Aegis 2011
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Re-centering Heart of Darkness >>> Justin McAtee “After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that’s supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin.” – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness The figuration of Kurtz and Marlow as “adventurers of the soul” is by no means a new concept in over a century’s worth of critical responses to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Albert J. Guerard’s classic interpretation of the novel as a “night journey into the unconscious, and confrontation of an entity within the self” (Guerard 39) has been particularly influential since its 1958 publication, setting the groundwork for a subsequent psychoanalytic tradition in Conrad criticism that the deconstructive critic Perry Meisel has characterized as “[determined] to ground the text in specificity” (20). While Meisel’s own criticism is similarly concerned with the interior journeys of Kurtz and Marlow (as opposed to the external, political aspects of the tale), he sees the specifically psychoanalytical readings of the text as reflective of “a common predisposition among the novel’s critics to assign highly concrete meanings to the tale” (20). While this tendency to ground the text in certainty is only natural in Meisel’s eyes- as it follows a trajectory set from the very first critiques of the novel and proves that “Heart of Darkness creates the terms of its appeal by challenging us to specify the meaning Marlow tries to find in the character of Kurtz”- he nonetheless calls attention to the fallacy of its direction (20). Meisel rightly perceives that these constructivist critics either overlook or deny a deconstructive function coded into the novel as an exploration of the limits of language . to a sort of violence against meaning which, as indicated by the title of Meisel’s article, effectively “de-centers” the text from a ground in a moral message. Still searching for meaning, the psychoanalytic critics chase the “phantoms” of nonexistent answers “to what Marlow himself says he is unable to disclose: the substance, the essence, the details of what it is that Kurtz has done, and what it is that he represents” (20). Attempts to assign specific meanings to the figure of Kurtz “fall prey to the same epistemological temptations that Marlow is forced to overcome by the end of the tale” (21). Heart of Darkness, “rather than [being] a psychological work…is a text that interrogates the epistemological status of the language in which it inheres”- a violence that works to render all of that text’s potential meanings “problematic” (26). Meisel, in his deconstructive analysis, however, stops short with Kurtz, and does not investigate other ways that the text of Heart of Darkness deconstructs meaning. Therefore, the first concern of this essay is to expand Meisel’s argument into its appropriate dimensions. It is not enough for Meisel to say that “Heart of Darkness creates the terms of its appeal by challenging us to specify the meaning Marlow tries to find in the character Kurtz”; there is a broader meaning being sought (20). The search for the essence, the “center,” of Kurtz is only part of a larger search- one which preoccupies Marlow’s through both ends of his framed tale. This second, larger quest is for the unseen wilderness “truth,” the source of a guiding,
