In December 1921 and January 1922 one of the works of High Modernism ---T. S
. Eliot’s “Waste Land” ---was in the making and Eliot was contemplating a quotation from Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” as an epigraph to the entire
poem. Ezra Pound, who was intensely involved in advising Eliot on the writing, was not convinced. We find the gist of the two poets’ correspondence in the notes of Valerie Eliot’s edition of “The Waste Land Facsimile”:
Pound: I doubt if Conrad is weighty enough to stand the quotation.
Eliot: Do you mean not use the Conrad quote or simply not put Conrad’s name to
it? It is much the most appropriate I can find, and somewhat elucidative.
Pound: Do as you like about Conrad; who am I to grudge him his laurel crown? (125)
The passage from “Heart of Darkness” was omitted. But, slim volume as it is, “Heart of Darkness” has come to stand as preface to an entire century. At American universities today, the text which is most often examined in the classroom is Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. More often than Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
, much more often than Milton’s “Paradise Lost” or any of the tales of Chaucer’s pilgrims, students examine “Heart of Darkness” in an educational setting.
Why is there this pedagogical focus? Perhaps it is because so short a text could render so many different interpretations resulting from its intentionally de-clarified narration. According to Peter Brooks, “Heart of Darkness” is rather an “unreadable report”. It bears witness to what the influential German critic
Walter Benjamin saw as a primary symptom of modernity ---a decline in the communicability of experience. In philosophical terms, “Heart of Darkness” has proved to be an exemplary Modern Text in its anxious exposure of the precarious bases
of civilization and in its skeptical inquiry into what gives sustained and sustaining value and meaning to human life and human lives. And the political subject matters of “Heart of Darkness” ---imperialism and colonialism, race and gender ---have proved increasingly controversial in the course of this century.
It is also possible that the main attraction of “Heart of Darkness” for the teachers and the students is the framing situation of the tale. On the deck of the cruising yawl, the Nellie, the audience, composed of the director of companies, the lawyer, the accountant, and the “I” speaker, is forced to pass a period of time listening to the story-teller Marlow’s exposition of what he once saw in Congo. This company which is compelled to interact in response to Marlow’
s tale is very similar to the usual discussion section in a university classroom
. Its members expose their abrasively differing interpretations of the events described. “Heart of Darkness” is convenient for the teachers and the students because it sets up a ready-made dramatized situation and invites everyone of the
class to draw up a chair and join the discussion.
All the teachers and the students need to do is to step imaginatively into
the space on the deck of the Nellie and to react to the situations sketched by Marlow. Marlow often seems like a comic caricature of the bumbling teaching assistant addressing a circle of sheltered students in the university classroom, who
are for the most part descendants of lawyers, accountants, and directors of companies. As Marlow explains his story, he appears perhaps a bit obtuse and limited
at times, but nevertheless more experienced than his audience. The success of “
Heart of Darkness” in the classroom is that it represents a classroom. It invites a variety of interpretations of clashing opinions within a web of incompatible impressions and prevents the reader from closing the debate on the meaning presented within the narration by Marlow.
However, the one who systemized this writing technique and its rendered effects is not Joseph Conrad, but Ford Madox Ford. In his obituary memoir Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance and in his The March of Literature from Confucius to Modern Times depicts himself as playing a very important role in Conrad’s creative effort. According to Ford, the two writers’ laborious work was momentous
for Western literature because in was a step in what he calls the march of literature towards literary impressionism.
Three strands entwine in Ford’s idea of literary impressionism: first, there is a parallel with the development of French Impressionist painting in the late nineteenth century; second, there is a connection between rendering impressions and taking scientific observations prior to forming generalizations, as in the positivist sociological methods of Auguste Comte or the biological observations of Charles Darwin; third, impressionism refers to the British empirical philosophy, which gives priority to sensory impressions in the formation of human consciousness.
Impressionist philosophy developed in the followers of David Hume foregrounds the activity of perception in a receptive mind, rather than the ostensible object perceived. Hume asserts in “A Treatise of Human Nature”:
All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds
, which I shall call impressions and ideas. The difference betxit these consists
in the degree of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions which enter with the most force and violence, we may name impressions; and, under this name, I comprehend all our sensations, passions, and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. (15)
In Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, Ford’s notions parallel those of Hume
when he claims that he and Conrad “accepted without much protest the stigma ‘
impressionists’ …because ... we saw that life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains. We in turn, if we wished to produce on you the effect of life, must not narrate but render impressions” (182). Like Hume, Ford gives priority to sensory perceptions in the formation of human understanding. In fiction,
Ford assumes that the narrative voice or center of consciousness in a story is anthropomorphic, that the language which constitutes the fictional text is like a
record of thought in a particular human mind.
In the beginning of chapter Ⅱ of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, Marlow has been working to repair his river steamer. His mission is to take that ship up
the river to rescue Kurtz. Marlow knows nothing about Kurtz except that he is said to be of the party of high principles, who justify the European invasion of Africa as a step towards civilization, and that he has sent large shipments of ivory down the river. Marlow is dozing at night on the deck of his ship. He hears
voices approaching. He recognizes the manager of the inner station and his nephew. They walk back and forth along the bank just below Marlow’s head, talking without knowing that he is listening. Marlow represents an eccentric point of view
, positioned just above the line of sight of the speakers as they walk along the
dock below him in the darkness. Marlow is at first so drowsy that he is inattentive, but he becomes fully awake when he recognizes that they are talking about
Kurtz.
Marlow hears only broken fragments of their conversation:
“Military post ---doctor ---two hundred miles ---quite alone now ---unavoidable
delays ---nine months ---no news ---strange rumors.” They approached again, just as the manager was saying, “No one, as far as I know, unless a species of wandering trader ---pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from the natives.” Who was it they were talking about now? ...They moved off and whispered, then their voices rose again. “The extra-ordinary series of delays is not my fault. I did my
possible.” The fat man sighed, “Very sad.” “And the pestiferous absurdity of his talk,” continued the other; “he bothered me enough when he was here. ‘Each station should be like a beacon on the road toward better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing.’ Conceive
you ---that ass! And he wants to be manager! No, it’s ---” Here he got choked
by excessive indignation, and I lifted my head the least bit. I was surprised to
see how near they were ---right under me. (86-87)
The perceiving intellect and the limited point of view organize and screen the material stated in such a passage, so that we hear only what Marlow hears and
sees only what he sees. Juxtaposition of past memory, fantasy and fictive present impressions are made in his mind. Such mental collages are typical of the indirect narration of Marlow. Not only are the juxtaposed images held in Marlow’s
mind, but Marlow’s consciousness also makes possible the broader juxtaposition
in “Heart of Darkness” between the comfortable yachts in which Marlow tells his tale on the river Thames versus his journey into the primitive remembered horrors of Congo. Only can the mind of this story-teller bring the remembered past and fictive present together and associate the story from Europe to Congo by following his stream of thought.
Positivist sociological inquiry as advocated by Auguste Comte or Emile Zola
also helps form literary impressionism. Comte proposes that the ultimate goal of
positivist philosophy is to represent all social phenomena by a single generalization, in the way that the law of gravity explains away large range of physical
phenomena. All real knowledge must be based on observed facts which are merely
direct sensory impressions. It was in this sense that Zola subtitled his Rougon-
--Macquart novels as a “Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire.” Zola, as a follower of Comte, believed that life is merely the interaction of a biological organism with its environment. He intended to be a “realist” by recording impressions of the outer world as they are sensed by a particular mind. The novel to him is a union of invention and observation. It is an
artistic statement of general ideas of heredity or history based on a collection of impressions or observations of phenomena. The invented generalization is problematic and needs verifying. The impressions or observations are more certain,
real and fundamental.
In “Heart of Darkness”, Marlow tells of the horrible scene when he finally
got near the location of Kurtz:
you remember I told you I had been struck at the distance by certain attempts at
ornamentation, rather remarkable in the ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had
suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I
saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing---food for thought and also for
the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events
for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. I was
not so shocked as you may think. The start back I had given was nothing but a movement of surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen---and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids,---a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole,
and, with the sunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal
slumber. （120）
In this passage, not only does Conrad borrow from Zola a typical naturalist
filthy scene of human skulls and ants going in and out of the skulls, but he also learns from Zola in an unexpected way by reacting against his naïve realism. This passage is realistic in the sense that it follows the real, or at least plausible, mental process of growing understanding in the persona and in the dramatic audience about a complicated event which lies elsewhere in space and time. Marlow does not plainly depict a horrible sight from an objective point of view as Zola would eagerly do. Instead, he tells us what he conceives in his mind
in the gradual process of realization: ornamentation ---food for thought and also for the vultures ---those heads on the stakes ---a knob of wood. The objective
description is replaced by a subjective brainstorming. Conrad’s novel is also
based on positivist evidence which is his personal experiences in Congo depicted
in his Congo diary. However, Zola’s novel is simply a claimed “slice of life”
while Conrad’s novel puts an exclamation point after his peeling off that “slice of life”.
“Scientific’ impressionist painting as practiced by George Seurat or Paul
Cezanne has a powerful shaping force on the conventions of literary fiction. The
attempt to capture the ephemeral moment when the observing consciousness involves in an authentic experience with an external stimulus sets the French Impressionist painting apart from the mechanical and conventional salon art in the nineteenth century. There is a general sense, in which the impressionist painters developed innovations in technique, structure and style in coherence with a shifting notion of what constitutes the reality and how art relates to the reality.
In Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, one may find some characteristics in fiction parallel some impressionist paintings of Seurat or Cezanne. Impressionist novels are not mere reports of the events. The sequence of events or plot is always reported by a story-teller or dramatic persona. By limiting the narration to
the words of a character, the author is suppressed from the text of the book. In
“Heart of Darkness”, the tale is twice-told, the character Marlow tells the story one evening to a limited dramatic audience on board a ship and one of those
present retells the tale to us. The story is like a stream of consciousness for
the memory and imagination of the inner speaker, Marlow, mingle with events which occur in the present when he tells the story. The outer speaker’s report of
Marlow’s tale does not depict directly the flow if ideas in Marlow’s mind. The
stream of words and ideas has already been shaped into a story and into language before it comes to the out speaker’s consciousness. However, the unnamed outer speaker also shapes the story. Marlow gives us his impressions of his experience in Congo. The outer speaker simultaneously gives us his impressions of Marlow
’s tale.
The main event in “Heart of Darkness” has already happened long ago. The dual time structure of the text sets up a kind of fictive presence as the story-teller and his audience wait for the tide to turn on the Thames estuary, while Marlow’s mind flashes back to the remembrance of the past events. We do not follow the sequence of events of the voyage in Congo in the order in which they happened, but in digressive loops of association as we follow the story-teller’s mental process of recounting the tale.
Frequently the reader’s chronology of understanding is not in synchrony with that of the story-teller. For example, in “Heart of Darkness”, the inner story-teller, Marlow, speaks of his experience when he was piloting a steamer through a hostile jungle on his way up the river to rescue Kurtz:
I was looking down at the sounding pole …when I saw my poleman give up the business suddenly, and stretch himself flat on the deck, without even taking the trouble to haul his pole in …At the same time the fireman, whom I could also see below me, sat down abruptly before his furnace and ducked his head. I was amazed.
Then I had to look at the river mighty quick, because there was a snag in the fairway. Sticks, little sticks, were flying about ---thick: they were whizzing before my nose, dropping below me, striking behind me against my pilot house. All
this time the river, the shore, the woods were very quiet ---perfectly quiet. I
could only hear the heavy splashing thump of the stern-wheel and the patter of these things. We cleared the snag clumsily. Arrows, by Jove! We were being shot at … (102-103)
Ian watt in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century calls such a temporary lapse between the raw impression and the rational interpretation of that impression delayed decoding and considers it to be one of the chief characteristics of impressionist style.
In the above passage, the story-teller takes us back to the remembered moment of his raw impression and recounts the sequence of events as he sensed them at
that time. He knows that the sticks were arrows when he is telling the tale. A
reader could possibly guess that they are arrows well before the story-teller tells us so. The story-teller, at that time, was distracted and so could not give
his full attention to analyzing the true nature of the flying sticks at first, whereas the reader is free to focus his attention on the puzzle and arrive at the
correct answer before the story-teller. This divergence of understanding sets up a tension between the chronology in the understanding of the reader and that of the more obtuse persona. We often encounter similar narrative structures in a
detective story. The detective encounters some puzzling evidence and the reader,
running ahead of the detective’s mind, recognizes the key clue to solve the mystery. In the common detection plot, the reader’s understanding sometimes runs
ahead of the narrators, sometimes lags behind it, but the main interest of the reader lies in the comparison of the reader’s understanding of things to the understanding of the detective.
The suppression of the author means the abdication of the role of omniscient story-teller and its replacement by the psychological reaction of a character to the spectacle of the event, so that the raw impression, for example of flying sticks, precedes the more thoughtful explanation that they are arrows.
Conrad’s aim as a writer was “by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel …before all, to make you see” (Preface to Narcissus XLIX). One may get a better understanding of what Conrad intended for us to see in the “Heart of Darkness” by using literary impressionistic analytic method to
approach his devices and techniques of story-telling and to anatomize the effects they render upon the reader.
