Desire in Heart of Darkness

Desire in Heart of Darkness

S T E P H E N R O S S

U N I V E R S I T Y O F V I C T O R I A

Heart of Darkness is by now so familiar to us, so studied, commentedupon, written about, argued over, appropriated, liberated, vilified,recuperated, rehashed, taught and retaught that it might seem asthough there can hardly be anything left worth saying about it. Yetdespite the virtual industry of criticism which has sprung up aroundHeart of Darkness in the century since its publication, an important veinhas been surprisingly neglected. This vein consists of readings whichsynthesize psychological with ideological perspectives to illuminate theinextricable intertwining of the psychic and the social in Heart of Dark-ness. That it has remained virtually unexplored is particularly sur-prising given Edward Garnett’s recognition of its centrality to thenovella in his 1902 review of Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories.There, he called Heart of Darkness a “psychological masterpiece” whichrelates “the things of the spirit to the things of the flesh, . . . the invisiblelife to the visible, . . . the sub-conscious life within us, our obscuremotives and instincts, to our conscious actions, feelings and outlook”(Garnett 132). The following year, another early reviewer pointed tothis important feature of the novella by complaining of the “wearying”effect of its “entanglement of psychological with external phenomena”(New York Times Saturday Review 296).

Both of these comments most likely belong in the category of whatthe New Critics called the affective fallacy, a version of the “adjectivalinsistence” (Leavis 204) attendant upon the literary impressionist tech-nique by which Conrad sought to convey psychological states throughan atmospherics so intense that “by the end of the tale an event as nat-ural as the darkening sky stands as a somber moral warning” (Lev-

Conradiana, vol. 36, no. 1–2, 2004

enson 405). But they also suggest the necessity of commenting on theirreducible commingling of the psychic and the social, the psycholog-ical and the ideological in Heart of Darkness. Their suggestion of thisnecessity has been echoed with varying degrees of emphasis by criticslike Andrea White, Paul Kirschner, Kimberly J. Devlin, Tony C. Brown,Henry Staten, and Thomas Cousineau. Reynold Humphries and BarryStampfl have argued for more or less intrinsic relationships in thenovella between the unconscious and “the mechanisms of a capitalisteconomy” (30–31) and “processes of imperialist history,” (184) respec-tively, while Tony E. Jackson has gone so far as to contend that “Heart ofDarkness proves that not only are the sacred givens of Western civiliza-tion no longer true, but the self is no longer true” (Jackson 4). Thesecomments are certainly provocative and promising, but they havealmost universally failed to develop into focused and sustainedanalyses of the interdependence of psychology and ideology which Itake to be the central problematic of Heart of Darkness.

Among the few exceptions to this failure is the recent work of Mari-anne DeKoven and Beth Sharon Ash, whose interventions have madeimportant advances on our understanding of Conrad’s obsession withportraying the complexities of the psyche even in the midst of overtlypolitical plots. DeKoven explores the “connection . . . between literarymodernism [including its focus on psychology] and political radi-calism” (4). To this end, she reads the imperialist register of Heart ofDarkness through Marlow’s “antiheroic return to the terrifying heart ofdesire, the maternal origin of life that generates . . . disillusionment anddeath” (85). Ash’s study makes use of “psychohistory” or “psychosocialdialectics” (3) to read Conrad’s novels in terms of his personal experi-ence of, and reaction to, modernity. In pursuit of this type of analysis,Ash undertakes “close psychological readings of Kurtz and Jim, and ofMarlow’s ‘inability to mourn,’ [to] suggest that Conrad sharesMarlow’s inclination to disavow loss and the need to mourn it” (128).As I hope will become clear, my reading is sympathetic to bothDeKoven’s and Ash’s, though it eschews both the feminist perspectivewhich leads DeKoven to treat the Congo river as an instance of “the Iri-garayan vaginal passage” (85) and the psychobiographical angle whichbrings Ash to relate her readings back to Conrad’s “impossible relationto his own text” (3) as symptomatic of his experience of modernity.

Much closer to the approach I take here is that advanced by MichaelLevenson in his provocative and nuanced essay, “The Value of Facts in

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the Heart of Darkness.” In the course of reading the novella as a “dramaof officialdom” (395) in the context of Max Weber’s work on bureau-cracy, Levenson points out that the complex interweaving of psychicwith social, which forms the crux of my reading, originated in theprocess of the novella’s composition: “Heart of Darkness . . . was con-ceived in distinctly social and political terms, and well into its composi-tion Conrad thought of it in this way. A work which has become per-haps the leading example of modern psychological fiction began withan expressed disregard for the fate of individuals” (392). Tracing thecomposition history of Heart of Darkness, Levenson shows that even asConrad attempted to write an objective critique of imperialist “ineffi-ciency,” he could not remain indifferent to the fate of individuals. Thusthe emphasis on “the political question” and “historical facts” (392) ofPart One gives way to Conrad’s characteristic obsession with “the fateof individuals,” leading him to create “a theater for the psyche, not in anisolated individual, but in a social configuration that gave the mind anexpanse on which to play itself out” (401). Levenson continues,“Conrad, in other words, envisions that form of community in whichsocial organization becomes psychological expression. . . . Heart of Dark-ness challenges the structure of institutions with the structure of themind” (401). Levenson pursues one avenue suggested by these com-ments by borrowing Max Weber’s notion of charisma to read Heart ofDarkness as “a drama of officialdom” (395) that “moves from an institu-tional to an instinctual domain” (405) so that “facts are inlaid with valueuntil judgment has become a task for the senses” rather than “the eth-ical mind” (405). I find the implications of Levenson’s commentaryprovocative and compelling, but I propose to pursue them in a some-what different direction from his, concentrating less on Heart of Dark-ness’s movement from the institutional to the instinctual than on itsdepiction of a fundamental continuity between them.

DeKoven’s, Ash’s, and particularly Levenson’s analyses areprovocative and rewarding, and provide a crucial context for myanalysis. Their insights inform one of my basic assumptions here: that,for all its engagement with the sociopolitical realities of modernity,Conrad’s work remains concerned first and foremost with individualexperience. I propose not to contravene their readings so much as toextend and develop their suggestion of a fundamental continuitybetween “social organization” and “psychological expression.” To thisend, I will trace the dialectical interdependence of the psychic and the

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social in Heart of Darkness to illuminate the remarkable vision—and cri-tique—of modernity their interaction articulates. I will begin by brieflyoutlining my theoretical and methodological commitments, beforesketching in the dominant social organization in which the novella’saction takes place, and finally elucidating the family romance by whichConrad inscribes the impingement of the ideological upon the libidinalto formulate a critique of modernity’s impact upon individual subjects.

Before I begin my analysis, I want to take a moment to outline itstheoretical and methodological commitments, and to define perhapsthe most vexed term in my discussion: modernity. First, though I use aLacanian model of psychoanalysis to explicate Conrad’s text, my over-riding concern with the modernity manifest (though in different ways)in the work of Conrad and Lacan also leads me to use Conrad’s text toelucidate Lacan’s concepts from time to time. I have tried to keep thistendency from inverting my preferred relationship between text andtheory (with the latter placed in service of the former), and hope that theend result is a clearer interpretation of Conrad’s work than would havebeen possible without the reciprocal illumination of Lacan’s theory.

In this context, and for the purposes of this essay, my use of the term“modernity”—which I take to reflect Conrad’s conception of, andengagement with, his contemporary culture—may best be delineated inrelation to the dominant social, political, ideological, and economicforce of at least the last 150 years: capitalism. As the primary feature ofmodernity, capitalism encompasses other characteristically modernphenomena like rationalization (both the tendency toward Taylorizedefficiency in labor practices and the incipient hegemony of instrumentalreason in epistemological and ontological realms)1 and secularization (adiminishment in—rather than an absolute loss of—shared normativevalues and belief systems based on a metaphysical teleology).2 Capi-talism’s remarkable malleability answers to Marshall Berman’s charac-terization of modernity as a cultural situation of “permanent revolu-tion” (95) ensuring not only its survival, but its increasing dominationof all aspects of life as the age of industrial revolution and nation-state-based empire building gave way to consumer culture and the postcolo-nial period of transnational business interests and corporate globaliza-tion. The last, and single most important, feature of modernity asincipient global capitalism which informs my discussion here—andConrad’s critique in Heart of Darkness—is its power to produce specifi-cally modern subjectivities. In Marx’s classic formulation, capitalist


modernity “not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subjectfor the object” (Marx 230).3

This element of modernity turns on the unprecedented manipula-tion and configuration of desire (both psychological and ideological)under capitalist culture, forming the focal point of both Conrad’s cri-tique and Lacan’s theory, simultaneously justifying my use of themtogether here and suggesting a larger (though perhaps not explicitlyformulated) truth about the experience of modernity.

I. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

The oppressive social organization in Heart of Darkness has been abun-dantly documented already, so I will avoid redundancy as much as pos-sible by simply highlighting its key features in the basic terms integralto my reading. Following Walter Allen’s contention that Conrad oftenset his works in remote locations out of a need to create “laboratory con-ditions” (Allen 309) in which to pursue his themes, I maintain that wemay read the social organization of Heart of Darkness—captured in thecorporate culture of the allegorically-named “Company” (Heart of Dark-ness 12) for which Marlow and Kurtz work—as a metonym for moder-nity. Almost from the tale’s outset, this social organization is power-fully linked to the psychic situation through the symbolic order. In theprimal scene of the novel (one which Conrad shares with his narrator),the young Marlow pores over maps choosing the places he would mostlike to visit, lingering especially over the many “blank spaces” (11).“The biggest—the most blank, so to speak” (11) is the heart of Africa,the journey to which forms the occasion for his tale of psychological dis-covery. From the Western perspective that Marlow would have had as ayoung boy growing up at the heart of the British Empire, these blankspaces are but undiscovered dominions, areas without proper socialorganization, civilization, or enlightenment. Their blankness suggestsdarkness as well, a chromatic expression of the feral character that res-onates with the cliché of “darkest Africa” and which is routinely takento be the “darkness” of the novel’s title.

It is somewhat perplexing, then, to find that the exploration andmapping that take place between Marlow’s youth and his maturityappear not as an illumination, but as a darkening: “[B]y this time it wasnot a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood withrivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of


delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. Ithad become a place of darkness” (11–12).4 In Lacanian terms and inMarlow’s conception, the mapping of the blank spaces amounts to theconstruction, rather than the rendering, of geographical reality. Just as,according to Lacan, the application of the symbolic to the real producesreality as the organized world in which subjects exist, so its applicationto the undifferentiated spaces indicated by blankness on the map pro-duces geographical reality. This production of geographical reality is soelementary an operation that its manufactured result appears simply asrendering; it is an ideological procedure whose opacity masquerades,for its consuming subjects, as transparency. And yet Marlow alerts us tothe artificiality of this process when he describes the changes made tothe mapped area not as filling in representations of geographical fea-tures, but as the advent of “lakes and rivers,” whose origin in symbolicfiat is reinforced by their association in a syntactic group with “names”:“It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names.”Reproducing on a geopolitical scale the production of reality throughthe application of the symbolic in the process of subjectivization, map-ping here produces geographical reality by organizing the flux of thenatural world according to categories and demands of a particular (i.e.,ideological) symbolic order.

In this case, the particular symbolic order manifest in the mappingprocess is that of modernity as capitalist rationalization, culminating inmonopolistic trading concerns driven by the profit motive and thesteam engine (12).5 Conrad lays out this ideological dimension bylinking the darkening strokes of mapping to the black ink used to indi-cate profit in accounting. A graphological counterpart to the delineationof “lakes and rivers” in the mapping process, the ledger-work ofaccounting translates geographical exploration into figures of profit.This connection is reinforced by the chief accountant, whose impor-tance is signaled in part by his position as the gatekeeper to the river atthe Outer Station, an important point at which the symbolic map is teth-ered to the real landscape. His position combines with his ability tocreate order out of the chaos surrounding him by reducing everythingto figures in a ledger to forge a conceptual link with the power of map-ping to make order out of the unruly landscape through the applicationof a symbolic grid of coordinates.

This set of associations takes on the dimensions of a critique of capi-talist modernity in light of the privileged position Conrad gives “the


Company” over any political entity as the driving force behind, and theprimary beneficiary of, the mapping process. Conrad makes a decisivepoint here as he pushes aside the predominant conception of imperi-alism as a nationally driven endeavor, instead making a private for-profit enterprise the chief agency at work in the region.6 In this context,Marlow’s Englishness meshes with the Company’s continental base tocreate a picture (and critique) not of nineteenth-century nation-stateimperialism, but of the incipient multinational capitalism that willbecome the dominant feature of modernity. Unwilling to let the truthbehind such seemingly transparent projects as geographical explo-ration elude his account, Conrad insistently lays bare the occulted con-nections that function as the inner workings of “the vilest scramble forloot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geo-graphical exploration” (“Stanley Falls” 187). In doing so, he provides uswith a model for reading through his juxtapositions to discern their crit-ical logic, restoring the disfigured history about which he writes to afuller and more meaningful vision of modernity.

The reality of the social organization thus produced by capitalistexploration and exploitation of the region is grounded in one particularsignifier, a commodity which is of the essence of Africa and vital toEuropean profit margins. That signifier/commodity is ivory. “Theword ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You wouldthink they were praying to it” (Heart of Darkness 26). As a commodity,ivory justifies the Company’s presence in the Congo and organizes allthe commercial (which is to say virtually all) activity in the region; itlures Kurtz there in the novella’s prehistory, sends Marlow after Kurtz,and even imagistically draws the Intended into its web of influence atthe novella’s close. Though ivory itself is clearly the object of the materi-alist operation of the Company’s interests in the region, its real powerlies in its status as a fetishized signifier, a quasi-sacred point de capiton7

rounding the ideological field of “reality” as dictated by the profitmotive. Marlow himself points to this operation as he restricts us to therealm of the signifier by directing our attention to “ivory” as a mantrarather than a material good—he does not see any ivory at all until hearrives at the Central Station.

In addition to, and consistent with, its status as a point de capiton,“ivory” also represents a multivalent objet a—the object-cause ofdesire8—which further tightens the bonds between the psychic and thesocial in Heart of Darkness: it is the object-cause not only of the Com-


pany’s desire, but also of its employees’ desire inasmuch as they earnpercentages on the profit it generates. At this point, the operation of thefetishization takes on a more explicitly psychological dimension as the(conjoined) twin registers of libidinal and capitalist desire converge ona single signifier (cf. the depiction of the Intended in terms of ivory[Heart of Darkness 72–75]). The transferal of libidinal desire onto theobject of capitalist desire replicates and reinforces the process by whichexchange value and association transform the product into a fetishizedcommodity. This entire process is bound up with the colonization oflibidinal desire by capitalism as modernity transforms subjectivity, pro-ducing, in its extreme manifestations, men like Kurtz. The status of“ivory” as both corporate and individual point de capiton/objet a thuslinks corporate desire to personal desire. Marlow’s emphasis on itsstatus as an overdetermined and fetishized signifier foregrounds thisoperation of desire as both a psychological and an ideological elementof the novella’s social organization, and prepares the way for its sus-tained critique of modernity through its exploration of desire and sub-jectivity.

Backing up the de facto potency of “ivory” to ground and organizethe ideological field in Heart of Darkness is the establishment of an entirelegal system around it. In this respect, the Company’s profit-drivenhegemony extends to a configuration of the law that correspondsclosely to its Lacanian formulation in “The Function and Field of Speechand Language.” The most salient point of this formulation is that thelaw is at root the law of the signifier: “the law of man has been the law oflanguage since the first words of recognition presided over the firstgifts” (Lacan 61). The logic of substitution and supplementarityintrinsic to the operation of language permeates all aspects of socialexchange for Lacan, from gift-giving through marital contracts, to theestablishment of larger social pacts and treaties (Lacan 61–67). In thisregard, the Lacanian formulation of the law is both universal and local,transhistorical and contingent: it governs all exchange from the mostbasic offering of a signifier in place of a material item (first formulatedby Freud’s explanation of the child’s game of fort/da) to the elaborate,multivalent, and locally variable fusions of the libidinal with the socialand commercial in traditional marriage ceremonies (Lacan makes spe-cific reference to the “modern” restriction of the incest prohibition tomother and sister, for example, as a particular instance of a universallaw [Lacan 66]), and the highly specialized terms of exchange involved


in pacts governing social, commercial, and political prohibitions andlicenses.

The law in Heart of Darkness operates analogously, taking its uni-versal dimension from the Company’s hegemonic governance, and itsparticularity from the Company’s designation of ivory as the sine quanon of exchange in the region, whether social, political, libidinal, or eco-nomic. It is the means by which the Company not only controls com-merce, but also “gives identities, establishes purposes, assigns des-tinies, and with its bizarre configuration of Central and Inner Stationseven constructs geography” (Levenson 395). The Company’s power todictate the law and thus to manipulate reality itself brings us back notonly to Lacan’s emphasis on the law as the law of the signifier, but alsoto Marlow’s emphasis on “ivory” (as opposed to the material good,ivory) as the fundamental element in the ideological field he enterswhen he signs on with the Company. Taken together, Lacan’s theoryand Marlow’s description bring to light the constitutive interrelation-ship between signification and desire in the ideological field of Heart ofDarkness, even as they point to the larger field of modernity with whichboth Conrad and Lacan engaged.

Marlow’s insistence that the introduction of the law has broughtabout not order but criminality provides perhaps the best example ofhow the arbitrary relationship between signification and reality accom-plished by the law informs the Company’s social organization of theCongo: “A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six blackmen advanced in a file toiling up the path . . . They were called criminalsand the outraged law like the bursting shells had come to them, aninsoluble mystery from the sea” (Heart of Darkness 19; my emphasis).Again insisting on the primacy of signification, Marlow points out thatthe men are only criminals by virtue of the power of the law to call themsuch. The full absurdity of this designation of certain men as criminalsaccording to a system of which they know nothing, and which they donot understand, comes out only much later, when Marlow attempts tomake sense of the Harlequin’s assertion that the heads on stakes outsideKurtz’s hut are those of rebels: “Rebels! What would be the next defini-tion I was to hear. There had been enemies, criminals, workers—andthese were—rebels” (58). By association, Marlow links the logic behindintroducing and administering the arbitrary law of modernity (ninetenths of which concerns possession) to the ‘unsound methods’ ofKurtz’s administration at the Inner Station. Prior to the advent of the


law (and its enforcement by the Company), the men Marlow sees at theOuter Station could hardly even have been called criminals, let alonebeen criminals; the introduction of a social order driven by the need forprofit introduces a value system whereby there can be “something inthe world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must notlook at a halter” (27). In one fell swoop, Marlow brings the Foucauldiangesture of pointing out that the advent of the law necessitates theadvent of criminality together with the Nietzschean insight regardingthe construction of the law as a cultural instance of the delineation of“good” and “evil” as indexical concepts which take their significancefrom the power which nominates them.

The connection between the arbitrary establishment of the law andthe imperatives of the economic culture behind the Company’s hege-mony in the Congo is solidified when Marlow stumbles into the groveof death only to discover that the “criminals” he saw on the path are infact guilty only of being physically capable of furthering the Company’sinterests. When this capability expires, as it has for the men Marlowsees in the grove of death, their sentence of hard labor becomes a deathsentence: “The work was going on. The work! And this was the placewhere some of the helpers had withdrawn to die. They were dyingslowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not crimi-nals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of dis-ease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom” (20).9 Nei-ther “enemies” nor “criminals,” these men are simply “helpers” whohave outlived (barely) their usefulness. Marlow’s bizarre use of theterm “helpers” at this juncture points to the difficulty of reconcilingwhat he sees with the signification options left him by the Company’slexicon: he can neither include the men among the law-abiding, sincethey have been deemed “criminals” by the authority of the land; nor callthem “slaves,” since to do so would be to accuse the Company ofbehaving illegally itself.10 “Helpers” thus attempts to balance these twoequally inadmissible options even as it exposes the dynamic of legalisticinversion at work in the Company’s governance of the Congo region.

In the traditional order of punishment by labor, a law is instituted,the violation of which condemns the criminal to hard labor as a servant(rather than an “enemy”) of the state against the laws of which he or shehas transgressed. In this case the work is a corollary to the law, supple-menting it as a reparative measure for the damage done or posed to thesocial organization by the criminal. In the Company’s inversion of this


process, the demand for work is discovered first. The institution of thelaw is put in place not with the intention of ensuring the stability of thesocial organization, but to generate a captive work force. It is legislatedslavery accomplished according to the arbitrary logic of significationand the potency of speech acts. Marlow’s inability to assimilate thetruth of the situation at this point in the narrative indicates the difficultyof Conrad’s critique, as it strives to emphasize the extent to whichmodernity’s recognition of the arbitrariness of the law can give way toits appropriation by vested interests. By first insisting on Marlow’s sen-sitivity to the operations behind signification and then depicting a crisisof that sensitivity at a crucial moment in Marlow’s initiation into thecorporate culture of the Company, Conrad sets down a prescient visionof the law’s appropriation by economic interests as modernity spreadsto become a global phenomenon.

The underlying principle of the law as it operates in Heart of Dark-ness, and the source of its relevance for my reading, is the imperative tosuspend and defer gratification of desire, to subordinate the individualwill-to-gratification to the larger corporate (i.e., social) will. In thisregard, the law that is generated by the Company, and which sanctionsits activity, bears a striking similarity to the psychic law as experiencedby the infant at the point of entry into the symbolic order. The actionwhich prompts this transition from primary narcissism to subjectivity isthe father’s command that the infant defer his or her gratification ofdesire for the mother; it is a self-enforcing and self-validating limitationof gratification which is based ultimately on the father’s right to enjoygratification before and in excess of the infant’s gratification. In both thesocial and the psychic situations, compliance with this command(though enforced with the threat of destruction) is rewarded by admit-tance to the community—whether that of the human community boundtogether by the symbolic order or that of a more circumscribed ideolog-ical community. By this mechanism, the ostensibly willing (but in factforced) containment of the will to gratification is imbued with ethical,even moral, value; it is an individual sacrifice which serves the greatergood of the community. This doubling and the problems that arisewhen desire is divested of all regulatory forces (i.e., when the father hasno limitations on his own gratification, or when a particular corporateor social entity behaves without restriction) forms the crux of bothLacan’s and Conrad’s engagement with modernity. It suggests not onlysimilarity but continuity between the psychic and the social, and articu-


lates the basic interdependence which structures and textures Heart ofDarkness.

From the semi-autobiographical primal scene in which Marlow firstregisters the “blank spaces” on the map of Africa to his participation inthe darkening work of imperialist exploration, Conrad creates a micro-cosmic vision of modernity in Heart of Darkness. Characterizing theivory collectors as “pilgrims” and capturing the fetishization of ivory asthe ideological point de capiton of the social organization, Conrad positsincipient global capitalism as the horizon of the social organization bymaking the Company, rather than any nation, the chief power in theland. This last move drives home the implications of the ideologically-motivated constructedness of this social organization by focusing onthe Company’s power as the origin, arbiter, and executor of the law.Starting with the Company’s ability to create an entire class of “crimi-nals” by discursive fiat, Conrad repeatedly draws our attention to howsuch constructions not only displace people and despoil landscapes, butactually alter individual identities and reconfigure subjectivities. Thisfinal step in the establishment of a social organization, the ideologicalfield on which the narrative unfolds, sets the stage for a closer consider-ation of how that ideological field impinges upon those to whom itsbasic principles seem inevitable, if not natural and just—people likeMarlow, Kurtz, and the Intended.

II. FAMILY ROMANCE

Though it takes place most obviously on a broad scale like that outlinedabove, the critique of modernity in Heart of Darkness finds its most com-pelling articulation in the narrative of libidinal desire and disruptedfamily romance which subtends the tale of Kurtz’s disintegration. In thebackground of the narrative of Marlow’s journey up the river to fetchKurtz is a domestic setting that explains not only Kurtz’s original deci-sion to go to the Congo, but also his erratic and finally fatal behavioronce there. Most critics sum up Kurtz’s background by pointing to thestatement that “[a]ll Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (50),ignoring the additional concrete information with which Marlow pro-vides us (70, 74; I will return to these particulars shortly). Perhaps themost striking feature of this background is that there is no mention ofKurtz’s father, and his mother is mentioned only when she dies,attended, significantly, by his fiancée, the Intended. This truncated


family narrative does not explicitly tell us a great deal about Kurtz’sbackground, but it does offer a suggestive starting point. The absence ofa father places the full burden of Kurtz’s psychic history on his mother;when she dies in the company of his Intended, the family romancepasses into a state of suspension supported entirely by the Intended. Inthe absence of any siblings, and with the death or absence of the par-ents, the Kurtz family romance is threatened with a final discontinuityand the Intended is cathected with the entire libidinal burden of familialcontinuity. And while this is a long way from a unique situation (theperpetuation of family lines devolves onto individuals, particularlyindividual women, all the time), Conrad makes the most of it as the nar-rative it sets in motion underwrites and counterpoints the surface plotof modernity’s imperialist excesses.

Perhaps the chief way in which Conrad draws our attention to theimportance of the libidinal register of the novel is through his insistentrecourse to calling Kurtz’s fiancée simply “his Intended.” Conrad capi-talizes on this overt signification by wedding it to the commentary onsignification, and its role in constructing the reality we encounter(whether narrative or concrete), that he has already undertakenthrough Marlow’s difficulties with and evasions of the incommensura-bility of signification. Functioning as a rigid designator, the signifier“Intended” both marks Kurtz’s fiancée’s place in the symbolic ordersurrounding Kurtz (she has, apparently, no existence apart from herfunction as his betrothed) and literally defines her; it is the essence ofher subjectivity as a signifier for other signifiers. The word “Intended”carries a sense of deferral and suspension of desire that backs up themore subtle commentary on signification and desire encoded inMarlow’s uncertain use of inadequate or overly general signifiers. As aliteral embodiment of intention as yet unfulfilled, the Intended capturesthe narrative’s basic concern with the deflections, deferrals, and suspen-sions of desire, becoming “the source of the momentum energizing[Kurtz’s] mistaken mission; in short, his intention” (Baker 342). Herstatus as “Intended” is, in effect, an existential condition which fixes herin a state of suspended gratification. Furthermore, this suspended grati-fication is not her own, but that of Kurtz, in relation to which she is theever-receding endpoint; she represents the objet a in Kurtz’s experienceof desire’s asymptotic operation.

The specificity of Kurtz’s narcissistic insistence on possession res-onates with the cultural emphasis on possession encoded in the institu-


tion of the law, suggesting some continuity between personal subjectivedesire and its cultural and institutional counterpart. Conrad works withthis suggestion of continuity by having Kurtz speak of “his Intended”in the same breath as he speaks of “his ivory” (Heart of Darkness 49),making her the libidinal counterpart of the commercial ivory. The gen-erality accorded by her anonymous moniker subtends the specificity ofher role in relation to Kurtz by making her an almost allegorical figureof modernity’s interference with the libidinal lives of its subjects. Thecapitalization of her appellation recalls Marlow’s sardonic reference tohis aunt’s characterization of him as “one of the Workers, with a cap-ital—you know,” and aligns her with other characters who are definedonly as generic versions of their roles in the Company, like theaccountant, the Manager, the General Manager, and Marlow’s audienceon the Nellie. The emphasis on the signifier which underwrites so muchof the novel thus also comes to the fore here, as “Intended” functions onboth the subjective and the cultural levels, inscribing the logic of signifi-cation and desire into the fabric of Marlow’s narrative on a level at onceintensely personal and diffusely general, simultaneously concentratingthe question of subject formation in a particular instance and pointingto its general conditions under modernity.

This emphasis on the power of signification to structure reality alsopoints to the ways in which it can mask certain unpalatable features ofreality. Just as the law of the Company designates those it needs forslave labor as “criminals” in order to maintain a ready work force, sothe formal designation of Kurtz’s fiancée as “his Intended” masks theeconomic imperative that keeps their relationship from consummationand sustains them both in situations of perpetually suspended anddeferred desire. When Marlow goes to visit the Intended near the end ofthe narrative, he tells us, “I had heard that her engagement with Kurtzhad been disapproved by her people. He wasn’t rich enough or some-thing. And indeed I don’t know whether he had not been a pauper allhis life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatienceof comparative poverty that drove him out there” (74). The very lan-guage of this description calls to mind a bank’s rejection of a loan appli-cation on the basis of insufficient collateral, revealing the literal bottomline, the vulgar economic principle behind Kurtz’s decision to go to theCongo. For all his “burning noble words” (50) about exerting “a powerfor good practically unbounded” (50), Kurtz also goes to the Congowith the pragmatic aim of making his fortune.11 Further, Marlow gives


us good reason to believe that though Kurtz may have been poor all hislife, it is not until his poverty keeps him from marrying the girl of hischoice that he gets impatient enough to undertake such a desperateenterprise. Though it is almost glossed over in Marlow’s narrative, thisdetail points to a fundamental strain of the novel: Kurtz is first and fore-most a victim of the impingement of economic imperatives into thelibidinal life of the individual subject. His desire for the Intended isthwarted by class considerations that ultimately come down to money;in response, he undertakes a dangerous but also lucrative enterprise toearn the satisfaction of his libidinal desire—all under the sign of such“honorable intentions” as serve to assuage public uneasiness aboutimperialism and private qualms about not only the pursuit of sexualgratification, but social status and respectability as well.

Initially evaluated in monetary terms, being designated as not goodenough because he is not rich enough, Kurtz unthinkingly buys into thevery system that so reduces him. That is, he not only ties his own worthto his financial wherewithal, but also makes the Intended into a com-modity, the right to enjoyment of which he can literally earn. Kurtz goesoff to become a self-made man, intending to use the machinery of capi-talist social climbing as a means to the end of his libidinal desire. Facedwith the indefinite deferral of his libidinal desire, Kurtz devotes all hisenergy to procuring ivory, believing that the satisfaction of his personaldesire is inexorably tied to his generation of wealth for the Company(on which he earns percentages). The result is a career that enacts theasymptotic logic of desire, a logic which operates on both the libidinaland economic levels and which ultimately leads Kurtz to his horrifyinginsights and death. Driven by his frustrated libidinal desire, Kurtzmakes a Faustian12 deal with the Company and enters the realm of capi-talist desire and production in which satisfaction exists only in the per-petuation of desire. He thus exemplifies the interplay between thesocial and the psychic, experiencing in his journey towards “the horror”the historically specific capitalist exploitation of the enduring psychicreality of desire. Generations of critics are thus right to assume thatwhat happens to Kurtz next is that he loses all restraint; what they havemissed is that the “colossal scale of his vile desires” (Heart of Darkness72), as they are unleashed by this lack of restraint, is continuous withthe desire he feels for the Intended and which is stifled by his penury.The monstrous desires in which Kurtz indulges while warlord of theInner Station region are the direct result of his frustrated desire for the


Intended as it is exacerbated by his “comparative poverty” (74); it is noaccident that the two chief outlets of his desire while in charge of theInner Station are sexual license and the procurement of “more ivorythan all the other agents together” (48).

While the point that Kurtz devotes himself to procuring more ivoryand hence producing wealth both for the Company and himself needslittle arguing, there is decidedly less evidence for my contention that theother main outlet of Kurtz’s desire is sexual license. In the absence ofdirect textual evidence for this assertion, we must turn our attention tothe figure of the African woman, Kurtz’s concubine at the Inner Station.Described only as “wild and gorgeous . . . savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent” (60), the African woman is clearly presented inconventional imperialist terms as a figure of unbridled, uncivilized pas-sion and lust. That she is a favorite of Kurtz’s and most likely his sexualpartner as well is suggested by the fact that she has “the value of severalelephant tusks upon her” (60) in addition to her other adornments.Given that the stockpile of ivory Kurtz has hoarded leads Marlow tocomment that one “would think there was not a single tusk left eitherabove or below the ground in the whole country” (49), the Africanwoman’s ivory adornments point to the same kind of equation ofwealth and libidinal desire that characterizes Kurtz’s earlier relation-ship with the Intended.13 Whereas he had been prevented by his eco-nomic situation from giving the Intended the all-important gift of aring, however, he clearly encounters no such resistance from the“people” of the African woman. The cleverly masked vulgar terms ofhis frustrated attempts to possess the Intended, here revealed as the“primitive” nature of Kurtz’s concubine, allow Conrad (in complicityhere with imperialist ideologies of racial difference) to expose the con-nection between libidinal and material accumulation. This combina-tion, taken with the other testimonies throughout the narrative ofKurtz’s unrestrained gratification “of his various lusts” (57) and “mon-strous passions” (65), indicates that he has not simply halted at the sati-ation of his lust for wealth when the opportunity to transform thatwealth into libidinal satisfaction as well presents itself to him. Finally,the simple binary of African woman/Intended combines with the asso-ciative logic of enjoyment/repression to suggest that the Africanwoman stands as much for the (uncivilized and narcissistic) gratifica-tion of libidinal desire as the Intended stands for its (civilized and neu-rotic) suspension and deferral. Indeed, Tony E. Jackson points out that,


at least within the lexicon of representations current at Conrad’s time,the savage per se (of which the African woman is presumably a partic-ular instance) embodies “the fantasy of a pre- or rather nonsymbolicconsciousness, of a condition wherein desire is immediately satisfied,wherein being is pure and unmediated by culture. This representationfigures the savage as living, relative to Western industrial civilization,in a state of jouissance” (Jackson 102). In direct opposition to the restric-tively civilized conduct of the Intended and her family, the Africanwoman truly does embody jouissance, and her close association withKurtz indicates not only that he has attempted to gratify his libidinaldesire as well as his economic desire, but that he has discovered some-thing essential about the nature of desire itself in the process.

Indeed, I would like to suggest at this point that the twin forces oflibidinal and economic desire which crisscross in Kurtz lead him to adiscovery of the nature of desire so profound and troubling that itprompts his famous last words. In the increasingly unbridled gratifica-tion of his “various lusts” Kurtz gradually becomes possessed by whatMarlow calls “the heavy mute spell of the wilderness that seemed todraw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutalinstincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions . . . thisalone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permittedaspirations” (Heart of Darkness 65). Supported in this “spell” by a socialorganization that encourages lawlessness so long as it is profitable,Kurtz manages to exceed even the loose limits of laissez-faire profi-teering. His ‘unsound methods’ are tolerated so long as he continues toship ivory with the correct paperwork (the “invoice” which so infuri-ates the Manager at the Central Station [33]) and to buy supplies fromthe Company stores. Only when he withholds ivory and repudiates theCompany’s monopoly on supplies (i.e., when he sends a load of ivory tothe station but himself turns back without obtaining fresh supplies fromthe Central Station [34]) is he deemed to have gone too far. Only thendoes the extremity of his transgression extend beyond simply breakingthe law, to eschewing all law together; he is not an outlaw, but utterly“unlawful.” Nearing the end of his pursuit of desire, Kurtz leavesbehind the restrictions of social organization altogether and gives in tothe seductive spell of instinctual gratification: “[I]t had taken him, lovedhim, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealedhis soul to its own” (49). Essentially experiencing a regression to primary narcissism through the gratification of his every desire—as


encouraged and facilitated by the Company’s profit ethic—Kurtz redis-covers the instincts of unfettered desire in all their violence and uncom-promising demand for unmitigated, uninterrupted, and undilutedjouissance. Indeed, Marlow’s description reads like a proto-Lacaniandescription of what might happen to an adult who managed to devolvepsychologically back far enough to remember the undifferentiation andtotal identification of the self with the gratification of one’s desires char-acteristic of the presymbolic infant.

Yet Kurtz is unable finally to complete this regression, just as he isultimately unable to satiate his desire. He finds instead that the losswhich drives him relentlessly onward in his quest for the elusive objet ais irremediable, just as there is no such thing as enough ivory to satisfythe Company’s demands. Marlow points to this conclusion as he specu-lates on the meaning of the heads Kurtz has mounted on stakes outsidehis hut: “They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the grati-fication of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him—some small matter which when the pressing need arose could not befound under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this defi-ciency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last” (57). Demonstrating characteristic astuteness,Marlow hits on the crux of Kurtz’s tragedy: the discovery that desireremains insatiable because it originates from a deep psychic woundwhich no object or succession of objects can ever heal. The “somethingwanting” in him is at base the déhiscence of subjectivity, the gap betweensignifier and signified which, according to Lacan, structures and drivessubjectivity. As Marlow extends his consideration of the nature ofKurtz’s tragedy, he approaches even closer to articulating this conclu-sion outright as he makes a connection between the “spell” whichenchants Kurtz and his discovery of the fundamentally fractured natureof the mature psyche.

[T]he terrible wilderness had found him out early, and hadtaken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. Ithink it had whispered to him things about himself which he didnot know, things of which he had no conception till he tookcounsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had provedirresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because hewas hollow at the core.” (57–58)


Having exhausted the external channels for satiation of his desire(the “fantastic invasion”), Kurtz is finally deflected into looking intohimself for the answer to the enigma of desire. When he does so, heplays out a dramatic crisis of subjectivity as he takes introspection to itsliteral and logical conclusion, glimpsing the abyss of human subjec-tivity and seeing in his final moment of extremity that jouissance anddeath are one and the same end of desire.

This insight constitutes the substance of the vision which promptshis famous “whispered cry” (72). Marlow contextualizes Kurtz’s lastwords with the terminology and conceptual apparatus for reading hisinsight as the culmination of a lifelong pursuit of desire:

It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face theexpression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again inevery detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during thatsupreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisperat some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was nomore than a breath: “The horror! The horror!” (68, my emphasis)

Beginning with the age-old image of blinding insight (and onewhich recalls the blindfolded woman holding a candle in Kurtz’s sketch[27]), Marlow focuses on vision as the primary modality of Kurtz’s“supreme moment of complete knowledge”: he cries out at “someimage, at some vision” that has “the appalling face of a glimpsed truth,”and not at some notional, conceptual, or ideational truth. Part of thereason for this, I would suggest, is that the vision Kurtz has is a glimpseof the hollowness within himself, of the death drive behind the inces-sant movement of desire; as such, it remains beyond the reach of sym-bolization and beyond articulation.14 It is a vision of the nothingness,the pure and irremediable absence at the heart of subjectivity posited byLacan, a truth the vision of which is made available to him only throughhis approach to the historically-specific kernel of antagonism at the coreof capitalist society (Laclau xi). Marlow supplements this suggestion bytying Kurtz to the ivory which has formed the primary object of hisdesire during his time in Africa. This alignment draws on the inevitableassociation of death with ivory collection to depict Kurtz as an embodi-ment of the death that lurks in the jouissance of desire. This confluence


of apparently opposite extremes is reinforced finally in the successionof expressions that pass over Kurtz’s face (“pride . . . power . . . craventerror . . . hopeless despair”) as he approaches the moment of extremityin which he has his definitive vision. Eyeballs rolling up in the momentof death as they do in the moment of jouissance, Kurtz has a vision of thevoid at the core of subjectivity and expresses it the only way he knowshow, not by describing it, but by crying out a warning that appliesequally to the transhistorical structuration of subjectivity and to the his-torically-specific system which exploits and reconfigures that structura-tion.15

The circuit of desire which reaches, to borrow from Marlow, “thefarthest point of navigation and the culminating point of experience”(Heart of Darkness 11) in Kurtz’s final words is finally completed asMarlow returns to its starting point by visiting the Intended. Perhapsthe most striking thing about the Intended when we finally meet her isher stasis. In contrast to both Kurtz and Marlow’s physical and psycho-logical journeys, the Intended has an almost deathly demeanor that isindicative of her arrested situation: “She came forward all in black witha pale head, floating towards me in the dusk” (72–73). Her embodimentof the principle of suspended and deferred desire in the primal scenethat drove Kurtz to the Congo is reinforced:

[S]he was one of those creatures that are not the playthings ofTime. For her he had died only yesterday. And by Jove, theimpression was so powerful that for me too he seemed to havedied only yesterday—nay, this very minute. I saw her and him inthe same instant of time—his death and her sorrow—I saw hersorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? Isaw them together—I heard them together. . . . my strained earsseemed to hear distinctly, mingled with her tone of despairingregret, the summing-up whisper of his eternal condemnation. (73)

Seemingly impervious to the passage of time—which is perhaps themost immediate experience we have of the movement of desire (thevariations in durée relative to one’s desire)—the Intended quite literallylives the suspension of desire which she represents in the narrative’sexploration of its dynamic. Having waited for Kurtz long enough tooutlive his mother, the Intended finds that her position as the object ofKurtz’s desire fossilizes with his death.


The mausolean atmosphere in which she lives penetrates Marlow’sconsciousness so that he not only experiences a collapse of time akin tothe Intended’s, but also senses that he has stumbled onto the ground ofdeath (or the entropic suspension of desire which may even be worsethan death), which he experiences as a diluted version of Kurtz’s finalvision. “I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panicin my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurdmysteries not fit for a human being to behold” (73). The Intended’sdrawing-room apparently correlates precisely enough to Kurtz’s dyingvision that it provokes a sense of panic in Marlow, as he finds that,despite his effort to draw back his foot from the abyss into which Kurtzstepped, he has somehow ended up in practically the same place.Indeed, immediately before he enters the Intended’s house, Marlow hasa vision of Kurtz “on the stretcher opening his mouth voraciously as ifto devour all the earth with all its mankind . . . a shadow insatiable”(72). This vision “seem[s] to enter the house with” Marlow as thoughthe entire momentum of unrestrained instinct unleashed by Kurtz weremounting a colossal return of the repressed to invade the sanctuary ofsuspended desire that is the Intended’s abode: “It was a moment of tri-umph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful rush which itseemed to me I would have to keep back alone for the salvation ofanother soul” (72). Finally the setting is complete, as Marlow recallsKurtz’s final words both as a foreshadowing of the lie he will tell theIntended about those words and as a powerful indication that he isabout to encounter a vision of what they signify. All of these images,memories, and motifs come together at last as Marlow, having seen theconclusion of Kurtz’s obsessive pursuit of desire, now arrives at itsorigin only to discover that the Intended, in her full allegorical signifi-cance, is in fact coterminous with the horror of Kurtz’s final vision.

Coded into the tale of Marlow’s quest, the tale of Kurtz’s beingdriven to the Congo by his frustrated desire for the Intended provides adomestic, libidinal undercurrent to the narrative. The Intended,cathected with Kurtz’s desire, is the crucial element in this narrativeand its vital link to the novel’s broader ideological dimension. This con-nection appears as she is cast as the libidinal equivalent to the ivory inthe novel’s symbolic economy: Kurtz is only in the Congo to earnenough money to be granted her hand in marriage. She bears the libid-inal burden of the Kurtz family narrative, and her appellation itself tiesher into the dynamic of deferred desire (physically, economically, and


semantically) as she becomes a manifestation (like the ivory) of the objeta, the concrete and intimate evidence of the asymptotic logic of desire.This trajectory culminates as Conrad exposes the interdependence ofcapitalist and libidinal desire in Kurtz’s twin obsessions with pro-ducing more ivory than all other agents combined and with indulgingthe sexual license made available to him by his concubine at the InnerStation. Finally, Kurtz’s last words articulate his vision of the truth ofdesire, its absolute insatiability and basis in an irremediable subjectivelack (what Lacan calls déhiscence) upon which the commercial culture ofmodernity capitalizes.

* * *

Depicting the “theory of social organization [that] contains implicationsfor a theory of modern character” (Levenson 399) hypothesized byWeber, Conrad in Heart of Darkness traces the contours of modernity’simpact upon subjectivity and desire. Beginning with the “laboratoryconditions” of a social organization which captures the features ofmodernity with which he is primarily concerned in Heart of Darkness(the culture of capitalism, ideological legitimation via fetishization, andcoercive enforcement of the law according to corporate expediency), hegradually zeroes in on the subjective consequences of such a culture viathe concrete impingement of economic imperatives into Kurtz’s familyromance. Heart of Darkness thus reveals Conrad to be much more thansimply “our most searching critic of bureaucracy” (397), but in fact ourmost astute diagnostician and piercing critic of the clash of the psychicand the social that takes place on the field of modern subjectivity.Tracing the particular confluence of forces governing the subjects inHeart of Darkness in Kurtz’s losing battle with the vagaries of desire as itis excited, manipulated, and exploited by the emerging capitalist hege-mony, Conrad thus provides perhaps the consummate account of thepredicament of the modern subject lost in a new cultural reality, a placeon the map so darkened now that it is impossible to read what mighthave gone before or instead.

NOTES

1 For more extended considerations of rationalization as a feature of moder-nity, see T. J. Jackson Lears, Marshall Berman, and Georg Lukács.

2 For more detailed discussions of secularization under modernity, see Matei


Calinescu, especially 41–42 and 62–63; Karl Marx, “Grundrisse”; Malcolm Brad-bury and James McFarlane (eds.); Georg Lukács; and Max Horkheimer andTheodor Adorno, especially chapter one, “The Concept of Enlightenment.”

3 Other critics who have described the same process in varying degrees ofMarxist idiom include Calinescu, Lukács, Peter Nicholls, Bradbury and McFar-lane, Lears, and Berman, whose summary of Marx’s conception of this processin “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” is perhaps the clearest and mostconcise of any:

the theme of insatiable desires and drives, permanent revolution,infinite development, perpetual creation and renewal in everysphere of life; and . . . the theme of nihilism, insatiable destruc-tion, the shattering and swallowing up of life, the heart ofdarkness, the horror . . . [is] infused into the life of every modernman by the drives and pressures of the bourgeois economy . . .[so that] their inner dynamism will reproduce and express theinward rhythms by which modern capitalism moves and lives.(102)

4 Jeremy Hawthorn and Ian Watt have remarked upon this oddity ofMarlow’s narrative, though neither accords it the attention it deserves in rela-tion to the interconnections between the psychic and the social that structureHeart of Darkness. See also Benita Parry, 23. That this is an element of the textwhich needs explication is borne out by the fact that such an astute critic asWalter Allen glosses over the relationship between darkness and enlighten-ment, preserving instead the simple binary according to which “the Heart ofDarkness of the title is at once the heart of Africa, the heart of evil—everythingthat is nihilistic, corrupt, and malign—and perhaps the heart of man,” but whichnonetheless remains “symbolized by Africa,” shrouding in darkness the Europeto which Marlow returns (304–05).

5 See also Levenson 395.6 A good deal of the astuteness of Conrad’s depiction here is a direct result of

Belgian King Leopold’s diabolical anticipation of government-business collu-sion. Making up for his relative lack of resources for the exploitation of theCongo by granting concessions to private business concerns (in exchange for ashare of the profit), Leopold effectively bridged the gap between imperialism asa national interest and imperialism as a business venture, a transfer captured byConrad in his radical reconfiguration of national imperialism in favor of thenameless Company’s trading concerns.

7 A point de capiton is a privileged signifier which taps into the irrationalimpulse to see a particular signifier as uniquely meaningful (i.e., as not subject tothe slippage of signification which renders other signifiers radically unstable)(Lacan 303). An ideological point de capiton operates similarly on a cultural level,structuring the ideological field by lending the appearance of immanent content


to certain signifiers, thus uniting the psychic and the ideological (Zizek SublimeObject of Ideology 87–97ff.).

8 Objet a is the name Lacan gives to the lack generated by the infant’s entryinto the symbolic (at the injunction of the law in its incarnation as the paternalfunction); it identifies that which is lost as the individual becomes a subject. Assuch, it is both the object of the subject’s desire and its cause. It is the object ofdesire insofar as the subject compulsively strives toward it; it is the cause ofdesire in its phylogenetic persistence in the psyche as a trace of that lost pleni-tude toward which desire tends. For further discussion, see Lacan 264–66 and314–24, Dylan Evans 124–26, and Slavoj Zizek Looking Awry 3–8 and The SublimeObject of Ideology 87–129. For an especially illuminating example of the ideolog-ical dimensions of point de capiton and objet a, see Zizek’s brilliant discussion ofMarlboro and Coca-Cola as anchors/objects of desire in the ideological field of“the spirit of America” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 96).

9 See Friedrich Nietzsche, 437–599. The connections between this arbitrarylegality and capitalism’s need for a ready and cheap labor pool become evenclearer in light of Patrick Brantlinger’s observation that “the ‘conquered races’ ofthe empire were often treated as a new proletariat—a proletariat much less dis-tinct from slaves than the working class at home” (182).

10 Another possibility, which Marlow does not seem to consider, is“workers,” though using this term would complicate matters for him even moreas it would place them in the same category in which his aunt places him whenshe calls him a “Worker” (15).

11 Several critics have noted this fact, but none has paid sufficient attention toits significance; for examples, see Watt 164, Kirschner 46, Staten 731, Devlin 728,and Tessitore 91–103.

12 That the drama of Kurtz’s career is essentially Faustian is something of acritical commonplace, though it is most clearly worked out by Cedric Watts (74ff.); see also Watt (167).

13 Jeremy Hawthorn provides a slightly different reading of this detail:“Marlow’s comment that the African woman ‘must have had the value of sev-eral elephant tusks upon her’ can be taken a number of ways. Either it suggeststhat this woman, too, is corrupted by the love of wealth or (I think more likely)that in using the ivory to provide decoration and display, she represents a morevital and straightforward life than the Europeans” (Hawthorn 202, n.12). I amnot quite sure how the two readings Hawthorn suggests are mutually exclusiveof each other, nor how they indicate an essential difference from the Europeans’love of wealth for the purposes of “decoration and display,” which we nowknow as conspicuous consumption. My own sense is that the differencesbetween the Intended and the African woman in this regard are more cosmeticthan substantial.

14 Marlow himself addresses this inadequacy shortly before he recountsKurtz’s final words, as he expresses his frustration at trying to convey the realsense of his experience: “I’ve been telling you what we said—repeating thephrases we pronounced—but what’s the good. They were common everydaywords—the familiar vague sounds exchanged on every waking day of life. But


what of that? They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness ofwords heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares” (65).

15 Avrom Fleishman gives Kurtz’s insight explicitly political content: “If wewere to give a name to Kurtz’s vision of ‘the horror,’ it might appropriately beanarchy: that state of social decomposition at the opposite pole from organiccommunity. This anarchy is already latent in the individual—individuality andanarchy are implicated in each other—and in the absence of an ordering com-munity it springs into action as terrorism” (92). My only reservation aboutFleishman’s reading comes from Conrad’s less than orthodox conception of andattitude toward anarchism. Given his professed belief that the millionaire is thegreatest anarchist (letter to Cunninghame Graham Oct 7, 1907; quoted in EloiseKnapp Hay 189), we might just as well say that the anarchy Kurtz sees is merelythe underlying ethos of laissez-faire capitalism.

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Desire in Heart of Darkness

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