Heart of Darkness - Book Report/Review Example

Heart of Darkness The language of Conrad's descriptions in "Heart of Darkness" frequently seems to refer beyond the immediate scene, though it is not clear to what. The more florid of these passages have been condemned in the well-known critique of F. R. Leavis, who complained about Conrad's "adjectival insistence" in Heart of Darkness: "The insistence betrays the absence, the willed 'intensity' the nullity. He is intent on making a virtue out of not knowing what he means." No doubt Conrad is sometimes guilty of rhetorical excess, and not every passage in "Heart of Darkness" can be defended. But here he stands accused (and for Leavis, at least, convicted) of knowing no more than Marlow, whose words Leavis quotes in order to demonstrate Conrad's epistemological shortcomings. Separating the perspectives of Conrad and his narrators is usually a complicated affair, but the failure even to try prevents Leavis from seeing that in Marlow Conrad dramatizes a gradual recognition and acceptance of the limits of human knowledge and, consequently, of what can be represented in Marlow's discourse. But Leavis is right to call our attention to the verbal excess that characterizes "Heart of Darkness". As Marlow's language strains toward definitive meanings, his words sometimes accumulate without effect; hence Leavis's irritated awareness of the stream of adjectives such as "inconceivable," "unspeakable," "inscrutable." But the effort to evoke the ineffable by describing what it is not sometimes amounts to more than an acknowledgment that language is an imperfect tool. Like the language of mysticism, Marlow's discourse often finds rapture in its inadequacy and consummation in the release into silence. Words become gestures, and they gesture toward a presence that resists verbal articulation. They constitute, in short, a negative theology. The desire to overcome verbal limitations by gesturing even more emphatically derives from a conviction analogous to Schopenhauer's motive for positing the world as will: the belief that the world as representation whether it be a hippo sunning itself on a riverbank or the "pale plumpness" shaking hands with Marlow in Brussels does not encompass the whole of reality. Beyond representation lies the Gothic threat of the numinous and the melodramatic appeal of the moral occult. (Mark A. Wollaeger, 1990). For anyone to be praised as a master of a given language, language must be conceptualized in a certain way, and in one of those marvelous coincidences that gives people faith in the notion of a Zeitgeist, that very conception was being developed by an obscure Swiss linguist at just the time Conrad was gaining a reputation. In lectures given at the University of Geneva beginning in 1906, Ferdinand de Saussure invented modern linguistics by identifying what he called the integral and concrete object of linguistics-language as such, the system of signs that enables members of a linguistic community to communicate. In signs, sounds are bonded with concepts to produce meaningful utterances, or words; these, when heard by another person, can be decoded so that the original thought is transferred to the mind of another. Since, in his account, thoughts are conveyed mechanically from head to head without reference to context, Saussure's theory represents the most influential version of “the language machine,” a metaphor that, according to Roy Harris, dominates all of twentieth-century linguistics. Because the language machine is constructed by society, its signs are, as Saussure argued, “arbitrary” and non-natural: Each linguistic community has its own categories and concepts. This part of Saussure's theory would have been intuitively apparent to the multilingual Conrad, and also Marlow, who seems to creep on toward Saussure as relentlessly as he approaches Kurtz. Marlow's experience of losing his way on the river, feeling cut off from everything he had known, also has unexpected Saussurean resonance. To Saussure's early readers, his most unconventional feature was undoubtedly the way in which he located language entirely in the heads of speakers and hearers, where concepts were joined to sounds. Where previous linguists stressed the matching of word to object, Saussure set the world off to one side, relegating it, as Marlow might say, “to another existence perhaps.” Conrad also grasped the devastating consequence of this account of the sign, an acute sense of unreality deriving from the fact that things can be called whatever the dominant power in the community chooses. “All is illusion, ” he wrote to a friend during a particularly bleak period, “-the words written, the mind at which they are aimed, the truth they are intended to express, the hands that will hold the paper, the eyes that will glance at the lines”. “The 'things as they are, '” he wrote to a friend in despair, “exist only in words”. And in another Zeitgeist coincidence, Conrad wrote in Under Western Eyes, a book largely set in Geneva and published at the very time Saussure was lecturing there, that “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality” There is, however, another consequence of language conceived this way, and this one proved to be beneficial to Conrad, or at least his reputation. Language that floats free of the world assumes the character of a game or instrument, a system that one can learn and a skill that one deploys, like playing the flute or chess, which any competent person may do, but some may do better than others. In the ethos of Saussure, it becomes possible for the first time to speak of linguistic “mastery.” Conrad's use of the alien English language provided the best possible example of mastery, since his facility was learned, laboriously, as an adult. In this respect, Conrad was an exemplary Saussurean writer. But in other respects, Conrad exceeded or eluded the Saussurean model, and the ways he did so actually provide the grounds for a compelling critique of Saussure and the whole idea of a language machine. Strangely, for a Swiss citizen, Saussure based his theory of language on the self-contained system of signs in a given linguistic community. But Conrad's thronging, multilingual mind operated on a completely different principle. For him, homonyms, cognate forms, common roots, and interlinguistic puns crowded around each word, which came accompanied, as it were, by adjacencies and distractions, including immediate translations into several other languages. It would have been impossible for Conrad to think of natural languages as tidy little self-contained packages, as Saussure does. But the fluidity and interpenetration Conrad experienced actually corresponded to the real world, beginning with Switzerland, where no lines on maps or gates at the borders seal off one language from another. Saussure's most glaring limitation lies in positing a mental world of clear and conscious thoughts, proceeding in crisp succession from mind to mind in obedience to intentions with an efficiency that can only be called Swiss. For Conrad, this was simply never the case. His daily experience of being misunderstood or not understood as a speaker instilled or perhaps reinforced a constant doubt that he could communicate with his readers, or even put his own thought into words at all. After noting, with one of those provocatively ambiguous phrases that define Conrad's peculiar stylistic richness, that Kurtz was “just a word for me,” Marlow asks his listeners, “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 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. We live as we dream-alone”. Such an insight, so characteristic of Conrad-so indicative of his particular kind of literary achievement, in which words seem to have meaning in excess of intention, and the transfer of thoughts is only a vain illusion-simply never occurred to Saussure. Indeed, we can measure the immense distance between the two by considering the portrait of “the Intended” in Heart of Darkness-a pathetic and deluded creature living entirely in her illusions, shown to be complicit with “the horror”-as a Conradian commentary (unintended, of course) on intentions in general. Perhaps, in a Swiss mood, we might prefer to live in a Saussurean world; but Conrad's corrosive doubt surely reflects, admittedly in extreme form, the actual experience of language users more accurately than Saussure's theoretical idealization. Language seemed to Saussure and others to be primarily a vehicle of communication, but Conrad's experience of language was, in general, one of intense groping solitude and isolation. He did, however, manage to communicate this experience so effectively that, for many readers, especially in the twentieth century, his most compelling narratives represent profound explorations of the inner world of the mind. This approach replaced an earlier “nineteenth-century” understanding of Conrad in which the subject of his tales seemed to be what happens to men when they venture into remote parts of the world where they have to exist in conditions of extreme heat and humidity without a supportive social structure. In the nineteenth-century reading, Conrad's work was valuable insofar as it extended the range of European literature, in a spirit of what one reviewer called “annexation,” all the way to the ends of the earth. In the twentieth century, however, Conrad was assimilated, perhaps too rapidly, to Freud and the general notion of the unconscious; the relationship between Kurtz and Marlow eclipsed that between Kurtz and the natives, and the paradigmatic Conradian issue became not annexation but “penetration,” a word that grasps, in a Freudian spirit, the cognitive and the sexual together. Marlow's desperate statement that it seemed to him he was trying to tell us a dream indicated, to many twentieth-century readers, that the narrative itself was a form of therapy. So powerfully did Conrad exemplify certain Freudian themes that he may in fact have exerted a reciprocal influence on Freud's reception. At least for literary critics, it almost goes without saying that Freud is Conradian; as Frederick Karl says, “Freud, too, returned from the world of dreams-an equally dark Congo-with an interpretation and a method”. But neither Freud nor Conrad had any interest-any conscious interest-in the other, and we should not feel obliged to staple them together, especially if this prevents us from fashioning a Conrad for the twenty-first century. (Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, Andrea White, 2005). Still we have to acknowledge here Marlow's two dominating claims: that he "understands" Kurtz's situation, since he himself "had peeped over the edge," and that he himself did not make "that last stride." Of course the latter might be as little to say that Kurtz died, in which case the former alludes to Marlow's almost dying of fever himself before getting out of the Congo. But, once more, no such physical inference ever seems appropriate in this narrative, just because its syntax always says more, always continues on past such a firm implication. More generally and more important, however - and because of this same syntactical continuousness - a reader may infer that the "edge" in question has little to do with physical death, or even with any moral or ideological limit. For the very limitlessness of Kurtz's language would seem to require that any "glimpsed truth" be only more of the same. "The horror! The horror!" would thus appear to be Kurtz's response to the utter and solitary vacancy of all that he has said and could say. 4 This "horror" - this dramatized deterioration of linguistic probability, with its consequent detachment of language from any purchase upon the world - would seem to assign to Heart of Darkness text-book status as a skeptical document, whose implications were quite similar to the claims of certain contemporary philosophers: language is so vulnerable to its own logical possibilities that it is only rendered meaningful by our memberships in some "linguistic community," whose conventional behaviors may restrict and regulate logic. In such a view, one's thorough separation from "kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you", from "a butcher round one corner, a policeman round the other", would be followed inevitably by linguistic mutation. The linguistic disease that follows upon such isolation, furthermore, seems as contagious in Heart of Darkness as the most ardent skeptic would want it to be. For in his confrontation with Kurtz Marlow seems to share the other's condition: "He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air." And yet he, as we have noted, is "permitted to draw back [his] hesitating foot" and, apparently, to avoid Kurtz's unequivocal recognition of the epistemological "horror." So his own skepticism at last, as he says, is only "tepid." But here we should recall that this is not because of the strength of Marlow's counter-skeptical principles but because he has been too preoccupied and distracted by his work - simply too busy - to see what Kurtz may have seen. (Ross C Murfin, 1985). Conrad clearly believed he had much to gain by emphasizing the structural and idiomatic continuity between the written word and the living voice; most of his fiction takes the form of what Jacques Derrida would call a 'writing of the voice'. In Derridean terms, Conrad's use of the storytelling proxy is a classically 'phonocentric' gesture, one that reproduces an age-old privileging of speech over writing. In his critique of the cult of the voce, Derrida takes up the structuralist model of language as an impersonal system of signs which he chooses to call écriture, or 'writing-in-general'. His most notorious formulation of his sense of speech as a function of writing is given in his discussion of Rousseau. In the course of unmasking the logic of supplementarity in Rousseau — the sense that writing always already inhabits the speech upon which it is supposedly parasitic — Derrida has cause to reflect on his own critical methodology. It would be tempting, he suggests, to believe that having demystified Rousseau's philosophy of language we have arrived at a transparent understanding of the man and his thoughts. But he accepts that his own discourse is subject to the same compromising textuality that it detects in Rousseau. In the light of this caveat, Derrida issues a caution that has become the master-slogan of deconstructive criticism: 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte'. Similar questions of language, truth, and textuality are broached in 'Outside Literature', Conrad's tribute to the scrupulous exactness of expression that characterizes the language of 'Notices to Mariners'. Conrad differentiates confidently in this article between literary and nonliterary language, between 'imaginative literature', where metaphorical language proliferates freely, and sailors' discourse, which is free from any trace of indeterminacy. However, the nagging possibility that there may well be nowhere 'outside' literature, or nothing outside text, is never far from the surface of Conrad's fiction. Conrad had plenty of reasons for wanting to get outside literature: he wanted to appeal to a mass readership; he wanted the spoken voice to override the dead letter; above all, he wanted to escape liter ariness, the duplicity and figurality of language. In a moment of wishful thinking, Conrad once styled himself 'the most unliterary of writers'; but the impossibility of getting 'outside literature' into some utopian realm of mathematical plainness or pure orality is one of the constant revelations of his fiction. Conrad's fiction is not unwavering in its commitment to the living voice; the antithesis between the spoken word and 'cold, silent, colourless print' gradually develops into a more complex opposition between authentic and inauthentic language where the latter comprehends any spoken or written discourse that flaunts its own uprootedness, figurality or ambiguity. He displays a particular and sustained fascination with gossip, a 'speech genre' to borrow Mikhail Bakhtin's useful term that constantly threatens to pervert authentic storytelling. Conrad's nautical raconteur, Charlie Marlow, is deeply exercised by the problem of raising his narrative discourse above the level of mere gossip. Conrad's heroes, including Kaspar Almayer, Tom Lingard, Mr Kurtz, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Razumov, Flora de Barral, Axel Heyst, and Doña Rita, all learn what it means to be subjected to invasive narrative curiosity. The storytelling on which the Conrad speech community thrives degenerates all too easily into gossip, hearsay, or rumour, discourses that are degraded and emptied of authority by thoughtless repetition. (Nicholas Royle, 2003). Thus it would seem that Conrad was occupied in his different ways, the fascinating prospect of language idling, language as mysteriously suggestive and delusive, and as paradoxically "existing" and substantial, as a dream, and occupied as well with what must be seen to stand against that dream in daylight. Reference: Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, Andrea White (2005). Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives; Routledge Joseph Conrad (1946). Youth: Heart of Darkness: The End of the Tether; J. M. Dent and Sons Mark A. Wollaeger (1990). Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism; Stanford University Nicholas Royle (2003). Jacques Derrida; Routledge Ross C Murfin (1985). Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties; University of Alabama Press Read More