Heart Of Carkness Essay, Research Paper

HTML1DocumentEncodingutf-8″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)