Heart of Darkness: A Minority Report

The following is both a ‘deconstructive’ reading of Heart of Darkness based on the early work, particularly Of Grammatology, of Jacques Derrida and a ‘minoritarian’-‘deterritorializing’ reading based on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – particularly their study of Kafka in their Kafka: toward a minor literature and Deleuze’s short essay ‘He stutters’. The deconstructive reading examines the ways in which in the course of the novel the privileging of the voice is threatened by a whole sequence of events and phenomena demonstrating the efficacy of what Derrida terms arche-écriture, writing in a larger sense. This leads to a total revaluation of the novel: for while Kurtz still succumbs to barbarism, all that at first seemed barbaric – the jungle, bodies, Africa, women (all forms of what Derrida includes within the rubric of arch-écriture) – increasingly assume substance and authority so that, at the end, we are faced with a ‘monstrosity’ (as Derrida terms it) that is also the promise of ‘an alternative society’ as Deleuze and Guattari would term it.

            No discussion of Heart of Darkness can begin without taking its bearings from Chinua Achebe's 1977 onslaught on the novel in his essay 'An Image of Africa' which, in many ways, can be regarded as one of the foundational texts of post-colonial studies. Achebe, it will be recalled, denounced Conrad as 'a thoroughgoing racist' and a 'purveyor of comforting myths' while the book itself was 'offensive and deplorable' that when not 'reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind' was content to

project the image of Africa as 'the other world,' the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality. (Achebe: 394)

The uncompromising virulence of Achebe's attack (prompted as much, he reveals, by the stereotype image of Africa that he finds in the Western media as by Conrad's text itself), that leads him to excoriate what he describes as the 'bleeding heart sentiments' of the 'liberal tradition' that might offer an apology for the text, is barely moderated by the acknowledgement that Conrad is 'one of the great stylists of modern fiction, and a good story-teller into the bargain.'

            It is this begrudgingly offered space between the ideological content of the text and its stylistic achievement, however, that has been gratefully seized upon by all those who have attempted to rebut or at least temper the intransigence of Achebe's essay. The recurring strategy is to concede the racist and imperialist implications of Conrad's ideological purview (those of his time after all, it will be claimed) while attempting to make the case that these limitations are compensated for and transcended by the aesthetic achievement of the work. Edward Said's summary claim is typical:

Whatever is lost or elided or even simply made up in Marlow's immensely compelling recitation is compensated for in the narrative's sheer historical momentum, the temporal forward movement – with digressions, descriptions, exciting encounters, and all. (Said: 25)

            A more sophisticated attempt to distinguish between the 'political' and the 'literary' is made by Nicholas Harrison with a resort to the formalist differentiation of récit (the raw material of the story) from discours (the artistic treatment of this material). Drawing on the work of Gérard Genette, Harrison sees Heart of Darkness on the very cusp of the break between nineteenth-century concerns with realism and vraisemblance and the fractured indeterminacy of the modernist text where

'dramatic action will slip into the background, and the récit will be overtaken in importance by the discours – which is the prelude to the crumbling of the novel as a genre, and the arrival of literature, in the modern sense of the word.' (cited by Harrison: 30)

It is the extent to which Heart of Darkness can be regarded as 'a paradigmatic work of modernist literature' (ibid.) that the kind of political attack made on it by Achebe is to some extent misguided:

To put it another way, it is precisely because it consists of complex narrative layerings and is bathed in semantic uncertainty – precisely, then, because of a certain indeterminacy – that Heart of Darkness seems a successful and pre-eminently literary text …… and that it makes Achebe's charge seem not wrong, perhaps, but misplaced. (ibid. 143)

Terry Eagleton's summary contention that

'The "message" of Heart of Darkness is that Western civilization is at base as barabarous as African society…' (cited by Harrison: 147)

is similarly guilty of neglecting 'forms of literary/critical attention that are worth sustaining', so that 'the gesture's apparent political incisiveness is undercut by its disregard for the detail of the text's historicity and literarity.' (ibid.)

            Nevertheless, and at the same time, Harrison several times remarks that, when faced by the sheer horror of

imperialist discourses and practices, and other forms of violence and inequality, it can seem trivial and trivializing to dwell on the particularities of literary structure, or to spend one's time on fiction at all. (Harrison: 60; see also 146)

And he is sceptical about what can be achieved by any purely critical analysis immanent to the text itself and that 'remaining alert to that indeterminacy that marks literature as such may seem frustratingly pernickety and at times apolitical tasks.' (ibid. 150)

             Now, it seems to me that this virtual splitting of the text between the 'political' content (bad) and the 'literary' style (good) is extremely unsatisfactory. Many years ago Roland Barthes remarked à propos of all formalist analysis 'A little formalism turns one away from history, a lot brings one back to it.' (Barthes: 112) Said, himself, while recognising that the imperial system is characterised by a 'perfect closure' (Said: 26) claims that Conrad, 'largely through formal devices' and 'dislocations in the narrator's language,' draws attention to the facticity of that system, the 'constructed' (and therefore 'deconstructable') nature of its  values, and so offers us the glimpse 'of a reality that seemed inaccessible to imperialism' (ibid. 32). In what follows I propose to follow further these two hints proffered by Said, the deconstructive propensities of the text and its glimpse of a beyond inaccessible to the imperial gaze.

The principal source of ‘deconstructive’ thinking is the early work of Jacques Derrida. At the heart of the deconstructive project is an interrogation of the privilege accorded to the voice in the Western episteme – because of the alleged immediacy and transparency of the voice to thought (Derrida (1976): 11)   – and the correlative ‘debasement’ and ‘repression’ (ibid. 3), indeed disavowal, of those sets of articulations, those differential codings, those material and institutional practices – all of which Derrida regards as forms of writing (ibid. 9) – that are the indispensable preconditions not only for any meaningful utterance but for the social itself.

Derrida cites a number of instances of philosophers and thinkers who express their bewilderment or even fear at the threat that writing offers to the voice. Saussure, for example, in his Course in General Linguistics, apologises for the need to resort to writing:

Although writing itself is alien to the internal system (of the voice) it is impossible simply to ignore a device used ceaselessly to represent language: it is necessary to recognise its usefulness, its defects and its dangers. (ibid. 34)

And Derrida glosses: ‘Writing, then, has the exteriority that is granted to tools: what is more, it is an imperfect instrument, a dangerous technique, one might almost say that it is evil (maléfique).’ (ibid.) He goes on to record Saussure’s barely disguised outrage at ‘the tyranny of writing’:

For instance, there were two spellings for the surname Lefèvre (from the latin faber), one popular and simple, the other learned and etymological: Lefèvre and Lefèbvre. Because v and u were not kept apart in the old system of writing, Lefèbvre was read as Lefèbure, with a b that has never really existed and a u that was the result of ambiguity. Now the latter form is actually pronounced.
Darmester foresees the day when even the last two letters of vingt will be pronounced – truly an orthographic monstrosity. Such phonic deformations belong to language but do not stem from its natural functioning. They are due to an external influence. Linguistics should put them into a special compartment for observation: they are teratological cases. (ibid. 41-42)

Writing is alien, external, defective, dangerous, evil, deformed, monstrous – it is difficult not to recognise the ethnological or racial undertones of these distinctions.

What follows from this initial privileging of the voice as opposed to writing – this phonologism or logocentricism – is a whole set of binary and hierarchical differentiations that reside at the heart of the Western episteme: those that privilege the mind as opposed to the body and the ideal as opposed to the real; those that privilege plenitude and presence as against differal and differential play; those that privilege notions of an immaculate and disembodied truth as against the vicissitudes of violence and power. At one with these prejudices that are endemic to Western thought is the privileging of the One as opposed to the Multiple or the Collective, the privileging of the Male as opposed to the Female, Man as opposed to Woman, and the Self as opposed to the Other. The privileging of the voice over writing, is at the heart, then, finally, of Western Philosophy in general and of European ethnocentricism and imperialism in particular.

In the light of what has just been said it is clear that Heart of Darkness cries out, if the expression be permitted, for a deconstructionist reading for few texts can have so insistently thrust before the reader the critical ideological status of the voice and its place within an imperialist problematic. Kurtz, the central figure in the piece, is again and again described as being ‘little more than a voice’:

I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing…The man presented himself as a voice…. A voice, he was very little more than a voice.’ (pp. 58-9)

And Marlow, the main narrator, himself rarely seems to his audience as anything more than a voice:

For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice… this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river. (p. 33)

Whereas the actual body of the text is burdened by a whole history of physical suffering and endurance, of work and exploitation, of material rapaciousness and human misery. It is a text, that is, where the voice and what we might call its superstructural and ideological pretensions are set against and in contrast with the real conditions of a brute material base and a set of institutional practices.

The great narrative opening of Heart of Darkness marks a moment of almost flawless ideological and rhetorical plenitude, the high-water mark of empire:

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth. (p. 3)

‘The sea and sky were welded together without a joint…. the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light’ – and welded together, too, are the small group consisting of the Director of Companies, the Lawyer, the Accountant, the unnamed narrator and Marlow himself:

Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. (p. 3)

Of a piece with this moment of ‘unruffled’ fullness is the measured, almost incantatory, narrative voice itself with its echoing and repetitive ‘glooms’ and ‘broodings’ that act like an insistent refrain throughout this opening scene: ‘gloom, brooding’, ‘brooding gloom’, ‘gloom….brooding’, ‘gloom brooding’, ‘brooding gloom’.

At the same time, however, we are made aware that this is also a moment of crisis:

The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The moment of fullness and immaculate presence is strangely foreboding, precarious and unstable. The internal resonances of the ‘glooms’ and the ‘broodings’, while mesmeric in their effect – eliciting a lulled half-attentedness – also have a slightly ‘skidding’ or destabilising effect as if the language is stammered or snagged. The inattention and snagging has Marlow himself questioning what has been actually said:

Light came out of this river since – you say Knights? (p. 6)

And now, when we check the narrative ourselves, we find that any slight inattentiveness might have produced other mis-readings: ‘varnished sprits’ might so easily have yielded – encouraged by the ‘vanishing’ in the next sentence – ‘vanished spirits’ or that later ‘bearing the sword’ might easily have rendered ‘bearing the word’ and ‘messengers of the might’ could easily be mistaken for ‘messengers of the night’ – in all cases, interestingly, a word with a physical reference offset only by a hairsbreadth from a word with an abstract reference.

            These might seem trivial matters but, first, they draw attention to that threat of the written to the spoken that so exercised Saussure and they set in play the possibility of instability and disequilibrium even at a moment of seemingly maximum certitude. Secondly such a ‘stammering’ or ‘snagging’ of language, which often takes the form of double-entendres, of grotesque puns and ambiguities, or of quasi oximorons, is to be found throughout Conrad’s work in general and Heart of Darkness in particular – so that, for example, we are told that the ‘great man’ in Brussels is only five foot tall, or that, while ‘Kurtz’ means ‘short’ in German, Kurtz himself seemed to be, in fact, seven foot tall. A note can advise simultaneously ‘Hurry up’ and ‘Approach cautiously’. More disconcertingly Kurtz’s magnificent and high-flown report (‘It was eloquent…The peroration was magnificent…. This was the unbounded power of eloquence – of words – of burning words.’) for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs closes on the peremptory and savage ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ (pp. 62) Language is at odds with itself, split, differing from itself. Take a classic Conradian phrase, such as ‘objectless blasting’: what is this? ‘purposeless dynamiting’ or ‘pointless cursing’? Or, again, the word ‘report’ that occurs a number of times in the text – is there not here a play on ‘report’ as a verbal ‘report’ and ‘report’ as the ‘report’ of a gun? Conrad continuously toys with these hesitations and bifurcations of language which often hinge on a word having simultaneously a physical reference and an abstract meaning, both, that is, material and ideal – the very issue at the heart of the writing/voice debate. There is a mischievous observation in The Secret Agent to the effect that a bumpy cab ride is bad for a ‘loose liver’ (are we talking about a dodgy organ here? or about someone who lives loosely?) Tony Tanner finds himself pondering Conrad’s use of the word ‘fiddle’ in the short-story Falk: is this a violin or a shady deal? (Tanner: 28) A characteristic rhetorical device is hendiadys: here, in Heart of Darkness we have the remarkable comment on the shrunken heads that surround Kurtz’s compound – ‘food for thought food and also for the vultures’ (p. 71) – to which I will return later.

Third, this ‘stuttering’ or ‘stammering’ of language, the treatment, in a sense, of language as impediment (Latin: impedimenta: tools, equipment) – reminds us that for Conrad English is a foreign language which means that he approaches it from the outside, as it were. The English language for Conrad is far more obtrusively a box of tools than it is for a native speaker and it is not surprising that he regards writing as some kind of physical endeavour – like ‘the conquest of a colony’:

The national English novelist seldom regards his work – the exercise of his art – as an achievement of active life by which he will produce certain effects upon the emotions of his readers, but simply as an instinctive, often unreasoned, outpouring of his own emotions. He does not go about building up his book with a precise intention and a steady mind. It never occurs to him that a book is a deed, that the writing of it is an enterprise as much as the conquest of a colony. (Conrad (1926): 197)

It is this situation of the writer as ‘a sort of stranger in his own language’ that Deleuze and Guattari regard as a characteristic of what they call ‘minor’ or ‘minoritarian’ writing. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) This is not simply because Conrad frequently adulterates his English with gallicisms and with a syntax that is French rather than English:

the great authors do not proceed in this manner, even though Kafka is a Czech writing in German, and Beckett an Irishman (often) writing in French [and Conrad a Pole writing in English]. They do not mix two languages together, not even a minor language and a major language, …. they minorize language, as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in a state of perpetual disequilibrium. … they cause language to flee …. they place it endlessly in a state of disequilibrium, they cause it to bifurcate and to vary in each one of its terms, according to a ceaseless modulation….. A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. (Deleuze (1994): 25)

The minor writer destabilizes and deterritorializes the major, hegemonic, language, working it, disarticulating and rearticulating it, turning it inside out like a subversive bricoleur.

            The notion of bricolage alerts us to the inevitable ambivalence of the ‘deconstructive’ or ‘minoritarian’ project: the inescapability of a resort to the very heritage that it seeks to subvert. To use and exploit the resources of the very heritage that one wishes to subvert means that that heritage has to be refurbished even if it is only so that it can serve ends alien to it. The text of Heart of Darkness is littered with evidence of a system in crisis; everywhere there are signs of broken communications: broken boilers, trucks without wheels, rusty rails (p. 42), smashed-up drainage-pipes (p. 19), pails with holes in them (p. 28), bricks without straw (p. 29), a wreck languishing for lack of rivets (pp. 33-4):

I did not see the significance of that wreck at once. I fancy I see it now, but I am not sure – not at all. (p. 25)

The wreck is ‘a great comfort to turn to’ amidst the bickering and back-biting of the Central Station:

No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit – to find out what I could do. No….. I don’t like work, – no man does – but I like what is in the work, – the chance to find yourself. (p. 35)

Marlow, like the writer Conrad at his desk – recall that ‘building up a book’ is like ‘the conquest of a colony’ – is engaged in reassembling from the already worked, already corroded, already compromised materials that his heritage supplies the very medium or vehicle that must challenge that heritage. This is the fundamental, potentially schizoid, dilemma of the task before Marlow: he finds himself embroiled in a venture about which he increasingly has doubts and reservations.

It can be no coincidence that this crise de conscience should occur at the moment when, according to Derrida,

a decentering had come about: at the moment when European culture – and in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts – had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference. (Derrida 1978: 282)

This is the very moment of Heart of Darkness itself: the moment when it was beginning to be recognised in the work of travellers like Mary Kingsley that Europe was not the only ‘culture of reference’, that Africa and Africans had to be credited with their own indigenous norms and values. M. M. Mahood recounts how at that same period, while Europe was horrified by evidence of native atrocities in Benin, ‘the expedition’ that went to avenge these atrocities ‘brought back to the British Museum the greatest haul of cultural loot ever to leave tropical Africa.’(Mahood: 30-1) It is a neat irony, then, that the brickmaker at the central station, frustrated in his endeavour to make bricks, has the walls of his hut covered with ‘Native mats…. a collection of spears, assegais, shields [and] knives [..] hung up in trophies.’ (p. 28)
           
Heart of Darkness responds, of course, to so many critical approaches but there are good grounds for suggesting that its most radical thrust comes from a destabilization and subversion of the hegemonic privilege of the voice and correlatively of the language and project of imperialism. We have already seen how the seemingly overweening rhetorical confidence of the opening scene – of the narrator’s exordium – is only slightly troubled by its stammered repetitions and potential mis-hearings or mis-readings. A more direct, even somewhat obvious, calling into question of the discourse of power is to be found in what is the next major scene of the novel – Marlow’s arrival at the mouth of the great river and his meeting with the Chief Accountant whose immaculate turn-out earns him his, Marlow’s, strangely extravagant respect:

When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high-starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear neck-tie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear…..
Moreover, I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser’s dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That’s backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt fronts were achievements of character. (p. 21)

            In many ways the Chief Accountant and his immaculately kept records recall the imperial purview enjoyed by the narrator in the opening episode, the seamlessness and unblemishedness of the scene he describes and the language in which he describes it. Whereas that assurance was undermined by subtle repetitions and hesitations, however, now the very propriety of the Chief Accountant’s appearance and his dedication to his accounts are more starkly called into question by the close proximity of a dying agent and the horrors of a chain gang and the grove of death:

He turned to his work….. In the steady buzz of flies the homeward-bound agent was lying flushed and insensible; the other, bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still treetops of the grove of death. (p. 23)

A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in 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 from like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope: each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. Another report from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of war I had seen firing into a continent. It was the same kind of ominous voice; but these men could by no stretch of the imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea. (p. 18)

The ‘report’ from the cliff makes Marlow think of the French ship ‘firing into a continent’. Here the significant conflation of ‘outraged law’ and ‘bursting shells’ into a single ‘ominous voice’ offers us a good example of the Conradian play on the word ‘report’. And set over against this ‘ominous voice’ are a chain of so called ‘enemies’ or ‘criminals’: the toiling, linked-together, alphabet-like articulated bodies – every rib, every joint – of the black men, have heaped on them all the opprobrium that we have seen that the voice has always cast upon writing, the body and the Other.
           
The juxtapositioning of the impeccably clad Chief Accountant and the scene of death all around him might seem critique enough of the imperial project. The further suggestion here that in the straggling line of black men we have something like a rudimentary pictographic script threatened by an alien ‘ominous voice’ might seem slightly precious, to say the least. Nevertheless it is just this dislocated relation of script to voice that seems to me to explain the place played in the text by the next ‘scene of writing’, the discovery of Towser/Towson’s ‘extraordinary’ An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship:

It had lost its covers, and the pages had been thumbed into a state of extremely dirty softness; but the back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton threads which looked clean yet. It was an extraordinary find. Its title was, An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship, by a man Towser, Towson – some such name – Master in His Majesty’s Navy. The matter looked dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve in my hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the breaking strain of ships’ chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old fellow, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real. Such a book being there was wonderful enough; but still more astounding were the notes pencilled in the margins and plainly referring to the text. I couldn’t believe my eyes! They were in cipher! Yes, it looked like cipher. Fancy a man lugging with him a book of that description into this nowhere and studying it – and making notes – in cipher at that! It was an extravagant mystery. (p. 46)

            Such a long and detailed description surely suggests that this account of a text within the text calls for serious attention. In the first place Towser/Towson’s Inquiry is in a condition not unlike Marlow’s wreck – that is seriously likely to fall apart and in need of refurbishment and repair. In this sense, like the wreck, it becomes a metaphor for the text as a whole: like the wreck and like Heart of Darkness it is held together by a thread that only just about wards off further dissolution. Secondly the text is of a ‘dirty softness’ and ‘dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures’: the repellent aspect of the Inquiry clearly derives from the fact that it consists largely of diagrams and tables – that is of forms of writing that cannot be spoken, that resist phonological appropriation. For Derrida ‘mathematical writing’ represents rather more than just an ‘enclave’ in the midst of phonetic writing:

This enclave is also the place where the practice of scientific language challenges intrinsically and with increasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writing and all its implicit metaphysics…(Derrida (1976): 10)

Thirdly, with the hesitation of ‘Towser/Towson’ we have yet another example of that stuttering or stammering effect we remarked on in the opening scene of the novel. Some commentators have seen this hesitation as a way of reinforcing the sense of the immediacy of the speaking voice but for me it is only one more example of that potential for misreading caused by the vagaries of a written text: ‘Towser/Towson’ alerts us to the differentiality of the written as opposed to the seamlessness of the spoken that I have already discussed. This differentiality of the written, moreover, is a clear indication of the ‘impropriety’, or impossibility, of the ‘proper’ name: there can only be a ‘Towser’ because there is a ‘Towson’ – that is the ‘proper’ can only ever be registered in relation to an ‘improper’, to another differentiated term. Every proper name is hollowed out by its place in a field of differences. Fourthly, the instability of the language in this passage is evident in the ambiguity and undecidability of many of its terms. The first encounter with ‘chains’ and ‘tackle’ is fair enough but what happens with the later ‘chains’ and ‘purchases’: are these ‘chains’ the same as the previous ‘chains’, and does ‘purchase’ here mean something similar to or quite different from ‘tackle’? Both ‘chain’ and ‘purchase’ can be concrete and abstract – a ‘chain’ is a series of material links as well as being a unit of measurement, while ‘purchase’ is a physical ‘hold’ as well as a commercial transaction – so that we have ‘chains/chains’ and ‘purchases/purchases’ just as we have the initial destabilization of ‘Towser/Towson’ – and earlier ‘sprit/spirit’, ‘sword/word’, ‘might/night’. Finally, the unspeakability of the whole text is aggravated by a marginalia written in cipher.
           
The deconstructive and deterritorializing potentialities of Towser/Towson’s Inquiry are subject, however, to a number of recuperative and reterritorializing strategies. Just as the back of the dissolving text has been ‘lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton threads’ so Marlow insists on restoring ‘a singleness of intention’ – the idealist and moral alibi par excellence, and one called increasingly into question as the text proceeds – to the recalcitrant ‘illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures’.  The ‘singleness of intention’, that resides in thought alone, in a sense, recuperates and mediates, perhaps in some sense sublimates, the ‘breaking strains’, the physical tensions of a material practice. And, as we are to discover later when we meet the Harlequin-esque figure of the young Russian, even the notes thought to be in cipher – that is as no more than a set of incomprehensible marks – turn out to be in common or everyday Russian. An ‘unspeakable writing’, dare we say, allows itself to be reabsorbed by the speaking voice.
           
The effect of this double movement – on the one hand deconstructive and deterritorializing, on the other recuperative and reterritorializing – is troublingly schizophrenic and the schizophrenic tendencies of the text begin to show increasingly pathological symptoms as the story progresses, most strikingly at the point where we meet up with the figure of the Russian Harlequin. This figure is almost in studied contrast to the immaculate figure of the Chief Accountant that we have met earlier:

He looked like a Harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow – patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding round his jacket, scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done. (pp. 64-5)

Instead of the ‘correct entries of perfectly correct transactions’ what this creature ‘in motley’ offers us are ‘rattled’ and ‘gabbled’ (pp. 65, 66) accounts of a whole series of opportunistic and risky shifts and stratagems. Just as his garments are composed of multiple patches so his discourse is one of shreds and fragments:

Brother sailor….honour….pleasure….delight….introduce myself….Russian….son of an arch-priest…Government of Tambov….What! Tobacco! English tobacco; the excellent English tobacco! Now, that’s brotherly. Smoke? Where’s a sailor that does not smoke? (p. 66)

What the ‘be-patched’ (p. 68) dress and stammered speech of the young Russian both betoken is a fragmentation of surface – the surface of the body and the surface of discourse. We recall that throughout Marlow’s concern has been with the ‘surface-truth…in these things’ and to avoid the snags that threaten his tin-pot steamer:

I had to watch the steering, and circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook. There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man. (p. 45)

It is this loss of surface – a loss of language accompanied by a puncturing of the surface of the body – that first signals the risk of descent into a schizophrenic delirium.
           
The fragility of the surface and the threat of a reversion to a kind of Kleinian aggressive schizo-paranoid orality has been more than hinted at all along by the presence of the cannibals aboard the boat. The integrity of the boat itself has already been compromised by the ‘Sticks, little sticks…thick; they were whizzing before my nose, dropping below me, striking behind me against my pilot house.’ (p. 80) – i.e. by what Marlow later realises are ‘Arrows, by Jove! we were being shot at!’ The delay in attributing a word to a physical thing is symptomatic that words and things are beginning to fly apart. At this stage in the narrative the thin mist that envelopes the ship is like the thin membrane or skin of a body without organs  threatened by the fragmented, schizoid bodies in pieces – the corps morcelé – that bestrew the bushes:

and then suddenly, as though a veil had been removed from my eyes, I made out, deep in the tangled gloom, naked breasts, arms, legs, glaring eyes – the bush was swarming with human limbs in movement, glistening of bronze colour. The twigs shook, swayed, and rustled, the arrows flew out of them, and then the shutter came to. (p. 55)

The journey up the river seems to be more and more like the tracing and aggravation of a fault line that began in the opening scene in the initial stammerings of the text and then proceeded to the split between bodies and accounts, and then to a further gap within language itself, between the phonological and the diagrammatic, between ideal intention and graphic tension, and now has become one between the integrity of a body surface – the BwO -- and the scattered organs of a corps morcelé.

It is at this point, as Marlow is talking to the Russian, that another violent regression in the symbolic order is registered. Marlow has been idly scanning what he had taken to be the ‘ornamental’ knobs on the posts surrounding Kurtz’s compound:

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… 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. (p. 71)

This is a critical moment of articulation and differentiation: only one head is facing this way, the rest are towards the house. It is a Janus moment – ‘food for thought and for the vultures’ – of the differentiation of the cerebral from the organic. Here – given the regressive trajectory of the text – it is a moment of desublimation from the symbolic to the ornamental and then from the symbolic/ornamental to the naked immediacy of a blackened human skull: language – phonetic, diagrammatic, symbolic, ornamental – all human markings – now entirely stripped away to reveal the nakedly organic beneath.

            A similar regression can be traced with the sudden eruption into view of the Savage Woman:

And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman.
She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent… (pp. 75-6)

The Harlequin body of the young Russian, in spite of its shreds and patches, had still been covered, whereas the extravagantly bedecked but nakedly eroticised body of the Savage Woman is clearly on display. There is no longer any of the residual propriety of even ill-fitting garments – there are no longer any pockets to be stuffed with Martini-Henry cartridges or Towser/Towsen Inquiries: here even anatomy is only partially conformed to – brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow: for the rest there are innumerable necklaces, bizarre things, charms, gifts, bits of ivory – a wholly heterogeneous and arbitrary accumulation and distribution of partial objects and talismanic effigies: here, indeed, we are far from the jointlessness and seamlessness of the novel's opening.
           
As capricious and as aggregative as it might be the figure of the Savage Woman is still an articulated whole and she is embued with a wild vitality. By the time we meet Kurtz he is little more than a disarticulated skeleton whose jaw seems hinged like that of a CGI Mummy:

I saw the man on the stretcher sit up, lank and with an uplifted arm, above the shoulders of the bearers…. I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded with grotesque jerks…. His covering had fallen off, and his body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. I saw him open his mouth wide – it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him. (p. 74)

The wide open mouth and the ‘weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him’ marks the extreme reversion of orality from the voice to pure hunger, language reduced to its last barely articulate cry, ‘The horror! The horror!’ Kurtz’s avid scrambling for fossilized ivory is like the posthumous and post-human scratchings of a corpse in a bone-yard of scattered shards. The grandiloquence of the opening scene has been reduced to a handful of broken teeth.
           
We have arrived at this account of the regressive collapse of language from the opening moment of discursive luxuriance to a last whisper amidst fossilized organic débris by means of the classic deconstructive tactics of unpicking seams and exploiting verbal play. It remains to be noted now that Heart of Darkness can also be seen to conform to a strategic pattern of what I would want to describe as regressive dephantasmatization. By this I mean a reversal of the stages of socialization that is precipitated by a failure to negotiate the phantasmal moment of Oedipalization – that is the abandonment of a solipsistic identity and the recognition of the Other, of the Social. This seems to be Kurtz’s failure, for all the vapourizings about ‘my Intended’ and, indeed, Marlow’s failure at the end in his failure of nerve when confronted by her. This failure is at one with the marginalization of women in the text and what seems to be a parthenogenic fixation – males reproducing males, males ever stepping into the shoes of other males – a pathology one suspects imperialism is particularly  susceptible to. In speaking of a regressive dephantasmatization I mean that in Heart of Darkness it is possible to trace the reverse of the trajectory that consciousness must trace from its organic beginnings to its achievement of a totally autonomous reflective capacity. The stages of this trajectory are marked along the way by Melanie Klein’s schizo-paranoid and manic-depressive positions, the emergence of a Good Object, and Oedipal intentionality – whence the symbolic significance of the failed encounter with the Intended.
           
Heart of Darkness is about the failure of intentionality and the reversion of Kurtz from a condition of high civilization – ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’ (p. 61) – first to a state of manic-depressiveness (the moment of the report on the Suppression of Savage Customs and its brutal codicil) and then to one of schizophrenic paranoia – his persecution complex. Kurtz has many of the attributes of the Good Object: he is the lost ideal ‘Good Object’ that becomes the raison d’être of Marlow’s quest; he is the object of both love and frustration on the part of the Russian Harlequin, and of the unbridled passion of the Savage Woman. The Russian Harlequin and the Savage Woman can be seen to correspond respectively, too, to the manic-depressive and the schizo-paranoid positions: the Russian with his ‘harlequinized’ – erogenously surfaced – body and the Savage Woman with her battery of partial objects.

We have tracked the stages: from the disembodied voice of the opening scene via the physically disengaged accounts of the immaculately clad Chief Accountant; from these bodiless accounts to the discrepancies of Towser/Towson’s Inquiry between the spoken and the diagrammatic, between intentionality and tension; from these recuperable texts to the patched body and fragmented mutterings of the Russian; from the symbolic to the ornamental to the organic marked by the posts in the compound; and down and down from the patched body of the Russian Harlequin to the partial objects and effigies that bedeck the Savage Woman, to the broken, disarticulated body of Kurtz and the scattered fragments of fossilized ivory, to an utterance – a cry, a sigh – that hardly belongs to language at all. It might be thought that the deconstructive and the minoritarian project of deterritorialization could hardly go any further – ‘a deterritorialization that will no longer be saved by culture or myth… an absolute deterritorialization… to give syntax to the cry’:

It’s what Artaud did with French – cries, gasps…. And it always ends like that, language’s lines of escape: silence, the interrupted, the interminable, or even worse. (Deleuze and Guattari: 26)

By the end of Heart of Darkness Conrad would seem to have adopted the two ways of deterritorializing a language that Deleuze and Guattari say the writer has open to him:

One way is to artificially enrich [it], to swell it up through all the resources of symbolism, of oneirism, of esoteric sense, of a hidden signifier….or…..go always further in the direction of deterritorialization, to the point of sobriety…..Arrive at a perfect and unformed expression… (ibid. 19)

On the one hand there has been the overwroughtness of dreams and of symbolism and the flirtation with a hidden signifier and, on the other, there has been a reduction of language, if not to an ultimate ‘sobriety’, then at least to an ultimate state of anorexic emaciation.

To leave the matter there, however, would be to risk repeating once again all those negative accounts of Heart of Darkness that begin with Leavis’s notorious claim that Conrad’s ‘adjectival insistence’ was at one with his ‘not knowing what he means’(Leavis: 180) and continues with Peter Brooks’ contention that ‘there is a generalization of darkness at the heart of Marlow’s (and Kurtz’s) stories…. Darkness is visible everywhere…Marlow’s tale makes the darkness visible’ (Brooks: 83-4) and with J. Hillis Miller’s extravagantly pessimistic view that

The Aufklärung or enlightenment in this case is of the fact that the darkness can never be enlightened. The darkness enters into every gesture of enlightenment to enfeeble it, to hollow it out, to corrupt it and thereby to turn it into unreason, its pretense of shedding light into more darkness.’ (Miller: 224)

Miller’s reading is offered as an example of ‘a deconstructive critic at work’ but the trouble with this reading is that it does not go far enough – as I think is the case with other readings such as those of Brooks and Tony Tanner who flirt with a deconstructive approach. For Derrida’s project is not simply negative, the ‘deconstruction’ of the Western episteme or simply the subversion of the idealistic pretensions of phonocentrism: it involves, also, a reassessment of all those forms of arche-writing – of writing understood as all those sets of non-phonologically dominated writing – marks, incisions, scarrings, traces – which we have seen the Western episteme characterise as signs of monstrosity and criminality, of subversion and enmity, but which, at the same time, constitute the necessary conditions of our social structures and systems of articulation:

To say that a people do not know how to write because one can translate the word which they use to designate the act of inscribing as ‘drawing lines,’ is that not as if one should refuse them ‘speech’ by translating the equivalent word by ‘to cry,’ ‘to sing,’ ‘to sigh’ indeed ‘to stammer’? By way of simple analogy with respect to the mechanisms of ethnocentric assimilation/exclusion, let us recall with Renan that, ‘in the most ancient languages, the words used to designate foreign peoples are drawn from two sources: either words that signify ‘to stammer,’ ‘to mumble,’ or words that signify ‘mute.’ (Derrida (1976): 123)

What this invites us to at once is a complete re-evaluation of all those terms denoting ‘mute-ness’, ‘silence’, ‘dumb-ness’, ‘jabbering’, ‘howling’, ‘unspeakable-ness’ and so on that are applied again and again to the jungle in the course of Heart of Darkness:

There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering… (p. 15)

A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor, vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild – and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sounds of bells in a Christian country. (p. 23 – the last phrase already inviting some reassessment of the significance of these wild sounds)

All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who have 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. (p. 32)

What is this thing that couldn’t talk? perhaps was deaf as well? Who says so? It is evident that the whole dumb thing is alive with messages, rhythms, articulations, beats, syncopations, communications – a whole cacophony of human messages. Once we change perspective and begin looking from the other side – from the side of the Other – everything changes:

I steamed up a bit, then swung down-stream, and two thousand eyes followed the evolutions of the splashing, thumping, fierce river-demon beating the water with its terrible tail and breathing black smoke into the air. In front of the first rank, along the river, three men, plastered with bright red earth from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly. When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendent tail – something that looked like a dried gourd; they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the response of some satanic litany. (pp. 83-4)

It is we, now, who are the exotics in our ‘fierce river-demon beating the water with its terrible tail’. Those three men ‘plastered with bright red earth from head to foot…stamp[ing] their horned heads, sway[ing] their scarlet bodies’ are the local functionaries as status-conscious, as dress-coded and regalia bedecked as any Company Director, Lawyer or Accountant – such as those on the Nellie listening to Marlow’s tale. Who says that these ‘strings of amazing words…. resemble no sounds of human language?’ What else can these amazing words be except human language – even if we cannot understand them?

            And let us look again at the Savage Woman:

She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet….. a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. (pp. 75-6)

Of course she is almost embarrassingly over the top – more Rider-Haggard, some have suggested, than Conrad, more ‘bling’ than Benin. But that does not disguise the fact that she is by far the most sophisticated and, in many ways, the most memorable figure in the text.

            Nor is this climactic moment unprepared for. Throughout the text as the fabric of European culture has collapsed into a schizophrenic delirium – indeed into ‘barbarism’ – there has been a persistent thread – sometimes literally a ‘thread’ – a persistent weaving, in a sense, of an alternative social structure which is African rather than European. It begins, perhaps, with the depiction of the Africans amidst the breakers off the coast:

Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks – these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along the coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. (p. 16)

There has been some discussion as to whether this is a 'racist' or simply 'realistic' (or, indeed, both, 'realism' itself hardly ideologically neutral) (Harrison: 23) description of Africans but I think this is to fail to recognise it as a kind of functional baseline of a 'state of nature' innocence prior to the series of increasingly complex markings to which these bodies will become subject in the course of the narrative. Early on there is the pathetic piece of white worsted around the neck of the dying African in the grove of death:

….he had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck – Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm – a propitiatory act? Was there any idea connected with it? (p. 20)

Then there are ‘the three pieces of brass wire’ (p. 50) given to the cannibal crew that man the boat – clearly a derisory gesture on the part of the Company but sufficient to act as a contract and restraint – the very quality Kurtz lacks – to the cannibals:

Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn't go for us – they were thirty to five – and have a good tuck in for once, amazes me now when I think of it. They were big powerful men, with not much capacity to weigh the consequences, with courage, with strength, even yet, though their skins were no longer glossy and their muscles no longer hard. And I saw that something restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there…. Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear – or some kind of primitive honour? (pp. 50-1)

Or take Marlow’s account of his fireman:

He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity – and he had filed teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because he had been instructed; and what he knew was this – that should the water in that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fearfully (with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his lower lip) (p. 45)

This seems to me to show Marlow at his boorish/waspish/racist/supremacist worst: the superciliousness of his ‘he was an improved specimen’ and ‘he had been instructed’ just seems petty alongside the evidently conscientious concentration of the fireman, while his total incomprehension of the social and cultural significance of the fireman’s body markings just smacks of ignorance and philistinism.
           
The piece of white worsted, the brass wires, the filed teeth, body markings and charms of the fireman (all forms of what Derrida considers to be arche-écriture), the bedaubed figures on the opposite shore, the ornamentally laden and culturally saturated figure of the Savage Woman – all constitute a reverse of the trajectory into the heart of darkness. At every stage the ‘Other’ becomes more substantial, more articulate. We are told by the Russian that the Savage Woman ‘talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour’ albeit in a dialect he, the Russian, does not understand. In other words, as Susan Jones remarked recently,  the Savage Woman has her own voice and her own history, just as has Africa. This is what any rigorously attentive reading of the text must come to terms with – that it is this incredibly ‘dumb’ thing with its manifold stammerings and cries, its rhythms and its markings, its scarified bodies and tramping feet – with its voice defying and voice transcending writing in Derrida’s sense of an arche-écriture – that constitutes an order of the social and the intra-human that outstrips the meagre reach of the essential solipsism of the voice. As in Robinson Crusoe – to which Heart of Darkness is in many ways a deliberate riposte (‘Kurtz’ little more than a corruption of Crusoe’s original name of ‘Kreutzer’) – and so fittingly closing the imperial moment opened by the former – it’s the cannibals, the criminal and feared Other, who express all the sociality that is going.

This is, in fact, what other readings have clearly seen but then repressed. Tony Tanner, for example, notes the number of words used in the text to describe speaking of one kind and another – ‘people whoop, yell, grunt, make "loud hospitable ejaculations", talk volubly, set tongues clacking, babble, mumble, hiss, fume, fret, speak in under tones, lecture the narrator with ‘deafening gibberish’, shoot out a string of words, and so on’ – but he regards this as an endeavour ‘to undermine the illusory finality and exactitude of the written text’…. ‘to rephysicalise language….. to get it off the page and back into the mouth, and make us aware of how intimately related it is to the body.’(Tanner: 34) What this fails to realise is that the ‘physicality’ of language is intimately bound up with the very writing that he thinks is being undermined. The welter of synonyms for speaking that re-establish the physicality of language – i.e. its exorbitance with regard to the voice and to a compliant phonological alphabet – are most closely associated in the text with the jungle. Similarly Peter Brooks, making use of a brilliant quotation from Lord Jim:

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?

seizes on the word ‘stammerings’ and continues

The word ‘stammerings’ may imply that the search for utterance will always encounter a crossing of voices, creating a dialogic discourse of more complex reference and truth than the heaven-and-earth-shaking last word. (Brooks: 80)

But he seems almost obtusely to refuse to recognise that it is in the depiction of the African jungle that we ‘encounter a crossing of voices….a dialogic discourse more complex…. than the heaven and earth shaking last word’ – the whole carnivalization and topsy-turvy-dom that subverts the hegemony of the voice of authority and the authority of the voice. It is precisely stammering (Deleuze's 'stuttering') that frustrates the very possibility of a full utterance – as we saw at the very beginning.
           
Hillis Miller seems to recognise in the text a ‘cacophony of dissident voices’ but then regards this cacophony as the triumph of darkness –

The direction of the flow of language reverses. It flows from the darkness instead of toward it. Kurtz is hollow at the core and so the wilderness can speak through him, use him to speak as a ventriloquist’s dummy through which its terrible messages may be broadcast to the world: ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ ‘The horror!’ (Miller: 220)

Again there is confusion: yes, there is a reverse flow of language – perhaps from the darkness, but this is not negative: it is the darkness of the body, the darkness of writing, the darkness of the Other, of Woman, of the world of Differance (to use the Derridean term) – and it is a gross calumny to blame the darkness for Kurtz’s ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ and ‘The horror!’ These are what Kurtz brings with him and what the darkness resists.
           
Others have given a more positive gloss to the novel's alleged failure to say what it means. For Hawthorn the failure of the novel to 'express the inexpressible' is the very mark of its success:

Dr Leavis associates Marlow's incoherence with a failure of meaning in the book, whereas it is a part of that book's meaning. (Hawthorn: p. 30)

while a more recent commentator has thrilled to the prospect that in the heart of darkness is to be found the Lacanian das Ding ('the Thing'):

This term, which has Kantian echoes, designates a psychic or existential realm outside the Symbolic order of language, knowledge and the Law. As such, it is beyond representation, and stubbornly resists definition or even exemplification. (Collits: p. 121)

For a third kind of reader, as we have seen, the novel's indeterminacy and hesitations, its subversion and destabilisation of its own discourse are an occasion for hope:

Conrad's self-consciously circular narrative forms draw attention to themselves as artificial constructions, encouraging us to sense the potential of a reality that seemed inaccessible to imperialism, just beyond its control, and that only well after Conrad's death in 1914 acquired a substantial presence. (Said: p. 32)

Benita Parry goes furthest in this direction in her more recent work. She wants to look, she says, 'beyond the book's manifest recoil from a mythic "Africa" and toward its inchoate apprehensions of what lies beyond its own cognitive compass…… to another semantic discourse that it own discourse cannot decipher…' and she continues:

I have tried to suggest that Heart of Darkness, in Marcuse's phrase, condenses an 'indictment of established realities.' But more, in its intimations of what may yet come out of an 'Africa' that in the fiction cannot speak its name, the book alludes to a reality that lies beyond its own epistemologically constrained field of vision. This Africa, to whose age-old voice Europe had for long remained deaf, was to acquire new accents that Conrad, ignorant of Africa's histories, cosmologies, social forms, and cultures, could not have imagined when intuiting those indiscernible possibilities that the silently expectant continent was holding in abeyance. Indeed, whereas the people are effectively silenced, the landscape is rendered eloquent. (Parry: 49-50)

I think this is all very well, but I have tried to argue that it still does less than justice to the text. The antithetical balance of the last sentence is elegant but just not true: the 'people' of Heart of Darkness, beginning with the Savage Woman, are shouting their heads off: the fact that we cannot understand what they are saying doesn't mean that we cannot hear them. I am also uneasy about Conrad's 'ignorance' – in fact I sometimes think that the noise of Conrad's text is being treated as so many commentators treat the noise of the African jungle: as if it wasn't there. Conrad does not parade a 'knowledge' of Africa – had he done so he would probably have been accused of usurping the Africans' right to represent themselves – but there is every evidence in the text that Africa is awash with its own 'histories, cosmologies, social forms and cultures', all encapsulated in that brilliant and strident image of the Savage Woman. The notion that Heart of Darkness depicts 'a silently expectant continent' is sheer nonsense.

What Parry fails to come to terms with is precisely what Kurtz and Marlow fail to come to terms with – with all that massive compendium of energy and articulation, that multiplicity of voices, those social and institutional rites – indeed ‘unspeakable [w]rites’ because ungoverned by the spoken voice – that Derrida marshals under the banner of arche-écriture, of writing in the largest sense. Comprehended in this amalgam is all that the voice of the text has conjured: otherness, difference, multiplicity, blackness, the jungle, the body, the feminine – ‘the women are out of it completely’ – all things that are anathematized as enemies, criminals, usurpers, savages, barbarian. It is this that accounts for the fact that what we have narrated in Heart of Darkness is one more of Marlow’s ‘inconclusive experiences’ (p. 8). It is this failed encounter – the failure, in a sense, to broach the Oedipal, the failure to abandon a parthenogenic fixation which is of a piece with the privileging of the voice – that of necessity precipitates the phantasmatic collapse I have spoken of earlier.
           
It is this that explains the lie to the Intended – the refusal to bring the experience home to her. It is all there, welling up in the darkness before the door, the whole complex event cresting for catharsis:

The vision seemed to enter the house with me – the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshipers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart – the heart of a conquering darkness. It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful rush which, it seemed to me, I would have to keep back alone for the salvation of another soul. (p. 91)

And Marlow, indeed, keeps it back: he claims he does so to protect her, but in fact it is to protect himself. The refusal to allow the Intended to hear ‘The horror! the horror!’ is the refusal of the one opportunity for an afterwardsness (Nachträglichkeit – this is the strictly technical term for the 'delayed decoding' that, as we have seen, Ian Watt has claimed characterises the narrative strategy of the text as a whole) repetition of the experience and its exorcization – what Marlow has called for earlier when he remarks plaintively to the audience aboard the Nellie ‘Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know. . . .’ Marlow’s lie is an act of bad faith, of disavowal, that betrays and leaves suspended in the void the Intended’s ‘j’ouis! j’ouis!’ – her j’ouis-sance, jouissance – the horror and the ecstasy of the darkness and of the feminine:

I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it – I was sure!' (p. 96)

The dark continent and woman are, indeed, one. The failed encounter with the one is the same as the failed encounter with the other.

In fobbing off the Intended with the lie that Kurtz’s last words were her name Marlow seeks to recuperate the privileges and reassurances of the proper name that genealogy and writing must ever render improper. Seeking to domesticate the horror by substituting for it the name of the Intended, Marlow attempts to reclaim her from her functional position and dispersal in a linguistic-social network, in a network of differences, in a system of arche-écriture – such as those occupied by practically all the other dramatis personae in the narrative: the Director of Companies, the Lawyer and the Accountant at the beginning or, indeed, the Chief Accountant and the Manager of the Central Station – all these designations being what Derrida terms ‘abstracts’. (Derrida (1976): 111) For this, in the end, is what the jungle and the darkness are – the social and the law, with all their massive energy, their threat and their promise. This is the very threat and the very promise, the ‘monstrosity’, that Derrida sees emerging from the deconstructive project and that Deleuze and Guattari regard as the glimpse of ‘another possible community’ facilitated by the deterritorializations of minor writing. (Deleuze and Guattari: 17)
           
These conclusions should not come as a surprise for this equivalence of the criminal and the social and the comparison of the social world to a gigantic writing – in fact knitting – machine is to be found in a number of places in the correspondence Conrad wrote to Cunningham Graham at the time of writing Heart of Darkness. It is in a letter actually discussing Heart of Darkness that he makes his notorious remark:

L’homme est un animal méchant. Sa méchanceté doit être organisée. Le crime est une condition nécéssaire de l’existence organisée. La société est essentielment criminelle – ou elle n’existerait pas. C’est l’égoisme qui sauve tout – absolument tout – tout ce que nous abhorrons tout ce que nous aimons. Et tout se tient. Voilà pourquoi je respecte les extrêmes anarchistes. – ‘Je souhaite l’extermination generale’ – Très bien. C’est juste et ce qui est plus c’est clair. (Conrad (1986): 159)

while in an earlier letter we have the following:

There is a – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider – but it goes on knitting. You come and say: “this is all right; it’s only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this – for instance – celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold”. Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident – and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is – and it is indestructible!
It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters. I’ll admit however that to look at the remorseless process is sometimes amusing. (Conrad (1983): 425)

You cannot, of course, simply read off the novel from these unguarded musings. They are typical of a certain fin-de-siècle entropic pessimism and nihilism – the sense of a whole social order becoming autonomous and indifferent to the human condition. The egoism that the first quotation claims will save us from the criminality of the social, when it becomes the anarchist cry of ‘Exterminate all the brutes,’ is the very cry that is called into question by the text itself. As for the inhuman heartlessness and conscience-less-ness of the knitting/writing machine here, that is far from the sense of exuberance, capriciousness, vitality, joyousness that even Marlow senses at the heart of darkness:

But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. …The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. (pp. 43-4)

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