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 JimIs 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.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).
(223-24)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 earthis 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.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.
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!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.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:
"`Mystery,' he repeated, before looking up. `Well, then let me always remain here.'" (LJ 269)... 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).