curs conrad

7/28/2019 Curs Conrad

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JOSEPH CONRAD

The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the

past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow,

devotion, valour, rage who can tell? but truth truth stripped of its

cloak of time.(Heart of Darkness, 106)

Conrads deserving a place in the history of English literature is rather

unusual. He was not English. He was not even born in an Anglo-American

cultural environment. Born to Polish parents in the Russian-dominated

Ukraine, he saw England only when he was twenty-one. A seaman and an

officer in the merchant marine, he was primarily seen by his contemporaries

as a writer of sea stories. What attracted his audiences was the adventurous

side of his novels. Yet understanding Conrad has never been an easy task for

readers, which is clear evidence for the fact that, beyond the apparent

adventure pattern of his stories, there always is some deep seriousness. His

stories were mainly enjoyed as stories, which is not surprising if one considers

the quality of the events that he narrated. *The readers+ interpreted as an

amateurs or foreigners clumsiness certain experiments in structure and style

which anticipated those of William Faulkner.1

It was only later in the

twentieth century that Conrad came to be appreciated as one of the most

accomplished English stylists, whose writings have a marked philosophical and

psychological character. Yet, no matter how English Conrad may have become

1Albert J. Guerard, Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer(NewYork and Toronto:The New American Library, 1950) 7.


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by serving under the English flag and writing novels in English, he would

remain, to the end of his life, an exile. Unlike any of his fellow novelists,

Conrad is English, while essentially remaining European, which accounts for

the very special sceptical and ironic views expressed in his novels.

The obvious difficulty of his style has, more often than not, made readers

keep aloof from his work. This is so much the more surprising if we consider

the fact that, from among all modernist or modernism anticipating novels, his

has enjoyed the benefit of being, in terms of plot at least, closest to the

adventure stories audiences seemed to be used to and like. Inspired from the

authors first-hand experience, Conrads novels appealed to the nineteenth-

century general public mainly because of their adventurous quality. Set in very

exotic, sometimes known or recognisable environments, they have deluded

readers into thinking that they were just adventure stories, devoid of deeper

meanings, thus primarily intended for entertainment. The fact that Conrad

was a Pole and a seaman who had so presumptuously taken to writing novels

in English has made even more learned readers misunderstand the purpose

and scope of his novels for quite a long time. Conrad was not credited with

the seriousness of a professional writer, he was not taken seriously by his

contemporaries in literary matters. A work that clearly anticipated the

techniques to be perfected later on by the modernist novelists seemed to be

predisposed only to superficial readings. Readers did not seem willing to move

beyond the comfortable surface made up of just a succession of inciting

events. Besides, Conrad, as compared to the other modernist writers, did not

extensively use the various consciousness-rendering techniques in his novels,

the techniques for which the modernist experimental novels have been

recognised as innovating by the educated twentieth-century readers. It seems

that no category of readers has felt totally comfortable with Conrads literary

offer. The common readers, who could have been attracted b y the

adventurous aspect of Conrads writings, must have found them too

technically difficult to cope with. The comparatively fewer elite readers may

have disliked his work precisely on account of its too facile and accessible


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content. This is a paradoxical situation that, starting with Conrad and the

tradition he and Henry James set up, came to characterise the work of all

modernist novelists and its reception.

While displaying clear affinities with the realist novel, while being,

superficially, adventure stories, Conrads novels have confronted audiences

with very elaborate narrative schemes, constantly challenging the readers

knowledge both of the world and of the novelistic conventions. His work has

incited interest as much as it has baffled and scared readers away. Under the

circumstances, this chapter is not intended as an exhaustive analysis of

Conrads work. It is just an attempt to reach a better and more profound

understanding of Conrads literary performance in the context of the turn -of-

the-century and modernist literature.

Anticipating the devices of modernism, Conrads technical innovation

was prompted by his very personal sense of value and philosophy of life.

Given the source of inspiration of his novels, Conrads technique was

supposed to perform a double function. It had, on the one hand, to strike a

correct balance between the subjectivity presupposed by personal experience

and the objectivity and impersonality required from any valuable piece of

narrative writing. On the other hand, it had to be made into an instrument

capable of rendering the relativity of a changing world. Bridging the gap

between the stable Victorian value system and the relative, fluctuating one of

the twentieth century, Conrads work evolves around a very original co de of

essential and perennial values, such as manliness, loyalty, courage, and duty.And, in a fairly paradoxical way, a technique of indirectness and relativity

manages to sustain, in Conrads case, the assertion of a solid system of old

and stable chivalric values, while placing under a huge question mark the

inner balance of the individual in permanent search of his inner self.

The main feature of the Victorian age is its apparent sense of security

and stability. This is mainly due to its being perceived as underlain by a set of

unquestioned and unquestionable values. The turn of the century confronted


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the individual with a state of crisis manifested by the destruction of the unity,

by the explosion of the universe in infinite value fragments. By reading

Conrads work, we have the chance to find out what happens in the moment

of crisis, at the turn of the century, in a moment when stability and instability

interact, which creates a cultural whirl that literature considers it its task to

represent. The technique Conrad devised, in anticipation of the elaborate

purely modernist stream of consciousness technique, turned his literature

into a means of investigation of the darkest recesses of the human soul and of

the essentials of the human nature. Yet, readers cannot help noticing that the

cultural and literary heritage of modern(ist) Conrad, no matter how reluctant

to accept it they may be, is Victorian. Just like his future modernist fellow

writers, Conrad incorporated this heritage into his work, possibly aware of the

fact that readers are incapable of appropriately decoding the novelty in

absence of the proper amount of given and known information. Thus the

issues, theories and philosophical ideas Conrad dealt with and enlarged upon

in his novels, as well as the technique he used indicate his turn-of-the-century

condition. They testify, on the one hand, to his belonging to the nineteenth-

century, while they point to his contribution to modernism, on the other.

Without impudently offending the public sense of value, Conrad learned to

play with his readers horizons of expectations. He asserted and denied,

confirmed and refuted the Victorian heritage, both in terms of ideas and of

technique, by satisfying and challenging at the same time his readers

expectations.

Although he started creating in the Victorian period, when the realist

convention of novel writing was at its highest, Conrad is never labelled as a

Victorian writer. If histories of literature mention him, it is less for the

Victorian quality of his work than for his being a precursor of modernism. To

be more accurate as to his position in the evolution of the English novel,

however, it is better to consider him a turn-of-the-century writer. Thus Conrad

is neither a fully-fledged realist, nor a perfectly defined modernist. Yet he is

both by his Janus-like way of facing backwards, towards the achieved realist


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tradition, and forwards, towards the nascent modernism. What makes his

work worth including in histories of literature is exactly his having had the

privilege of contemplating the period of crisis of the Victorian value system

and, more importantly, his being aware of it. This state of awareness

prompted him to choose that technique able to render the complexity of an

old new age, which made him known and worth mentioning in relation to the

modernist enterprise. Conrads novels perform a clear shift of focus from the

outer to the inner aspects of the self, dictated by the novelists awareness of

the state of crisis at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth

century. Yet, the subject matter of Conrads novels seems to be anchored in

the solid Victorian tradition, which sometimes makes readers mistake his

technical devices for the conventions of realism. These two contradictory, yet

possible, readings simultaneously activated by Conrads text give us the

measure of the complexity and profoundness of Conrads work. While being

rooted in the factual reality of the turn-of-the-century period, it opens up

toward a deeper symbolical dimension, thus effectively bridging the gap

between the particular and the general. The paradox about Conrads work is

that it simultaneously asserts and subverts a stable value system, giving

prominence to the potentialities of the self to be in and out of an inherited

moral framework. References to the Empire should not, therefore, be a

surprise to any reader familiar with the turn-of-the-century matters, but they

certainly cannot prove Conrad to be a Victorian writer, since matters relating

to Britains imperialistic experience had been, by consensus, taken as taboo

subjects at the time.

As ambiguously suggested by the title, Conrads Heart of Darkness may

be simultaneously seen as a novel about a voyage into the heart of the jungle,

about the condition of the Empire at the end of the Victorian period, as well as

about a journey into the self. The form of Conrads novel, result of the

carefully selected narrative method, encourages each and all of these readings,

separately and simultaneously. All readings, however, contribute to


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understanding Conrads work as an investigation of the human self in its

various aspects.

Described in unequivocal terms as the powerful long novella of

imperialism

2

, Conrads Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 and published involume form in 1902, challenges the nineteenth-century readers horizon of

expectations, ironically questioning and undermining the very bases of the

value system that it seems to assert and impose. Heart of Darkness artfully

contrasts two value systems whose encounter defines the turn-of-the-century

period, Victorianism and the twentieth century. It thus creates the background

against which the potentialities of the novel as an art form are revealed as a

valuable instrument of investigation of the self. Introducing Marlow, eye

witness and narrator, from the very beginning of the novel as part of the

intended technique of indirectness, pointing to Marlows propensity to moving

and searching meanings beyond the palpable reality, Conrad clearly indicates

that the novel will not be like any other novel, that the form the shell is

part of the meaning and has to be understood as well as the events described. A

new form is necessary because the novel is not a mere reflection of the

tangible, and known reality, but an exploration of different types of reality.3

[] Marlow was not typical [] and to him the meaning of an episode was

not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out

only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos

that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

(67-68)

Apparently assuming a position of objectivity that conveys the meaning

of an undoubted pride in and submission to the values of the Empire,

permeated, however, with a subtle ironic flavour, Conrad presents the Thames

in the opening pages of the novel. The reference to the history associated with

the river, presented in binary oppositions, helps the reader see the meaning

directions opened by Conrads further treatment of the subject.

2Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993) 95.


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The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after

ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in

the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the

earth. [] It had known the ships and the men. [] the adventurers and

the settlers; kings ships and the ships of men on Change; captains,

admirals, the dark interlopers of the Eastern trade, and the

commissioned generals of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers

of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often

the torch, messengers of themight within the land, bearers of a spark from

the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into

the mystery of an unknown earth! The dreams of men, the seed of

commonwealths, the germs of empire. (66-67)

Starting in London at an indefinite moment of time, which, however, is

historically suggestive of the time of the British Empire, Conrads Heart of

Darkness raises a number of issues relating to the advent of a new era,

characterised by relativity, fragmentariness, instability, lack of a shared sense

of public value.

Familiar with the new philosophical ideas emerging in the age, with the

premises of anthropological studies combined with Freudian theories, Conrad

voices his interest in the problems of the Empire and in imperialism as a

starting point for his investigation of the nature of mans relation to himself and

to other. The incursion of the white civilised missionaries into the heart of the

African darkness is only a pretext for Conrads unveiling the mysteries of the

human nature, and analysing the darkness of the human heart. The ambiguously

formulated title encourages the reading of the novel at these two levels. Heart

of darkness may be seen as a metaphor of the jungle of Africa, but it can

equally be decoded as the dark aspects of the human heart. The modern

individual oscillates between two conflicting tendencies. One implies the effort

to find and cast meaning upon an apparently incoherent and meaningless

reality, the other implies a denial of any unifying value, a questioning of the

very possibility of any meaning. The former tendency presupposes an

interpretation of the title as a journey into the darkness, which has a heart, so

3Brian Spittles,Joseph Conrad, Text and Context(London: Macmillan, 1992) 62.


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eventually a meaning worth looking for. The latter focuses on the innermost

and darkest aspects of the human being, whose investigation is nothing but a

failure. The individual must acknowledge his condition of duplicity, as part of a

stable moral system, of meaningfulness, on the one hand, and as part of thepuzzle of existence, of meaninglessness, on the other.

The main features of the Victorian age, self-confidence, progress,

stability, trust in the individual, originate all in the power and the scope of the

Empire. It is the Empire that provides the individual with the comforting

feeling of belonging to an immutable and incontestable value system. Under

the circumstances, it is hardly conceivable that the British would ever think of

questioning the almightiness of the monarchy or Londons being the

commercial and financial centre of the world. Much of the individual sense of

confidence and stability is given by these two major Victorian strongholds that

give the measure of Britishness and lead to the definition of the place of Great

Britain in the world. For this particular beneficial effect that the Empire and its

institutions were considered to have on the individual at the end of the

nineteenth century, one cannot expect that they will ever become plain subject

matters of literature and be seen as other than taboo subjects.

This mentality characteristic of the nineteenth-century Victorian England

can be considered to be the reason why Conrad chose to write Heart of

Darkness adopting the standpoint of the cultural exile, which was what gave

him, to a certain extent, the freedom to tackle such a delicate problem. That is

also the premise from which Conrad may have started when he conceived

Heart of Darkness as a highly ambiguous narrative text, asking far more

questions than it proved ready to offer answers to. By a method of indirectness,

which presupposed the presence of Marlow, protagonist and narrator, Conrad

invites the reader to perform the act of reading at various levels simultaneously,

to learn to become an active participant in the act of meaning of creation. The

main quality ofHeart of Darkness is its being challenging to its readership

artistically, philosophically and politically.4

The choice of the method of

framing the narration of events within a narrative is dictated by Conrads

intention to allow the creation of deliberate thematic ambiguities, a critical

4Brian Spittles, op. cit., 62.


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historical perspective and a tone of ironic detachment.5

In all situations, it is

Conrad, the lifelong exile and the precursor of modernism, in conflict with

Conrad, the nineteenth-century British subject, who tries to refresh his readers

perception of reality and to formulate and impose a new status of literature.It would be thus too easy to say that Heart of Darkness is the story of a

voyage of exploration in search for ivory down the Congo into the heart of

Africa. Reading the novel as a story of the rightful and beneficial transfer of the

values of white civilisation to the black savage people of Africa would be

oversimplifying. The sophisticated symbolical texture of Conrads novel

reveals unsuspected meanings, rather unorthodox for the age, about the essence

of the relationships established between civilisation and primitivism in the light

of the theories formulated by anthropology at the turn of the century.

Primitivism is almost as old, it may be supposed, as civilisation; both

terms, of course, being relational. As a literary convention, primitivism allows

the civilised to inspect, or to indulge, itself through an imaginary opposite. It is

often a self-critical motif within the culture []. But in the modernist period a

radical questioning of the present civilisation along with the close study of

tribal people gave a new edge to the primitivist impulse.6

In line with the ideas forwarded by anthropology, Conrad focuses on

issues such as the classification and relationship of races and cultures, hinting

at the environmental and social relations. Yet his major interest, which

benefited from the most extensive treatment, engendering thus the best artistic

achievement, is in mans nature and destiny, especially from the perspective of

mans relation to God. It is not surprising, therefore, that Conrad uses religious

symbols to interpret the nature of the colonisation process. Man performs an

exploratory descent into the primitive sources of the human being, as Conrad

seems to believe that, only by exposure to evil, can man achieve self-

knowledge and understand the essence of reality, or life.

5Ibid., 62.

6Michael Bell, The Metaphysics of Modernism, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism,

ed.Michael Levenson (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1999) 20.


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They [the colonists] wandered here and there with their absurd long staves

in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence.

The word ivory rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would

think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it

all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! Ive never seen anything so

unreal in my life. Andoutside, the silent wilderness surrounding this clear

speck on earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or

truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.

(Heart of Darkness, 89)

By establishing an analogy between the modern colonists and the Middle

Ages pilgrims, Conrad challenges the readers knowledge of the benefits ofcolonisation. Although the modern colonists look very much like the pilgrims

in the Middle Ages, with the staves in their hands reminding of the old palm

leaves, Conrad repeatedly and ironically points to the fact that the pilgrims

were armed to the teeth. Thus all the essential humanistic values lying at the

core of the pilgrimage in Christian terms are questioned and invalidated by the

greed, rapacity and violence that characterise the group of people in search for

ivory. Wealth, symbolically present under the form of ivory, is the only faiththat the white people have.

Throughout the novel, ivory is the shrine at which the pilgrims pray.

There is only one exception, when ivory acquires a much deeper meaning than

that of material wealth that is associated with the rapacious plunder of the

jungle. Mr. Kurtz, Marlows double and symbol for his unconscious, the Holy

Grail that the uninitiated Marlow is in search for, is the man who had proved

the ablest of all colonists. Kurtzs original status in the African territories is

particularly revealing as regards the value standards in circulation at the end

of the nineteenth century as far as the purpose and scope of the Empire were

concerned. Educated in Britain, Kurtzs perception of the uncivilised savages

was infused with all the clichs currently associated with the native

populations in occupied territories, which Conrad seems to demolish in an

ironic tone.


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The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and as he was

good enough to say himselfhis sympathies were in the right place. His

mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed

to the making of Kurtz [](122)

The report that he wrote for the International Society for the Suppression

of Savage Customs concluded by Exterminate all the brutes! gives the whole

dimension of Kurtzs, and implicitly Europes, colonising potential. Yet under

the pressure of darkness, Kurtz, and through him Marlow, is the one who

discovers the immensity and impenetrability of the unconscious, having the

revelation of the power of the unconscious to invade and control consciousness.

It is significant to remark at this point that Conrad created in a period of

colonial expansion scientifically grounded by the rise of anthropology, with

Freudbecoming fascinated by primitive life and artefacts. The relationship

of consciousness to the unconscious in his [Freuds] metaphorical discourse

reflects the structure of colonialism with the unconscious as the region to be

colonised and controlled by the ego.7

My ivory. Oh, yes, I heard him. My Intended, my ivory, my station, my

river, my everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in

expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of

laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything

belonged to him but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he

belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.

(121)

At the heart of the jungle, Kurtz dares challenge the very position of God,

he places himself at the centre of the universe, gesture of impiety which

jeopardises his integrity. Kurtz becomes the God of darkness, and he is

immortalised into a monument of darkness. Kurtz, the dying man, leaves room

for Kurtz, the God of the worshippers. At this moment, ivory no longer stands

for the object of human greed, it symbolically becomes the material out of

7 Michael Bell, op cit., 23.


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which Kurtz, God and man, is made. It is in ivory that the darkest and finest

threads of the individual conscious and unconscious being are carved.

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never

seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasnt touched. I was

fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face

the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terrorof an

intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of

desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete

knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision he

cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: The horror! The

horror! (147)

The ambiguity that Kurtzs last words create, as Conrad chooses to give

no clear indication regarding the referent of Kurtzs vision, encourages the

interpretation of the novel in terms of various realities, other than the palpable

one. In confrontation with the other, the individual manages to discover his

hidden, darker self. Marlow is exposed to the evil existing latently in the human

nature, and it is only through evil that he can reach the truth and purify himselfto be able to understand the essence of the good.

In order to demonstrate the force, and yet the vulnerability of the

individual, confronted with the aggressiveness of hostile forces, Conrad resorts

to a much older set of values, that he transplants in the new context of the

twentieth-century relativity. He takes over and personally interprets the

chivalric code, making it pliable to the new co-ordinates of a tainted

civilisation. In a world marked by the death of God, Conrad tries to transfer the

values of chivalry, and to make them consonant, up to a certain point, with the

modern cultural environment. His attempt is to accommodate the Christian

chivalric value system to the questioned, questionable and deformed modern

one.

Yet in spite of the apparent solidity and simplicity of the ideas Conrad

constructed his work on, Heart of Darkness turns out to be a sophisticated

investigation of the darkness of the self, avoiding at the same time , by the

choice of narrative technique, simple-mindedness and straightforwardness. The


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narrative structure being centred on Marlow, and the story being filtered

through memories means that meaning is deliberately placed under question,

that nothing can be taken for granted, as the narrators themselves are

susceptible to questioning. Yet, in a manner that would become commonpractice in modernism, Heart of Darkness demonstrates that the mind and the

inner life of the individual are far more complex than what can become

apparent at the level of the restricted reality of external events.

The mind of man is capable of anythingbecause everything is in it, all the

past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow,

devotion, valour, ragewho can tell?but truthtruth stripped of its cloak

of time.(106)

Marlow, as the narrator and experiencer of the story, serves Conrads

artistic purpose by his investigating abilities, of self and other. His readiness to

expose himself to the challenge of initiation makes him into the perfect

embodiment of Conrads philosophy.

He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if

one may so express it, a sedentary life. (67)

Artistically, Marlow is meaning, while being, at the same time, the way of

access to the meaning of reality. In Heart of Darkness, moreover, Marlow is

individually engaged in a process of initiation, which grants him ascendancy on

his fellow sailors. Embarking upon a test and quest initiation journey, or

voyage, suggested by his sailing down the Congo into the heart of the jungle,Marlow performs an incursion into the self, as well as into human nature.

Substantially and in its central emphasis Heart of Darkness concerns Marlow

[] and his journey toward and through certain facts and potentialities of the

self.8

What is surprising about Conrads thesis is that Marlow may not be,

technically speaking, a reliable narrator, but he is to be fully trusted as to the

8Albert J. Guerard, The Journey Within, Conrad. A Casebook. Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and

Under Western Eyes, ed. C. B. Cox (London: Macmillan, 1981) 52.


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investigations of the self and of the human nature in his capacity as a captain.

To be a captain, in Conrads view, means having a position reached by personal

effort, and due to personal value. Ascendancy is gained by qualities intrinsic to

the individual, and not imposed from the outside. The crew functions as anentity and a unified body, because its members agree to observe a code similar

to the chivalric one, they agree to see in one another the values and qualities

that counterbalance the threat of the hostile, dismembering and distorting forces

in the universe. Conrad emphasises the applicability of the hierarchical system

from the very beginning ofHeart of Darkness.

The Lawyerthe best of old fellowshad, because of his many years and

many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug. The

Accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying

architecturally with the bones. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning

against the mizzenmast. (66)

Marlow is not only a technical invention and innovation to ensure the

appropriate degree of involvement and detachment at the same time on the part

of the writer. Marlow himself reiterates often enough that he is recounting a

spiritual voyage of self-discovery. He remarks casually but crucially that he did

not know himself before setting out []9

The encounter between Marlow and Kurtz points to the central theme of

Heart of Darkness, that of initiation. Man performs an exploratory descent into

the primitive sources of the human being. Conrad seems to believe that, only by

exposure to evil, can man achieve self-knowledge and understand the essence

of reality, or life.Yet, even if Marlow reaches a state of self-awareness at the end of the

voyage, the novel does not posit, optimistically, the idea of a meaning

underlying all things. Marlows voyage of self-exploration is just another form

of mans attempt to come to terms with a universe devoid of stable central

values. Yet his being incapable of producing an appropriate explanation as far

as Kurtz was concerned is indicative of the fact that at the end of his journey,

9Albert J. Guerard, The Journey Within, 53.


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far from being redeemed and in possession of moral truths, as the pattern of the

novel seems to suggest, Marlow becomes only more self-aware, cursed to

acknowledge his inner darkness, and to learn to live with it. The perennial

values that the initiation journey implies are undermined by the discovery thatthe self is ultimately darkness.

The ambiguity of the language used in connection with Marlows meeting

Kurtz points to the potential stability of Marlows value system, subversively

undermined by his final discovery. In the interior you will no doubt meet Mr.

Kurtz. (84)

The reading of Conrads works in terms of simultaneous stability and

fragmentation, of strongly asserted values and horribly questioned ones is

synthesised in Marlows symbolic encounter with Kurtz, or, in the light of our

demonstration, with his real self.

Soul! If anybody ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasnt

arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was

perfectly clear concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible

intensity, yet clear; [] But his soul was mad. Being alone in the

wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had

gone mad. I had for my sins, I suppose to go through the ordeal of

looking into it myself. [] I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that

knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

(144)

Notromo, just like Heart of Darkness, simultaneously is a novel about

imperialism and about the human condition, about the individuals search foridentity, about his propensity towards progress and self-destruction, about

good and evil, about the darkness inherent in human greatness. In a typically

modernist manner, Conrad plays with his readers horizon of expectations and

draws him into the challenging game of coping with interrelated layers of

significance.

Nostromo derives its title from the name of one, we could say the main,

character. That is what the readers expected from a turn-of-the-century novel,


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that was one of the ways titles were made use of in relation to the novels

progress according to the Victorian conventions. The feeling of confidence

before things known in point of narrative organisation is so great that the reader

is not tempted to give a second thought to the strangeness of the name itselfNostromo. Only on concluding the reading of the novel does he feel invited to

correlate the name with Conrads statement in the Authors Note to

Nostromo. Antonia the Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the People are the

artisans of the New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary

and daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the only

being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart of a trifler.10

The novel undoubtedly offers an image of Western imperialism. Yet by

interpreting the title in the light of Conrads statement, the reader is forced to

move back to a remote cultural and literary tradition, of a more general value,

embedded and inherent in the modern one the medieval system and the

allegorical mode of creation. Thus the appropriate, even if not exhaustive,

access to the meaning of the novel necessarily implies the r eaders ability to

activate at least two horizons of knowledge and to use two interpretative

schemes. Conrads novel is not strictly about imperialism and the effects it has

on the individual, as John Holloway suggests. Nostromo (1904),

unquestionably Conrads masterpiece, provides a definitive picture of how

Western financial imperialism *+, proffering to bring to an equatorial

American society material advancement and an end to the picturesque

banditry of the past, in fact brings only spiritual emptiness and an unnoticed

compromise with principle, or progressive blindness to it.11

Nostromo focuses on the effects of the colonists presence in the

imaginary Republic of Costaguana. Apparently in deference to the commonly

accepted value system established by the British Empire, Conrad sees the

European, especially English intrusion as beneficial to the countrys interests.

The order and prosperity that the silver mine brought to the region of Sulaco

10Joseph Conrad, Authors Note toNostromo (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994) 13.

11 John Holloway, The Literary Scene, The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, 7, From Jamesto Eliot, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990) 66-67.


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relieved the native inhabitants of the terror and poverty inflicted upon them

by the dictatorship of the Spanish. In this way, Conrad asserts and implicitly

questions the beneficial effects of European imperialism. Yet in the

description of Mrs Goulds house in Sulaco, he seems to plead for unity in

diversity, for all the moral values that were said to be underlying the

imperialistic expansion in compensation for the destructive effects of the

same action.

She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in Sulaco) open

for dispensation of the small graces of existence. She dispensed them with

simplicity and charm because she was guided by an alert perception of values.

She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in

delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal

comprehension. Charles Gould (the Gould family, established in Costaguana

for three generations, always went to England for their education and for

their wives) imagined that he had fallen in love with a girls sound common

sense like any other man *+ (50)

Mrs Gould is of Italian origin, but she is made to embody the whole spirit

of the Victorian age. The quoted passage ironically refers to the generally

acknowledged superiority of the English, to their privileged but also

providential role, no matter in which part of the world they decided to set

foot with civilising intentions. The reader may be thus tempted to take things

literally and consider Conrad a writer whose late assimilation as a British

subject dictated a position of acceptance of and subservience to the

imperialistic values. Yet the readers expectations are challenged by the

novels being opened towards a symbolic dimension.

The symbolic texture ofNostromo is exquisite and highly elaborate. It

gives the novel the atemporal dimension that is absent in the apparent strict

chronology of the story, whether the chronological aspects cover the extended


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history of the Republic of Costaguana or the detailed description of the three

revolutionary days of Sulaco.

The first part The Silver of the Mine introduces one of the central

symbols of the novel, in the light of which most of the meaning ofNostromointended by Conrad is to be interpreted. The silver of the San Tome mine is

presented in the novel both as destructive and regenerative, yet central to the

existence of practically all the characters of the novel. Apparently, it is the

cause of some of the characters wealth and progress and of some others death.

This is, however, an oversimplifying reading that could be avoided by a closer

look at the symbolic valences of this noble metal. The interpretation of silver as

a symbol is beneficial to the overall meaning of the novel, since this symbol is

not used in isolation, but interwoven in the novels symbolic texture in close

correlation with two other significant ones - the light and the island.

White and shining, silver symbolises purity and purification, the purity of

consciousness, sincerity and loyalty. It is also associated with the royal dignity.

Yet from an ethical point of view, silver symbolises greed and moral

degradation, which is a form of perversion of its original value.12

Since silver is

essential to the story ofNostromo, all the characters relating to it in one way or

another, its centrality is one of the main engines actuating the interpretation of

the novel on different levels of significance. Nostromo dwells upon the

destructive effects of imperialism in its material interests, as much as it does on

the voyages of initiation and exploration of the self undertaken by Decoud and

Nostromo.

Ivory as a symbol generates the same ambiguity of interpretation in

Heart of Darkness. The novels underlying value system oscillates between the

greed and destruction inherent in the imperialistic experience, and more

elaborately in human nature, and the civilising beneficence of the same

experience. Because of its white colour, ivory is a symbol of purity. The fact

that it was used as a material for Solomons throne, it could mean power, in the

sense that it cannot be broken or destroyed. It may also be associated with

incorruptibility.13

In the light of this symbol, Heart of Darkness may be

12

see Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant,Dicionar de simboluri, vol.3 (Bucureti: Editura Artemis,1995) 140.13

see Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, op. cit., vol.2, 50.


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interpreted both as a novel of and about imperialism in Africa, but also as a

novel of initiation focusing on mans need and ability to investigate the

darkness of human nature.

Due to the centrality of the two symbols to the structure of the novels,both Nostromo and Heart of Darkness encourage a reading in which time and

timelessness merge. Thus the reader is compelled to consider simultaneously

both meanings relating to the imperialistic experience at the end of the

nineteenth century and meanings pertaining to much older value systems

ranging from primitivism to the Middle Ages.

From a narrative point of view, Conrad uses in both novels knowledge

strategies similar, in the sense that he starts from what his readers expect given

the moral system in which they were born and educated. Then, subtly, in most

cases ironically, he challenges their expectations, compelling them to

reorganise their perceptions and knowledge horizon.

Conrads standpoint as regards the imperialistic experience is more

clearly formulated in Heart of Darkness than in Nostromo, simply because he

decides to leave aside an explicit reference to the presence of the British in

Africa. This is contrary to historical facts, but it allows him to take a less biasedview of the mechanism and philosophy of the empire.

Following the common public opinion at the time, according to which the

white peoples presence in the colonised territories had a highly moral

civilising effect upon the savage native inhabitants, Conrad presents the

colonists as pilgrims, expected to behave in moral purity, humility and pity

towards the other. Contrary to expectations, they all wear guns, as they are

driven by material rather than moral or spiritual interests.

Familiar with Darwins theory of evolution according to which living

things developed differently in different places over a long period of time,

theory launched at a moment when most Western people believed that all

things were created by God, Conrad makes Kurtz into an idol and God of the

savages. He thus questions his readers common perception of the savage

people and forces them to rethink their existing system of knowledge.


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Following the same line of argument, Conrad who endows Marlow, the

narrator and experiencer of the story along the Congo, with discerning and

judgement faculties, conceives him as a materialisation of the same clash

between inherited patterns and clichs and new ideas emerging at the turn ofthe century. Thus Marlow initially perceives the savages as an inferior species

on the line of evolution

A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men

advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow,

balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time

with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short

ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. (80)

to be able just later on to assess and understand them as what they

really were a different civilisation, distinct from and yet similar to

the white European one.

It was very curious to see the contrast of expressions of the white men and

of the black fellows of our crew []. The whites, of course greatlydiscomposed, had besides a curious look of being painfully shocked by such

an outrageous row. The others had an alert, naturally interested expression;

but their faces were essentially quiet [] (111)

Yet Conrad was not interested in the imperial experience per se, the

ideological implications of imperialism are hardly resonant with the writers

more philosophical interest in the evolution of the self. The intimate contact

with the primitive and the savage, the isolation from the constraining forces of

institutionalised civilisation, revealed a truth of human nature. It is latently both

barbaric and insecure: capable of inflicting almost inconceivable cruelty on

other humans, and always on the brink of ontological crisis and consequent

self-destruction.14

This brings about, on Conrads part, a questioning of the

fundamental values of the civilisation that is capable of undergoing such

disintegration. For Conrad, darkness is the possible equivalent of the unknown,

14Brian Spittles, op. cit., 21.


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but first of all it stands for the primitive condition of human life, with a return

towards the primordial jungle and water, an opportunity to rediscover the

depths of the individual soul.

Conrads point is that ultimately, when contemplating mans real nature,there is no essential difference between an individual socially perceived as evil

and one that the admiring eyes of men see as good. The same fear, anxiety,

even puzzlement experienced by Nostromo, Marlow or Kurtz before human

darkness also torment Sotillo or the Negroes, apparently the embodiment of the

principle of evil according to the generally accepted Western standards at the

end of the nineteenth century.

The fusion of the timeless and of the temporal, or better said the

embedding of the temporal into the timeless, is a characteristic of most

modernist novels, covering the specific treatment of time in modernist fiction.

As the modernist novelists develop an explicit interest in the individual, more

precisely in the mental life of the individual, ranging from the conscious to the

unconscious, they inevitably have to reorganise their perception of time. Time

is no longer perceived only in its chronological, clock-measured aspects, but

mainly in its subjective dimension. The concept of time was probably one of

the most clearly affected by the shift of interest of modernist fiction from the

objective to the subjective, from external events to the inner life of the

individual.

The elaborate and sophisticated narrative technique Conrad uses in his

novels opens up deeper meaning possibilities in the interpretation of the

novelists work. The interposing of a narrator, or narrators, between the reader

and the story, as well as the masterly woven symbolic texture of the novels help

Conrad go beyond the strictly delimited historical time and place his work into

an atemporal dimension. His novels are about distinct individuals evolving in a

distinct cultural environment, as much as they are novels about the human

nature and the condition of the human being in relation to himself, to the other

human beings and to the universe in which he lives. Conrads novels are in and

out of their time simultaneously, making readers reorganise both their

knowledge of the contemporary world and their perception of the place


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contemporaneity has within the time continuum. Conrad oscillates between the

particular and the general, freely moving between the two in his conception of

the novel. Unlike other modernist novelists who seemed to have taken refuge in

their work from the aggressive and shifting reality they lived in, Conrad daresconfront significant issues specific to the turn-of-the-century period, asserting

and undermining at the same time the stable and hardly contested Victorian

value system. Drawing on his experience on board the ship, Conrad builds his

own system of values on the perennial hard core of the much older moral code

of chivalry. In this way, he transgresses the boundaries of his age and places his

work in a dimension of timelessness.

As far as time handling is concerned, Heart of Darkness, which is the

story of Marlows voyage along the Congo into the heart of the jungle, is

expected to progress in clear sequence, following a more or less clear

chronology. Even if the initiation meaning is associated to the voyage, in line

with the chivalric code that Conrad refers to from the first pages of the novel

when he emphasises the hierarchical organisation on board The Nellie, it is still

in stages that one expects the process to take place. The story of the voyage into

the jungle, literally, or into the human self, symbolically, represents the core of

the novel and occupies most of the space of the book with the exception of the

first two and the last pages. It is understandable that the most audible voice

should be Marlows, who narrates his adventures in the first person, as

experiencer, witness and interpreter of the events. On a first reading of the

novel, few will notice that Marlows point of view is subtly embedded in a

more neutral and detached perspective of another anonymous narrator, in

whose voice the narrative opens and ends. Unobtrusive as this narrative voice

may be, to such an extent that it is almost ignored, being mistaken at first sight

for Marlows, in the few pages in which it appears, it raises a lot of

interpretation problems on account of the person and tenses used. Although the

perspective is undoubtedly that of a third-person omniscient narrator, the

narrators presence in the narrative is marked by the use of the personal

pronoun we, which suggests his being part of the group of seamen on board

the ship.


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What we should observe is that Conrad does not simply alternate the

two voices. He embeds the first-person narrators voice into a more

comprehensive first-person narrative context, which resembles, in

generalising and evaluating force, a third-person omniscient one. If asked

about the point of view from which Conrads novel is narrated, most readers

will yield to a first impulse and decree that Heart of Darkness is a first-person

narrative, from the single perspective of one single narrating character. This is

because Marlows story constitutes the centre of interest of the novel and

Conrad narratively decided in favour of a more vivid, unmediated rendering of

events. This is what makes the story attractive and easier to follow. The

almost unnoticed presence of the more knowledgeable anonymous narrator

only complicates things and reduces the degree of involvement that Conrad

achieved by delegating narrative powers to Marlow. Yet, given Conrads

stylistic accuracy and effectiveness, the explanation of this choice of technique

will contribute to better understanding the overall meaning of the novel.

There are at least two reasons for this narrative solution. First, Conrad did not

want to give up the complete control of an omniscient-like narrator over the

narrative. Marlow had been endowed with the critical faculties likely to make

him function as a refined analyst of human nature. Yet, he was emotionally

involved in the events he recounted, he was too subjective for his perspective

to be unconditionally relied on. The more detached omniscient-like narrator

was used in the beginning of the story to introduce Marlow and give the

reader the size of Marlows potential as a narrator due to his ability to observe

and judge things. He was also brought in the end of the story to endorse, in away, Marlows findings. He was there to reinforce the conclusion Marlow

could barely put into words.

The story begins on board a cruising yawl in a London harbour and ends,

after an incursion into the very bowels of the earth, into the darkness of the

human soul, into the heart of the jungle, into the essence of evil, the very

same place and moment of time. Though constructed in an apparently

chronological succession, the novels main quality is its structural circularity


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generated by the iterative temporal pattern. The novel begins and ends in the

same point, Marlows highly subjective narrative being enveloped in the more

objective and detached one of the anonymous narrator, a member of The

Nellies crew.

Conrad delimits the historical time the novel is set into not by mentioning

a specific year, but by subtly alluding to the place and cultural context that

moment of time belonged to. London, suggested by the presence of the

Thames, is referred to as the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth, which,

in association with the Companies, undoubtedly places the novel in the

Victorian age and the days of the Second British Empire. The novelist

purposely avoids the use of either of these two terms, which gives him the

freedom to analyse, without bias or deference to the Victorian system,

Britains, as well as other European countries, imperialist tendencies. By

extension, Conrad sees expansionism and greed as inherent in human nature, as

an inevitable counterpart of the splendour and wealth of civilisations. He thus

transgresses chronological time and can afford to generalise on essential

existential issues, by the mediation of the we omniscient-like narrator. More

importantly, by his vacillation between the temporal and the timeless, between

the particular and the general, he finds a way, not thought of before him, to

challenge the very foundations of the system he seemed to praise. Only by

understanding the movement Conrads narrative performs in and out of

chronological time, can the reader make sense of the extremely subtle

subversiveness of the novelists discourse. Conrad manages to assert and deny,

to confirm and refute a stable, never contested and almost unanimously praised

value system. He is very serious and ironic at the same time, but only on

condition the reader can become aware of the two time dimensions.

The following fragment from Heart of Darkness illustrates the temporal

strategy Conrad uses in his novels. Significant events and outstanding figures

of Englands history encourage generalisations on human nature. It is as if the

Thames did not flow only into the sea of water, but also into the sea of time.

The narrative moves forwards and backwards in time, from the present of the

narrative to the past recorded by history.


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The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with

memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the

battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation

is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and

untitled the great knights-errant of the sea. *+ Hunters for gold or

pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword,

and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of

the spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb

of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! (67)

Besides, the permanent alternation between the present of the narrative,

rendered in tenses of the past time, and the present of Marlows story, rendered

in tenses of the present time, creates the illusion of a time continuum and blurs

the perception of time as chronology. This gives Conrad the freedom to

formulate his own value judgements within a highly restrictive ideological

framework.The same difficulty of the narrative pattern characterises Nostromo.

Seemingly benefiting from the backbone solidity of a coherently and

conventionally constructed plot, which would easily mislead the reader into

reading the novel as one designed in perfect compliance with the nineteenth-

century conventions, Nostromo turns out to be highly modern in point of time

handling. The obvious modernist opening is given by an intricate, sometimes

difficult to follow, interweaving of two chronological schemes, one coveringthe history of the Republic of Costaguana, the other with reference to the three

days of the Sulaco revolution. The shorter and more strictly delimited period is

embedded into the longer and more indefinite one, although frequent

movements from the one to the other are performed through the mediation of

various characters and narrators voices. The reader is hardly given

chronological certainties. In most cases, he is forced to move backwards and

forwards in time, which accentuates the feeling of doubt already born out of the

sense of the characters belonging to a relative value system. Anticipating the


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modernist preference for subjectivity in time treatment, Conrads narrative

displays a number of time layers mentally activated by the characters in the

novel. In Part the First, for example, the time scheme is circular, denying the

traditional convention of a simple linear plot development. Many occurrencesare described and analysed, but with the action ending at the exactly the

temporal point at which it began in the novel. The effect of these devices is to

involve the reader intellectually.15

The symbolic texture of Nostromo is

exquisite and highly elaborate. It gives the novel the atemporal dimension that

is absent in the apparent strict chronology of the story, whether the

chronological aspects cover the extended history of the Republic of Costaguana

or the detailed description of the three revolutionary days of Sulaco.

Artfully combining the temporal and the timeless, Conrad made his work

into an efficient instrument of investigation of truth, or life, or reality. His

fiction is thus to be seen as a highly sophisticated form of knowledge. By

devising a narrative technique capable of taking him always closer to the

essence of the individual human being and of humanity, Conrad came to be

undoubtedly acknowledged as a forerunner, or even initiator of modernism in

terms of novel writing. Ant yet, it is precisely because of this oscillation

between the timeless and the temporal that his work has constantly lent itself

to controversy, being sometimes misunderstood, sometimes rejected

altogether.

Conrads novelsare simultaneously novels about imperialism and about

the human condition, about the individuals search for identity, about his

propensity towards progress and self-destruction, about good and evil, about

the darkness inherent in human greatness. In a typically modernist manner,

Conrad plays with his readers horizon of expectations and draws him into the

challenging game of coping with interrelated layers of significance.

15Brian Spittles, op. cit., 4


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curs conrad

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