Heart Of Darkness

27 Pages 6726 Words

His flowing English seemed to be derived from a dictionary compiled by a lunatic.
--Lord Jim
Is 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 for...