

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781784992477
  9780719074905
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847796745
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Literature

Variously described as 'the average pilgrim', a 'wanderer', and 'a Buddha preaching in European clothes', Charlie Marlow is the voice behind Joseph Conrad's 'Youth' (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and Chance (1912).

Conrad's Marlow offers a comprehensive account and critical analysis of one of Conrad's most celebrated creations, asking both who and what is Marlow: a character or a narrator, a biographer or an autobiographical screen, a messenger or an interpreter, a bearer of truth or a misguided liar?

Reading Conrad's fiction alongside the work of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, and offering an investigation into the connection between narrative and death, this book argues that Marlow's essence is located in his liminality – in his constantly shifting position – and that the emergence of meaning in his stories is at all points bound up with the process of his storytelling.

1

Marlow: ‘Youth’ and the oral tradition

For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)

Marlow: character or narrator?

The description of Marlow given in the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, distilling, as it does, decades of critical discussion, provides a useful place from which to begin a study of his role, its authors tell us:

He has often been seen as Conrad’s autobiographical alter ego, since his narratives are based on Conrad’s own experiences in the ill-fated Palestine (‘Youth’) or in the Congo (‘Heart of Darkness’). At the same time, Conrad and Marlow differ fundamentally in their ethnic background (Marlow is an Englishman, without Slavic origins) and their marital status (Marlow never marries, and becomes increasingly misogynist).¹

Contained in this short passage are two ideas that have been central to critical approaches to Marlow. The first is the suggestion of a biographical link between Conrad and his fictional creation. The second is the implicit understanding that Marlow is a fictional character (with an ethnic background, a marital status, and an increasingly misogynist outlook that implies a mappable psychology) in addition to being a narrator (it is ‘his narrative’). Whilst it is the second of these approaches that will be adopted here, the biographical reading of Marlow indicates the direction that this narratological approach to Marlow will take. The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad connects Conrad and his character through near identical experiences (aboard the Palestine and in the Congo), but for the purposes of this study, the point of interest in this suggestion of autobiography lies not in the correspondence of events in the lives of Conrad and Marlow but rather in their shared position as storytellers. This chapter, which concerns itself with storytellers and storytelling, will argue that the Marlow texts, and in this sense they might be said to be autobiographical, dramatise concerns about the writing process itself.²

On occasion, the question of how to position Marlow has revealed rather divided approaches to the works in which he appears. The texts can be shown to support, on the one hand, a narratological approach that regards Marlow in terms of his narrating activity, and, on the other, a more character-driven analysis that regards Marlow as a character in his own right. As I will go on to suggest, this is a division that is made possible by the framed structure of the four texts which effectively creates two distinct ‘Marlows’: the Marlow who narrates and the younger Marlow who is the subject, or at least a subject, of that narration. In essence prioritising one Marlow over the other, narrator or character, becomes a question of emphasis that is best understood by an exploration of the relation between these two figures. In any case, before Marlow is approached in his duality it is useful to briefly rehearse the critical approaches that privilege just one of his roles: Pierre Vitoux, Richard Curle, Alan Warren Friedman, and Bernard J. Paris provide clear examples.

Vitoux, in ‘Marlow: The Changing Narrator of Conrad’s Fiction’, argues that Marlow is not a character in the proper sense and his reading emphasizes Marlow’s own act of narration, arguing that, ‘He is part of the tale not as a character in it, but as the narrator of it, merging into his role.’³ For Vitoux the relative successes of the four texts depend on the narrating Marlow’s relation to his tales rather than his actions within those tales as a character. Indeed, writing of Chance, Vitoux suggests that ‘the reader’s impression at the end is still likely to be that there is too much Marlow in the novel … smothering it in his general view of life.’⁴ Richard Curle, goes further, describing Marlow as, ‘a literary device’ by which ‘the narrative can be carried on.’⁵ This tendency to regard Marlow as a narrator rather than a character is neither new nor unusual: Conrad himself responded to suggestions that Marlow is ‘a clever screen, a mere device’ in his 1917 ‘Author’s Note’ to ‘Youth’, offering a view that could readily be used to support the notion of Marlow as narrator, he is ‘not an intrusive person’ and is ‘most discreet’.⁶

The ‘Author’s Note’ also gestures towards the opposite reading: Conrad talks fondly of his creation, ‘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’, he recognizes a certain ‘assertiveness in matters of opinion’ and suspects his narrator of ‘vanity’.⁷ It is Marlow the ‘man’, assertive and possibly vain, that is the centre of Friedman’s study ‘Conrad’s Picaresque Narrator’. Coining the term ‘Marlovian’, Friedman reads the four Marlow novels together, arguing that Marlow should be read as the character central to the quartet and suggesting that when read in this way the texts ‘differ markedly from what they are in isolation. In the four works taken together, Marlow himself becomes the moving centre of an episodic, larger fiction in which characters and incidents spin off and revolve around him’.⁸ Friedman goes on to suggest that the four tales exist ‘perhaps most fundamentally, certainly most organically – as temporal stages in the development of Marlow himself’ continuing with the suggestion that, ‘it is our task, then, to consider how this oddly constructed tetralogy – growing much longer and more cumbersome each step of the way – negotiates the personal, moral, and esthetic evolution of its central spokesman.’⁹ Cedric Watts would appear to agree, writing: ‘Cumulatively, Marlow was to become the fullest, most sophisticated, and most convincing character in the whole of Conrad’s literary work’, a statement that is based on a reading of all four texts.¹⁰ Publishing history bears such a reading out: the order of Marlow’s experiences in ‘Youth,’ Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Chance coincides with their order of publication. Further to that, Blackwood’s 1902 volume Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, was originally envisaged as a triptych united by Marlow, under the title ‘Three Tales of Sea and Land’, comprised of ‘Youth’, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. However, when it became clear that Lord Jim was growing beyond the confines of the short story it was replaced by ‘The End of the Tether’.¹¹ This character-based approach to Marlow finds what is perhaps its most detailed consideration in Bernard J. Paris’s recent book Conrad’s Charlie Marlow, an extended psychological study of the character that regards the Marlow of ‘Youth’, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim as ‘a single continuously evolving character who is profoundly affected by his experiences and develops inner conflicts in the course of these works’, and goes on to argue that ‘seeing him predominantly in functional terms obscures his psychological complexity.’¹²

Despite their apparent polarity these two positions, at the extremes of which we find Curle and Paris, are by no means mutually exclusive. Rather it is possible to situate Marlow in either position, as narrator or character, or, more plausibly, as occupying both positions simultaneously within each text. It is undeniable that this duality caused a certain amount of anxiety, or dismay, in Conrad’s early readers; John Masefield’s 1903 review of Heart of Darkness is perhaps not untypical in its complaint that ‘the author is too much cobweb, and fails, as we think, to create his central character.’¹³ More recent responses to Conrad’s work tend to evince an openness to the fluidity of Marlow’s dual positioning. Wayne C. Booth, who also describes Heart of Darkness as a ‘web’, pauses to question the validity of the questions that have been asked of the text:

Is Heart of Darkness the story of Kurtz or the story of Marlow’s experience of Kurtz? Was Marlow invented as a rhetorical device for heightening the meaning of Kurtz’s moral collapse, or was Kurtz invented in order to provide Marlow with the centre of his experience in the Congo? Again a seamless web, and we tell ourselves that the old-fashioned question ‘Who is the protagonist?’ is a meaningless one.¹⁴

Booth neatly illustrates Marlow’s dual role as storyteller and as the subject of story. Emerging from this rejection of the over-simplistic, and often reductive, question ‘who is the protagonist?’ is another question: it becomes necessary to ask, what remains in the absence of an easily identifiable protagonist? Booth’s description of the narrative of Heart of Darkness as a ‘seamless web’ is one with which many readers will concur, understanding it to indicate a radical complication of the relative positions of the narrator and the narrated. Booth’s notion of Heart of Darkness as a narrative in which the merging of narrator and character is seamless, with its questioning of the legitimacy, and possibility, of prioritising one over the other, suggests a way of reading Marlow that can be usefully extended across the four texts in which he appears. Picking up on the questions raised by the recognition of this ‘seamless web,’ this chapter will examine the ways in which Marlow can be read both as a narrator and as a character whose primary action within the stories is often the act of narration.

Marlow and narrative structure

This structural reading of Marlow’s dual role owes much to Jakob Lothe’s Conrad’s Narrative Method and Watts’s The Deceptive Text, two texts which demonstrate very successfully the richly productive connection between form and content in Conrad’s fiction. By mapping the divided narrator/narrated across onto the more familiar form/content division it is possible to regard the use of Marlow as both narrator and narrated, as both a character who narrates and as a character of that narration, as an essential element of Conrad’s artistic achievement. In this way, I will go on to explore the ways in which Lothe’s comment that ‘when the relationship is productive and successful, as in “Heart of Darkness”, it becomes particularly difficult to discriminate between constituent aspects of form and content’ might be applied to the various ways in which Marlow is deployed.¹⁵ Following Lothe’s example, I will proceed by offering an overview of the narrative structures common to the four Marlow texts, examining the processes of narrating they employ with reference to Gérard Genette’s work on narratology, before exploring a reading of ‘Youth’ in which the relation between the two Marlow’s, the form if you like, is central to the story’s ostensible ‘content’.

Genette’s Narrative Discourse, a key text of narrative theory, begins by identifying three distinct ways in which the word ‘narrative’ is commonly used:

A first meaning [narrative] – the one nowadays most evident and most central in common usage – has narrative refer to the narrative statement, the oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or a series of events … A second meaning [story] … has narrative refer to the succession of events, real or fictitious, that are the subjects o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the texts
• Preface
• Introduction: Marlow, realism, hermeneutics
• 1 Marlow: ‘Youth’ and the oral tradition
• 2 Heart of Darkness and death
• 3 Lord Jim and the structures of suicide
• 4 Chance and the truth of literature
• Epilogue: the sense of an ending
• Bibliography
• Index